Category: Anthropology
Published as Toward a new human universal: rethinking anthropology for our times in Radical Anthropology Journal No. 2, 2008-9, 4-10. Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At much the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas opposed the racial inequality of Spain’s American empire in […]
What would an engaged anthropology for the twenty-first century look like? A lecture in six parts given to an undergraduate course, Politics, Economics and Social Change, at Goldsmiths College, London on 26th March 2009. It was introduced as ‘The anthropology of politics’, but my intention was to speak about how we might engage with our […]
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 […]
In 2006 Brian Holmes, an art critic, activist and social theorist who lives near me in Paris, wrote a wonderful essay on art’s financial futures, ‘The speculative performance’. This stimulated me to reply in a letter which is reproduced below. Dear Brian, I like your piece on financial speculation very much. The Goldberg example (an […]
Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, won a U.S. Professor of the Year award. 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 […]
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 […]
A lecture at the Library of Congress on 23rd June 2008 by Mike Wesch. See also: The information revolution The machine is us/ing us A vision of students today Introducing our YouTube ethnography project Interview: how we learn
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 […]
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
The problem with writing about Marx for readers schooled in the analytical tradition is that dialectical thinking is often opaque to them. How can production be both all of the economy and part of it? How can history be philosophical speculation and empirical inquiry without joining up the ends? How can Capital be both a […]
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.
