No-one can deny that the human presence on our planet has undergone remarkable development in the last two centuries. In 1800 the world’s population was around one billion. It had grown slowly over the previous 10,000 years since the invention of agriculture. Cipolla (1968) estimates that births regularly exceeded deaths by 1% during that period. If that had been the only story, the planet’s surface would now be entirely covered with bodies thousands of miles deep and expanding into space at exponential speed. The reason it didn’t happen was that the agricultural regime was visited by periodic gluts of death, by famine, war and disease, wiping out that excess fertility and allowing for only a slow increment in the world’s population. Around 1800 only 1 in 40 people lived in towns and cities (the largest, London and Beijing, having populations of around one million). The rest lived by extracting a livelihood from the land. Animals and plants were responsible for almost all the energy produced and consumed by human beings: wind, water and fossil fuels contributed negligible amounts to the energy economy. Continue reading ‘Development’ »
Contains: 1. Critical anthropology 2. The anthropology of unequal society 3. French Marxist anthropology 4. Feminist anthropology 5. The globalization of apartheid
Critical anthropology
An ‘anthropology’ is any systematic study of humanity as a whole. The modern academic discipline has its origins in the democratic revolutions and rationalist philosophy of the eighteenth century. The question then was how the arbitrary inequality of the Old Regime might be replaced by an equal society founded on what all people have in common, their human nature. It was thus a revolutionary critique of the premise of inequality and a source of constructive proposals for a more equal future. Such a future was thought to be analogous to the kinship organization that preceded societies based on the state and class division and could still be observed among contemporary savages. This framework for thinking about social development was retained and elaborated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But it is no longer the leading anthropological paradigm, having been replaced by a relativist ethnography that is more compatible with a world society fragmented into nation-states. Continue reading ‘The critique of unequal society’ »
We are all part of a long struggle between inequality and democracy. They are each other’s opposite. If the democratic goal is for the people most affected by decisions to have the biggest say in their making, this becomes impossible when the resources that they bring to the process are vastly unequal. In the twentieth century, people’s aspirations for democracy in their lives were routinely squashed in the name of great ideas – state socialism and the free market – whose effects were to exaggerate the power and wealth of a few at the expense of everyone else. Let us not dwell either on the wars that led to mass loss of life and destruction on a scale unheard of before.
The outside world cares a great deal about what happens in South Africa, since it occupies a central place in our shared history. South Africa was a pioneer in the formation of the world economy as a racial order around 1900 and it supplied much of the gold that made a previous age of globalization possible. The excesses of apartheid provoked a worldwide reaction. Nelson Mandela’s release, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall, seemed to usher in a new era of human freedom, not just for South Africans. Today, people who have never been here ‘know’ that crime is rampant in South Africa; and this reinforces an often unconscious conviction that ANC rule does not pose the threat to global injustice and racial inequality it might once have promised. We do not choose our collective place in history, but South Africans have become a symbol of futures that the rest of us both fear and hope for. Next year’s world cup offers outsiders a chance to get beyond the symbol to the social reality. But what will they find here? The human warmth of the majority of its people or bureaucratic and criminal violence? Continue reading ‘Democracy and inequality: the Warwick experiment in Durban’ »
Africa has become poorer in the last half-century, but, from being the most sparsely populated continent around 1900, Africa’s seventh of the world’s population now equals its share of the total land mass; and urbanization there is fast approaching the global average of around 50%. We need to understand this ‘urban revolution’ of unprecedented speed and scale; and specifically to identify how Africa’s urban economies might act as a springboard for economic development in the coming century. The continent is divided into three disparate regions — North, South and Middle (West, Central and East Africa); but a measure of convergence between them is now taking place.
A preoccupation with Africa’s post-colonial failure to ‘develop’ – or to ‘take-off’ — has obscured what really happened there in the twentieth century. The rise of cities has been accompanied by the formation of weak and venal states, locked into dependency on foreign powers and leaving the urban masses largely to their own devices. The latter have generated spontaneous markets to meet their own needs and these have come to be understood as an ‘informal economy’. Whatever its value in bringing to light hitherto invisible economic activities, this concept is largely negative, focusing on whatever is not regulated by state bureaucracy and law. It tells us nothing about the social organization of these practices. In order to understand Africa’s twentieth-century experience – the extraordinary compression of contradictory social developments within a short period — we must first take a long view of the region’s divergence from the general historical trajectory of the Eurasian land mass. Continue reading ‘The political economy of urbanization in contemporary Africa’ »
This is the first of three lectures, the culmination of an undergraduate course given at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2005-6, that consider the question of how anthropologists might approach the formation of world society in the coming century. The other two were posted earlier. The set is: 1. the anticolonial revolution 2. development and 3. globalisation. All three were filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola.
Africa’s traditional societies and agrarian civilization
Africa has seen extraordinary urban growth in the twentieth century and this, rather than the conventional view of the continent as an exporter of raw materials, should form the basis for thinking about development in future. This means exploring ways of linking present forms of urban commerce to the world economy, as well as to national and regional markets. Indigenous commerce has so far been approached mainly in terms of the ‘informal economy’. The social forms that organize the informal economy and mobilize its resources must surely play a significant part in whatever happens next.
If African ‘development’ is ever to break out of the unhappy pattern established in the last half-century, its engine will have to be sustained endogenous economic growth. But, in order to understand Africa’s twentieth-century experience, we must first take a long view of the region’s divergence from the general historical trajectory of the Eurasian land mass. Continue reading ‘Africa’s urban revolution’ »
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
