I approach the anthropology of money through four themes:

Money as memory, a meaningful link between persons and communities
Money as idea and object, the rise of virtual economy
Money as ‘heads & tails’, the impersonal expression of states and markets
Money as what people use it for, the potential for economic democracy

Following Marx, I conceive of ‘commoditization’ as a historical dialectic of social abstraction that is closely linked to the rise of money as a universal social principle. If we do things for each other in society, these services have to be separated from what we do for ourselves. This process draws us into ever-widening circles of interdependence based on calculated exchange. The money circuit is becoming detached from production, trade and politics. I ask if the euro is something new or a throwback to older forms. In future people everywhere will issue their own money instruments. Meanwhile, the euro’s movement in history offers a glimpse of where world society is heading. Money is a suitable strategic focus for anthropological study of that society.

Money and method

My first attempt to approach money as an object of anthropological enquiry was a lecture given two decades ago (Hart, 1986). Malinowski (1961 [1922]) set a trend for anthropologists to dispute economic universals in polarised terms, juxtaposing exotic facts and western folk theories, without acknowledging the influence of contemporary history on their own ideas. My lecture had three parts which, taken together, constituted a method.

“First, we should be more explicitly aware of the concrete conditions which stimulate our interest in some abstract problems rather than others. This means asking what it is in the world as we experience it that informs our researches, whether directly or indirectly. Second, it is no good taking potshots at vulgar reductions of economic ideas, when the intellectual history of western economic thought is itself extremely plural, even contradictory. A constructive reading of that intellectual history might have served Malinowski’s ethnographic analysis better than the straw man he chose to attack. Finally, when historical awareness and a more sophisticated intellectual apparatus are combined with our discipline’s standby of ethnographic fieldwork, the resulting anthropological analysis offers a more secure foundation for critical understanding of the world in which we live.” (Hart, 1986 : 637).

So I first located the problem of money in contemporary economic history, arguing that state control of money was being undermined in the leading capitalist societies. Then I traced two strands of western monetary theory explaining money as a token of authority issued by states or as a commodity made by markets. These strands came together in the writings of Keynes (1930). But, rather than acknowledge the interdependence of top-down and bottom-up social organization (“heads and tails”), economic policy has swung wildly between the two extremes (“heads or tails?”). Last I showed that the token/commodity pair could inform a reanalysis of Malinowski’s ethnography.

“Anthropologists have to be capable of comparing their exotica with a more profound picture of ideas and realities in the industrial world that sustains us. Conventional economic reasoning fails to enlighten us because it is so unremittingly one-dimensional. The coin has two sides for a good reason – both are indispensable. Money is at the same time an aspect of relations between persons and a thing detached from persons….Today’s effort is an act of bricolage rather than brokerage, formed from a vision of the anthropologist as a handyman who can help repair the damage done by professionals.” (Ibid : 638-9).

Some anthropologists (e.g. Parry and Bloch, 1989; Foster, 1999; Guyer, 2004) have drawn on this framework for the purposes of a dynamic ethnographic analysis, without embracing world history or the theories of economists. In other words, the academic division of labour still reigns supreme and most anthropologists prefer to stay on familiar ground rather than risk being exposed as naïve interlopers on territory made familiar through common journalism or already colonized by experts.

In Closed Systems and Open Minds (Gluckman, 1964), an anthropologist and an economist explored “the limits of naivety” in social anthropology. They argued that anthropologists, given their pretension to address humanity as a whole, are obliged to open themselves up to the full complexity of social reality. At some stage they must seek analytical closure in order to draw simple patterns from these open-ended inquiries; and these abstractions may often seem to be naïve from the perspective of other disciplines. Gluckman had in mind the rich texture of ethnographic encounters, whereas I was suggesting that conjectural history, overthrown by fieldwork-based ethnography, should be rehabilitated, even if specialists can easily show the naivety of anthropologist’s accounts. Specialization can be an obstacle to the growth of knowledge; for specialists become prisoners of their expertise (Popper, 1997). Anthropologists have long enjoyed a certain intellectual freedom that can be invigorating for the more conventional sciences. We just have to be more explicit about how this comes about.

Foucault (1973 [1966]) ended his “archaeology of the human sciences” with some reflections on why psychoanalysis and social anthropology (ethnologie) “…occupy a privileged position in our knowledge”:

“…because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form a treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question…what may seem, in other respects, to be established.” (1973 : 373) “[They] are not so much two human sciences among others, but they span the entire domain of those sciences, they animate its whole surface…[They] are ‘counter-sciences’; which does not mean that they are less ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly ‘unmake’ that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences. (Ibid:379)

Foucault attributed anthropology’s originality to its being both “traditionally the knowledge we have of the peoples without histories” and “situated in the dimension of historicity”, by which he meant “within the historical sovereignty of European thought and the relation that can bring it face to face with all other cultures as well as with itself” (ibid : 376-7). He was sure the human sciences had reached their limit and this was doubly true of a discipline whose premises were being undermined by the collapse of European empire. Given the disappearance of the traditional object of anthropology, we have to find not only a new one, but also a theory and method appropriate to it. This means identifying the historicity of our own moment, as well as complementing ethnographic fieldwork with world history and humanist philosophy (Hart, 2003).

I propose that the object of anthropology should be the making of world society or the human universal. One name for this is “humanity”, at once a collective noun, a moral quality and a historical project for our species. Another is “the people”, whom contemporary ethnographers have studied assiduously in all their differences, but without much sense of what makes them the same. Anthropology’s object in the nineteenth century was world history, but this became discredited by its evolutionary racism. Before that, the liberal philosophers found speculation about humanity as a whole indispensable to the making of democracy. Kant (2006 [1798]) established “anthropology” as the scholarly name for this project. How might these older traditions be reconciled with the fragmented cultural relativism of twentieth-century ethnography? We should not repudiate the revolutionary principle of joining the people where they live in order to find out what they think and do. Contemporary anthropologists have justly celebrated cultural variety in the here and now; but they have neglected longer term perspectives on human history and have privileged collective norms over the personal experience of individuals.

In addition to drawing on the historical sequence of paradigms for anthropology, I would add the existentialist or romantic quest for understanding how individuals make sense of their relationship to the human predicament in general (Hart, 2003). Humanity is after all facing a highly uncertain future affecting all life on this planet; and we are increasingly aware that each of us is a unique personality with the chance to make a difference. Such a focus could be labeled “self in the world” or “subjects in history”; and it should lead anthropologists to take a greater interest than before in biography, autobiography and fiction.

Each of us embarks on a journey outward into the world and inward into the self. We are, as Durkheim (1965 [1912]) said, at once collective and individual. Society is mysterious to us because we have lived in it and it now dwells inside us at a level that is not ordinarily visible from the perspective of everyday life. Writing is one way we try to bring the two into some mutual understanding that we can share with others. Ethnographic fieldwork, requiring us to participate in local society as we observe it, adds to our range of social experience and brings lived society into our sources of introspection. One method for understanding world society would then be to make an ongoing practice of trying to synthesize these varied experiences. This is to some extent what I attempted in The Memory Bank (Hart, 2000).

I asked there what future generations would consider distinctive of our times and came up with the digital revolution in communications, manifested as the rise of the internet in the 1990s. The half-century begun by the anti-colonial revolution had seen the formation of world society as a single interactive network. How was the digital revolution affecting the forms of money and exchange? I concluded that the impersonal conditions of personal economic agency were shifting in profound ways (see also Hart, 2005).

I had previously written a draft of a text-book showing how anthropologists can and do address the economic institutions of modern society. But I rejected this effort because it was too impersonal. I could not identify myself in it. I based the successor volume on personal memory – on my own teaching and research over three decades and especially on my own encounters with the economy as a gambler, journalist, consultant, publisher and academic entrepreneur. The idea of a memory bank comes from computing; but banks are also where money is kept. I came to see that the two great memory banks, language and money, were converging as information in the internet; and of course the book itself was my memory bank. Soon afterwards I developed this website for the diffusion of my writings under the same name.

There are as many worlds as there are individuals and their journeys. This could be our starting point; but it will not do for the study of world society. For this anthropologists need to enter the objective world of money, markets, digital communications, ecology, cities, population statistics, trading blocs, nation-states, corporations, networks and war, all the while risking exposure of our professional naivety. Making a better society also means using the imagination for purposes of fiction, the construction of possible worlds out of actual experience. Thinking about the macrocosm is made easier through contemplation of microcosms. Novels and movies compress the world into a narrow format that we enter subjectively on our own terms, allowing us to make a meaningful connection with history. In the past, human universals have sought to extinguish or dominate the cultural particulars through which human beings live. The principle of the new universal is, I believe, already revealed to us in great literature. It is that human universals must not just tolerate cultural particulars, but can only be realized through them. Thus, the most creative writers reach general truths by digging deeply into particular places and personalities. This has always been the great strength of ethnography.

The success of British social anthropology in the interwar period derived from the unity of its object, theory and method (Hart, 2004). The object was “primitive societies”, far-flung peoples of the empire encountered in the here and now. The theory was “functionalism”, the idea that customary practices, however bizarre, make sense and fit together, since daily life would be impossible otherwise. And the method, as their successors repeat in an unchanging mantra, was “fieldwork-based ethnography”, joining people where they live to find out what they do and think, then writing it up in universities back home. Even if I consider that anthropology has one ultimate object (to study and help create world society), I have been compelled to make a virtue of being methodologically and theoretically eclectic. Like many of my contemporaries, I have been drawn into the long struggle to reinvent our discipline in the face of post-colonial realities. Studying money has become for me the object and means of this re-invention.

The anthropology of money: some themes

(a) The meaning of money

The word money comes from Moneta, whose temple in Rome was their mint. Moneta was the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses. Her name was derived from the Latin verb moneo whose first meaning is “to remind, bring to one’s recollection”. For the Romans, money was an instrument of collective memory that needed divine protection, like the arts. It was both a memento of the past and a sign of the future.

Money’s prime function could thus be said to help us keep track of those exchanges we wish to calculate. But a lot more circulates by means of money than what it buys. Money conveys meanings and these tell us a lot about the way human beings make communities. Money expresses both individual desires and the way we belong to each other. In this it resembles language, the other great means of communication (Hart, 2007b). How do meanings come to be shared and memory to transcend the minutiae of personal experience? Memory was central to Locke’s philosophy of money (Caffentzis, 1989 : 53). For him property belonged to a person who made it his own by performing labour on what nature gave humanity in common. But for a claim on property to endure, that person has to remain the same; and this depends on memory. So money helps us to stabilize personal identity by holding something that embodies the desires and wealth of all.

Communities exist by virtue of their members’ ability to exchange meanings that are substantially shared between them. People must understand each other for practical purposes. And that is why communities operate through culture (meanings held in common). Money is an important vehicle for this collective sharing as well as for the differentiation of individuals by wealth and status.

Communities operate through implicit rules (customs) rather than state-made laws. In the nineteenth century, few believed that the state, an archaic institution of agrarian civilization, could govern the restless energies of urban commercial society. Accordingly, “primitive” communities were studied to throw light on the task of building modern societies along democratic lines. After the First World War, the modern state was seen as inevitable and small-scale alternatives became irrelevant. But now large states are in disarray. The word is out for devolution to less rigidly organized “communities”. Market networks seem to offer more direct access to the world at large. Cheap information allows relations at distance to be made more personal. So we have to rethink how societies can best be organized for their development.

The meaning of money is that each of us makes it, separately and together (Hart, 2006). It is a symbol of our individual relationship to the community. This relationship may be conceived of much as in existing states — as a durable ground on which to stand, anchoring identity in a collective memory whose concrete symbol is money. Or it may be viewed as a more creative process, allowing each of us to generate personal credit linking us to multiple forms of association. But few people are ready to accept that society rests on nothing more solid than our transient exchanges.

(b) Money as idea and object

Keynes (1930) held, against the myth that traces money to the barter of commodities by savages, that states invented money. He distinguished how purchasing power is expressed (“money-of-account”) from the currency that is actually held (“money-proper”, what Dodd (2005) calls “the monetary medium”). These are money’s insubstantial and substantial forms, respectively. It was thus always both an idea and an object; we might say, virtual and real. The convenience of using money for exchange on the spot seemed to Keynes less important than the emergence of a money standard named by law. Moreover, the acknowledgment of private debts (“bank money”) has long been used to settle transactions expressed through the money of account.

Modern state money is currency of little or no worth offered to a people by their government in payment for real goods and services, with the obligation to pay taxes on all transactions using the sole legal means of exchange within the territory. Central banks jealously guard the national monopoly, policing the banks who actually issue most of the money. Most currencies today are a hybrid between commodity-money (based on gold for example) and fiat-money (paper money). From the beginning, states and markets were symbiotic. Rulers needed the revenues from taxation of trade and some imported commodities as symbols of power; merchants needed the protection of law and the establishment of a public standard. Each excluded the possibility of society being conceived of as persons belonging to particular communities.

(c) Heads or tails?

The coin has two sides (Hart, 1986). One contains a symbol of political authority (heads); the other tells us its quantitative value in exchange for other commodities (tails). The two sides are related to each other as top to bottom. One carries the virtual authority of the state; it is a token of society, the money of account. The other says that money proper is itself a commodity, lending precision to trade; it is a real thing.

Victorian civilization based its market economy on money as a commodity, gold. For much of the twentieth century, under Keynes’s influence, political management of money was normal. Now there is talk again of “the markets” reigning supreme and of states losing control over national currencies in a process of globalization. Yet the evidence of our coinage is that states and markets are or were each indispensable to money. What states and markets share is a commitment to founding the economy on impersonal money. If you drop a coin and someone else picks it up, they can do exactly the same with it. This absence of personal information from the currency is what recommends cash to people who prefer their transactions to be invisible. But economic democracy requires people to participate in exchange as themselves, not just as the anonymous bearers of cash.

What if money came from the people instead (Hart, 2006)? The German romantic, Adam Müller (1931 [1816]) thought money expressed the accumulated customs of a nation (Volk); while Simmel (1978 [1900]) and Mauss (1990 [1925]) conceived of money as an expression of trust within civil society, locating value in personal management of credit and debt. In the age of digital communications, other possibilities present themselves. If money is a measure of transactions, it might even become more meaningful than it has been of late.

(d) People’s money

The bureaucratic power of states rests on coercion. Revenue collection, both public and private, depends on the authorities being able to force people to pay through the threat of punishment; and territorial monopoly is indispensable to both. This, for all their conflicts of interest, underlies the continuing alliance between large corporations and national governments. Will borderless trade at the speed of light permit governments and corporations still to compel payment of their dues? Contemporary conflicts over intellectual property hinge on this question (Hart, 2005).

How might public economies be organized without effective means of coercing payment? Some Swiss cantons have recently released their stock exchanges from government supervision, because the threat to punish offenders was idle. Exchanges were asked to draw up their own rules with the sole sanction being to exclude transgressors. With the erosion of territorial power, people will have to turn to more informal means of regulation within their own forms of association. The forms of money and exchange are likely to be no exception.

Modern bureaucracy, as embodied in law, markets and science, has undermined the meaningful attachment of persons to the social order. So, when bureaucracy fails, the means of personal connection will have to be reinvented. There are many antecedents for building communities on the basis of individual members’ moral and religious commitment. The growth of NGOs financed by charitable donations supports this point. Mauss (1990 [1925]) was far-sighted when he traced the origin of the modern economy to the gift, rather than to barter.

Mauss’s emphasis is consistent with the idea of money as personal credit, linked less to the history of state coinage than to the acknowledgement of private debt. Our need to keep track of proliferating connections with others is mediated by money as a means of collective memory. People will increasingly enter circuits of exchange based on special currencies. At the other extreme, we participate as individuals in global markets of infinite scope, using international moneys of account (such as the euro), electronic payment systems of various sorts or even direct barter via the internet.

It is a world whose plurality of association will resemble feudalism more than the Roman Empire. In such a world, one currency cannot possibly meet all the needs of a diversified region’s inhabitants. The shift to ever more intangible versions of currency — from metals to paper to bits — has exposed the limitations of central bank monopolies. In response, people have already started generating their own money in the form of a variety of community currencies often using sophisticated electronic payment systems (Hart, 2006).

Even when they don’t issue their own money instruments, people do make their own social uses of it. Zelizer (1994; 2005) argues that monetary flows are best approached through understanding the social practices of ordinary people. This too is the dominant perspective of Parry and Bloch’s collection, Money and the Morality of Exchange (1989). The anthropology of money must build on this perspective, since economic democracy has its origin in such practices. But I have been concerned mainly with the prospects for people to make money rather than take it for their own ends.

Commoditization: the dialectics of social abstraction

One common strand informing these several lines of inquiry into money has been Marx’s analysis of the historical relationship between people, machines and money in Capital. People ought to control machines and through them money, to be distributed in the general interest; but it is the other way round — money controls the machines and the people, with unequal and often socially disastrous results. Our political task is to reverse this situation. His book was a means to that end and he began it with the famous chapter on “commodities” which deserves our close attention, especially the opening section : “The two factors of a commodity: use-value and value (the substance of value and the magnitude of value)” (Marx 1970 [1867] : 35-41).

Marx defines the commodity as a useful product of labour which, by means of social abstraction, is endowed with value in exchange. In an earlier article (Hart, 1982), I sought to improve on this definition, first by making the historical dialectic more explicit and then by taking up developments since Marx’s time. I recast the commodity as a process, “commoditization”, defined as “the progressive abstraction of social labour”. When we do things for each other in society, these services have to be detached from what we do for ourselves. This process of abstraction draws us into ever-widening circles of interdependence, the most inclusive of which are exchanges using money.

The commodity is progressively (but not necessarily in a historical sequence):

Some useful thing external to the producer;
Made social by becoming available to outsiders;
Specialization extends exchange to an inter-community level;
Sometimes persons circulate, not things (e.g. marriage exchange);
Products of socially divided labour are circulated by means of gift-exchange, barter or payments of rent;
This may be elaborated as markets, exchange at negotiated rates, not the gift;
Then special- and general-purpose monies enter into the circuit of exchange;
Money is the commodity crystallized as pure exchange value (Marx);
Now money can take the form of capital to make profit;
Eventually “industrial capital” employs human labour, as opposed to finance and merchant capital;
Passing beyond Marx’s time, services come to outweigh goods in the world market (things are replaced by what people do for each other);
Now commodities are often ideas and work for society is recognized through wholly abstract ciphers; money is information flying around cyberspace as bits;
The world market for money is dominated by derivatives – secondary contracts that gamble on the future prices of commodities actually bought and sold;
But people still do many things for themselves; make gifts; use old-fashioned cash; join computerized barter networks etc.

This is, of course, a bourgeois just-so story; and it has been thrown into question again by the recent collapse of the utopian attempt to separate finance from the real economy and politics. But it is based on Marx’s and it does illuminate a basic trend that he predicted, the apotheosis of capital as money exchanged for money in a pure form detached from what people do. It is consistent with Mauss’s (1990 [1925]) argument that gift-exchange and market contracts rest on a shared logic of reciprocity; but not with the opposition between “gift economies” and “commodity economies” that animates so much anthropological discussion today (Gregory, 1982; 1997 : chapter 2; Hart, 2007a).

In his introduction to Grundrisse (1973 [1859]:100-108), Marx states that we must start from the concrete conditions of our moment in history and then draw some analytical abstractions from them. Some are content just to achieve abstract ideas; but for Marx the point is to insert these simplified abstractions back into their concrete starting-point. Yet he opens Capital with this abstract discourse on “commodities” and the three volumes never get to where he was aiming for in Grundrisse, “the world market and its crises”.

Both Marx (1970 [1867]) and Simmel (1978 [1900] : chapter 6) noticed that social abstraction through capitalist markets seemed to go along with intellectual abstraction as philosophy and science in ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, England in the seventeenth century and, we might say, the USA in the twentieth. But we should not lose sight of the dialectics involved. The commodity remains something useful and in that use lies its concrete realization. The reality is the mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete and our method has somehow to reproduce that.

We rely on the products of abstraction to engage with others in highly concrete ways; and information-based trade in commodities and money allows us to interact with increasing specificity at great distances. Thus I once had a service contract for my website with a firm in Bangalore, India. I could talk to the webmaster there by internet telephone, while he showed me various design possibilities through our browsers– all in real time and at no cost. This is getting close to what we could do to if we were in the same room together. Working with a PC will be a lot less lonely in future.

The digital revolution in communications is as radical as any in human history, comparable to the invention of agriculture (Hart, 2000, 2005). The internet went public less than two decades ago and its basic technologies were invented in the context of the second world war. We are like the first digging-stick operators who stumbled into a revolution whose culmination thousands of years later in Chinese agrarian civilization was unimaginable to them.

A case study: the euro

The euro is, with the US dollar, an example of the “homogenization” of money in recent times, the tendency for currencies to become more alike and for national currencies to take shelter with a global one (Dodd, 2005). As a very recent experiment, it lost 20% of its value against the dollar when it was only virtual (money of account), regaining more than that after its launch as notes and coins (monetary medium), only to slide back in 2005 and recover in 2006, since when its strength against a weakening dollar may have jeopardized its manufacturing exports. With the dollar’s role as world currency coming under pressure, the euro offers one of the few alternative refuges for the free flow of capital worldwide.

The European Union is the most dynamic political experiment in the world, with its rapid enlargement giving rise to intense debate over economic policy. The French and Dutch rejection of the new constitution revealed a popular concern that European governance is too remote, elitist and bureaucratic. I see the European project as an antidote to reactionary nationalism; but it could surely do with being more flexible and accountable. The “no” votes highlighted the issue of Europe’s “social model”, specifically of its ability to withstand the neo-liberal world economy. The monetary union agreed at Maastricht is too rigid and the Dutch in particular found they had imported inflation with the euro, partly because the governments of larger countries overspent their limits to shore up depressed economies. Some Italians, faced with Asian competition for their manufactures, now express nostalgia for lira devaluation.

As European and American foreign policy have diverged since the end of the Cold War, this has led to growing public discussion of their respective economic models. Market liberals see only decadence in Europe and a euro that was a dead duck before it even got started. Some American radicals, on the other hand, claim that Bush invaded Iraq because Saddam was switching his oil money into euros. In the meantime, no-one knows how long Japan and China will finance the USA’s trade and budget deficits nor what will happen to the world economy if they sell off their dollars. The rise of the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as producers of agriculture, minerals, manufactures and information services is the biggest shift in global capitalism since the USA and Germany challenged Britain’s commercial ascendancy a century ago. A focus on the euro is a way of simplifying this complex situation. That is after all one of money’s principal functions. So is the euro a new form of money and what difference has it made so far?

An editorial in Libération, of 1^st January 2002, celebrated the euro as a revival of the spirit of the Roman Empire under the heading “Rubicon”:

La marche de César sur Rome fut l’acte fondateur d’une Pax romana qui étendit son empire plusieurs siècles durant d’un bout à l’autre de l’Europe, garantissant au continent prospérité et civilisation. Les Européens n’ont jamais tout à fait perdu le souvenir de cet âge d’or….L’euro, véritable icône de l’Union européenne, est une nouvelle réincarnation de l’éternel projet d’unité d’un vieux continent hanté par sa longue histoire de conflits sanglants… (p. 3)

Moneta returns to claim her cultural legacy and a newspaper of the left temporarily abandons its republicanism to invoke the idea of empire. If money is memory, then the euro provokes very long memories indeed, as well as a degree of amnesia. Whatever we may think of Rome’s political system, the promise of overcoming the fragmentation of European sovereignty inherited from feudalism is indeed the huge symbolic prize conferred by monetary union. The EU is a community, not a state; and its founding principle of “subsidiarity” ensures that there is room for many levels of community underneath. Ironically, by suppressing their own national currencies, some countries may encourage the formation of parallel exchange circuits, employing virtual deutschmarks or francs as community currencies. There is scope for less inclusive monetary instruments to complement the euro. After all, the identity of the French is hardly erased by a currency that crosses borders.

Has the euro made any difference to the personal memory of individual Europeans? Their travels between member countries have been simplified, but not much else has changed. In most respects the system of banking remains the same and this reflects the conservatism of Maastricht and of the European central bank it eventually created.

The technical form of money is becoming ever more insubstantial — from precious metals and ledger entries to paper notes and electronic digits. In the process money is revealed as pure information and its function as an accounting device (money of account) takes precedence over its form as circulating objects (the monetary medium). The euro began life in a wholly virtual form, without an objective existence as currency. Since money futures markets were invented in 1975, international exchanges of money no longer mainly pay for traded goods and services, but rather consist of money being exchanged for money in another form. In this way the money circuit (known as “the markets”) has become almost wholly detached from real production, trade and political management.

In this world of runaway intangibles, the arrival of the euro notes and coins in January 2000 had a tangible objectivity. The banks of course still create over 90% of all euros in the form of paper loans (or more often as bits in cyberspace), but the actual currency was seen to be a symbol of a new political era. Almost all suppliers took advantage of the switch to round prices upwards. Otherwise, since the participating national currencies had been linked together within EMU for a decade, the euro has made little difference to people’s experience of money either as an idea or as an object.

What about “heads or tails”? Has the euro altered the balance between states and markets? The euro may not be a national currency, but it does aim to be federal, like the dollar, and the participating countries represent in effect a league of states. Joining a larger currency bloc is a way of trying to cope with “the markets” — the global tide of virtual money that threatens to swamp the independence of national economies. But the euro is still a form of state money and its management is likely to be even less democratically accountable to the public than its national precursors. The euro is in principle a throwback to the Bretton Woods era of fixed parity exchange rates; and it does not take much imagination to figure out that some parts of the European economy will suffer from its rigidity. The plight of countries like Ireland, Spain and Austria after the “credit crunch”, specifically their inability to devalue with th efreedom enjoyed by Britain, Sweden and Switzerland, confrms this hypothesis. At least the euro coins have generally dispensed with the heads of rulers.

The economic destiny of 300 million Europeans is now tied to the fortunes of a single currency whose management cannot possibly meet their varied needs and interests and whose political form is unwieldy enough to retard effective action in a crisis. If government of modern societies from a fixed central point has always been anomalous, this is even more true of Europe as I write now. Its constituent states will come under pressure from their own people for more flexible instruments of economic management. The euro cannot do the job all by itself. National monopolies of money have in any case only been around since the 1850s. Now would be a good time to recognize the need for a variety of monetary instruments, for as many in fact as our communities.

Is the euro a step towards money that better reflects the interests of people in general? The technical forms of currency are relatively insignificant — notes, coins, cheques, ledgers, plastic, digits — and the euro embraces them all. The form of the money of account is more important and, after several thousand years of state money linked to markets for scarce commodities (Keynes, 1930), it will take some effort to embrace another form, people’s money. Territorial states are an anachronism today. Digitization encourages a growing separation between society and landed power. The euro involves only a limited break with the territorial principle. Its logic is still that of a central bank monopoly within an expanded territory. The national governments of Euroland are likely to be more constrained in their ability to raise taxes beyond the norm for the region. And of course, travellers throughout Europe will be less subject than before to usurious exchange rates. But against this, the management of the European economy from a single fixed point will impose costs on regions ill-suited by the common monetary policy. And it is still the case that people will finance governments and the banks through the imposition of a monopoly currency as sole legal tender.

There are other democratic possibilities. We can make our own money rather than pay for the privilege of receiving it from our rulers (Hart, 2006). Already social experiments involving community currencies are breaking new ground, thanks to the possibilities inherent in the new information technologies. The next chapter of monetary history will be written by new approaches addressing the parts that the euro alone cannot reach. But the euro itself will probably be with us, well, for as long as European people think of themselves as a community for some purposes. This project has been severely strained by the financial (subsequently general economic) crisis of 2008-9 which has brutally exposed not only the gap between East and West Europe, but also the vulnerability of countries like Spain and Ireland to dependence on the European Central Bank’s management of a single currency, a role that increasingly looks to reflect Germany’s interests as the dominant member. Meanwhile the euro’s movement through our turbulent world offers us a glimpse of where human society is heading – perhaps to a totalitarian and fragmented future, even to world war, but just possibly also towards greater economic democracy and human unity.

Conclusion: money and the making of world society

The euro is the most tangible symbol of the European Union, but not co-extensive with it. For the last century or more, member states had supplied their citizens with a monopoly currency that served both as the reification of the national economy and as their principle link to the world market. The move towards political and monetary union in Europe is the most striking example of a general trend. Everywhere nation-states are coming together into regional trading blocs as one kind of response to globalization: NAFTA, Mercosul, ASEAN, ECOWAS etc. At the same time, many states have hitched their waggon to the sinking dollar. In the meantime, the sheer size and volatility of global money markets and internet commerce undermine the credibility of existing national polities as an effective bridge to world society. The international settlement after 1945 looks increasingly inadequate. Before long, calls for a world currency will become louder than at present (Frankman, 2004).

Money is a universal measure of value, but its specific form is not yet as universal as the method humanity has devised to measure time all round the world. It is a store of memory linking individuals to their various communities, a kind of memory bank and thus a source of identity (Hart, 2000). If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment lends finality to your choice. Money thus links us imaginatively and practically to the widest reaches of society, while lending precision to the fulfillment of our most concrete desires and obligations. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination.

If the object of anthropology is to become the making of world society, the substantial intellectual gains made by ethnography in the twentieth century must be married somehow to humanistic, historical and philosophical inquiries adequate to the task. The study of money offers one strategic focus for this, since money, more than most institutions, links each of us directly with the humanity’s potential to make universal society.

References

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DODD, N., 2005 : “Reinventing monies in Europe”, Economy and Society, 34 (4) : 558-583.

DURKHEIM, E., 1965 [1912] : The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Glencoe IL, Free Press.

FOSTER, R., 1999 : “In God we trust? The legitimacy of Melanesian currencies”. D. Akin and J. Robbins (Eds), Money and Modernity : state and local currencies in Melanesia, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press : 214-231.

FOUCAULT, M., 1973 [1966] : The Order of Things : an archaeology of the human sciences (Les mots et les choses), New York, Vintage Books.

FRANKMAN, M., 2004 : World Democratic Federalism : peace and justice indivisible, London, Palgrave-Macmillan.

GLUCKMAN, M. (Ed), 1964 : Closed Systems and Open Minds, Chicago, Aldine.

GREGORY, C., 1982 : Gifts and Commodities, London, Academic Press.

1997 : Savage Money : the anthropology and politics of commodity exchange, Amsterdam, Harwood.

GUYER, J., 2004 : Marginal Gains : monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa, Chicago, Chicago University Press.

HART, K., 1982 : “On commoditization”, E. Goody (Ed) From Craft to Industry, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P.

1986 : “Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin”, Man, 21(4) : 637-656.

2000 : The Memory Bank, London, Profile Books. Republished 2001 : Money in an Unequal World, New York, Texere).

2003 : Studying World Society as a Vocation, London, Goldsmiths Anthropology Research Papers No. 9. http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/papers/sws

2004 : “What anthropologists really do”, Anthropology Today, 20 (1) : 3-5.

2005 : The Hit Man’s Dilemma : or business, personal and impersonal, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm.

2006 : “Richesse commune: construire une démocratie économique à l’aide de monnaies communautaires”, Jérôme Blanc (éd), Exclusion et Liens Financiers – Monnaies sociales : rapport 2005-2006, Paris, Economica : 135-152.

2007a : “Marcel Mauss: in pursuit of the whole”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49 (2) : 1-13.

2007b : “The persuasive power of money”, S. Gudeman (ed), Economic Persuasions, New York, Berghahn.

KANT, I. 2006 [1798] : Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

KEYNES, J.M., 1930 : A Treatise on Money (2 volumes), London, Macmillan.

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Müller, A,  1931 [1816] : Elemente der Staatskunst : Theorie des Geldes, Leipzig, Kröne.

Parry, J. and Bloch, M. (Eds), 1989 : Money and the Morality of Exchange, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P.

Popper, K., 1997 : The Myth of the Framework, London, Routledge.

Simmel, G., 1978 [1900] : The Philosophy of Money, London, Routledge.

Zelizer, V., 1994 : The Social Meaning of Money, New York, Basic Books.

2005 : “Missing money: comment on Nigel Dodd” (above), Economy and Society, 34 (4) : 584-588.

First published in E. Baumann, L. Bazin, P. Ould-Ahmed, P. Phélinas, M. Selim, R. Sobel (éds)
Argent des anthropologues, monnaie des economistes (Harmattan, Paris, 2007)

The Trap Part 1 Fuck you buddy

Part 2 The lonely robot

Part 3 We will force you to be free

The weekend had a considerable impact on me and not just the car crash (to which I will return). I spent my first year in a Manchester bomb shelter and it took a long time for the devastation to be cleared up after the war. I am a keen historian too. So it’s not as if this stuff is new to me. Even so, the vivid immediacy of it all made a deep impression, forcing me to reflect again on what that war means for us today. The symmetry of two historic invasions 900 years apart, in the same places and from opposite directions, set off a sort of poetry of association.

What struck me first were the logistics of the Norman invasion and the D-day landings. William had to build all those boats, load them with men, horses, food and wine, erect a temporary fortress on the beach. He had already mastered the art of building castles from which to dominate the surrounding countryside. His castle at Caen, built to consolidate his position as Duke of Normandy, is much more impressive than any that I have seen in Britain. The military effectiveness of the Norman heavy cavalry has been much remarked upon. But the Bayeux tapestry museum exhibit points to another technology of control, writing, which William put to effective use in England, sending out monks trained in Norman scriptoria to compile the land registry of the Domesday book.

The genius of the American generals, Marshall, Eisenhower and the rest, was likewise logistical. The Germans defending France were subjected to a mobilization of people, machines and material that the world had never seen before. Less obvious is the fact that, by fighting this global war on several fronts at once, the Americans invented bureaucratic technologies that we have lived off ever since — systems theory, the internet and econometrics.

Each event — the Battle of Hastings and D-Day — deserves to stand alone in history for its political consequences. Yet they were both part of a global war. William’s invasion (the Normans were Vikings who had matched feudal cavalry to seamanship) was timed to coincide with an attack on Northeast England by the King of Norway, while other Normans were busy conquering Sicily. Within two decades of capturing England, the Normans were setting up colonies across the Mediterranean and banging on the gates of Jerusalem. William’s first task after being crowned in London was to secure the Irish Sea routes between the Baltic and the Mediterranean, access to which had been interrupted since the Arab conquest and by Danish expansion in the North Sea. In nationalist perspective, the whole point of Hastings was to replace the Saxon nobles and bishops with a Norman ruling class. But there were wider stakes at play and these have been largely forgotten or ignored.

The Caen Memorial has a place for the Eastern front of the Second World War. We learn that of the 50 million people who died in that war (compared with 8 million in 1914-18), 20 million were Russians. After being gripped by a video of the Battle of Britain, I sat with my young daughter alone at a screening of the Siege of Leningrad (almost three years!) and the Battle of Stalingrad. I don’t know what she made of it all. Sometimes she was frightened. Mostly she wanted to know if the good guys won. It was pretty overwhelming, the extraordinary mobilization of citizen armies and the shared devastation suffered by civilian populations. It is not hard to imagine why these people, when the war was over, built the nearest thing we have seen to functioning social democracy and set about creating an anti-colonial world order.

I have been living in France for a dozen years now. One lasting impression is how much more alive twentieth century history is here than in Britain, where a sort of post-imperial amnesia seems to have set in, and the United States, which was founded on an escape from history. I couldn’t help reflect on the tremendous power of that American mid-century expansion into the world, a tidal movement that may be ebbing now; and on the lack of domestic damage suffered by Americans for whom Pearl Harbour and the World Trade Center were so exceptional. I want the whole world to come to Caen and see what actually happened in that war.

All of this took place against the backdrop of the economic catastrophe we are living through today. Just as the fall of the Berlin wall opened up the history of the twentieth century, returning us to 1917 and beyond, the financial crisis of 2008 (fast becoming the general economic collapse of 2009) has brought the Thirties back to life. For some time now, I have felt that the analogy with the Great Depression is misleading. The Reagan/Thatcher credit boom was like the three decades of financial imperialism before the First World War and that would place us now around 1913-14 on the brink of another world war. There is something sterile about this kind of comparison, however, and that seemed doubly so after my visit to Normandy.

The history of 1914-45 cannot be repeated today. There will never again be huge citizen armies slugging it out for control of national territories, while cities are bombed into submission. The technologies of twentieth century warfare were pioneered by the British at the turn of the century in response to Irish, Boer and Indian resistance to Empire (concentration camps, hit squads, disinformation campaigns); the Bulgarians invented civilian bombing in the Balkan wars of 1912-13. The horrors to come will be of a different sort, building on social technologies that have been discovered more recently. As Marx said, you can’t steal from a nation of bankers in the same way as from a nation of shepherds. The same goes for war. Maybe next time Europe will be less central to the action.

Oh yes, the crash. Within twenty minutes of collecting a rental car at Caen railway station, I was lost in the suburbs, the sun was low in my eyes and I was faced with a maze of roads and tramlines. While I was figuring out what to do (but moving), I missed a light and was slammed into by something the size of a train. The car was trapped on the kerb and neither the tram nor I could move. None of us was hurt. The rescue operation took three hours and involved a plethora of firemen, police, tramway officials and breakdown men. Everyone was very good about it. I was caught between feeling desperately unlucky (this particular tram came every ten minutes, why in the second that I crossed that line?) and also very lucky (we were untouched and I escaped more bureaucratic inconvenience than seemed likely at one time). You could say that the event cast an air of gloom over the excursion, timed as it was to coincide with Sophie’s birthday.

Maybe the crash softened me up to be more receptive to the Caen and Bayeux museums than I would otherwise have been. I don’t know. It was a memorable weekend for sure.

We are connected at last, humanity that is. World society is a reality. It has come home to roost in America. The reduction of the World Trade Centre to rubble marked this in the most vivid way possible. The world is one. Boom. That unity is violent. Boom. The sudden shock of recognition that America is in the world, not apart from it. The curious thing about the first decade after the Cold War is that, even as America took over the world, Americans, who come from all over the world, became more insular, more separated from it than before. John Locke once wrote, ‘In the beginning all the world was America’, meaning in a state of nature. Well, now all of our world is America again, but this time it reflects the age of money and unequal property that succeeded the state of nature in Locke’s scheme. The task of establishing civil government, successor to the age of money, awaits us.

After the catastrophe, a time for rationality. But reason works better backwards than forwards. Rationalization of the past is more effective than attempts to project a rational future. Today’s terrorism has a specific origin in the covert operations of the US government under Reagan during the 80s. Following the defeat in Vietnam, the Americans fought the Cold War through Third World proxies trained to use terror as a means of subduing civilian populations: in ex-Portuguese Africa, Unita and Renamo (supported by the outlaw South African regime); in Central America, the Contras; in Afghanistan, the Mujaheddin and, as we all now know, Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the IMF opened up the rest to the predations of corporate capital and to the drain of debt interest. When the Berlin Wall fell, Bush the Elder orchestrated the Gulf War for domestic consumption by television and then everything went quiet for a decade. The interventions in former Yugoslavia were minor policing operations in comparison. The Clinton years, in retrospect, now seem like a belle époque. Wall Street contrived the biggest boom in economic history, the internet connected us in a single network and the last checks on American military power evaporated. The bobos of Manhattan turned inwards to enjoy life at the centre of the world, while the rest of America was absorbed in itself. The cracks in all this were already beginning to show principally as a collapse of internet stocks and then of the telecoms boom when Hollywood’s perennial images of spectacular destruction were enacted for real on September 11th.

So now we have an unlimited war on terrorism, waged against the same Islamic fundamentalism that the CIA once encouraged in the Mujaheddin. This Republican regime relishes the opportunity to range worldwide without consultation and without even paying lip service to international law. After 1945, the USA decided to build up Western Europe and Japan as its junior partners in a new project of collective empire. The rules of this collective were set by the American reaction to Suez: the appearance of joint decision-making and participation, but only one active policeman allowed. This was supposed to be different from the European imperialism whose replacement by nation-states was supervised by Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. It is celebrated as such by Hardt and Negri in their bestseller, Empire. It was established practice as recently as Kosovo. Yet now American columnists boast of their country’s freedom to act as it likes, a freedom prepared for by countless international treaties left unsigned. At home, Bush the Younger’s appeals to ‘the nation’ have produced a stampede to conform; anti-terrorist legislation and judicial practice promise to overthrow hard-won civil liberties; and Americans try to come to terms with estrangement from a world that resents their careless wealth and unfettered power. In the name of anti-terrorism, the satellite governments introduce their own versions of internal repression; border controls and surveillance in general are stepped up; and, while only the British have volunteered to be the Yankee imperial bag-carrier, no-one else has mustered serious criticism of the Americans’ conduct of the Afghan war.

The immediate aftermath of September 11th thus looks like a regression. For some time now, it has seemed that the old corporate bureaucracies were in retreat, when faced with the rise of a global network society. Even the capitalist corporations have gone through a frenzy of downsizing and outsourcing during the last decade in a drive to take on a more flexible network form. State capitalism, the attempt to manage accumulation and markets through national bureaucracies, has been eroded by a tide of electronic money flowing across borders with virtual impunity, while the ability of corporations to dictate terms to national governments is growing every year. Criminal markets for drugs, arms and bootleg copies of everything dominate trade in much of the world. Now we have seen a band of terrorists, employing the techniques of informal economy and network society, produce the most dramatic public theatre in memory. And how does the Bush regime respond? With B 52s bombing a country into a stone-age to which it had already returned. If the fall of the Berlin Wall was a universal symbol of the people’s triumph over bureaucratic power, this is the counter-revolution, contrived by a ruling elite threatened for a decade by increased freedom of social connection and reduced popular fear of central power. What is new is the unilateral assumption of this function by the American government. We might call it ‘state capitalism in one country’. But the rest of the world’s unpopular regimes know that it shores up their own powers of rule, even if they are not being given a token role in the action.

It is convenient for the rulers of our unipolar world to focus attention on cultural politics abstracted from history on the struggle between good and evil, liberal enlightenment and religious bigotry, ‘the American way’ and a recalcitrant Islam. Our task should be to expose the social contradictions that this ideology conceals. For this is a capitalist world and capitalism is not standing still while the media hang breathlessly on every minor development in Afghanistan. What democratic forces are emerging to confront a corporate capitalism whose hegemony has never been more universal than now? This question entails another. How might we break up the idea of a monolithic America, that rhetoric of national unity on which Bush depends for popular support, in order to identify the forces within American society ready to oppose their own government and corporations? This means refusing to equate the US ruling elite with the American people and their instinct for democracy. Knee-jerk anti-Americanism leaves out of the global struggle against neo-liberal capitalism many of the elements that are best placed to play an effective part. We must distinguish between the American state and the American people, even if today in an atmosphere of perceived national crisis many Americans are reluctant to do so. Against Bush’s version of America as lawless world bully and institutional expression of corporate capitalism, there is another living tradition representing America as a self-sufficient federalist democracy, with weak central government, offering a home for the world’s oppressed peoples.

The fight is on to save the commons of human society, culture and ecology from the encroachments of corporate private property. This is no longer principally a question of conserving the earth’s natural resources, although it is definitely that too, nor of the deterioration of public services left to the mercies of privatized agencies. The information age has raised the significance of intangible commodities. Increasingly we buy and sell ideas; and their reproduction is made infinitely easier by digital technologies. Accordingly, the large corporations have launched a campaign to assert their exclusive ownership of what until recently might reasonably have been considered shared culture to which all have free and equal access. Across the board, separate battles are being fought, without any real sense of the common cause that they embody. The napsterization of popular music, harbinger of peer-to-peer exchange between individual computers, is one such battle pitting the feudal barons of the music business against our common right to transmit songs as we wish. The world of visual images, of film, television and video, is likewise a site of struggle sharpened by fast-breaking technologies affecting their distribution and use. In numerous subtle and not-so-subtle ways, our ability to draw freely on a common heritage of language, literature and law is being undermined by the aggressive assertion of copyright. People who never knew they shared a common infrastructure of culture are now being forced to acknowledge it by aggressive policies of corporate privatization. And these policies are being promoted at the international level by the same American government whose armed forces now seem free to run amok in the world.

In the case of the internet, what began as a free communications network for a scientific minority is now the contested domain of giant corporations and governments. The open source software movement, setting Linux and an army of hackers against Microsoft’s monopoly, has opened up fissures within corporate capitalism itself. The shift to manufacture of food varieties has introduced a similar struggle to agriculture, amplified by a revival of ‘organic’ farming in the context of growing public concern about genetic modification. The pharmaceutical companies try to ward off the threat posed to their lucrative monopolies by cheap generics aimed at the Third World populations who need them most. The buzzword is ‘intellectual property rights’, slogan of a corporate capitalism determined to impose antiquated ‘command and control’ methods on world markets whose constitutive governments have been cowed into passivity. The largest demonstrations against the neo-liberal world order, from Seattle to Genoa, have been mobilized to a significant degree by the need to oppose this particular version of global private property. The events of September 11th have temporarily diminished this movement, especially in North America, just as they have added to the powers of coercion at the disposal of governments everywhere. In this sense, the global movement for greater democracy and less inequality has suffered a reverse.

A large proportion of the activists resisting the corporate takeover of world society belong to the western middle classes. This is so whether we are talking about the internet, software, cultural products, food, drugs, pollution, arms control or the exploitation of cheap labour. Europeans make their own distinctive contribution, but many of these movements have their source in America. The Free Software Foundation is American. The American courts tried Microsoft. Napster was an American invention. American farmers are fighting rents imposed on food varieties by corporate monopolists. American consumers resist being made the guinea pigs of drugs companies. Of course, these activities can be and are represented by corporations, their lawyers and political stooges as ‘unAmerican’. But they are an expression of what is best in America, its democracy.

It is a widely shared and justified belief that the age of money, whose culmination we are witnessing today, is not in the interest of most human beings, that the American government and giant corporations (half of them American, a third European) are indifferent to that common interest of humanity. The rest of the world needs Americans to join them in the struggle for decent human standards in social life. They bring tremendous resources of technology, education and economic power to that struggle, but above all they bring their country’s liberal political traditions. It would be a pity if the effect of September 11th was to obscure that possibility of global democratic solidarity, leaving the world stage to Texas oilmen and Muslim fanatics, with their mutual conspiracy to divide and rule.

An article circulated among my academic colleagues, “The Needless Destruction of Iraq’s (and our own) Cultural Heritage”. It was written by a Director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and it protests the looting of the Baghdad museum, while US soldiers looked on with indifference. It was meant for the New York Times op-ed page and was rejected. I can see why it was rejected. Perhaps there were more ambivalent versions available certainly two others were published . A little irony would not have gone amiss and the author doesn’t seem to recognize that his professional interest might undermine his advocacy. And Mesopotamia was the cradle of all Eurasian civilizations, not just “ours”.

I had been mulling over the irony of bombing Baghdad in the name of democracy long before the war broke out. I don’t believe that the battle to displace agrarian civilization (a.k.a. the old regime) has yet been won. The Phoenicians, the Athenians and the Carthaginians did their best to establish a commercial civilization in the ancient Mediterranean for the best part of a thousand years and it was the Romans who won in the end, making the place safe for military landowners for another millennium and a half. So if America is exasperated with the Old World of its own origins, what better symbolic way of speeding up the transition to democracy than smashing up Mesopotamia? Except that, in doing so, Bush and Co reveal their own addiction to warfare as a technique of control, just like the old regime.

State capitalism is essentially backward looking. The belle époque of Clinton’s dotcom bubble now seems like the dream that it was and America has since turned to “state capitalism in one country” (only one world policeman allowed). It will be the ruin of us all if not checked. Arundhati Roy said recently that the only institution on earth more powerful than the American government is American civil society and I think she is right. We have to explode the ideology of freedom that links them free markets, free democracy, free to get run over by a tank, free to bury the past.

So when I heard of the cultural catastrophe last week, I immediately wondered if the looters and the lumpen crusaders had a common goal. I haven’t read many interviews with looters. It is assumed that they are just a greedy, undisciplined rabble let loose by Saddam’s fall. Lately there have been whispers of organised crime hiding behind the general turmoil, in which case Saddam’s totalitarian regime was not wholly effective, unless this is state-sponsored crime as in post-Soviet Russia. Saddam’s hangers-on didn’t run away or get to be buried in the rubble as so many remnants of DNA they stayed to get rich by stealing their country’s heritage under cover of a mob they conjured up themselves. No doubt President Assad is already lining himself up to fence the stuff to American billionaires for their private collections. The sack of Baghdad sees the loot going back to America, in a privatised way similar to but not quite the same as how the British Museum was filled.

But I digress. Could there have been another motive for the looting, one that has resonance with America’s historic mission to erase the old regime from the world, by bombing and occupying its source? Maybe the looters, like generations of American immigrants, born again and otherwise, just wanted to wipe out their past. Not just Saddam, but the whole sorry history, including colonialism, back to Sumer for crissake. What good did it ever do them, this revered past? Better to make a new start. This fits with Rumsfeld and his merry men, doesn’t it? A new beginning, at least for Bechtel. A born again Christian ideology of remaking the world from scratch. The ironic contrast with the priority given to safeguarding oil is made by everyone. But oil is the future, not the past and it’s running out. You say that these relics are priceless? Nonsense, cultural heritage is a creative capitalist industry these days. If it depended on a fixed stock of artefacts, where would the expansion be then? Schumpeter called it creative destruction…Just think of how Europe and Japan bounced back after all that real estate got wiped out. The archaeologists haven’t got the point. And in any case, Baghdad had already been razed to the ground by the Mongols, so it was really no more of an antique than Los Angeles.

Another angle. Most capitalist fortunes originated in theft. How can we disparage the spirit of enterprise in this instance? It’s like when the Serbs asked the western powers, How can you blame us for establishing our nation with the techniques you used at your own neighbours’ expense? This is what I find compromising about the American cultural heritage experts who wanted to work with the Pentagon, gave them long lists of sites “not to destroy” while they went about killing and maiming the Iraqi people, for whom no such lists were drawn up. And now they are outraged that their livelihood has been disrupted. What were they doing in bed with the Pentagon in the first place? Didn’t they think that an American army on the rampage would be as callous and brutal as any other, when it came down to it? Did they imagine that these ill-educated blacks, Latinos and poor white trash would have anything on their minds beyond self-preservation and the need to rest? Did they buy the rhetoric of surgical strikes, of invasion without collateral damage? Just what is it about clay figurines from 5,000 years ago that makes them exempt from the holocaust? It exposes the hypocrisy of our educational systems that this aberration against humanity could be seen as being susceptible to careful cultural management. All it would have taken was a tank or two, a few shots in the air… And quite a few dead people, more like.

The article in question starts by asking American readers to imagine a crowd looting the Smithsonian while the police stand idly by. This provoked a thought experiment, which follows. It is 1941. The Churchill government has escaped to Canada. The victorious German army enters London. Derelict buildings are everywhere, some of them still burning. Small arms fire can be heard in all directions. Snipers have a clear line on the advancing soldiers. Public services, including the police, have evaporated. They encounter a mob in the process of pillaging the British museum. Frenzied looters can be seen pushing wheelbarrows stacked with medieval tapestries and Greek statuettes. What are you supposed to do?  Tell them to take the stuff back, so that it can await shipping to Berlin? Shoot them for getting to the loot before the Nazis? But isn’t it the case that if the perfidious British want to destroy their own monarchical cultural heritage, it aids the reconstruction of their polity by the Germans? In any case, the Germans are too tired to react and have their hands full with the snipers. Perhaps an intrepid BBC reporter, at least one who can imagine collaborating with the new regime, interviews a few looters. Why are they stealing stuff from the BM? The answer is that they want to steal anything they can. They have lost everything. Why shouldn’t they grab what they can? People are looting anything that comes to hand the hospitals, the hotels, the ministries, Selfridges, anything. It’s just that these icons of cultural heritage are more shocking to the educated class than mattresses thrown out of the windows of the Savoy.

Maybe all of this is simply unbelievable. The British are much too well-behaved to become this kind of undisciplined mob, aren’t they? Or are they? What does it say about the nature of Iraqi society that this should be the outcome of its demise? What is the comparative evidence of how people have behaved elsewhere under conditions of abrupt regime change, invasion or war? Isn’t the outrage of the orientalists an expression of a belief that somehow the American empire ought to be different, perhaps as nuanced in its techniques of control as its British predecessor? Most damning of all, a marine is reported (by Robert Fisk, who else?) as phoning in, ‘Yeah, some guy says some biblical library’s going up…’. The shame of it, that our soldiers should have a weak command of the language. The Europeans will be crowing over this example of ugly Americanism for years. Maybe US marine jokes will temporarily displace Bush jokes from the internet charts.

Irony isn’t enough. But how do you talk to these self-important academic representatives of American or ‘western’ civilization? I tried yesterday with an archaeology graduate student. He beat a hasty retreat up the stairs. In any case he had an important matter to expose to public view, another urgent plank of the campaign to oppose the infidels who run the White House.

I was contacted by a guy in Hyde Park, a software artist unattached to the university, who had read my Mesopotamia piece on a list. He invited me to a public meeting of a Committee against War and Racism. Always glad to seize any chance to make virtual society real, I squeezed all my jobs into the first half of the day and headed South around 4pm. On the way over, I read a Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet by Eliot Weinberger called 9/12. He is a writer from New York and the pamphlet is five essays starting with Bush’s election coup, then the day after September 11th and three other ruminations on that and the Bush regime at later intervals. It made a big impact, not least because the journey from Evanston to Hyde Park was a perfect length to read it. It was a day when my dislocation in the world appeared to be redeemed, if only partially. It is so well written, humane and muscular, and incredibly informative.

For most of my time here, I have affected to be dismissive of the American progressives I have encountered. They seem to be in despair, talking of exile, preoccupied with getting Bush out, insular. When I come with my line about the American opposition that is built into the country’s history, they talk instead of a popular monolith that is brainwashed by the media and look to Europe for resistance French intransigence, the English press. Weinberger, with his relentless accumulation of detail, the Curse of the Bushes (cowardice) and all that, tipped me over. I realised more concretely than before what these people were talking about; and the tenacious grip I have on my own vision of America as a force for enlightenment and democracy in the world slipped a little.

The meeting in the university church was a bust. I guess the only public culture Americans have is that of a revivalist meeting. Each of six speakers gave their personal testimony a Palestinian woman missed the plane for her father’s funeral because she was arrested at the airport; an old man told how his prescription drugs for Parkinson’s were unaffordable because money is being diverted from Medicare to war; a Vietnam vet offered some insight into conditions in the army today; a public health professor went on about the damage to people in Iraq and here; there was just one standard leftist rant alright, but predictable. That wasn’t too bad. It was the discussion that was depressing. Because everyone had their own private agenda and no way of making a conversation out of it. So one girl wanted to know about smallpox vaccination because someone in her family (a soldier?) had been made ill by it; some old guy went into a rambling thing about the UN; two Spartacists stood up and made incredibly insensitive speeches, calling for a Bolshevik revolution (1917 was the only successful anti-war movement in history) and reminding us that Lenin called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism they were shouted down. I couldn’t stand it any more, the impotence of the occasion, found my contact, made my apologies and left.

But the journey wasn’t yet over. I still had to take the Red Line to Howard and on to Evanston. This time I was reading Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for a class. This is an excerpt from the American edition:

“The title is taken from W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘The second coming’ and that for his second novel, No Longer At Ease from TS Eliot’s ‘The journey of the magi’. The choice of titles reflects the author’s awareness of a debilitation that Okonkwo foresees in Things Fall Apart. This comes from the world of Yeats’s cataclysmic vision and how the Irish poet would have appreciated the wild old Nigerian…No Longer at Ease ends not with a matchet swing but a gavel’s tap.” (Evoking Eliot: the world ends not with a bang but a whimper).

I once read a book by Stephen Toulmin called Cosmopolis. At one stage he merges two poems by Donne and Yeats, the latter’s being this one Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold… He claims that they are in effect the same poem, as revealed by the fairly seamless merger. He goes on to say that both Donne and Yeats were radical conservatives, defined as someone who, disgusted by contemporary society, would renew it in the name of a value taken from the past. I suddenly thought, Hang on! Donne and Yeats are my two favourite poets, so what does that make me? And ever since, I have known that I too am a radical conservative. Witness the fact that I prefer to read old books. And I know what past value I want to revive the tradition of classical anglophone liberalism from Milton and Locke to Smith and Jefferson. This project has solidified of late and underlies my book proposal for The Human Economy.

All of this was passing through my mind while the Chicago Transit Authority train made halting progress toward Howard (a place chiefly known as the nearest source of booze and sex for the inmates of that dry Methodist town where I now earn my living). And it came to me then, not an original thought, but original to me. That we are living in fascism now. I recall a book of essays about America between the wars, called The Aspirin Age. A major theme was fascism then Huey Long, Father McLoughlin etc. And I realised what Weinberger’s pamphlet had demonstrated, that the Bush clique were a continuation of that thread, only this time with the corporate state within a state, the Pentagon in tow (fuelled by two-thirds of American taxes), with the most irresponsible American corporations in charge and with fundamentalist Christianity as a vision for fixing the world. I understood more fully why my American friends were depressed. I could still hang on to my own vision of the liberal democratic tradition, but I can also now embrace more fully the vision of the American and European left. America has come under the control of fascists.

Not long after, I went to a meeting of the International Socialist Organization in Rogers Park. It was billed as “Karl Marx’s revolutionary ideas”. But I went as part of my fieldwork study of American dissent while I am here. I was invited by a young friend,. John whom I had known in Cambridge and Paris. The speaker was a cross between a Hell’s Angel and a teddy bear, called Adam. He rattled off a prepared speech, mostly based on the Communist Manifesto, gave a potted early bio of Karl Marx and was careful not to strain his audience (“As a young man he was attracted to leftwing circles arguing about the ideas of a German philosopher called Hegel, but I won’t go into that…”). He had one good joke: “He wrote against censorship for the Rheinische Zeitung, but most of what he wrote was censored.”. The speech was OK, nothing special.

We were in a high school doubling as a community centre, with women’s keep fit classes and black caucuses. The room was small and full (good planning). I was impressed by the range of the audience. In Britain a meeting of Trots would be geriatric, male and all white. Here there was a good mix of age, gender, race and class. Then we had a discussion. I had in mind my previous experience in the university church, where all the speakers had only their private agendas and no way of making a conversation, like a revivalist meeting without the holy ghost to keep things communal. This was entirely different. People spoke in an order determined by the chair, a large lady who couldn’t remember Adam’s name, but knew most people in the room. The main speaker waited until the end to get back in. The speeches were relevant and abstract, sometimes relating to each other. Most of all I was impressed by the respect and kindness people showed each other, as well as by that American trick of trying to address the largest number in an uncomplicated way without condescending. It was impressive, like a church meeting of the better sort, sticking to the agenda, but turned outwards to the world not inwards.

I tossed in an anomalous comment early on. There had been talk about bourgeois wealth being diverted to the alleviation of poverty come the revolution, about capitalism being on its last legs, old, past its sell-by-date. So I reminded them that a third of humanity still worked in the fields with their hands and a similar number had never made a telephone call in their life. Who or what was going to bring them into the circuit of shared wealth, if not capitalism? Who would send up the satellites and lay the cables to bring them all in? Well, this got them going in not unexpected ways. Later I made my pitch for nationalism (and behind that racism) as the main obstacle to a socialist revolution capable of addressing the scope of the world capitalist economy. I talked of states, corporations and transnational institutions as the social relations of production that now act as so many fetters on the development of the forces of production. People responded positively to that. The show ended up with what I took as the stalwarts of the group making an upbeat pitch two young Asian women, a Hispanic man, a Jewish intellectual, a Stalinoid white woman at the back who controlled the purse strings and offered a good but irrelevant piece on musical chairs as a way of indoctrinating children with a dog-eat-dog ethos early. Only one person broke the pattern, a gay black man who did the revivalist thing (“I come from Grand Rapids and it was only when I was a teenager that…”), much to the discomfort of the others.

I came away impressed and uplifted. The art of political conversation is not dead in America. They were a small groupuscule I learned that they had been thrown out of the SWP in Britain, plus ça change. They are having a potluck on Saturday to raise funds for their big conference here in late June (100 panels… groan!). I might go. They were nice. They said things I hadn’t heard before. Like someone asked what the socialist revolution would look like and how do you persuade people it doesn’t have to be like Stalin’s Russia and one guy said you just get on with your life and join in the fights that mean something to you. They had a highly idealised view of the Third World (peons working for absentee landowners), but they wanted to connect with them and some of them knew in detail what was going on in Bolivia, Argentina etc. It gave me a warm feeling. I enjoyed myself and not even mainly because I had spoken and afterwards bought a book of Trotsky’s speeches, chatted with someone whose mother was French and so on.

Afterwards, John and I went to his apartment and talked for a couple of hours. It was a very stimulating conversation in the course of which I reached what seemed then and now to be my clearest ever conception of our moment in world history, of the relationship between capitalism and revolution. A lot of it had to do with trying to explain the relationship between two things: the shift in the social organization of economy from house to city to nation-state to world society; and the idea that the shift to virtual commodities, especially money instruments, was not necessarily a house of cards about to collapse, but possibly a new stage in the rationalisation of the market. I argued that the main contradiction is between national and global organisation of the economy, that there are two great camps, combining right and left, who adhere to each pole respectively. I rehearsed my line that this opens up the terrain for a classic liberal revolution in which some elements of capitalism combine with popular democratic interests, this time to break up state capitalism. This will lead to new global Keynesian institutions, but not to socialism in the first instance or soon. Capitalism still has a way to go to complete its mission to bring cheap commodities to the masses and to break the grip of the old regime by making the market universal.

In the course of this conversation, I found myself trying to capture in soundbites the glimpses I have had of the high financial capitalist world, mainly through Satya, an Indian mathematician who designs derivatives for Union Banque Swiss. I couldn’t help thinking of the huge UBS trading floor, the multitude of traders locked into their Panopticon on the world, all those screens with moving numbers in lights and televisions showing the weather everywhere, hidden away in an inaccessible place in a huge implacable building on North Wacker with black windows, seeing everything, but seen by no-one. How could this score of Trotskyites in a crummy high school room in a rundown Chicago neighbourhood compete with that? We have to find the points of possible alliance with those sectors of capital for whom the Bush strategy doesn’t work. I recalled a factoid about China’s 40% share of world economic growth last year. It reverberates in my skull. I wonder if I could get into Swiss banking as a fieldworker somehow. I have such a slender grip on this stuff. I have read most of the books on Drexel Burnham Lambert, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers etc in the boom years. But I want to see that floor again, if only from the outside. It has become the symbol of what I am reaching for.

I saw Polanski’s The Pianist only recently on video, while I am spending three months in the USA.. I have been coming here for thirty years and I am a great fan of this mysterious society and its warm people. Lately, I have been disturbed by a discernible shift to autocracy, even brutality in public life at home and abroad. Much of this is justified as the need for security in response to “terrorism”. We all depend on impersonal society, call it law, bureaucracy, the market or whatever. And the quality of face-to-face interaction with other human beings is still our measure of the standards we set for personal society. The balance between the two is a thin line we tread daily. Personal society can mean feudalism or criminal mafias and no-one wants that, whatever we may think about the tendency of bureaucrats to trample on basic human interests.

The other day I left my wife crying at the airport where her personal goods had been systematically ripped apart by officials claiming to be just following orders. She said she had never been treated that way in the Soviet Union. There is no question that people who travel through US airports these days expose themselves to harassment and humiliating treatment that would have been unthinkable two years ago. All in the name of security, of course. Black young men have suffered much worse from the police for much longer. But it does seem as if American society could be sliding imperceptibly towards instituted inhumanity of a sort we once called fascism. The present government’s indifference to law, whether in Iraq, at Guantanamo or in the domestic detention of suspects, and its apparent ability to lie with impunity merely reinforce the impression that we are witnessing something new here or perhaps rather something old that we thought we put behind us after 1945.

These thoughts were brought to life and made relative by watching The Pianist. The first half of the movie is harrowing. It shows a decent middle class family shuffling down the slippery slope to destruction by a fascist society that had trained some of its members to behave with the most callous brutality imaginable. At every step, normal people could doubt the plausibility of what was happening to them. By the time they tried to resist, it was too late. The second half is a chase whose outcome is already known (it wouldn’t be a movie if the hero died before the end). This reduces the suspense and contributes to a feeling that the film lasts too long. The main character and his relationships don’t develop at all in a protracted sequence marked by historical dates the Warsaw uprising, the arrival of the Russians and so on. But the movie did provide a useful way of placing disparate phenomena along a continuum we might label ‘fascist’.

Could I claim that roughing up the belongings of a French woman with a baby at the airport is analogous to picking eight men out of a line at random and shooting them in the head? My answer was and is Yes. Because Nazism started out with the acquiescence of ordinary people in brutality that escalated imperceptibly over time. And because all nationalisms are implicitly a racist assertion of superiority over foreigners who lack any claim to human rights. The critique has to start with the inhumanity of normal society harassed women slapping kids in supermarkets, men in their 50s being thrown on the scrap heap because the terms of trade dictate it, a teenager being strip-searched because she fits a drug runner’s profile. I think this makes me a liberal, as does the belief that we can’t return to the Warsaw ghetto or the Gulag, not that far. Why so? We are witnessing an attempt to put the lid on a popular uprising that was continuous since 1945 and peaked in the 90s. The resistance is not obvious today because people are fearful about losing more than they think they can afford to. And they are right to be afraid. But I don’t think the repressive classes can get away with as much as they did in mid-century. And here I rely on the classic liberal idea, that people know too much these days.

So I wonder what this fine movie provokes in the minds of the audience: that this couldn’t happen to us again or that it could, if we forget the history it brings alive for us?

A review posted on Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com).

Jack Goody, in his latest book The Theft of History (see below for details), does not seek to account for Euro-centrism as such, but rather to demolish its pretensions to intellectual respectability. This attack was implicit in a series of large-scale historical comparisons going back three decades, but it is here made his principal focus for the first time. Goody sets out to show that, in order to turn a temporary success into an origin myth without end, even the most serious Western writers have unjustifiably traced Europe’s global ascendancy back to the civilization of the Renaissance or to that of Ancient Greece. In separating Europe from Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, they have systematically downgraded Asian societies, while ignoring Eurasia’s common foundation in a Bronze Age civilization that started in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. Above all, as the first owners of a newly formed world society, they have rewritten history with themselves in the driving seat and have usurped the legitimate claims of others to have shared in humanity’s greatest achievements. In other words, having stolen their land, the Europeans proceeded to steal their history also.

The book’s structure is pleasing. Inevitably Goody has had to be selective when approaching such a diverse topic and what we have here is a set of related essays. These are organized in three groups of three, framed by an introduction, a short essay on how Europeans made the world’s time and space in their own self-image and an afterword. The first of these groups examines the historical categories that allegedly account for Europe’s divergence from Asia before the early modern period: Antiquity, Feudalism and Asiatic Despotism. The second discusses three authors who have done much to shore up European assertions of their own uniqueness: Needham, Elias and Braudel. The third deals with institutions, values and even emotions for which Europeans have claimed a monopoly: towns and universities; humanism, democracy and individualism; and love. If, by the end of all this, believers may not yet be convinced that these bulwarks of Euro-centrism have been demolished, it is in part because Goody leans over backwards to be fair to his opponents, some of whom he clearly admires. But before entering into the substance of his arguments and methods, we should place this work in the context of his extraordinary writing programme over the last three decades – by my count at least fifteen books, two-thirds of them written after his official retirement (Hart 2006).

It began with the publication of Production and Reproduction: a comparative study of the domestic domain (1976). In the terse Preface, Goody explains how his motives were rooted in the Second World War and subsequent experience as a fieldworker in West Africa.

What I knew about the medieval literature and history of Europe whetted my appetite to learn more about pre-industrial societies, their beliefs as well as their economic and productive systems. A period in the eastern Mediterranean had extended these interests in time and in space…Events were moving fast in Ghana during the period I was first there and the Convention People’s Party, to the Birifu branch of which I was inscribed, were well on their way to power. However it was not only the links between local ‘tribe’ and national politics that concerned me, but the earlier links, with long-distance trade, with Islam, with neighbouring states. It was on these historical subjects that I wrote when I first returned, and it was these subjects, in a wider context, that I pursued when trying to ask what it was that writers meant when they used terms like feudal to describe African states. How did the states and local communities in Ghana resemble and differ from those of Europe, Asia and the Middle East with which they were so often compared and contrasted? How could we best understand the differences between a village in the Italian Abruzzi and a settlement in Northern Ghana? What made people think the adjectives ‘tribal’, ‘primitive’, ‘savage’ appropriate to one set of cultures and not to the other? Were there no better ways of assessing similarity and difference than by means of a pair of crude binary oppositions?…How could one bring a wider range of knowledge about these other societies to bear on an understanding of our own situation? How could we provide historical, sociological and humanistic studies generally with a more universalistic base, with a less European-centred framework?…It is time we tried to fit together the numerous detailed investigations of social life in different parts of the world with the larger speculations on the development of human culture. (Goody 1976: ix-x)

He had already, in what is still his masterwork, Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962), brought an impressive range of ethnography and literature to bear on a comparative study of the domestic relations through which people manage their own reproduction and participate in the wider society, for which he considered the transmission of property held the key. In Production and Reproduction, the empirical source is an ethnographic atlas and the argument is framed in world historical terms. Goody proposes here that, when contrasted with sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Asia have more in common than proponents of the West’s uniqueness would imagine. This reflects their shared origin in Mesopotamia’s ‘urban revolution’ — as defined by the Marxist pre-historian, Gordon Childe (1942) — a transformation that never occurred in Africa South of the Sahara. Intensification of agricultural production in Eurasia (the plough, irrigation) resulted in class divisions based on the devolution of unequal property through both sexes in ways that isolated the nuclear family from wider kin groups.

Soon afterwards, Goody extended his analysis to cultural questions, particularly to the issue of writing. The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977) took aim at Lévi-Strauss for confusing oral and written technologies of communications with mentalities constructed according to the imperial binary of primitive and civilized. This thesis, pursued in several subsequent volumes, has made a significant impact on the humanities and social sciences (Olson and Cole 2006). He has approached food and cooking, then flowers and representation through a materialist comparative sociology that often emphasized class differences rooted in conditions of production and again drew on the regional contrast between Africa and Eurasia. His excursion into the history of the European family (1983) showed that western forms could not be distinguished from those of their Mediterranean neighbours. The thesis of the present volume was first aired in The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive (1990) and the violence done to Asian societies by Euro-centric historiography received a comprehensive rebuttal in The East in the West (1996). Since then Goody has tackled Islam in Europe (2003) and Capitalism and Modernity (2004). Reflecting a general trend in anthropology, Africa has dropped out of focus in favour of a critical attempt to get western scholars to re-examine themselves and to acknowledge that the grounds for asserting a long-term superiority to Asia are non-existent.

So what are the specific arguments of this book? Perhaps the most significant result of the West’s global hegemony has been to impose a universal system of time-space on the rest of the world. The Theft of History kicks off with a brief sketch of how this came about, emphasizing the distortions of world history that have accompanied this development. Europe’s claim to having diverged from a Bronze Age civilization whose heartland was in Asia through the ancient Greeks and Romans goes back to the Renaissance, but it took on particular salience in the age of western imperialism. Goody sifts patiently through the arguments for their unique achievements in culture, economy, politics and law, showing that writers like Moses Finley (1973) and Karl Polanyi (1957) rely on the invocation of notions like ‘genius’ or arbitrary categories to shore up inconsistent and erroneous propositions. He refuses, however, to go as far as Martin Bernal in Black Athena (1987) who derived much of Greek culture from Egypt and claimed that the separation of ancient Greece from the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean was an invention of racist imperialism in the nineteenth century. Goody’s reasons for maintaining distance from Bernal, apart from feeling that his linguistic evidence is shaky, are that Europeans have no more of a monopoly on ethnocentrism than of other cultural traits and that they adopted racist attitudes to their Mediterranean neighbours long before they were in a position to conquer the world.

Perhaps the most bare-faced invention of Western philosophers and historians was to name the collapse of civilization after the fall of Rome ‘feudalism’ and then to suggest that it provided a unique launching pad for capitalism. Goody, who long ago (1971) resisted the export of the ‘feudal’ label to African polities, now convincingly undermines any such claim to distinctive progress, emphasizing rather medieval Europe’s massive loss of standing when measured against the Asian societies of the period. Taking Perry Anderson (1974) to task, he also rejects the notion that Japan’s early capitalist success had its roots in a similarly distinctive ‘feudal’ past. The whole sorry attempt to create a single exceptional sequence for the West culminating in the triumph of ‘freedom’ from the Renaissance onwards just does not add up. Its corollary is the notion that Asian societies as a whole were in all this time merely static, being hidebound by subservience to rulers unconstrained by law (‘Oriental despotism’). Goody does not have much trouble disposing of that one.

Goody chooses three individuals as exemplary of the trend he wishes to subvert and holds them in varying degrees of respect. Joseph Needham appears at first sight to be an unusual choice, since his multi-volume Science and Civilization in China (1954-2004) showed that Chinese technology was the equal of or better than Europe’s up to 1600. But Goody takes issue with Needham’s idea that the West took off on a trajectory uniquely its own since then. He has long been critical of Norbert Elias (1939), ostensibly as the leading advocate of Europe’s claim to have invented ‘civilization’ starting with the Renaissance. Goody’s arguments against the historical veracity of this claim echo earlier chapters, but an added note of asperity comes from the fact that they overlapped in Ghana soon after independence. Elias’ comments then about an imagined ‘primitive’ Africa provide Goody with further proof of his Euro-centrism. Who could deny Fernand Braudel’s excellence as a historian? Jack Goody does not try to. Nevertheless, the trilogy Civilization and Capitalism, 15th to 18th Century (1981-84) tries to establish that Europe was and is the original home of ‘true capitalism’. Goody, with more support from Marx (1867) and Weber (1922) than he appears to realize, rejects the claim that this mercantile variant of capitalism was any different from many Asian examples going back to the Phoenicians. His suggestion elsewhere in the book that we might all be better off without Werner Sombart’s (1902) neologism could be right.

Much of the argument concerning the West’s claim to being the unique author of the modern world rests on a series of keywords, obviously western in origin, whose universal aspirations and exclusivity Goody disputes. These include the occidental city and the bourgeoisie it nurtured (Weber 1978); associated institutions like the western university and the forms of knowledge it generated; democracy and the idea of freedom; humanism, individualism and romantic love. Goody provides an erudite, if scattershot critique of all of them, demonstrating that these concepts are not only vague beliefs, but their institutional core is widely shared, especially by Islamic civilization, but also as far afield as Northern Ghana.

His ‘Last words’ offer a recapitulation of all this. The main pre-industrial civilizations of the Eurasian land mass have a common origin in the rise of cities, the state and class society five millennia ago; and they grew side by side for most of that time, with first one area taking the lead and then the other, but without significant institutional divergence, certainly when contrasted with Africa. Goody’s method has always been comparative sociology. He prefers to break down abstract cultural concepts into analytical frameworks that permit empirical investigation across a wide historical range of societies. He has chosen to restrict himself to the Old World and has largely by-passed the last two centuries of world history. His vision is one of durable continuities rather than of decisive breaks, at least since the ‘urban revolution’. Above all, he has tried to deconstruct the ideology of inevitable and eternal Western hegemony over the peoples of the world, nowhere more powerfully than in this book.

The cracks in this strategy become more evident when, in his conclusions, Goody evokes the issue of industrialization. Under one heading or the other, this raises the question of the material foundations of our world. Identifying the process with its early phase, he shows that manufactures on a substantial scale can be found in Asia too at various times in the past, as well as in the present. But this is a misleading interpretation of the problem. It has not escaped Goody’s notice that his thesis is more popular today, even among western scholars, than when he started out; and that this may be related to China’s recent rise to economic prominence. The West’s grip on the world economy is slipping, if it is not yet actually over. But his attempt to extend his thesis concerning agrarian civilization to the last two centuries is not convincing. Thus he says in passing, of China’s leading role in world economy today, “This latest shift has been carried out by a communist government, without much deliberate help from the west” (p. 286). This is simply untrue. Unlike India, which pursued a path of technological and financial self-sufficiency after independence, China’s transition to capitalism has been fuelled by massive technology transfers and capital investment from the West. Goody’s revisions of received opinion on western pretensions to global leadership are invaluable; but they do not throw much light on the dynamics of modern world history. Here then are enough unanswered questions for a few more books in the series.

To return to the empirical fact of Western imperial domination in 1900 with which I began, this can now be seen as the midpoint in an unparalleled transformation of world society over the last two centuries. In 1800, the world’s population was around 1 billion, having grown slowly over ten millennia of agricultural production; only 1 in 40 human beings then lived in an urban settlement; almost all the energy people used came from animals and plants; as Goody points out, China was still the world’s economic powerhouse and Europeans had only a toehold on most of the planet. By 2000, the world’s population had grown to 6 billions, doubling in the previous forty years, while Europe’s indigenous population went into reverse; almost half of humanity lived in cities; and this was made possible by increased use of machines as converters of inanimate energy, once coal and now oil. The latest stage of mechanization was a digital revolution in communications whose symbol is the internet. Before that, the most powerful social movement for a century had been the anti-colonial revolution — the drive of peoples forced into world society by western imperialism to establish their own direct relationship to it. It seems quite plausible today that America and Europe will soon be replaced as the engines of world society by countries like India, China, Brazil and Russia whose peoples were not long ago subject to the kind of cultural condescension whose premises Goody undercuts so comprehensively in this book.

Jack Goody is right to point out that, among his anthropological contemporaries, only Eric Wolf has attempted world history on a similar scale, especially in Europe and the Peoples without History (1982). He acknowledges with approval Wolf’s decision to coin the term ‘tributary states’ for a range of pre-industrial societies that might otherwise be named ‘feudal’, ‘Asiatic’ or something else. Between them they have kept alive the anthropology of unequal society that Lewis H. Morgan (1877) and Friedrich Engels (1884) took from Rousseau (1754) and passed on to twentieth-century Marxists like Gordon Childe (1942). Modern ethnographers have been highly critical of western complacency, but their examples have generally been taken out of the context of world history as a consequence of rejecting methods that were tainted by association with Victorian imperialism and racism. Whatever the limitations of his approach, Goody has excavated a new anthropological vision of our world that is bound to become even more salient as the present century unfolds.

References

Anderson, Perry 1974 Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso.
Bernal, Martin 1987 Black Athena: the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization (vol. 1) London: Free Association Books.
Braudel, Fernand 1981-84 Civilization and Capitalism: 15th to 18th century (3 vols). London: Phoenix.
Childe, V. Gordon 1964 [1942] What Happened in History. London: Penguin.
Elias, Norbert 1994 [1939] The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.
Engels, Friedrich 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (various editions). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Finley, Moses 1973 The Ancient Economy. London: Chatto and Windus.
Goody. Jack 1962 Death, Property and the Ancestors: a study of the mortuary customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
1971 Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa. London: Oxford University Press.
1976 Production and Reproduction: a comparative study of the domestic domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1977 The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.
1983 The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1990 The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive: systems of marriage and the family in the pre-industrial societies of Eurasia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1996 The East in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2003 Islam in Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press.
2004 Capitalism and Modernity: the great debate. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hart, Keith 2006 Agrarian civilization and modern world society. In Olson and Cole (eds), Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society (see below), 29-48.
Marx, Karl 1970 [1867] Capital: the critique of political economy (vol. 1). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Morgan, Lewis H. 1964 [1877] Ancient Society. Cambrige MA: Bellknapp.
Needham, Joseph 1954-2004 Science and Civilization in China (7 vols). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Olson, David and Michael Cole (eds) Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society: implications of the work of Jack Goody. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Polanyi, Karl 1957 The economy as instituted process. In K. Polanyi, C. Arensberg and H. Pearson (eds) Trade and Market in the Early Empires. New York: Free Press, 243-269.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1984 [1754] Discourse on Inequality. London: Penguin.
Sombart, Werner 1902-27 Moderner Kapitalismus (3 vols). München/Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
Weber, Max (G. Roth and C. Wittich eds) 1978 Economy and Society (2 vols). Berkeley:
University of California Press.
—- 1981 [1922] General Economic History. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books.
Wolf, Eric 1982 Europe and the Peoples without History. Berkeley: University of California
Press.

Review article for Archives Européennes de Sociologie
Jack Goody The Theft of History, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

8

In 1963, when I entered the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology as an undergraduate student, I little knew that the ASA had just staged there what became known in retrospect as its first decennial conference or, as one wag put it, “the joint meeting between the British Empire and the University of Chicago.”We were perhaps more irreverent about our teachers in the 60s, but I could not have guessed then just how good a local circle that included Meyer Fortes, Edmund Leach, Jack Goody, Audrey Richards, Reo Fortune, G. I. Jones, Ray Abrahams, Esther Goody, Polly Hill and Stanley Tambiah would look now. I am sure there are many who feel the same way about their own education in the departments of Firth, Evans-Pritchard, Gluckman and Forde.

I soon learned that I was being inducted into a cross between a cult and a lineage, specifically into a double descent group whose twin founding ancestors were Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. The idea was to get within two degrees of separation of one or both of these, which wasn’t hard. Malinowski stood for ‘fieldwork’ (I have been there and you haven’t), Radcliffe-Brown for ‘theory’, a kind of theory I was unfamiliar with which had nothing to do with western intellectual history, but rather seemed to have sprung, like Athena from Zeus, out of the foreheads of initiates after they underwent prolonged exposure to the lives of exotic peoples.

This apparent disregard for the Western canon gave the social anthropologists a reputation for being as illiterate as the barbarians they studied and they had only recently won significant acceptance as fellows of Cambridge colleges. Even so, they had a fairly prominent public profile. Edmund Leach wrote pyrotechnic reviews for the New Statesman and later gave acclaimed BBC Reith Lectures. The humanities dons were beginning to use their concepts and cite their books. Sociology made a belated entry to Cambridge, but the social anthropologists were strong enough to ensure that one of their own got the first chair. An impressive cohort of PhDs came off the production line, including the Stratherns, Bloch, Kuper, Parry, Gudeman, Humphrey, the Hugh-Joneses and later Ingold, Fuller, Hann etc. The academic labour market was buoyant enough then to give everyone a flying start in the profession from which most have not looked back.

The common curriculum was very narrow, despite the intellectual adventures that our teachers went in for themselves. I once asked in a supervision, “Why are the Lele matrilineal?” and was told, “We ask how, not why. That is evolutionary history. We are only interested in the functional consequences for Lele society that they are matrilineal.” Yet Jack Goody had already embarked on his wide-ranging historical inquiries and wrote articles in places like New Society saying that social anthropology was after all comparative sociology; Meyer Fortes gave public lectures incorporating the legacy of Freud and Judaeo-Christianity; Edmund Leach came into the lecture room one day waving Le cru et le cuit and told us that anthropology would never be the same again.

It was confusing, but the adepts among us realised that being intellectually retarded by the official syllabus was necessary if we were to be admitted to the secret society. And the big secret was that it was a holding company for those with the right credentials to do whatever they like and call it ‘social anthropology’. Meyer Fortes, who took the spirit of the guild and made a trade union out of it, said “Social anthropology is what social anthropologists do” — and he had a way of controlling who they were, the ASA. He once told me with more than a hint of irony, after I complained about the mindless empiricism and factional disputes that animated the Cambridge seminar, “Your problem is that you are too rational, Keith. Anthropology is irrational.”

This gap between collective representation and personal practice may account for some of the boundary wars described by Mills. A new professional cadre, tightly controlled by a few acolytes of the founding fathers, had numerous battles to fight in order to preserve their hard-won independence. At first it had been the amateurs — the missionaries, the racists, the folklorists, the district commissioners, the Rosicrucians. Then there were the leftovers of Victorian evolutionism, the vigorous cell of diffusionists, all the non-sociologists who cluttered up the Royal Anthropological Institute and its publications. And of course there were the Americans who actually funded Malinowski at the International African Institute to promote studies of the sun setting on the empire (“the dynamics of culture contact”) and who always threatened to overwhelm the British demographically (“I just don’t care for their kind of writing”, wrote Evans-Pritchard. Well, Clifford Geertz got his own back with a vengeance). The empire itself posed problems. After all, we couldn’t let those Australians, South Africans and Indians adulterate our brand name by doing their own thing, even if they trained more students than we did. No wonder the rallying cry was ‘theory’ with Gluckman as cheer leader.

It was only when I met an old West Indian revolutionary, C.L.R. James, that I realised how seriously biased my education had been when it came to the anti-colonial revolution. It seems obvious now that the end of empire removed the institutional basis from any claim that “the sociology of primitive peoples” was a universal discipline. Indeed, the question of the relationship between social anthropology and empire became a hot topic in the 60s and 70s after the event. It was a way for a new generation to differentiate itself from the elders who were, I think, rightly aggrieved over being misrepresented. They had always sided with the liberal establishment in London against the racist regimes of the colonies they worked in. Had they not fought evolutionary racism as strongly as Boas and the cultural relativists? Alright, they stayed out of the 1950 UNESCO report on race, but that was to protect the discipline’s scientific standing in the universities by steering clear of ‘controversy’. It was misleading to say they had assisted in the subjection of indigenous peoples to imperial rule. No, social anthropology did not do much for the cause of empire. Its main contribution was to shore up the nation-state at home.

The British could reasonably claim to have launched ‘ethnography’ as the dominant worldwide paradigm of social and cultural anthropology in the twentieth century. And Malinowski was its prophet. He got the model from Central European nationalism: the ethnographer describes the timeless customs of a peasantry living close to nature and bound together by kinship, the living soul of a Volk seeking a state to match its culture and territory. His timing was perfect. Wilson supervised the Versailles project to replace empire with a system of nation-states. The new academic ethnographers reproduced that political model in their ‘primitive sociology’, lending to a war-ridden and fragmented world the appearance of timeless universality. Moreover, Radcliffe-Brown’s contribution, structural-functionalism (a label exported to American sociology by Talcott Parsons), claimed that the simpler societies replicated in microcosm eternal principles of social order, as manifested in corporate states of the inter-war period. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown shared Durkheim as a precursor because their discipline was implicitly conceived of as a means of defending the nation-state and its ‘organic’ division of labour against revolution. The social anthropologists had more important ideological priorities than merely shoring up the peace in the colonies.

The model of fieldwork-based ethnography that is still sacrosanct for most social anthropologists thus had a specific historical origin and a contemporary social function. It was appropriate to insist that social anthropology was distinctively British. This was after all the nationalist century. But the model and its social matrix, state capitalism, came out of something else and they have been giving way to new forms for some time. It is hard for us to see that ‘ethnography’ reflects the central tendency of 20th century world society, just as its predecessors as the dominant paradigm for anthropology reflected theirs. We pay lip-service to our discipline’s origin in the Enlightenment as a quest for the principles of human nature with which to replace the arbitrary inequality of the old regime. But we generally ignore the fact that Kant invented the term ‘anthropology’ for modern purposes, as part of a cosmopolitan liberal project that still has much resonance for us. The next stage we know mainly in order to denigrate it, as our founders did in their struggle to get established. The Victorians explained their easy conquest of the world as a result of a superior culture linked to biology and the method of evolutionary history helped them to organise the ongoing development of a universal racial hierarchy. The age of nationalism, our own, likewise needed a vision of the world as a medley of isolated cultures and the social anthropologists provided one. It is unlikely to be the last in the sequence.

No other fragment of the academy committed itself to joining the people where they live in order to learn what they do and think. The social anthropologists in their prime were right to be proud of that, even if it sometimes led to misleading claims to having done away with libraries and the other standbys of sedentary research. They won their niche in the universities and were content to be influential in a few of the best. Although they thought of their main audience as the ruling elite, they did sometimes reach out to the public through radio and accessible publications. Their monographs will be ranked among the great original achievements of the twentieth century. When future generations ask how the peoples brought into world society by western imperialism joined humanity on their own terms in the twentieth century, they will find that the British school of ethnographers left an outstanding record of some societies from which these new movements came.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” The new tense favoured by the social anthropologists, the ethnographic present, allowed them to develop for their discipline a unity of object, theory and method that was eminently suited to their times. This very success posed difficulties for the reproduction of their successors. First of all, like the nation-states they mimicked, they favoured static, not historical models of society and had difficulty dealing with movement. Second, they obscured their own background in western intellectual history in order to promote a bogus methodology where ideas were made to appear out of live observations. Third, even if the British people sometimes seem not to have woken up to it yet, the world has changed a lot since 1950. The classical British school of ethnography is now part of the circumstances transmitted from the past to constrain our present actions. It will not do to repeat their recipes as if nothing has happened. That is why a strategy so brilliantly adapted to conditions in the mid-twentieth century may not serve us well in the next.

Editorial for Anthropology Today, October 2003.

There is no such crisis in India, China, Brazil or South Africa. America’s brand of business-driven government linked to an aggressive nationalism resembles the fascist regimes of the 1930s. Everyone in the former Soviet Union and its satellites, from peasant parties to the former communists and even the KGB wants to wrap himself in the flag. Emigrants from African countries, for all their ethnic pluralism at home, invariably assume a national identity abroad, just as Europeans did in the nineteenth century. No, if there is a crisis of national identity, it is in Western Europe and especially in Britain, where the United Kingdom shows every sign of being on its last legs after only three centuries of its existence.

The revolutions of the decades around 1800 unleashed a new universalism which found its counterpart in the international movement to abolish slavery. Society was on the move everywhere, propelled by Napoleon’s armies and British industry. But this also provoked a reactionary backlash: nationalism and reinforcement of the security state. The idea of being a nation represented an escape from modern history, from the realities of urban industrial life, into the timeless past of the Volk, of the people conceived of as a homogeneous peasantry, living in villages near to nature, unspoiled by social division, the very archetype of a community united by kinship.

Before nationalism, western intellectuals compared their societies with the city-states of the ancient world. Now they fabricated myths of their own illiterate ethnic origins in primeval forests. Traditional society was conceived of as being outside the social forces making the modern world, both in time and space. Romantics drew on rural imagery to invent a national culture capable of resisting these forces by slowing them down. Their slogan could have been “Stop the world, I want to get off”. This is why western farmers, and agriculture generally, carry a political weight far beyond their economic importance today.

Modern states have appropriated the rhetoric of democracy while reserving real power to remote bureaucracies. We are all equally free and are committed to democratic principles on a universal basis. Yet we must justify granting some people inferior rights; otherwise functional economic inequalities would be threatened. This double-think is enshrined at the heart of the modern nation-state. Nationalism is racism without the pretension to being as systematic or global. Nations link cultural difference to birth and define citizens’ rights in opposition to all-comers. The resulting identity, built on regulation of movement across borders, justifies unfair treatment of non-citizens and blinds people to humanity’s common interests. So, apart from the state as a social form, one problem to overcome is its culture.

State, society and community have been merged in the nation to create a master concept of the means of association that is extraordinarily tenacious. There are at least four types of community, all of them incorporated into the idea of the nation-state. It is a political community monopolizing relations with the outside world and providing money and the law at home; a community of place, a nested hierarchy of territories; an imagined community, constructing cultural identity through symbolic abstractions of a high order; and finally a community of interest, uniting people in trade and war for a shared purpose. In the twentieth century most people experienced society at every level through the lens of national identity.

The world economy has been turned upside down since the watershed of the 1970s. Manufactures have been relocated to Asia, especially China, and now information services are finding their way to India. The Third World has been through an urban explosion to match its population growth and, in the form of debt repayments, has transferred unprecedented sums to the rich countries, notably the USA, where the digital phase of the machine revolution is concentrated. World society has been formed as a single interactive network through a combination of neo-liberal economics and the internet. The rise of transnational corporations, with their slogan “you can’t buck the markets”, has been accompanied by the dismantling of welfare states. There is plenty for thinking people of all nations to worry about.

If some now find their own brand of nationalism less convincing than before, we must account for its erosion. This new world market has revealed itself to be an engine of stark inequality. The egalitarian premises of nation-states, seeking to curb capitalism’s polarizing tendencies, have given way to a world in which “the rich get richer” is now taken to be axiomatic. This may be a transitional stage on the way to a new world order capable of curbing the excesses of corporations and the market. But for now winner-takes-all is king. We could regard this as humanity being temporarily caught between national and world forms of society. Or it may be that we have reverted to an imbalance between market and state typical of the 19^th century, before national regulation aspired to curb domestic capitalism.

If capitalism is out of control today, what political units and strategies are adequate to making it more democratically accountable in the manner of the New Deal and after the war? There are three main places to stand: we can put our faith in reinforcing the powers of the nation-state against globalization; in developing regional federations, such as the EU, NAFTA and ASEAN; or in strengthened global institutions and networks. The problem is that each of these options makes bedfellows of interests that have been traditionally opposed as right and left. Thus nationalism throws together greens, the unions and racist anti-immigration groups. In regional federations the voices of popular interest groups are drowned by those of the member-states and big money. A global strategy juxtaposes the transnational corporations, the IMF and the strongest states with democratic associations, such as the World Social Forum. ‘Civil society’ is thus split between all three levels and in ways that defy traditional classification, thereby adding to the general political confusion.

These developments can be seen everywhere, but they are most true of Western Europe, where the political experiment of the European Union has provoked a crisis of national sovereignty, especially for the peoples of the Northern fringe. Countries with ageing populations and no experience of colonial empire are responding to intensified Third World immigration with hysterical concern for their recently forged national identities. But the prime example of neurotic preoccupation with all these issues is Britain. To the above general analysis, we can add Britain’s creeping constitutional crisis – a crisis with so many dimensions as to be almost invisible, because it is all-pervasive. I offer only a bare list here.

It boggles the mind to acknowledge it, but the United Kingdom is falling apart. It is not surprising that the threat of all this unraveling would provoke a conservative backlash, fueled by governments of both right and left as well as by the media. Yet, contrary to Victorian imperial propaganda, the British are a revolutionary people with a pronounced taste for violence and a disciplined passion for fairness. If any three or four of the dimensions listed above became critical at once, the balloon really could go up. The idea of the U.K. as the most unstable major polity in the world today is counter-intuitive. Even so, it is reasonable to speculate how it all might end.

I once had a dream in which I answered a knock on my door in Cambridge. It was a large middle-class woman in a caftan. She said, “We have occupied St. Luke’s nursery to keep it open. We have put up barriers on Hertford Street to slow down the traffic. And we have started a tax strike for decent public education, health and transport. Are you with us?” “Yes”, I replied, “I will help organize the e-mail campaign.” You can be in my dream, if I can be in yours – and Bob Dylan said that.

Fassin’s editorial begs for a sociological analysis of the discipline’s national predicament. Some readers may have recently received a letter asking them to oppose anthropology’s apparent demotion within the administrative structures of the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). The discipline’s marginality in France is not new. The fast track into the national educated elite (competitive entry to the École normale supérieure, agrégation etc) never had a place for anthropology; and the country’s leading anthropologists (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Godelier) were often first agrégé in philosophy. The recent reorganization of the French universities has further entrenched sociology’s dominance over the smaller anthropology section.

The French profession is divided: the Association pour la recherche en anthropologie sociale (APRAS) is the keeper of the exotic flame, while the Association française des anthropologues (AFA) is more explicitly engaged with contemporary society, but lacks the other’s institutional influence. Finally, anthropologists share with other French academics the entrenched inequality privileging Parisian researchers (CNRS, École des hautes études en sciences sociales) above those who teach in the provincial universities. The present government has tried to do something to reduce this gap, but has met with the organized resistance of scholars whose conditions of employment are the envy of academics everywhere.

French anthropology’s weak engagement with racial inequality thus mirrors the general divisions and elitism characteristic of higher education there, with the added problem that it lacks the established position of history, philosophy or sociology. The concentration of institutional power in Paris both deters public criticism by academics who are ultimately dependent on it and ensures that their voices are largely excluded from policy-making circles and the media.

* * * *

National variations in the present condition of anthropology are striking. If French anthropology seems to be beleaguered these days, Brazilian anthropology, having once been confined largely to Amazonia, is now booming as a source of investigation and commentary on mainstream urban society. Scandinavian anthropology offers a flourishing model of public engagement. Anthropology is a major operation in India and Nigeria today, being mainly concerned with ‘tribal’ populations and internal cultural diversity. Anthropologists in the USA and Britain have organized themselves quite effectively as professional guilds, but there is little public knowledge there of what they do (try using ‘anthropology’ as a keyword for email alerts from the New York Times); and the discipline’s relationship to the universities is precarious. Perhaps institutional inertia will save anthropologists from the oblivion that perennially threatens us, perhaps not.

It is time to acknowledge that the ethnographic model that took root in twentieth-century anthropology is itself partly responsible for the contemporary malaise in the places where it was once strongest. I have argued elsewhere in AT that anthropologists are right to be proud of our discipline’s democratic move to join the people where they live in order to find out what they think and do. But an exclusive reliance on the method of fieldwork-based ethnography serves us ill if we wish to chart a way forward now.

To take my own training, British social anthropology in its prime had a coherent object, theory and method. Its object was ‘primitive societies’, the far-flung peoples of Empire; its theory was ‘functionalism’, the order in everyday life; and its method was ‘fieldwork’, supplemented by universal comparison. The resulting ethnographic vision shared some of the assumptions of a world divided into nation-states – bounded places, culturally homogenous, self-sufficient and outside time.

Even then, such abstractions contradicted the need to grasp a world in movement. American funding pushed British ethnographers to study ‘the dynamics of culture contact’ in the 1930s. The Manchester school explicitly took the side of Africans against settler society in the 1950s. And independence from colonial rule led many anthropologists to take a wider historical approach to local societies in the 1960s and 1970s. The recent shift to ‘cultural’ anthropology in Britain has reversed this engagement with social history, although it persists in the compromised field of ‘development’. But it has been obvious for half a century that the old object and theory of social anthropology have gone, even if the fieldwork method remains the (no longer wholly distinctive) badge of our profession.

* * * *

If we wish to consider what anthropology may become, it would be worthwhile asking what else it has been in the past. The modern discipline has its origins in the philosophical anthropology of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. It was after all Kant who first gave currency to the term. The object of this anthropology was ‘human nature’, what all human beings have in common, seen as a necessary foundation for the democratic societies that would succeed the old regime. The theory was, broadly speaking, ‘universal reason’; the method a combination of humanist speculation and wide-ranging comparison.

Anthropology put these revolutionary concerns behind itself in the nineteenth century, when the object was to explain racial hierarchy in a world newly unified by western imperialism. The theory was ‘evolution’; the method was ‘world history’, later disparaged as ‘conjectural’ history. Twentieth-century anthropology grew out of a rejection of this synthesis. But we may have thrown the baby out with the bath water.

What then might be anthropology’s paradigm in the century coming up? That depends on what you think its social function is or ought to be. I would guess that the Cold War’s emphasis on social science research will soon take a backseat to teaching of the humanities. Anthropology deserves to flourish as the broadest possible framework for general education, helping individuals to place themselves more effectively in a connected world. The discipline’s object in that case would be the making of world society or ‘humanity’ (at once a collective noun, a moral quality and a project for our species). The theory might be some amalgam of humanism, romanticism and existentialism; the method an eclectic combination of all anthropology’s previous paradigms – philosophy, world history, ethnography – and some more as well, perhaps autobiography.

Not all national anthropologies are as vulnerable. But we lack a vision of what anthropologists do for our world. At first, ethnographers detached themselves and the peoples they studied from world history, focusing on remote rural peoples, while humanity concentrated itself in huge cities and fought global wars. Our slogan could have been “Stop the world! I want to get off.” (What makes the French distinctive is that the world they want to get off is American.) Anthropologists once felt they could speak for humanity as a whole, despite ignoring the drive of non-western peoples to join world society on their own terms. Now, when production and capital accumulation are being relocated in China, India and Brazil, such complacency is even less tenable than in the heyday of the anti-colonial revolution.

No-one can deny that ethnographers of late have responded to the need for engagement with a world in movement, to the point where sitting in a faraway village has become the exception. But this stretching of the original research paradigm to accommodate contemporary social realities leaves more fundamental questions of method unexamined. There is a hunger for informed visions of what our world is becoming and how each of us might relate to it. Identification of anthropology with the academy alone inhibits our ability to bridge that gap.

* * * *

The standard recipe for making anthropology less insular and backward-looking is to argue for greater contemporary ‘relevance’. It is not obligatory to confront current events like the French riots, especially if we have some other defensible intellectual strategy for our discipline. But anthropologists are confused; and the public is even more confused about what we do and why. We are compromised by our own institutions, institutions as profoundly unequal as the society whose shortcomings gave anthropology its original democratic impulse. Getting involved with the contemporary problem of racial inequality is a good place to start; but it will take more than that if we want our discipline to flourish, rather than merely survive in some corners of a world going somewhere else.

It is not surprising that the right-wing newspapers would call for loyalty to crown and country, nor that this government would suspend the rule of law in order to be seen to be dealing with Muslim ‘extremists’. More remarkable were Polly Toynbee’s discovery, in The Guardian, that there might be something to the French ban on religious symbols in school after all, and Jonathan Freedland’s article in the same newspaper on 3 August, ‘The identity vacuum’, where he argued that Britain’s hold over its ethnic minorities is ‘weak’ and something should be done about it.

Freedland’s approach had the advantage of being simple. Britain allows the difference of its constituent ethnic cultures to go largely unchecked (‘multi-culturalism’). The French have a strong national identity, but are intolerant of cultural difference. The Americans have a strong national identity which allows for ethnic difference (sometimes also called ‘multi-culturalism’). So Arab-Americans give their first loyalty to their country, whereas British Muslims have nothing to fall back on but their religion. The conclusion is that somehow ‘Britishness’ must be reinforced by moving towards the American model, but not the French.

This made me think of de Tocqueville who also regularly compared the three countries. In Journeys to England and Ireland, recounting travels originally made in 1835 with his English wife, de Tocqueville observed that England had the strongest state in the world, but a weak and decentralized administration. By the first he meant the ability of the ruling class to project power inside and outside Britain; by the second the independence of the shires and municipalities. France, on the other hand, had an administration strongly centralized in Paris, but the state’s power was much weaker, even if symbolically more prominent.

In some respects the two countries have moved in opposite directions since 1945. Both states have been drastically weakened by the loss of empire and the rise of American hegemony, but the French have maintained the means of projecting some independent state power, whereas Britain has opted to become bag-carrier to the American empire. The most striking contrast, however, lies in the trend of administrative relations between the centre and its periphery. In France all the major provincial cities are enjoying a renaissance, building their own metros, erecting huge arts complexes and asserting their leadership as regional centres. In Britain, especially since Thatcher, the grip of central government over cities and counties has grown inexorably tighter. This is so despite the establishment of parliaments with limited powers in Edinburgh and Cardiff (Whitehall still controls finance) and a renewed air of vitality in a few cities like Manchester.

London’s share of the country’s wealth and power has increased disproportionately over this period. The media exhibit the same extraordinary concentration, with The Manchester Guardian’s move south its most poignant symbol. The functional integration of politics, finance, communications and transport in London has been reinforced by the decline of traditional industries elsewhere and the rise of the service economy. It also helps that the world’s rich have decided that London is an entertaining place to park themselves and their money.

Consider, in the light of this, the background of those young men who blew up the London underground and a bus. It is trite to observe that their families moved into the mill towns of the north just when the industries and those locals who could were moving out. What is less obvious is the uneven pattern of racial segregation that has grown up there in recent decades. Occasionally riots in Oldham and Rochdale and the advance of the British National Party make the headlines. But the London media are tied by an umbilical cord to the political class whose activities sustain them, and the news flickers only fitfully before dying.

In the early 1990s I was watching a game of Lancashire League cricket in Rawtenstall, when I noticed that the home team included no South Asians. This was odd since another team, Enfield, had seven, led by a dashing pair of opening batsmen called Masood and Mushtaq, known to their adoring, majority white fans as ‘Mas ‘n’ Mush’. Then I also noticed that there were no Asian spectators, even though the local streets and parks were full of South Asian kids playing cricket. I made some enquiries and found that the town was run by what amounted to an apartheid system. The local Labour council put all the South Asian immigrants into one or two housing estates and never mixed them with the ‘indigenous’ population.

Yet when I lived there, I recall Lancashire people saying with pride, ‘We are mongrel folk,’ and so they, or I should say we, were. Lancashire was empty before the industrial revolution and all the workers had to come from somewhere else. Around 1900, when Lancashire’s three million people represented a quarter of the national population and contributed over half the value of the country’s exports, one million of them came from Ireland. So I recall Rawtenstall’s segregated cricket ground when I read about the race riots in the north or when a government minister makes a token visit there to investigate the context the London bombers grew up in. What strikes me is the extreme local variety of race relations, reflected in the contrast between the two cricket teams and their supporters. This suggests that any solution to the problems we are facing should address Britain’s administrative hierarchy rather than the question of national identity.

There are two main issues here: one is our need to understand where British multi-culturalism comes from, and the other is to place Britain’s current political crisis in a framework of social history which is appropriate to the problem.

De Tocqueville’s formulation suggests that the British ruling class’s famous tolerance for cultural difference was originally a sign of strength, not weakness. Let them have their petty religions and tribal cultures, as long as we get to run the show. This goes along with an imperial state whose power was normally masked at home, the so-called ‘night-watchman state’ whose apparent function was merely to safeguard property. This attitude still persists long after its political and economic base has withered away, to be replaced by a central government addicted to the manipulation of appearances. The Victorians had a strong commitment to public life and built a public infrastructure to match. We have lost both.

The end of empire, American hegemony and London’s pre-eminence are the headlines of Britain’s current political situation. I might mention other significant trends. Racist paranoia over immigration we all know about. The collapse of the public sector is linked to the growing dominance of business corporations in the world economy. And the digital revolution in communications is eroding national boundaries. But there is one thing that no-one ever mentions. The United Kingdom, barely 300 years old this decade, is beginning to fall apart. Britain’s creeping constitutional crisis has so many dimensions as to be almost invisible, because it is all-pervasive. I offer only a bare list here:

1. The European Union and national sovereignty
2. The pound sterling versus the euro
3. Scottish independence
4. The two Irelands
5. The monarchy and growth of republican sentiment
6. Regional devolution in England and Wales
7. The absolutist powers of parliament

8. An antiquated and unfair electoral system
9. The Lords in relation to parliament, the law and feudal property
10. The link between church and state

New Labour came to power with an agenda to address these issues squarely, but the longer it has stayed in government, the further into the background serious reform has been pushed. We should not forget that the British are a violent people with some historical experience of revolution. The image of Britain as a stable lynchpin of world society dies hard. It was fabricated by some talented Victorians on a foundation of real power; but for a century now social realities have become progressively separated from this cultural construction, despite its daily reproduction in the national media. It may be counter-intuitive to claim that the United Kingdom is a potentially unstable polity. But the London bombings have made it less so.

The British media, true to type, call for a revival of national identity by the cultural means they know best. What would happen to their circulation and viewing figures if the country broke up? We might also ask, what are the implications of this crisis for anthropological knowledge and methods? For contemporary anthropology is no less fixated than the media on cultural analysis.The British school of social anthropologists was once famous for privileging ‘society’ over ‘culture’ as the object of their investigations. If you have forgotten what this meant, check out Fortes and Evan-Pritchard’s introduction to African political systems again. We could say that the Germans and Americans have always favoured a cultural approach to anthropology and the British adhered to the French emphasis on society. The fact that this is less the case today reflects increasing deference to the United States and an almost automatic opposition to French ideas and practices. Perhaps the cultural imagination takes over when the gap between prevailing ideas and social realities becomes large. In any case, if multi-culturalism should be replaced by a stronger sense of national identity, it will take more than exhortations by the British government and the London media to put right the country’s social malaise.

I leave British anthropologists with one last thought. The universities were once bastions of local cultural and political autonomy, especially when the British state was strong. This autonomy has been systematically removed in recent decades, to be replaced by the insane procedures of a central bureaucracy run amok. At a time of unprecedented institutional uncertainty for the United Kingdom, its universities have been stunned into passivity by administrative controls Louis XIV would have been proud of. If we paid attention to what is actually going on in British society, we might draw from our historical reflections more effective strategies of collective self-preservation. But then anthropologists are not the only people to have retreated into denial when faced with Britain’s moral, political and infrastructural decay.

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]]> http://thememorybank.co.uk/2005/07/07/the-london-bombings-a-crisis-for-multi-culturalism/feed/ 2 http://thememorybank.co.uk/2005/02/15/february-2005/ http://thememorybank.co.uk/2005/02/15/february-2005/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2005 12:00:43 +0000 keith http://memorybank.co.uk/?p=76 France is notorious these days for two things – getting up the nose of the Americans (from French fries to ‘freedom’ fries) and banning the veil in schools. The second of these is a ‘total social fact’, something that taps into the deepest and most contradictory currents of modern French history. As an anthropologist who lives in Paris, I am often asked to comment, but I find it hard to say what I think.

I spend so many hours locked away writing that I hardly have the time to get out. But, when I do, I don’t feel excluded from the life of the streets. Alienation from social experience is so much the norm in Paris that it is stripped of its bitterness, allowing the stranger to sample the array of cultural distractions at will, not least the charming banter of the shops in his quartier. The palpably public character of Parisian society means that one can be alone, but not lonely. Everyone belongs. There isn’t much incentive to join an expatriate clique, although many ethnics here, including the British, are extremely insular. And, even if I am not fluent enough to participate actively in public discourse, I draw immense satisfaction from living in a place where intellectuals are considered to be indispensable to civil society.

The day my last book arrived in the post, I couldn’t help mention it to the butcher. He is an artisan with no middle class pretensions, but he immediately asked me if I would be going on the Pivot show (Bouillon de Culture, a literary magazine on television, starring Bernard Pivot). I said I doubted it, since the book was in English. He added that it probably depended on knowing the right people. At this point, the lady behind me in the queue said that her son, the author, had been interviewed by Pivot. The whole shop then spent a few minutes discussing a TV programme that anywhere else than France would be considered the exclusive preserve of a tiny self-selected minority.

English-speakers often ask me about the law banning the veil. Their own distaste for the measure reflects an unthinking multi-cultural liberalism – the domestication of cultural relativism by the nation-state. The French republic has no room for such ideas. The law is universal or it is nothing. This particular law bans the wearing of conspicuous (ostensible) religious signs in schools. The obvious target is the wearing of the veil (hijab) by Muslim girls, but it applies also to the Christian crucifix, Jewish skull-cap and Sikh turban. The explicit aim is to preserve the secular character (laïcité) of the French public education system. But inevitably it has been seen by the large Muslim minority as an attack on their cultural values.

The French believe not only that they have the best culture in the world, but that the world ought to be French. They share the first conviction with the Chinese and the second with the Americans, which partly accounts for their clash over the Middle East. Paris was the centre of the world for all the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth. France offered the subjects of its colonial empire the opportunity to be French, which meant conforming to the republic’s laws and national customs. In the twentieth century, immigrants from North Africa were likewise expected to assimilate to French universalism. But of late the migrants have been asserting their religious difference in increasingly strident ways.

Thousands of Muslim women marched in the streets to protest the ban. The Catholic bishops and Orthodox Jews were just as vocal in their own way. But there is wide public support for this assertion of laïcité. At one level, two reactionary ideologies confront each other — an anachronistic imperialism and fundamentalist bigotry. But the French have not forgotten the ruinous legacy of their own religious wars and the reception of Muslims today has disturbing echoes of anti-semitism in the past. I haven’t yet been able to pin down the connection, but the Jews are without doubt a third party to this present dispute.

Twentieth century history is very much alive in the serious French media. You can find out here about how the train timetables were organized for the Holocaust, about life and death in the Gulag and even about how the British saved Europe by resisting the Nazis after France fell. Compared with the fictions and amnesia that mark my own country’s relationship to modern history, this political engagement with the living past is remarkable. There is still much to be explained and atoned for.

The French participated actively in the Holocaust through the Vichy regime, but were never held accountable since they were judged to be on the winning side. The colonial army’s atrocities in North Africa likewise escaped international sanction. The same people often took part in both and many found a political home with the French right who have dominated post-war governments. Maurice Papon, the Bordeaux chief of police under Vichy, was responsible for rounding up Jews for the concentration camps. He was later appointed Prefect of Police in Paris, where he commanded the massacre of Algerian demonstrators in 1961. Much later (2002) he was convicted of crimes against humanity.

The number of recorded anti-semitic acts, desecrations of cemeteries and such, increased tenfold after the millennium. Most of these were attributed to Muslim youths and the Minister of Education toured the Paris suburbs to advertise the government’s disquiet. But at the same time, the Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen beat the Socialist leader to the run-off against Chirac, giving rise to the ironic slogan votez l’escroc, pas le facho – vote for the crook, not the fascist. There is plenty of indigenous anti-semitism still around. France’s opposition to the USA is also widely seen as being pro-Arab and anti-Israel. Chirac was recently the first French president to visit Algeria since independence and this lined up the government unequivocally with the Muslim world.

More Jews settled in France from Germany and Eastern Europe after the war than anywhere else, mainly because of France’s secular laws and public culture. An even larger number of North African Jews took refuge there later. Now many Jews are leaving France for Israel because they think it is a hostile environment that explicitly caters to the same Muslims supposedly victimized by the new law.

I once read a magazine story about a communist deputy-mayor in the Paris suburbs whose parents were refugees after the war, while she had embraced the universalism of the left in 1968. Now her children wore star of David pendants to parties, associated only with Jews (referring to their schoolmates as ‘the French’) and talked about emigrating to Israel. It is hard to assess the balance between assimilationist and separatist tendencies among Muslims or Jews. But the latter get more publicity these days and that fuels the sort of public sentiments addressed by this law.

Let us not forget what is supposed to go on in schools. In my part of Paris, the attitude of the middle classes to education seems refreshingly straightforward. If you ask where they will send their kids, they say ‘just to the local public school’. Of course, many middle-class parents seek privilege for their children by sending them to private schools, but just as many lower-class parents go private for the sake of a good Catholic education that the public system denies them. There is little of the obsessive manipulation of money and place that feeds the educational neurosis of the American and British middle classes.

But if this had been about stopping Catholic girls from wearing a crucifix or Jewish boys a yamulka, I doubt if it could have stirred up such deep-seated feelings. These are just tokens of religious or ethnic identity and as such they harm no-one. What particular threat does the veil pose to Fren
ch secular society? It must have something to do with the symbolism of seclusion, of hiding women from the public gaze. For me, the women’s movement was the one solid legacy of the adolescent rebellion of the sixties. It is hard enough to accept a sharp demonstration of distance from a common life, but even more so when female emancipation itself appears to be the victim.

I am glad that my two-year-old daughter will go to school in France and so I half-heartedly endorse this measure. The religious minorities are convinced that it is wrong. My Anglo-American friends are too. But then they abandoned the aspiration for a viable public sphere long ago – and the French have not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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