Casualisation takes different forms in different academic contexts, from the "adjunctification" of teaching in the U.S.A. to precarious grant-funded postdoc positions common in Europe and the U.K. and the efforts to introduce other forms of temporary academic employment in New Zealand (Shore and Davidson 2014) and Australia (Barcan 2014). Seeking to contribute to these and other current discussions on the future of research and higher education in the era of privatisation and funding cuts, Hana Cervinkova and Karolina Follis convened the panel "Anthropology as a Vocation and Occupation," held on August 3, 2014 at the 13th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Tallinn, Estonia. The goals of the panel, as stated in the Conference Programme, were as follows. "(1) On behalf of EASA, we seek to understand how our members who fall into the early-career category view their current career prospects; (2) Drawing on current debates on the future of research and higher education under conditions of austerity, digitalisation and casualisation of academic labour, we seek to stimulate an exchange that would examine those international concerns from a perspective specific to European anthropology; (3) We hope to learn whether EASA itself has a role to play assisting early-career anthropologists as they navigate both the available and the yet-to-be-created (or discovered) opportunities for anthropologists in Europe today" (EASA 2014: 98). The overall findings were that in the current academic environment early-career anthropologists (advanced PhD students, postdocs and junior lecturers) are facing a set of external conditions which imperil the pursuit of anthropology as a vocation and an occupation. This article offers a detailed account of specific positions that emerged in the course of the panel discussion, as well as a list of suggestion for the EASA Executive Committee.