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Column by Yvon van der Pijl

About ten years ago, I had had about enough of the scientific business, as I had come to call academia. I was done with the inward-looking, often ego-focused, competitive output culture.

Yes, there is something paradoxical in the preceding sentence. Output suggests yield, a product brought out. I felt trapped in a system that hindered true encounter with a real outside.

As an anthropologist, I delve into end-of-life issues, the power of rituals in loss and farewell, and the need to break ties and connect. The need to break out of the academy brought me to a funeral organisation with an ambitious plan: the development of a 24/7 farewell house in Amsterdam Zuidoost with space for the diversity of our society. The project had sparked my anthropological interest, but mostly I thought I was exploring a professional turnaround, perhaps as a funeral director.

I felt trapped in a system that hindered true encounter with a real outside.

Doubt leads to surprising, valuable encounters. Ten years ago, I did not leave the academy. I accepted the engagement with a motley crew of professionals, stakeholders and interested parties in end-of-life counselling, funeral care and farewell rituals. By doing with them what, in a sense, I have always done: teaching and researching. In a sense, because there is a difference from my earlier academic
version. In that motley crew, we work in mutual engagement that starts with impact - learning from and with each other - rather than ends with output.

In doing so, I promise myself not to shout comfortably from the sidelines, but to be the proverbial nitpicker - whether outside or inside the academy or in the connection in between. After all, sharing results and providing answers cannot be done without asking critical or uncomfortable questions. And engagement evokes obligation; the obligation to move away from academic selfinterest. After all, an engaged, open science is a science of service, a work in progress that started or me about ten years ago.

Dr. ir. Yvon van der Pijl is associate professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Social and Behavourial Sciences and lecturer at Après la Vie Academy for funeral professionals