Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropology

My immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak’s book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006). In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it was not really a surprise at all. The United Kingdom has had a tempestuous relationship with the European Economic Community (EEC) and then the European Union (EU), ever since it joined in 1973. The discussions against this huge European border experiment (one of the most radical border experiments I can think of) have been unceasing, and came from left and right (and of course from anarchists), from the centre and the peripheries, from populists and internationalists. Those in favour of whatever ‘Europe’ might mean were always much less newsworthy. Anthropologists were among many who lined up to critique everything about the politics, economics, ideology, structure and especially the bureaucracy of the EU (and some of them have contributed to this Forum). Yet once the referendum result was published, I realised that there is also much material in my field notes that shows that people did not really mean that the EU should cease to exist. Like the constant complaints against the habits of one’s closest kin, roiling against the EU is serious, but it does not really mean disavowal or divorce. Until, apparently, it does. This Forum represents the immediate reactions of 24 colleagues in anthropology about ‘Brexit’. The commentaries were all written within five days of the news coming out. Apart from having to trim the texts for space reasons, they have been left as they are, documents of immediate, often raw, reactions. In that sense, these texts are as much witness statements as they are observations; as much an echo chamber of all the endless discussion that came in the aftermath of the result as it is considered observation; as much an emotional reaction as it is analysis. I did ask all contributors to think about how to engage their knowledge of anthropology in addressing this issue. As their responses describe, there are many hugely serious and frankly alarming political, economic and ideological challenges facing both Europe and the world at the moment that have become entangled with Brexit. So this is not the time to sit back and say nothing. Others have been speaking out too, of course, including Felix Stein’s