Category: Economy
My talk makes a number of points that can only be sketched briefly in twenty minutes. 1. Humanity is caught between national and world society. This is both dangerous and an opportunity for us. Yet much of what has been presented here has assumed that we can safely talk about the United States in isolation […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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
1. LETS and Me All my life money has been an obsession. When I was 5, I was bewildered by the relationship between rationing coupons and pocket money. When I was 12, I took up betting on the horses. Gambling saw me through university. I even became an entrepreneur in the slums of a West […]
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 […]
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.
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.
