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In the late 90s I met the US ambassador in Paris. He asked what Tony Blair was going to do with the pound/euro issue. I said the question should rather be which of Blair’s subjects he could bring along to take part in any currency deal. By that I meant that the United Kingdom, formed […]
UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA THE HUMAN ECONOMY RESEARCH PROGRAMME POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS – CALL FOR APPLICATIONS The University of Pretoria’s Human Economy Research Programme has funding for six postdoctoral fellows to undertake research on topics relevant to the following themes · Money in the Making of World Society · Building a Human Economy in southern and central […]
Presentation at the World Bank PSD Forum 2006, Washington DC, April 4-6 Bureaucratic form and informality Most people attending this Forum live substantially inside what we may call the formal economy. This is a world of salaries or fees paid on time, regular mortgage payments, clean credit ratings, fear of the tax authorities, regular meals, […]
LETS and ‘open money’ The late twentieth century saw a revival of self-organized credit money, paradoxically in the leading centres of western capitalism. LETS, meaning ‘Let’s do it’, but later elaborated as Local Exchange Trading Systems, began in British Columbia in 1982-83 at the initiative of Michael Linton. This was in response to a temporary […]
On the one side a puny self; on the other a vast unknowable universe. How to bridge the gap? This is an existential question that goes far beyond the claims of a minor twentieth century academic discipline. But it is one that anthropologists might address, if we wanted to. Traditionally religion performed this task and, […]
Anthropologists have given up on speculating about the unity of humanity and simply chronicle the diversity (as Lévi-Strauss put it in his UNESCO paper on race). Everywhere we look these days, the question arises of why anthropology has so weak a public profile. This is my answer, some parts tongue in cheek, others less so. […]
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.
