 a political anthropologist at SOAS and I specialise in the study of organisations, specifically organisations that aim to do public good. So far I've mainly studied international NGOs and parliaments. Within SOAS I run something called a 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 web page 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. Marc Abiles 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 and 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 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 still counting I actually learned 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 of 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 was 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 it's 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 realised 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 you know you really gotta gotta watch out for him and Tom the guy who 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 please just uh here's my business go. I said to Tom after this guy there well it just happened always going on with that guy and he said yeah that 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 one job to the next so I wanted to tell you next something about uh in little bit more depth uh 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 I've read this lawmaking is absolutely core to the business if you're like of of parliament to to what it's actually trying to achieve it's a legislature amongst other things so so well how does law actually get made well I thought well I'll I'll I'll follow law I'll follow and I chose one very um small clause it was 250 words in a bill about children and families and it had come about because um uh 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 as carers so a group sprung up fathers of justice um and they were campaigning to have more time with their children on separation uh because they thought that the courts weren't fair 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 um legislation and I got particularly interested in the final one which is expressed here in 2b so this little bit of uh this amendment um 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 law it's a former family court judge and uh 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 in a children's charity uh in Bloomsbury uh as she then put it to the Labour Party and they didn't manage to get through but finally this this court judge did because she stood up and said you know I'm above party politics this is this is evidence and uh 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 would take a superficial look at the documents um that lead up to a law uh becoming approved by parliament you miss out all the engagement between politicians and 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 uh which are called surgeries in in in the UK as you probably know um a private so you have to treat this with an immense kind of delicacy but I 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 um all the different health clinics they really know their constituency well and in a way they act like and particularly um when uh we've had austere austerity for a number number of years the problems caused by austerity really show up in in constituencies the other thing that really shows up are mental health issues so in a recent uh visit with um um a colleague who is a psychotherapist and a group analyst we listen to estimates by MP 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 and they're doing these MP staff are trying to help those people without that much support themselves um 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 um 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 and 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 it it does mean that they have less time to be kind of uh 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 in parliament and in the constituencies to return to the question of what it feels more generally like to be an MP um I was very struck by the the stress that they experience themselves and um I think it's partly because they're juggling these multiple roles they're having to shapeshift 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 um the the constituents are very uneven and one described it being MP as feeling like um you're on the receiving end of Genghis Khan's preferred form of torture which is when you have uh or each limb being tied to a horse and the horse being told to to pull and it can be a very lonely kind of job addictive yes but 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 and pressure and exposure on on social media and so forth some don't alcoholism and divorce are pretty high amongst MPs um 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 how do they do this how do they create some kind of stability uh in their work and I had kind of three processes which I identified as processes which create some continuity across MPs work and and potentially some some stability so the first kind of continuity for MPs is what I've called rifts you could you could think of these as little kind of nuggets of ideology or or ideas or or values or beliefs or whatever so um 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 um 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 92nd version a five minute version a 20 minute version and and so forth and um these these rifts are what politicians have to use to try and persuade people uh 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 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 have 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 they are connected to thousands and thousands of people partly in their constituency but 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 um 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 uh 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 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