The Memory Bank

Machines, money and people in the formation of a global society. A lecture in five parts given at Goldsmiths, University of London on 23rd October 2007. Filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola.

Part 1

The rest of the lecture can be found here:

• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

A lecture in five parts given at Goldsmiths College, London on November 26th. Filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola.

Part 1

The rest of the lecture can be found here:

• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

This is an undergraduate lecture on Anthropology and Globalisation (in five parts) that I gave at Goldsmiths College, London in 2006. Filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola.

Part 1

The rest of the lecture can be found here:

• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

Russian comment on YouTube:

Not many people even politicians can talk about serious matters for such a long time without looking at the written text.

I divide my comments into two parts. In the first, I draw briefly on five individual papers when presenting a historical analysis of the crisis faced by university teachers of social anthropology today; this is focused on Britain in particular, as are the majority of papers here. In the second, I consider the remaining nine papers collectively to show how concerns with specific techniques and media of learning point to the possibility of an anthropology which would stand the 20th century academic discipline on its head. The inspiration for this speculative exercise is Kant who after all invented the modern term ‘anthropology’ (Kant 1978). But the dialectic of actual and possible worlds employed here is, of course, Hegelian. In my report on the Frankfurt conference where I met many of the contributors to this volume and its companion (Hart 1998), I likened the contemporary discipline to a driverless bus whose passengers were looking out of the back window. I was particularly scathing about a failure of collective reproduction which now sees a few established academics enjoying much improved privileges, while the majority of young anthropologists languish in casual labour and unemployment. This is a reflection of what has been happening in world society for the last two decades. If we are to take heart from the teaching manifestos on offer here, we must also ask why now is an appropriate moment in history to imagine a more positive future for anthropology. Continue reading ‘Teaching social anthropology’ »

I want to start with Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch. He held that Cosmopolitan Right, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. In other words, we should be free to go wherever we like in the world, since it belongs to all of us equally. The contrast with our routine experience of international travel today could not be more marked. He goes on to say:

The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degree into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.

This confident sense of an emergent world order, written over 200 years ago by the man who coined the word 'anthropology', can now be seen to be a product of the high point of the liberal revolution, before it was overwhelmed by its twin offspring, industrial capitalism and the nation state. We now live in a less confident world, but it can still generate moments that touch our universal humanity, like the first man to orbit the earth in space or a Chinese man confronting a tank on global television. Continue reading ‘Humanity between National and World Society’ »

A bureaucratic revolution in the late 19th century led to capitalism being organised by states and large corporations. This stage of 'state capitalism' is still with us and it involves the attempt to manage markets and accumulation through national bureaucracies. Its antithesis was called socialism, but after our experience in the 20th century, it may be better to name this 'economic democracy', the attempt of people in general to win back a measure of control over their own economic lives. In anthropology studies of 'the informal economy' have drawn attention to what people do for themselves under modern conditions and there is a tradition of alternative economic arrangements such as attempts to organise independent circuits of money and exchange.

Karl Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation (1944) in a small New England college near the Canadian border at the height of the second world war. He wrote it in the spirit of an Old Testament prophet, but his prophecy turned out to be wrong. The world was coming to the end of a period of unparalleled human disasters – two world wars, the Great Depression, Fascism, Stalinism, a lot of ugly conflicts like the Spanish Civil War. Even after 1945, many people thought civilization would not recover and it took the Korean War to bump start the economic recovery of the 50s and 60s. But the world liberal economy did recover under US leadership and Polanyi argued here that the market was finished as a vehicle for organizing society. Only social planning could meet human needs and repair the disaster of committing society to a market framework. Continue reading ‘State Capitalism and Economic Democracy’ »

The year I got my doctorate, in 1969, there were 23 lecturing jobs I could have applied for in Britain; and at least one had no applicants. The fifteen new universities that had just been created were still recruiting and their graduate students had not yet reached the market. The situation quickly turned to one of job scarcity; and Heath’s government chose this moment to announce a pay review that included the polytechnics and teachers training colleges as well as the universities. The lecturers’ union, the Association of University Teachers (AUT), chose to stay out on the grounds that we were part of the ruling class, the Civil List, and should not be considered with the others. Continue reading ‘How my generation let down our students’ »