Archive for the ‘Audio-visual’ Category.

Interview by Alan Macfarlane

Alan Macfarlane interviewed me in April 2006 and January 2009 as part of his ‘Ancestors’ series (no comment).

The full interview, in two parts of an hour each divided by the year 1983, can be found here. Other interviews of anthropologists by Alan can be found here.

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The metacurrency project

Beyond National Capitalism? the lecture

Beyond National Capitalism

AND NOW: the video!! Click on Read more for a 12-part lecture and discussion lasting about an hour and a half. Continue reading ‘Beyond National Capitalism? the lecture’ »

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Hello Africa: mobile phones

Martin Konzett made this trailer in East Africa. Thanks to Ken Banks (@kiwanja) for the link.

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An engaged anthropology for the 21st century

What would an engaged anthropology for the twenty-first century look like? A lecture in six parts given to an undergraduate course, Politics, Economics and Social Change, at Goldsmiths College, London on 26th March 2009. It was introduced as ‘The anthropology of politics’, but my intention was to speak about how we might engage with our times through an anthropology whose object is defined as ‘the making of world society’. What do we need to know about humanity as a whole that would help us to build a better world? Such an anthropology might be both an aspect of the academic discipline of the same name and an interdisciplinary project undertaken by historians, ethnographers, philosophers, political economists, geographers, students of literature and many others, perhaps you.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

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Cambridge lecture on international development

I revisited my old college, St. John’s, Cambridge on 24th February 2009 to give a lecture on “International development: a historical perspective from Cambridge” for Cambridge University International Development on the occasion of the University’s 800th anniversary year. What follows consists of a short Introduction, the lecture in 5 parts and audience discussion in 4 parts, the whole lasting about an hour and a half.

In 1996 I gave a not dissimilar lecture in the same place: Clarkson, Cambridge and the international movement for human rights.

See also Between slavery and emancipation in West Africa.

Lecture:              Part 1,     Part 2,     Part 3,     Part 4,     Part 5.

Discussion:         Part 6,    Part 7,     Part 8,     Part 9

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L’effet Keith cool

A Manchester band called Keith takes Paris by storm.

Liberation review (in French) of their CD Vice and Virtue.

Here’s a video from 2006.

See Manchester on my mind for this Keith’s reflections on what it means to come from back there.

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Mike Wesch: A portal to media literacy

Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, won a U.S. Professor of the Year award.

I have been trying and failing to teach world history to anthropology students for 40 years. Here is a Wesch experiment to get students to condense world history into less than 5 minutes using Twitter. Let’s not be critical of the end-product. The point is to scale down the world and scale up the self so that the two can enter into a meaningful relationship.

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The Trap: what happened to our dream of freedom?

Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary in three parts, ‘The Trap’, shows how ideas and methods gestated in the Second World War and developed in the Cold War led to the narrow and false notion of freedom that flourished in the neoliberal period. Brian Holmes’s brilliant essay on Adam Curtis, featuring The Trap in particular, offers a valuable summary and critique of the documentary.

The Trap Part 1 Fuck you buddy

Part 2 The lonely robot

Part 3 We will force you to be free

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Mike Wesch: An anthropological introduction to YouTube