 If there's any problem, then please put any problems in the chat. But a very big welcome. Thank you so much for coming to hear my talk. I'm a research professor in the anthropology department and I don't teach, but I plan to tell you some stories about how I research parliaments and I hope to give you a picture of what anthropology is like by doing this. And you may think that this sounds like politics, but it is a very anthropological take on political questions. So please do ask me any questions in the chat as I go along and I'll answer them when I get to the end of my talk. And you can keep asking questions at any time and I'm going to share my presentation now. Please tell me in the chat if you can't. So I'm going to kick off and I'm going to talk for about 15, 20 minutes and then I'm going to leave some time at the end for you to ask me questions. So I'm a political anthropologist at SOAS and I specialize in the study of organizations, specifically organizations that aim to do public good. So far I've mainly studied international NGOs and parliaments. Within SOAS I run something called the Global Research Network on Parliaments and People and we've been giving scholars and artists in Bangladesh and Myanmar and Ethiopia to study their own parliaments. And these projects are designed and led by those scholars in their own countries and the results are truly outstanding. So you can see some of their research on the webpage that I've given you here on the title slide and I really recommend having a look because a lot of their work is truly extraordinarily talented. But I'm going to talk about my own research today and I'm going to talk about a growing trend which is studying institutions at home. As you know traditionally a lot of anthropologists used to go to other countries when they were doing their research but quite often anthropologists turn their attention to home and I'm particularly interested in these institutions of parliaments. And in Europe the territory of parliamentary studies was very much dominated by historians, political scientists and legal scholars until quite recently. Marco Biles was the first anthropologist to venture into European legislatures in France and then in the European Parliament. And he was interesting because in contrast to political scientists he really avoided kind of just looking at the institution as an abstract entity producing lots of statistics and schemata and typologies and so forth. He shone a light on aspects of parliaments that are really neglected their history, their language, their rituals, their symbolism, the imagination that's involved in doing politics and how these are all interconnected. So he really got into the entanglements that you find in parliaments and looked at contradictions rather than avoiding them. So I followed in his footsteps and went to the Westminster Parliament and I started by studying the House of Lords. So I was there intensely from about 98 to 2000 and then part time after that and then I went and bravely went into the Commons which is a much, much more frantic place. So what did I do when I was there? Well, I did an immense mix of activities and that is how anthropologists work. We never use one kind of method to try and understand what's going on in a place. So I'm not going to bore you by telling you all of these except just to say that actually although I did a huge number of formal interviews over 350 so far and still counting, I actually learnt more probably from the informal conversations, basically the gossip, you know, catching people after meetings and talking to them during functions to find out what is really going on behind the scenes. But I also found out a huge amount by doing what I call kind of mini histories. So it's kind of case studies but with a kind of narrative form and I'll tell you a little bit about one of those in a moment. So I used a whole range of methods to try and understand what's really going on behind the scenes in the House of Lords and the House of Commons. So there's a brilliant anthropologist called Tim Ingold who describes what it's like doing anthropology. He writes about how we're interested in philosophical questions but we don't just stay at a really abstract level. We leave the people in. We're interested in everyday relationships and the ways that people make meanings in an everyday sense. And so in a way it's a bit like being a detective except that we're trying to answer puzzles rather than to solve crimes. I looked at various sites that politicians go to because what I was interested in was to try and understand the nature of political work. So what do they actually do politicians? We get a very strange view of them because we see them through the prism mainly of the television and the way they look in Prime Minister's Question Time or when they're arguing with each other. That really represents a tiny, tiny fraction of what politicians actually do. So I went to all the different sites. I tried to get into political party conferences and more difficult into their meetings. I visited constituencies. I watched them in select committees and so forth. So I really covered up the whole range of all the different sort of jobs that they do. And I realized that actually politicians are shapeshifters. They jump from different audiences, different expectations, different pressures and they have to literally shift their shape in order to adapt to the different kinds of work that they do. And this is very revealing about what anthropology is like because I discovered this one day not in a kind of cold, clinical, even way but in a kind of revelation that I had when I was talking to a clerk in this. This is one of my most frequented fieldwork sites. This is a café in the House of Commons where very often MPs will meet visitors. And I was talking to a clerk and the clerks are the people who run parliament. They're extremely knowledgeable. So I was asking him to try and explain to me about the work of select committees. And an MP came up and he saw that I was wearing a parliamentary pass. So he assumed that I was a member of staff in the House of Commons. So he started joking with us and he started saying, oh gosh, he was warning to me. He's saying, oh beware of this guy. He's really unstable. He's really got to watch out for him. And Tom, the guy I was talking to, kept trying to interrupt him and say, can I introduce it? And finally he said, can I introduce you to Dr. Crew, who's from the University of London. She's writing a book about the House of Commons. And this MP shapeshifted in a second. He stood straight. He became very formal and serious. He shook my hand and he said, Dr. Crew, I'm delighted to meet you if I can help you in any way. He's just, here's my business card. I said to Tom after this guy there, what just happened? What is going on with that guy? And he said, yeah, that's what it's like for MPs. Every day they have to try and read their audience and work out what kind of relationship they're in, because they're in such a dizzying kind of range of different relationships with different people. So they're continually having to adapt, jumping from one job to the next. So I wanted to tell you next something about, in a little bit more depth, two of the kinds of jobs that they're doing. One is about making law, and the other one is what they do in their constituency. So the lawmaking, I thought, right, this lawmaking is absolutely core to the business, if you like, of parliament, to what it's actually trying to achieve. It's a legislature amongst other things. So how does law actually get made? Well, I thought, well, I'll follow law. I'll follow, and I chose one very small clause. It was 250 words in a bill about children and families. And it had come about because when families break down, on average, 350,000 children don't get to see both parents on separation. And this is often the father because they tend to have, often don't have such a, the main role as carers. So a group sprung up, Fathers of Justice, and they were campaigning to have more time with their children on separation because they thought that the courts were unfair to fathers. And this piece of law was trying to encourage the courts to say children should be involved with both parents. But to cut a long story short, I followed all the changes that were made in this little tiny piece of legislation. And I got particularly interested in the final one, which is expressed here in 2B. So this little bit of this amendment, if you look at all the documents, so if you just kind of did a textual analysis, which is what lots of scholars do, then actually it looks as if this was made by a member of the House of Lords, a former family court judge. And yes indeed, she did stand up one day and put this amendment and it got passed. But that kind of covers over an incredibly complex, huge number of people who got involved in campaigning for this clause. In fact, it was originally written by a young woman called Hazel, a paralegal, a children's charity in Bloomsbury. She then put it to the Labour Party and they didn't manage to get through, but finally this court judge did, because she stood up and said, you know, I'm above party politics. This is evidence. And sure enough, okay, but it was also a political campaign that took months and months and months. And my point is that if you look, if you just take a superficial look at the documents that lead up to a law becoming approved by parliament and you miss out all the engagement between politicians and civil society. And this is what anthropologists are about. They're, they really like looking at the depth of the relationships that go on kind of beneath, for example, illegal text. So the other area of work I really wanted to tell you about was MPs in their constituencies. This is a kind of mysterious world from the point of view of scholarship, because not that many academics have gone and really looked at what happens in constituencies. It's not very easy to find out because a lot of the meetings, particularly the meetings which are called surgeries in the UK, as you probably know, are private. So you have to treat this with an immense kind of delicacy. But I observed a lot of surgery meetings. I shadowed MPs, I talked to MPs and their staff and I found out a few very interesting things. One was that they have a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of their constituency, of what's going on, the issues, the problems, the various charities, which are the efficient housing officers, all the different health clinics. They really know their constituency well and in a way they act like and particularly when we've had austerity for a number of years, the problems caused by austerity really show up in constituencies. The other thing that really shows up are mental health issues. So in a recent visit with a colleague who's a psychotherapist and a group analyst, we listened to estimates by MPs' staff that possibly as many of half the people who present with problems in constituencies have some kind of mental health issue. So what's good and they're doing these MPs' staff are trying to help those people without that much support themselves. And finally about constituencies, another aspect which I found very interesting was that it was the women MPs who seemed rather more comfortable with this kind of work. And although lots of men were also comfortable, it was only male MPs, a few of them, who delegated entirely to female case workers or looked a little bit uncomfortable at this very emotional kind of labor. And that is interesting. It needs a little bit of a bigger sample, but it would be interesting if in a familiar pattern, if it is the case that women MPs across the country are doing this much more hidden, very emotionally difficult labor, because it does mean that they have less time to be kind of working in Parliament and improving their position within the party so that they can get a position in government or on the opposition front bench. So that's just to give you a little flavour of some of the work that goes on in Parliament and in the constituencies. To return to the question of what it feels more generally like to be an MP, I was very struck by the stress that they experience themselves. And I think it's partly because they're juggling these multiple roles, they're having to shape shift, they're having to adapt to all these different pressures, they can't please all their, whatever it is, between 50 and 100,000 constituents, the constituents are very uneven. And one described being MP is feeling like you're on the receiving end of Genghis Khan's preferred form of torture, which is when you have, or each limb being tied to a horse and the horse being told to pull. And it can be a very lonely kind of job. Addictive, yes, but lonely. And so this raised another puzzle for me, which was, so how do these MPs cope? How do they cope with this endless changing and fracturing and pressure and exposure on social media and so forth? Some don't. Alcoholism and divorce are pretty high amongst MPs, but many do. And many really, really keep going back. They keep standing to be MPs and they do stay relatively sane. So my question is, how do they do this? How do they create some kind of stability in their work? And I had kind of three processes which I identified as processes which create some continuity across MPs' work and potentially some stability. So the first kind of continuity for MPs is what I've called rifts. You could think of these as little nuggets of ideology or ideas or values or beliefs or whatever. So MPs have to develop rifts as individuals, as factions within their party, as political parties, and need to improvise them for different audiences. So we think of MPs as very inauthentic and changeable, but actually they can be quite repetitive, actually, because if I give an example of Chris Bryant, Labour MP told me that when he was having to be an expert on pensions, he developed a riff about pensions, which was possible to use for all kinds of different audiences. He had a 90-second version, a five-minute version, a 20-minute version, and so forth. And these rifts are what politicians have to use to try and persuade people to give them support for the causes that they mind about. The second way that they create some kind of continuity in their work is through rhythms. So again, there are similarities between all MPs. So all MPs pretty much go to Prime Minister's Question Time at the same time every week with the Parliament sitting on a Wednesday. And then there are other rhythms which are organised MPs by party, so they tend to go to their annual party conferences, for example. But there are still more rhythms which are idiosyncratic to each MP. And MPs will be very influenced by whether they've got a background in social work, whether they're more interested in business or whatever. But I think we need to know more about the rhythms of MPs and how they vary, including our own. So it's an understudied area. And finally, rituals are really, really important in Parliament. And we think of rituals as something that happens in religion, but actually they're vital in both political worlds and in the legal world. We really need them. So if you've got a very important decision being made, for example, by a judge in a court or by politicians about, say, Brexit, then you need to have rigid rules and to be able to witness that people are sticking by the rules for people to consent to the decisions that are made. We would have anarchy without rituals. But they're also interesting for researchers because the more things are ritualised, the more that it reveals that there is a politically significant event going on. So they're also very useful as research tools. And this is partly why anthropologists really are very interested in them. So to conclude, politicians are like us, but they're also not like us. So they're like us because actually we're all shapeshifters to some extent. We're different with our families. We're different in our workplace. We're different if we're going into holiday. We shapeshift in the sense that we're continually adjusting to different places and times and audiences. But what's interesting about politicians, I think, is that because they're so exposed, they are connected to thousands and thousands of people, partly in their constituency, also to those who are interested in their causes. So partly because they're exposed, partly because they're very ambitious, and partly because they're in competition with each other. They are shapeshifters in a way that the dial is turned up. So we're all similar in the sense that we have to make adaptations, but they do so in a way that's magnified and amplified. So politicians are like us, but with the dial turned up. And I think this is partly why we don't like them. They kind of remind us of the worst of ourselves. But actually we should really put that dislike to one side because to engage with politics, we have to find allies amongst politicians. And we need to distinguish between government, which rules us and creates chaos very often, and the bits of parliament that are holding government to account, and the bits of parliament that are about us being represented as citizens. So I think we need to understand more about politics, but we also need to do politics ourselves in order to make democracy work. So that's just to give you a flavour of how anthropologists approach trying to understand the world. And I'm going to now look at your questions if you have any. So does anybody have any questions, either about what I've said, about politicians, or if you want to ask any questions about what SOAS is like, then I'd be really happy to answer. At the moment I don't have any questions, in the chat. And I've got some, fantastic. So do you think that the way in which politicians shapeshift makes them more trustworthy to the public and electorate? Excellent question, yes. I think it makes them more frustrating, but actually is there any choice? So if you think of the aspect of shapeshifting that is entailed in representation, it is very frustrating when you go to your MP and you demand something and they don't take any notice. So in a sense you can experience the frustration of them shapeshifting to some other interest away from one's own. But of course, if you take any group of people, there are conflicts in our interests and our preferences and in our demands. Yes, in a way, I think it makes them more frustrating, but on the other hand, I don't think there's any way around it. I think it will always be clear within any group of people and to be presented, those conflicts need to be brought out into the open and debated. So I personally think politicians should be more accountable for the choices that they make and for the decisions that they may interact to and who they give preference to, but I don't think shapeshifting can be abolished slightly. Did I find politicians reticent about participating in my study? I did. And actually I would say that there's a kind of bias in my study which I tried to take account of and in a way I think anthropologists recognize there's always going to be some bias and they make bias part of the study rather than trying to get rid of it. So one of the biases was that the politicians I spoke to were the ones that were willing to speak to me. So yes, you're right, some were reticent, but the more thoughtful ones were nearly always happy to speak and usually when I interviewed them, to be honest it turned into some kind of therapy because their lives are so stressful and so pressured. So what are the difficulties? I think the difficulties are to do with access so you're absolutely on the button with how this kind of work is challenging, but it does get easier when you're known. So I am now known particularly amongst the officials within the House of Commons and they know that I will be discreet and that's often a question of timing, so I'll be careful not to reveal what's going on within political parties if it undermines them in some way, but I will always protect the confidentiality of individuals, of course, unless they give me permission, but sometimes actually they really like to be named in things that I write about, so I really go back to every single person who I'm representing in my books and discuss with them how they want to be represented and now I've got the proof that I do that, it's much easier to get their trust. Do I think that the recent return to in-person voting in the Commons is a result of over-ritualization or dependence on tradition? No, I think there's lots at stake with the way that you do the voting, so some of the reasons that they like doing voting in person is that it gives more control over the voting for the whips. So if they're doing electronic voting from a distance, then people can vote whichever way you want, but of course political parties are teams and to get things done, the whips want them to vote as agreed by the whole party, particularly obviously by the leaders. So the reason why they like to have voting in person in the lobbies is so that the whips can keep reminding people to vote the way that they want. Yes, another cracking question. Do I have any tips for building relationships with people participating in your studies? Yes, I mean the most important thing I've found is that if you're really going to do participatory research, then you have to think very hard about building relationships right at the beginning of the study. You really, in order to build trust and really to take into account very plural perspectives, you have to get people involved as early as possible. You also have to be accountable, I think, and if people can see that you've been accountable in the past for what you've found out and you've really explained what you've found out, then that helps, but also you have to try and be very aware of who you're excluding and obviously you can't include everyone. It's a bit like parliamentarians can't represent the interests of everyone equally and you can't include everyone in your studies, but you have to be very honest and not over claim your findings. So if you've really found out about only one particular party in much more depth then you really should be honest about that. Another question is, did I ever find an MP or a politician not receiving you politely? I mean they're so good at reading the situations they're in that they were polite to me because they knew that I'd be writing about them so they nearly always were polite, although when under extreme pressure I have seen them be a little bit grumpy, but not as writing about them. Yes, the next question is, do you think shapeshifting applies to any other group of people in the public eye? Excellent question. We are all shapeshifters, particularly if we're in the public eye. So actually lecturers are shapeshifters. We talk differently to our students. I'm speaking to you very openly and honestly now I might be a little bit more cautious if I was talking to politicians. So we're all shapeshifters and I think we should be more honest about that and we should hold each other to account that although we're adjusting and improvising to different audiences we're not shifting our values. So there's a kind of core consistency to our values even if we communicate differently in different places. And the final question is, does shapeshifting affect the research relationships of the object of study or result in phantom findings? I think shapeshifting in a sense as a researcher you have to make adjustments to the different audiences. So for example, you can't always ask consent in the same way if you're in a private space with one person then you can very easily, but if you're watching them in a debate then obviously you can't. So really anthropology is a highly reflective and reflexive way of reasing. So rather than pretending that you can get rid of shapeshifting or you can get rid of bias or you can get rid of subjectivity you make it part of your study. So this is the kind of thing that we love to discuss when we're either teaching or doing research. But thank you so much for coming. We've got one more question so I hope I'm allowed to answer that. I think we haven't been shut down so that's good. Did you find that different parties have different cultural relationship norms or they're generally uniform throughout the house? Completely different. Completely different. So I campaigned for example in a by-election with all the main parties and they do everything differently. So obviously they have some ideological differences although that's kind of exaggerated. One MP told me that she only agrees with about 40% of them for manifesto usually at any one time. But they do have ideological differences. There are cultural differences. There are class differences between the different parties. Some of the smaller parties are more about nationalism so their relationship with Western culture is far more antagonistic. But there are even aesthetic differences. You can see they dress differently. One aspect of campaigning that I find kind of amusing is that they drink different drinks. The Conservatives tend to drink wine. When I was with Labour they tend to drink tea. They tend to drink so forth. So yeah, huge differences. I think I've come to the end of the questions. I hope you'll come to SoA because it's the best place I've ever been. And it's the most extraordinarily diverse, exciting, vibrant place. It's kind of London in the world and the world in London. And I really love it. So I hope we'll be welcoming you there. Thank you so much for coming.