Category: Uncategorized
After the Paris attacks. A letter to my daughter, Lou Hart. Sophie and Constance are shaken, S more moved by all the calls from kin and friends, poring over images of the carnage, but also thinking of what it means to be gunned down in a bar, asking why people would throw down blankets to […]
http://interventionseconomiques.revues.org/304 Résumés Français English Interest in the work of Karl Polanyi has increased with the coming of neoliberal globalization and it may still increase given the catastrophies that followed. In his book The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi explained the difficulties encountered by capitalism between the two wars. They resulted in part from the tendency […]
What would happen if anthropologists, for some limited purposes, abolished the division between academic writing and journalism that Mauss himself observed and that has prevented us from grasping how they fed into each other at a key moment in his life? The dominant presence before the war of his uncle, Émile Durkheim, obviously contributed to […]
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.
