Is an anthropology of the internet possible? If so, what would it look like? I will attempt a provisional answer here, building on my book about the consequences of the digital revolution for the forms of money and exchange. People, machines and money matter in this world, in that order. Most intellectuals know very little about any of them, being preoccupied with their own production of cultural ideas. Anthropologists have made some progress towards understanding people, but they are often in denial when it comes to the other two; and their methods for studying people have been trapped for too long in the 20th-century paradigm of fieldwork-based ethnography. I do not advocate a wholesale rejection of the ethnographic tradition, but rather would extend its premises towards a more inclusive anthropological project, better suited to studying world society, of which the internet is perhaps the most striking expression. For sure, we need to find out what real people do and think by joining them where they live. But we also need a global perspective on humanity as a whole if we wish to understand our moment in history. This will expose the limitations of the modern experiment in the social sciences — their addiction to impersonal abstractions and repression of individual subjectivity.
The essay is rather long, but it’s parts may be read separately:
1. The origins of the internet
2. The political economy of the internet
3. The virtual and the real
4. A Kantian anthropology for the internet age
For some time now I have tried to relate major innovations in science and mathematics to the movement of society in history. At the grandest level of generalization, there are observations such as Oswald Spengler’s when, in The Decline of the West (1918), he contrasted ancient and modern ideas of number in terms of ‘magnitude’ and ‘function’ respectively and linked this to the money system. Ian Hacking in The Taming of Chance (1990) has shown how linear causality was replaced by probabilistic reason and statistics in the course of the nineteenth century; and this is undoubtedly related to the salience of crowds as opposed to unique effects. The homology between Darwinian evolutionism and Victorian capitalism was pointed out by Marx (Gerratana 1973). It is plausible to posit a link between scientific/artistic modernism and the movement of world society in the decades leading up to the First World War. And the sciences of complexity that have emerged since the 1970s, with their language of chaos, fractals and phase transition, evoke the postmodern moment in social and cultural history. Continue reading ‘The social meaning of the power law’ »
The Haitian disaster has boosted Naomi Klein’s theory of ‘disaster capitalism‘. In an article entitled Disaster capitalism headed for Haiti, Stephen Lendman provides a summary of Klein’s argument and a trenchant account of recent events in Haiti as a powerful reinforcement of her central thesis, featuring American imperialism at its worst.
“Neoliberalism dominates the world with America its main exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere. As a result, wars are waged, social services cut, public ones privatized, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or in duress to object. Disaster capitalism is triumphant everywhere from post-Soviet Russia to post-apartheid South Africa, occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Honduras before and after the US-instigated coup, post-tsunami Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia, New Orleans post-Katrina, and now heading to Haiti full-throttle after its greatest ever catastrophe. The same scheme always repeats, exploiting people for profits, the prevailing neoliberal idea that “there is no alternative” so grab all you can.”
This is a fair summary of the thesis and much of Lendman’s account is valuable, even if it is inevitably selective and its main points have been made by a number of journalists at less length (including this one and this). My interest is in the theory itself, in what sort of handle it gives us on the Haitian disaster and what to do next. Although I admit we are an insignificant minority, I am also interested in the lessons we might draw from this event for anthropology as an intellectual project, especially since the Haitian crisis forces us to ask what anthropologists have done and might do.
I argue that anthropologists are a prime constituency for Naomi Klein’s ideas, since she paints a bleak picture of the world without offering any political or intellectual program capable of addressing the problems she identifies. This allows her adherents to retreat into their habitual myopic passivity while claiming to be radically engaged. Continue reading ‘Is Haiti to be another victim of disaster capitalism?’ »
The changing character of money
Of all the institutions we live by, the most pervasive is money (see the book that this website is named after). Its power to affect our lives is often disturbing, yet most of us take its form for granted. Here I address what looks on the face of it like a minor subject, community currencies. This generic term covers many different ways that ordinary people can now issue money themselves. They do so in local or virtual associations formed as circuits of exchange, usually on a small scale. But these experiments with money contain the seeds of a profound social revolution.
Now that world society is being formed as a single interactive network, we need to ask how it might be made more democratic, since democracy is universally acknowledged to be the only legitimate basis for our societies. The principle that those who are most affected by decisions should play the main part in making them is simple, but rarely realized in practice. Moreover, political democracy has often been subverted by economic inequality. Rather than follow the tradition that rejects markets and money because they are identified with capitalism, I prefer to explore their potential to sustain a more genuine economic democracy than at present. We express our desires democratically whenever we spend money; but this kind of voting is massively unequal, since some have so much more than others. The vast majority of people alive have hardly any money to spend at all. How much better it would be if we made our own money and voted with that. A radically new approach to money, offering individuals and communities more effective control in their own economic decision-making, is the most direct way to restore democracy to our participation in society. Continue reading ‘Building economic democracy with community currencies’ »
I want to start with Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch (1795). He held that Cosmopolitan Right, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. In other words, we should be free to go wherever we like in the world, since it belongs to all of us equally. The contrast with our routine experience of international travel today could not be more marked. He goes on to say:
“The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degree into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.”
This confident sense of an emergent world order, written over 200 years ago by the man who more than anyone founded anthropology as an academic discipline, can now be seen to be a product of the high point of the liberal revolution, before it was overwhelmed by its twin offspring, industrial capitalism and the nation state. We now live in a less confident world, but it can still generate moments that touch our universal humanity, like the first man to orbit the earth in space or a Chinese man confronting a tank on global television. Continue reading ‘Studying world society as a vocation’ »
Mohandas K. Gandhi’s critique of the modern identification of society with the state was devastating. He believed that it disabled citizens, subjecting mind and body to the control of professional experts when the purpose of a civilization should be to enhance its members’ sense of their own self-reliance. He proposed instead that every human being is a unique personality and participates with the rest of humanity in an encompassing whole. Between these extremes lie proliferating associations of great variety. He settled on the village as the vehicle for Indians’ aspirations for self-organization; and this made him in many respects a typical twentieth-century nationalist. But what is most relevant to us is his existentialist project. If the world of society and nature is devoid of meaning, each of us is left feeling small, isolated and vulnerable. How do we bridge the gap between a puny self and a vast, unknowable world? The answer is to scale down the world, to scale up the self or a combination of both, so that a meaningful relationship might be established between the two. Gandhi devoted a large part of his philosophy to building up the personal resources of individuals. Our task is to bring this project up to date. Continue reading ‘The digital revolution and me’ »
Global Studio (established 2005) is a place based action research program where international students, academics and professionals come together with local universities, local government , NGOs and CBOs to collaborate with disadvantaged communities.
GS grew out of the work of the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers (2002-04) with founding partners University of Sydney, Columbia and Rome. Over the past three years (mainly) architects, planners, urban designer, landscape architects, film makers and industrial designers have worked with community groups in the Johannesburg township of Diepsloot.
The recently uploaded film, Diep Salute, profiles Diepsloot township hip hop artists, made with the aim of also promoting community development and job creation through the arts.
Now published here by Storicamente as “The great economic revolutions are monetary in nature”: Mauss, Polanyi and the breakdown of the neoliberal world economy.
Anthropology in the financial crisis
Everybody knows that we are living through a hinge moment in world history generated by the financial crisis of 2008. The collapse of the credit boom has already had dramatic social consequences: the default and nationalization of banks, dramatic losses of personal savings and mortgage foreclosures on a massive scale. Where it will all end is anyone’s guess. Apart from these tangible effects, the present crisis also concerns ideas about the economy. Free market economics has gained an unparalleled dominance within the academy and society more generally in the last three decades. Economists, armed with impenetrable mathematical arguments, encouraged politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown to claim ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) to their market fundamentalism. They preached an eternally benevolent spiral, ‘beyond boom and bust’, guaranteed by radically reducing the role of the state and politics in distribution – the question of who gets what in the world. The collapse of this pretence has been as sudden as the paper fortunes built on it. All too often a distinction is drawn between the world of finance and the ‘real economy’, as if borrowing money for holidays against rising house prices and the theft of public assets by corporate predators were not real. I argue for a perspective that treats money as an integral part of society rather than as something semi-detached from it (Hart 2000, 2007a). Continue reading ‘The breakdown of the neoliberal world economy’ »
Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At much the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas opposed the racial inequality of Spain’s American empire in the name of human unity. We are living through another ‘Magellan moment’. In the second half of the twentieth century, humanity formed a world society – a single interactive social network – for the first time. This was symbolized by several moments, such as when the 60s space race allowed us to see the earth from the outside or when the internet went public in the 90s, announcing the convergence of telephones, television and computers in a digital revolution of communications. Our world too is massively unequal and the voices for human unity are often drowned. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. The task of building a global civil society for the twenty-first century, perhaps even a federal world government, is an urgent one.
The failure of the New York investment bank, Lehman Brothers, in September 2008 triggered a financial collapse whose ramifications are still with us. Predictions of the outcome of the ensuing global economic crisis vary widely. Following a sustained equities rally in mid-2009, some commentators now argue that the recession following Lehman’s demise is already over and the free market ready to assume its inexorable rise, while others talk of a double dip recession, persisting debt deflation and a recovery that could take 25 years. Continue reading ‘A human economy for the twenty-first century’ »
Edited extracts from a recorded conversation between Keith Hart and Bill Maurer
Marina Del Rey, August 2007
KH: There are quite profound similarities and differences between us. My version of the dialectic is that, if we want the quite significant differences to remain under control, we have to establish a framework of sameness to start with, because I really think that we’re very different in style. So I would like to start by trying to establish how some of the questions that we’re posing are the same or similar, how we came to invest so much in the study of money as anthropologists.
BM: There is one similarity that struck me in reading all your work in advance of this meeting. Both of us refuse, as you put it, to demonize money. There’s no reason why it can’t be remade anew by us for some other ends. I’ve been very frustrated by the anthropological literature. It often presents a familiar story: capitalism comes to town and then all of a sudden all that is solid melts into air; things fall apart. It’s the end of the world. And we know what happens: the story is written as if we already know the end of it: dispossession, exploitation, wealth will flow up and so on. On the one hand, yes, that’s what happens. But on the other hand, if we say that it is what always happens when there is the kind of monetization or commoditization associated with “capitalism,” then we’re never going to see the unintended effects of it when they are right in front of our noses. Continue reading ‘The politics, pragmatics and promise of money’ »
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
