The second part of the title of this post is that of a book described as a ‘Feast-Script’, put together in honour of Prof. Ullrich (Ulli) Kockel, and edited by Mairéad Nic Craith, Katerina Strani and Alastair Mackie. It’s now been published by LIt Verlag Dr. W. Hopf Berlin (2024). Yesterday some thirty-five people – from old friends across Europe to a couple of his current doctoral students – gathered on Zoom to celebrate both the launch of that book and Ulli Kockel’s lifework. It’s an event and a book I’m very proud to have been able to contribute to.
That, however, is not the reason I’m writing about it here. Reading my way through its many essays I have been forcibly reminded that, despite everything that is wrong with the Higher Education system in the UK (and it’s a long list), there are still dedicated people – Ulli and his wife Mairéad being outstanding examples – who are quietly resisting that institutional system’s dominant realpolitik. People who maintain a strong sense of the real value of education as a calling and an act of service. People whose work resolutely points us away from the cult of possessive individualism geared to empowering and enriching small elites. People who resist the State control of research through a reductive audit system that tacitly maintains the myopia that blocks access to the ecosophical understandings needed if we are to face our deepening socio-environmental situation. People with the ability to work within an academic system preoccupied with status and money while still managing to promote values that run counter to its priorities. An ability that reminds me of certain intellectuals working in the USSR just prior to glasnost, people able to navigate the official world dominated by the State and, at the same time, contribute to an unofficial, underground culture with quite other concerns and values.
Ulli Kockel is what I would call a “post-disciplinary” thinker. Someone whose concerns, while grounded in a particular engagement with European Ethnology, extend to interests that range from the social sculpture of Joseph Beuys to indigenous literatures, from philosophy to human ecology.
Something of the consequence of that range of interests and of the curiosity that fuels it is suggested by the title of an essay he wrote for a book I organised and edited back in 2009. His essay is called Old Europe, Debatable Land, or: Why do I feel “at home” in places I’ve never been to? As Katerina Strani perceptively writes in Heimatkunde, Ulli is not an expert in ‘a tiny part’ of a single discipline within an increasingly corporately-determined academic system. Rather he is someone who is ‘resisting, remaining, thinking, enriching academic thought and practice in a creative, stoic, and humble way that is so strikingly different from the contemporary academic norm of pompousness and self-aggrandisement’. (Nic Craith, Strani and Mackie 2024, 39).
On a personal note, yesterday’s meeting was important to me for another reason. Some twenty years ago Ulli organised a seminar for interested staff at the university where we were both teaching to discuss an artist’s book I had just produced called Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig. During the discussion he pondered the possibility that what I had made might be a creative form of left-field ethnology. As I’ve explained in my contribution to Heimatkunde, that observation was very important to me and to the way I came to see the possibilities of deep mapping. What I learned yesterday is that his pondering my work in that seminar also played a part in his developing the concept of creative ethnology. A concept central to the 9th SIEF Congress, held at the University of Ulster, Derry, in June 2008, where Ulli, as the incoming President, made the liberation of the ethnological imagination central to the congress programme.
To learn that our exchanges in that distant seminar had been mutually beneficial to our thinking and teaching is for me an important reminder that, even in this difficult time when so much of what we do can seem pointless in the face of a culture of gross simplification and outright untruth, the value of sharing original speculative thinking can still feed into living by other, more honest and hopeful, stories.