The Memory Bank

In March 2011, I attended the annual Digital Money Forum organized by David Birch of Consult Hyperion in London. At some point Dave and I recorded this exchange as a podcast in the Tomorrow’s Transactions series.

BBC Radio 3 talk by me    (15 minutes)     13 June 2011, 22: 45

Listen here

The written text may be found below, but look at this description by the producer:

“Money. You don’t know where it’s been,
But you put it where your mouth is.
And it talks.” (Money, by Dana Gioia)

The history of money stretches back some 11,000 years. There have been certain key moments in its development and each essay tells their story and the resonance that these revolutionary blips have had ever since.

1. Cows – round about 9,000BC cattle were first domesticated. Soon after they became units of exchange and thus the idea of money was born: cows became cash on legs. And they still are – in certain parts of Africa commodities (especially brides) are priced in cows. Professor Keith Hart explores the early examples of money as part of an economy of living persons and things.

In the rest of the series, Essayists explore: the emergence of the very first banks; the setting of inter-regional and international standards; how the very first coins helped also foster abstract thought; and the appearance of the first forms of paper money in ancient China.

Series Producer: Paul Kobrak.

This was written before I was commissioned to write the essay, but I could not shake Paul from his belief that contemporary practices in Africa and the Pacific are evidence of the early history of money nor that money is a commodity whose origins lie in barter. It means that a century of academic ethnography has not dislodged the ideology of unilinear evolution. I tried to insert more about the contemporary crisis of the money system, but this was excised. The line in every sense had to be maintained. I still managed to keep some of the message in what I read and the notion of “an economy of living persons and things” was added to the notice. But if ever evidence were needed of anthropologists’ collective failure to dispel the idea of “primitive” money from the public imagination, this is it. And why would they listen to us if we refuse to engage with questions of world history? Continue reading ‘The Origins of Money: 1. Cows and Shells’ »

International Study Day

Anthropology of the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism

3 mai 2011, 10h-17h, musée du quai Branly, 37 Quai Branly, 75007 Paris, Cinema Theater

Convened by Jonathan Friedman (IRIS/EHESS) & Laurent Berger (LAS/MQB)

Programme

10h-10h15 Jonathan Friedman (IRIS-EHESS) & Laurent Berger (LAS-MQB) « Introduction: Towards an anthropology of the crisis in capitalism »

10h15-11h Paul Jorion     « How to become the anthropologist of the crisis »

11h-11h30 Discussion

11h30-12h15 Don Kalb (Central European University, Budapest and Utrecht University) « Financialization and Neo-nationalism in the New Old Europe »

12h15-12h45 Discussion

LUNCH BREAK

14h30-15h15 Keith Hart (Goldsmiths University of London)     « The financial crisis and the end of all-purpose money »

15h15-15h45 Discussion

15h45-16h30 David Graeber (Goldsmiths University of London)     « Debt and crisis in historical perspective »

16h30-17h Discussion

Like many of you, I became a bit worried about this radioactive cloud. I have tried to gather some information to see if my family and friends in Europe, the US and Mexico were safe. As you may have similar worries, here is how I came across this conclusion after reading some newspapers.

For information on what is going on in Japan, look at the US press (eg: Last Wednesday, US authorities said last week there was a problem at reactor 2 before the Japanese authority acknowledged it. cf. NYT)

For information on the US, read French newspapers. (The graphic of the evolution of the radioactive cloud disappeared from the pages of the NYT when it was reaching California. It is now in Le Monde)

Graphic of cloud’s forecast path

French meteo

[!! Don't open the last link if you are in New York, as it seems that the hard part of the cloud is reaching us right now and that it may last a few days] Continue reading ‘A brief summary of the radioactive cloud coverage’ »

Tahrir Square, Cairo after Mubarak left

Delacroix or what? (the date is a palindrome!)

These scenes remind us that we need not be defined by our differences, we can be defined by the common humanity that we share.

A workshop on The Human Economy was held at Goldmiths London on the afternoon of 26th January 2011. It involved all three editors and several contibuting authors and was organized by Professor Catherine Alexander, who is one of them. The editors each spoke about their own involvement in the international project and their vision for it. Antonio David Cattani spoke first, followed by Jean-Louis Laville and then me (part 1, part 2 and part 3, followed by Q&A part 1 and part 2).

Podcast of a lecture and discussion at LSE on 27th January 2011.

There is a lot more to be said about what has happened as a result of Africa’s urban revolution in the twentieth century. But let’s fast forward a bit and consider the prospects for the coming half-century. The publication of an oped piece by Chinua Achebe in today’s New York Times, Nigeria’s promise, Africa’s hope, prompted me to indicate how I approach the question of Africa’s future.

What did he say? We need “to examine the story of African people”; and what is happening in Africa today is the result of the last 500 years, when Africa was dominated by Europe, first through the slave trade and then colonialism. If Africans are going to get out of the mess they are in now, the West has a duty to help them. Before independence all Africans thought about was freedom. But they didn’t know what to do with it. Cue in Nigeria’s post-colonial history: corruption and incompetence; the Biafra war (equating ‘Biafrans’ with Igbo nationalism as a democratic people); oil, plutocracy, disorder; some recipes for a democratic future, such as proper elections, freedom of public information etc.; finally what is needed is “a new patriotic consciousness”. I didn’t get much idea of where hope might come from, for Nigeria or Africa, unless it was from following the author’s recommendations. Continue reading ‘Africa’s hope’ »

The Memory Bank has never truly been a blog. Its purpose has always been self-publishing, the first place to put my papers and videos, and where from the beginning I made my book of the same name available.

Now I have decided to blog about a book I want to write in the coming months. It’s working title is Africa’s Urban Revolution. It is about what happened in Africa during the twentieth century (as opposed to what didn’t happen — ‘development’) and the prospects for significant economic improvement in the next half-century. It is about Africa’s place in world history and its relationship to the shift of economic power from West to East. This book has been brewing for over four decades since my first and only prolonged fieldwork experience in the slums of Accra. It is thus about building a vision of world history out of ethnography.

I announced this book four years ago. It was then called The African Revolution. There are some thirty posts listed here under that category for anyone interested in exploring the prehistory of this moment.

I hope to post 3-5 times a week until I am done. What I plan is a counter to Afro-pessimism, not exactly Afro-optimism, but on that end of the spectrum.

“The distinctive feature of our age is that mankind as a whole is on the way to becoming fully conscious of itself.” (C.L.R. James)

By “anthropology” I refer here not to the academic institution but to a human teleology in James’s sense. We must improve our self-knowledge as individuals and as a species, especially the relationship between the two. Such a relationship is mediated by a bewildering variety of associations and identities which have been the prime focus of anthropology conceived of as a social science. What interests me, and I believe the vast bulk of humanity, is how each of us relates to the whole and only secondarily how social connections mediate that relationship. Continue reading ‘Kant’s relevance for anthropology today’ »