TEACHING ANTHROPOLOGY IN FRANCE

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 513.

Firstly, we can say that the stages of the complex recruitment process in French universities, which is closed more or less to the national labour market: with no ad in international journals, etc.

The first stage is called “qualification”: everybody with a PhD who is willing to apply for academic jobs has to go through this first stage. He/she has to apply to the commission for anthropologists. Qualification is the key to opening up the job market for young post-docs. Then, the second stage is to apply at the local level based on a central list of positions open published by the Official Journal of the French State. Positions are not advertised in other ways, for example in newspapers. Usually, there is between two or for positions for anthropologists every year. Local committees, whose members are elected by the staff of the relevant department, receive about 100 applications for one job. This system is under a lot of criticism, for its clientelism and localism, and so on. Unfortunately the recent reforms of the universities imposed by the government don't seem to improve the system of recruitment.

Anthropologists are teaching in a huge variety of academic contexts: this situation is related to the shortage of positions in anthropology departments and to the demand for anthropological skills – especially for methodological competences, but not only that.

So today, probably more anthropologists teach outside anthropology departments than in them. This means that teaching anthropology cannot any more be – at least only - training students to become professional anthropologists. The demand for anthropological teaching is great and at the same time, the discipline is in a relatively weak institutional position within the universities.

The application in France of the EU Bologna reform, “LMD” (Licence/Masters/Doctorat the simplification to three levels of degree) aiming to restructure university degrees in order to harmonize them across Europe, was not very good for social anthropology. It is widely understood to risk further squeezing anthropology out of university training. In effect, the License has become a necessary feeder to Masters programs. But relatively little License-level anthropology training is available within French universities and the hitherto common pattern of students coming to the discipline later in their curses appears more difficult to sustain under the new reform. Instead, Masters-level anthropology training is increasingly limited to multidisciplinary programs where it is frequently positioned as a marginalized partner within a bureaucratically-mandated “forced marriage”.[11]