Category: Anthropology
Mohandas K. Gandhi’s critique of the modern identification of society with the state was devastating. He believed that it disabled citizens, subjecting mind and body to the control of professional experts when the purpose of a civilization should be to enhance its members’ sense of their own self-reliance. He proposed instead that every human being […]
Edited extracts from a recorded conversation between Keith Hart and Bill Maurer Marina Del Rey, August 2007 KH: There are quite profound similarities and differences between us. My version of the dialectic is that, if we want the quite significant differences to remain under control, we have to establish a framework of sameness to start […]
These posts to the ASA Globalog in November 2009 were part of a series about anthropologists’ contributions to understanding the financial crisis. 1. “In the long run we’re all dead” (Keynes) 2. “The great economic revolutions are monetary in nature” (Mauss) 3. The limits of naivety for the anthropology of money 4. Surfing the credit […]
What follows is a transcript of a lecture I gave to a conference, ‘Anthropology and psychology: the legacy of the Torres Strait expedition, 1898-1998’, which was held in St. John’s College, Cambridge, 10-12 August 1998. It was published online by Science as Culture and may still be found there. I have chosen to revive it […]
Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. I wish to explore the possible contribution of anthropology to such a project. If the academic discipline as presently constituted would find it hard to address […]
Contains: 1. Critical anthropology 2. The anthropology of unequal society 3. French Marxist anthropology 4. Feminist anthropology 5. The globalization of apartheid Critical anthropology An ‘anthropology’ is any systematic study of humanity as a whole. The modern academic discipline has its origins in the democratic revolutions and rationalist philosophy of the eighteenth century. The question […]
“Don’t take this personal, it’s just business” My essay is about the tension between the impersonal conditions of social life and the persons who inevitably carry it out. This relationship is poorly understood, perhaps never more than now, when the difference between individual citizens and business corporations operating on a scale larger than some countries […]
Alan Macfarlane interviewed me in April 2006 and January 2009 as part of his ‘Ancestors’ series (no comment). The full interview, in two parts of an hour each divided by the year 1983, can be found here. Other interviews of anthropologists by Alan can be found here.
This essay 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 this […]
Martin Konzett made this trailer in East Africa. Thanks to Ken Banks (@kiwanja) for the link.
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.
