Category: Economy
(Public lecture, 'The African Revolution: urban commerce and the informal economy', given at the University of Ghana in Accra, 8th January 2007) I spent over two years, 1965-68, living mainly in an Accra slum area, Nima 441. Not long afterwards and drawing on that research, I was credited with being the source of the ‘informal […]
The term ‘informal economy’ became current in the 1970s as a label for economic activities that take place outside the framework of bureaucratic public and private sector establishments. It arose in response to the proliferation of self-employment and casual labour in Third World cities; but later the expression came to be used with reference to […]
In this essay I address anthropologists’ concerns with intellectual property and relate them to the principal conflict in global capitalism today. The drive of corporations and governments to privatize the cultural commons has gained momentum only in the last two decades, a period when neo-liberal ideas and policies have dominated world economy. Most anthropologists intuitively […]
Staffan Löfving (Editor), Peopled Economies: Conversations with Stephen Gudeman Stephen Gudeman has earned the right, through a series of exemplary books published since the 1970s, to be considered the world’s leading practitioner of ‘economic anthropology’. His commitment has always been, under a number of labels, to bring an anthropological sensibility to the study of economies […]
…be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air. — The Tempest IV: I, 147 There is a shop near our local park that sells little girls’ ballet dresses. The yellowing models in the window do not […]
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.
