I have been trying and failing to teach world history to anthropology students for 40 years. Here is a Wesch experiment to get students to condense world history into less than 5 minutes using Twitter. Let’s not be critical of the end-product. The point is to scale down the world and scale up the self so that the two can enter into a meaningful relationship.
Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary in three parts, ‘The Trap’, shows how ideas and methods gestated in the Second World War and developed in the Cold War led to the narrow and false notion of freedom that flourished in the neoliberal period. Brian Holmes’s brilliant essay on Adam Curtis, featuring The Trap in particular, offers a valuable summary and critique of the documentary.
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, 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 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. 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.
If I have learned anything from these amateur inquiries, it is that the history of ideas and the history of society have at best a very loose chronological relationship. But that hasn’t stopped me from pursuing the connection. I have been sustained in this by a belief that social science is ideology and therefore in denial as far as social reality is concerned. This explains why the epistemology of economics remains trapped in the seventeenth century world of Galileo and Newton, caught between rationalism (microeconomic theory) and empiricism (econometrics); or why the methodological achievements of quantum mechanics – you can’t measure position and movement at the same time and if you observe something you change it – have had so little impact on the social sciences in the twentieth century. I have become convinced that the physicists and mathematicians, fondly assuming that their objects of study have nothing to do with human experience, are in fact a better guide than the social scientists to how ideas about the world are influenced by society. For this reason, I have avoided biological subjects since these lend themselves so readily to ideology, preferring rather to glean what I can from the study of stars, earthquakes, clouds, metals and elementary particles. Continue reading ‘Models of statistical distribution’ »
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.
The family took a trip to Normandy based on Caen, home to William the Conqueror (formerly known as the Bastard) and the Memorial to World War II. We went to Bayeux for the tapestry and visited the beaches of the Normandy landings in June 1944. We were exposed to a bombardment of images and sounds, all of them evoking the war. The weather was freezing, the sky blue and the winter sun cast a pale light on the landscape. We took in the buildings and the fine regional cuisine: there is nowhere like France for reliable pleasures of that sort.
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. Continue reading ‘Reflections on a visit to Normandy’ »
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.
All my life money has been an obsession. When I was 5, I was bewildered by the relationship between rationing coupons and pocket money. When I was 12, I took up betting on the horses. Gambling saw me through university. I even became an entrepreneur in the slums of a West African city as part of my doctoral fieldwork. I put together a small real estate fortune during the 70s and then lost it when I was divorced. So, when I was asked to give a public lecture to my fellow anthropologists in the mid-80s, it was perhaps not surprising that I hit upon the topic of money. I brought plenty of personal experience to my subject, none of which showed in my official presentation. I called this ‘Heads or tails?’, referring to the two sides of the coin, one representing money as an aspect of political society, the other its value as a commodity in exchange. My argument was that both sides were indispensable to money, but for much of the 20th century we had been subjected to ruinous swings between theories emphasizing one side to the exclusion of the other. The lecture was published in Man, 1986. Continue reading ‘Two pieces on money for a Japanese magazine’ »
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.
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.
