Anthropology at a critical juncture in Pakistan: slow epistemic exclusion, disciplinary value, and futures beyond the ivory tower

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract Questions about anthropology’s gradually declining enrollment and uncertain career prospects repeatedly surface in Pakistan. These concerns range from a staff member asking, “What has happened to anthropology?” to students questioning what opportunities a degree in the discipline could offer. These encounters foreground a broader concern: Why does anthropology appear to lack “scope” in Pakistan despite its relevance to domains such as public health, development, governance, and social change? This article approaches that question through an ethnography of academic life. Drawing on continuous participant observation and experiences at admissions counters, in classrooms, and through teaching, departmental, and curriculum work, the study brings student narratives, informal academic conversations, cohort observations, and documentary review into dialogue. Using “scope” as an entry point, the article examines the processes through which anthropology acquires or progressively loses institutional and epistemic value. Rather than treating declining enrollment as a self-evident indicator of failure, the article follows the categories through which disciplinary value is constituted and articulated: “scope,” “practical” knowledge, the “ivory tower,” and the reputation of anthropology as a “high-scoring” subject in Pakistan’s Central Superior Services (CSS) examination. These expressions illuminate how employment anxieties, institutional ranking, pedagogical practice, and bureaucratic aspiration enter everyday judgments about knowledge. The article conceptualizes anthropology’s condition as slow epistemic exclusion: the discipline remains formally present while progressively losing the resources, recognition, and institutional pathways needed to sustain its knowledge-making and professional practice. Addressing this condition therefore requires more than curricular reform. It requires attention to the institutional relations, from everyday pedagogical encounters to broader structures of resource allocation, professional recognition, and public engagement, through which anthropology is taught, practiced, valued, and understood.