The Memory Bank

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’ »

Phil Swift’s brilliant post on the relevance of Henry Mayhew’s 19th century investigations of London’s working classes for a politicized ethnography today has set off many reverberations inside my skull. One issue is the relationship between Mayhew’s project and Marx’s. Both are highly critical of the social causes of the condition of the working class, but Mayhew’s ethnographic realism offers insight into their lives with some ethical commentary, while Marx was a radical journalist, philosopher, economist, anthropologist, political activist and on a par with the great novelists of his day, such as Dickens, Balzac and Zola. Capital has an imaginative scope that places it in my iconography alongside Moby Dick. Continue reading ‘Marx between Mill, Mayhew and Dickens’ »

This post is taken from Disputed Questions: a series of debates organized by Neil Turner for the Open Anthropology Cooperative.

I would like to argue for the motion: One of the major challenges of anthropology is the redefinition of the concept “society.”

The idea of society started out as a Latin expression for an ad hoc alliance between stateless peoples in the event of an attack on any one of them. The latter would assume temporary leadership of the alliance and the rest would follow them (the word is derived from the root, to follow). Much later society came to be thought of as a centrally organized, bounded entity, medieval precursor of the nation-state. Just as the English-speaking peoples have done most to promote the idea of economy in the modern world, the French have contributed most to concern with society and its derivatives, including the central question of the sources of solidarity. Social anthropology is in large part a continuation of this French project and in France, because of Durkheim and Mauss, sociology and anthropology are not as strongly demarcated from each other as they are elsewhere.

I believe that humanity is caught precariously in transition between two notions of where society is located, the nation-state and the world. The dominance of the former in the 20th century fed the ethnographic revolution in anthropology which, rather than following the needs of colonial empire as is commonly assumed, was in fact an attempt to make the national model of society universal by finding its principles everywhere, even in so-called primitive societies. These principles included cultural homogeneity, a bounded location and an ahistorical presumption of eternity. The centrality of the state to such a concept of nation was negated by the study of stateless societies in these terms.

Clearly world society is not yet a fact in the same sense as its principal predecessor. But the need to make a world society fit for all humanity to live in is urgent for many reasons that I don’t need to spell out. Retention of ethnography (which first emerged in Central Europe to serve a nation-building project) as our main professional model has made most of us apologists for a fragmented and static vision of the human predicament, reinforcing a rejection of world history that amounts to nothing less than, “Stop the world, I want to get off”. We no longer study exotic rural places in isolation from history, but, in abandoning that exclusive preoccupation, we have failed to bring the object, theory and method of anthropology up to date.

Ethnographic fieldwork, joining the people where they live to find out what they do and think, has been too fruitful an innovation to be replaced. But we do need to renew our engagement with the discipline’s 18th and 19th century antecedents, with a humanist philosophical critique aiming at democratic revolution and a world history adequate to our current planetary dilemmas.

The idea of world society has already made a tentative appearance in the form of world religions, world war, global markets, the UN, the digital revolution in communications, fear of global warming and much else. Nation-states have for half a century or more been coming together for mutual self-defence in large regional trading blocs like the European Union, NAFTA, ASEAN and Mercosul. The largest federal states (the US, China, Russia, Brazil, India etc) are microcosms of world society from whose variations we could learn much about what a world society might look like. But, as John said, the most striking consequence of recent developments has been the rise of network society as an alternative model to that of the nation-state.

Anthropologists have been in the forefront of research into network society, which has obvious affinities with their earlier focus on stateless peoples and on the emergent forms of internet-based networks. We could bring this focus more concretely back home by asking what sort of society the OAC is, represents or points toward; and what kind of anthropology we are uniquely suited to develop as a practical social experiment. But my main case for supporting the motion lies in the obvious historical fact that our current social forms are inadequate to the pressing dilemmas facing humanity now and that anthropology ought to be at least in part a means of addressing them intellectually. For that reason, existing notions of society in our discipline need to be revised.

By making a case in this way, I leave it open for my main thesis to be challenged either in specific terms or by proposing alternative approaches to the problem of society for anthropology. In my previous message I promised to engage concretely with earlier posts and haven’t done so. Rather than post a third contribution, I will leave such points to come out in further discussion, if any ensues. But I would like to restate that this intervention arises out of stimulation by previous contributions to this thread, especially the most recent examples.

At the height of the credit boom, three Icelandic banks built up a huge trade by offering higher interest rates on deposits in Britain especially, but also in some other European countries, notably the Netherlands. At one time these banks had liabilities much larger than Iceland’s GNP. Their owners bought football clubs and the like. Iceland has a legally ambiguous relationship to the European Union and it wasn’t clear which regulatory bodies were responsible for supervising these activities.

When the crash of September 2008 occurred, the British government used emergency anti-terrorist legislation to seize the banks’ assets. Many local government authorities were compromised by having taken advantage of the higher interest rates. The Icelandic economy went into freefall, but the people accepted draconian austerity measures as a way back to solvency. Then the British and Dutch governments, backed by the IMF, insisted that Iceland’s taxpayers should meet the full cost of the defaulting banks’ liabilities. Continue reading ‘Iceland’s revenge’ »

The First World War was more than a watershed; it was an irreversible fissure in modern European history. The state had acquired undreamt of powers in the course of the war: to mobilize and kill off huge armies, to control production and distribution, to monopolize propaganda; from now on it was a struggle between rival state forms for world domination. The claim of Western societies to lead the rest of humanity in reason and civilization had been mortally wounded by the senseless slaughter of the trenches. Life after the war was quite unlike what had gone before. Marcel Mauss, who admitted to a sense of relief when the war first allowed him to escape from his scholarly burdens, took his time to resume his academic and political activities. The death of Émile Durkheim and numerous colleagues during the war took some adjusting to, while some close friends told him it was now time to grow up. So, to a double life as a professor of the religions of uncivilized peoples in the marginal École pratique des hautes études and as a political activist-cum-dilettante, he now had to add responsibility for the movement launched by his uncle at a time when the sociology project still felt rather precarious.
Continue reading ‘Mauss on gifts, markets and money’ »

Sunam Son from Chicago wrote to me through the contact form to ask what I meant by my occasional references to a possible World War III. I wrote this in reply.

1. The economic crisis has provoked historical comparisons with the 1930s, but I consider another analogy might be when three decades of financial imperialism went bust in 1913, leading to the catastrophe of 1914-45 of which the 1930s was an expression, not the cause.

2. The crisis has accelerated the shift of economic power to Asia and the Bric countries. The question is whether the West and the US in particular will allow this process to continue peacefully. I once had a conversation with a Pentagon official who said: “You Europeans have taken the moral high ground from us. The Chinese have taken our manufactures. That leaves us with just the weapons. I guess it’s double or quits”. I have no idea how serious he was. Maybe he was winding me up. Nixon’s mad dog strategy was to make people believe he could push the button and that would make them more compliant. Continue reading ‘World War III’ »

Is an anthropology of the internet possible? If so, what would it look like? I will attempt a provisional answer here, building on my book about the consequences of the digital revolution for the forms of money and exchange. People, machines and money matter in this world, in that order. Most intellectuals know very little about any of them, being preoccupied with their own production of cultural ideas. Anthropologists have made some progress towards understanding people, but they are often in denial when it comes to the other two; and their methods for studying people have been trapped for too long in the 20th-century paradigm of fieldwork-based ethnography. I do not advocate a wholesale rejection of the ethnographic tradition, but rather would extend its premises towards a more inclusive anthropological project, better suited to studying world society, of which the internet is perhaps the most striking expression. For sure, we need to find out what real people do and think by joining them where they live. But we also need a global perspective on humanity as a whole if we wish to understand our moment in history. This will expose the limitations of the modern experiment in the social sciences — their addiction to impersonal abstractions and repression of individual subjectivity.

The essay is rather long, but it’s parts may be read separately:

1. The origins of the internet
2. The political economy of the internet
3. The virtual and the real
4. A Kantian anthropology for the internet age

Continue reading ‘An anthropology of the internet’ »

For some time now I have tried to relate major innovations in science and mathematics to the movement of society in history. At the grandest level of generalization, there are observations such as Oswald Spengler’s when, in The Decline of the West (1918), he contrasted ancient and modern ideas of number in terms of ‘magnitude’ and ‘function’ respectively and linked this to the money system. Ian Hacking in The Taming of Chance (1990) has shown how linear causality was replaced by probabilistic reason and statistics in the course of the nineteenth century; and this is undoubtedly related to the salience of crowds as opposed to unique effects. The homology between Darwinian evolutionism and Victorian capitalism was pointed out by Marx (Gerratana 1973). It is plausible to posit a link between scientific/artistic modernism and the movement of world society in the decades leading up to the First World War. And the sciences of complexity that have emerged since the 1970s, with their language of chaos, fractals and phase transition, evoke the postmodern moment in social and cultural history. Continue reading ‘The social meaning of the power law’ »

The Haitian disaster has boosted Naomi Klein’s theory of ‘disaster capitalism‘. In an article entitled Disaster capitalism headed for Haiti, Stephen Lendman provides a summary of Klein’s argument and a trenchant account of recent events in Haiti as a powerful reinforcement of her central thesis, featuring American imperialism at its worst.

“Neoliberalism dominates the world with America its main exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere. As a result, wars are waged, social services cut, public ones privatized, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or in duress to object. Disaster capitalism is triumphant everywhere from post-Soviet Russia to post-apartheid South Africa, occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Honduras before and after the US-instigated coup, post-tsunami Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia, New Orleans post-Katrina, and now heading to Haiti full-throttle after its greatest ever catastrophe. The same scheme always repeats, exploiting people for profits, the prevailing neoliberal idea that “there is no alternative” so grab all you can.”

This is a fair summary of the thesis and much of Lendman’s account is valuable, even if it is inevitably selective and its main points have been made by a number of journalists at less length (including this one and this). My interest is in the theory itself, in what sort of handle it gives us on the Haitian disaster and what to do next. Although I admit we are an insignificant minority, I am also interested in the lessons we might draw from this event for anthropology as an intellectual project, especially since the Haitian crisis forces us to ask what anthropologists have done and might do.

I argue that anthropologists are a prime constituency for Naomi Klein’s ideas, since she paints a bleak picture of the world without offering any political or intellectual program capable of addressing the problems she identifies. This allows her adherents to retreat into their habitual myopic passivity while claiming to be radically engaged. Continue reading ‘Is Haiti to be another victim of disaster capitalism?’ »