ABSTRACT
Anthropology offers students a culturally relativistic disposition that helps render the strange familiar and the familiar strange in a diverse and globalized world. Promoting the practical value of an anthropological education is a taken-for-granted necessity. As Dána-Ain Davis argues in her own analysis of neoliberal impacts on higher education, autoethnography ‘can provide valuable insights into the tensions between the neoliberal environment and being an academic in such a setting’. Neoliberal entrepreneurialism occurs as a result of extrinsic market forces, and adaptation to these is often fuelled by the desire to prove’s relevance or even simply survive the external pressures. Ambivalence marks the history of the model of the liberal arts college in the American context in a few key ways. Neoliberal obsessions with measurement, big data, assessment, process, responsibility, accountability and rationalization are attempts to claim authority of the truth-of-the-matter, no matter what subject is at hand.
