Archive


Category: APE

  • Cambridge lecture on international development

    I revisited my old college, St. John’s, Cambridge on 24th February 2009 to give a lecture on “International development: a historical perspective from Cambridge” for Cambridge University International Development on the occasion of the University’s 800th anniversary year. What follows consists of a short Introduction, the lecture in 5 parts and audience discussion in 4 […]

  • The political economy of urbanization in contemporary Africa

    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 […]

  • The anticolonial revolution

    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 […]

  • On development

    An undergraduate anthropology lecture in six parts given at Goldsmiths College in 2006 (filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola). Part 1. Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

  • Africa’s urban revolution

    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 […]

  • The globalization of apartheid

    It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined.…that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities. J.-J. Rousseau Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754) Cosmopolitan Right shall be limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality [the right of […]

  • Africa on my mind

    I’ve got Africa on my mind. Not an old sweet song, more a beat: ta-ta ti-ti ta-ti-ta. I hear it everywhere and it takes me back to those times I spent in Atinga’s gin-bar, tapping out the rhythm on a bottle while the guy sang to a one-string guitar. I want to tell you a […]

  • Between slavery and emancipation in West Africa

    Jean-François Bayart says that African states, traditional and modern, have always practiced ‘the politics of the belly’; by which he means that they are distinguished by the ways their ruling classes routinely extract revenue from their long-suffering peoples. Catherine Coquéry-Vidrovitch earlier coined the expression ‘African mode of production’ to describe the most prominent of these […]

  • The urban informal economy in retrospect

    The term ‘informal sector’ (later ‘informal economy’ and now often just ‘informality’) arose almost four decades ago to describe the unregulated activities of the Third World urban poor. But the problem of proliferating urban masses, supporting themselves in invisible ways and at some perceived risk to public safety, is an older one.

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The Memory Bank

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.

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