A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
In this essay I address anthropologists’ concerns with intellectual property and relate them to the principal conflict in global capitalism today. The drive of corporations and governments to privatize the cultural commons has gained momentum only in the last two decades, a period when neo-liberal ideas and policies have dominated world economy. Most anthropologists intuitively […] →Read more
Introduction This paper started out as an attempt to study the euro from an anthropological point of view; but it has ended up being more about anthropological method and money in general. Even so, a focus on the new European currency leads me to ask how we might study transnational or even global phenomena like […] →Read more
‘Western values’ have officially remained more or less the same since the liberal revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, whereas society has since been transformed — first by industrial capitalism and the nation-state, now by corporations running amok in an increasingly integrated world economy. For at least a century western societies have been based […] →Read more
A memorial celebration of Polly Hill’s life took place in Clare Hall, Cambridge on 28th May 2006. She died peacefully on 21st August 2005, aged 91. Chris Gregory, who partly owed his own conversion from economist to ethnographer to Polly Hill, provided the continuity; her grandchildren read poetry; Mark Hill and Caroline Humphrey made short […] →Read more
Fred Cooper’s Colonialism in Question is mainly about changing fashions among the people who study colonial and post-colonial societies. But its third section, ‘The possibilities of history’, opens up larger questions, particularly in the essay, ‘States, empires and political imagination’ (the longest in the book). Here FC argues persuasively against the tendency to read modern […] →Read more
Colonialism in Question: theory, knowledge, history This book is about people who study colonialism. In particular, it asks why there should now be a mini-boom in colonial studies, when once it was virtually unknown. Beyond that, Fred Cooper is clearly fed up with much of this work and especially the conceptual language of recent colonial […] →Read more
Staffan Löfving (Editor), Peopled Economies: Conversations with Stephen Gudeman Stephen Gudeman has earned the right, through a series of exemplary books published since the 1970s, to be considered the world’s leading practitioner of ‘economic anthropology’. His commitment has always been, under a number of labels, to bring an anthropological sensibility to the study of economies […] →Read more
Letter to the Editor, Anthropology Today Kate Fox’s best-seller, Watching the English, is guaranteed to stir academic prejudices, because her style of writing is self-consciously designed to wind us up. David Mills’ editorial (AT 22[2]) is predictably dismissive: “Since when have the linguistic conventions and social rituals around alcohol consumption offered insight into national character, […] →Read more
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 […] →Read more
Didier Fassin began his commentary on French anthropology’s non-response to last year’s riots (AT February 2006) with a reminder that an army of Andean ethnographers likewise missed the rise of Shining Path in Peru. While his subject matter is specifically French, the issue of anthropology’s relationship to contemporary society is a general one. Fassin’s editorial […] →Read more
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.
