Archive

Category: Anthropology

Globalism, the crisis in capitalism and anthropology

A lecture in five parts given at Goldsmiths College, London on November 26th. Filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola. Part 1 The rest of the lecture can be found here: Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

The Human Economy

Has been published in a new open source journal created by the Association of Social Anthropologists, ASAOnline. See the original keynote lecture of the Rethinking Economic Anthropology conference held at the LSE on 11th and 12th of January 2008 here as streaming video. World society has been formed as a single interactive network in our […]

IE + IT = ED?

Is informal economy plus information technology a path towards economic democracy? This essay is frankly autobiographical. It is an attempt to excavate the intellectual and political connections between my early and later work in economic anthropology.

Anthropology and Globalisation

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. Part 1 The rest of the lecture can be found here: Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Russian comment on YouTube: Not many people even politicians […]

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 […]

The theft of history

In 1900, about four-fifths of the planet’s land was controlled by people of European origin. Although European expansion was by then four centuries old, this land grab had largely taken place in the previous half-century and for most of Africa in the last two decades. It was manned by the world’s first population explosion, when […]

On commoditization: exchange in the human economy

In the wake of market fundamentalism We have lived in the last three decades through an explosion of money, markets and communications and are now beginning to experience the consequences. Whatever else this hectic period of ‘globalization’ brings, it represents a rapid extension of society to a more inclusive level than the twentieth-century norm which […]

British social anthropology’s nationalist project

We are all indebted to David Mills (Anthropology Today, October 2003) for his well-informed account of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (ASA). We need reliable histories if we are to make sense of our own murky times and chart a way forward. Mills, thanks to careful research, a dispassionate […]

Interview with Patrik Aspers

1. Professor Hart, could you please begin by telling me a bit about what you are currently working on? In the last couple of years I have written several articles on money from different points of view. Four essays in press are ‘On money and anthropology: towards a new object, theory and method’, ‘The persuasive […]

Teaching social anthropology

I divide my comments into two parts. In the first, I draw briefly on five individual papers when presenting a historical analysis of the crisis faced by university teachers of social anthropology today; this is focused on Britain in particular, as are the majority of papers here. In the second, I consider the remaining nine […]