Category: World
Contains: 1. Critical anthropology 2. The anthropology of unequal society 3. French Marxist anthropology 4. Feminist anthropology 5. The globalization of apartheid Critical anthropology An ‘anthropology’ is any systematic study of humanity as a whole. The modern academic discipline has its origins in the democratic revolutions and rationalist philosophy of the eighteenth century. The question […]
A friend sent me a link to an article, ‘World at risk of double dip recession‘ and asked if I agreed. By Economics correspondent Stephen Long. I wrote the following in response: Hi, I have moved away from thinking of the economic crisis as a single global event. I am reminded of what was long known […]
“Don’t take this personal, it’s just business” My essay is about the tension between the impersonal conditions of social life and the persons who inevitably carry it out. This relationship is poorly understood, perhaps never more than now, when the difference between individual citizens and business corporations operating on a scale larger than some countries […]
This essay started out as an attempt to study the euro from an anthropological point of view; but it has ended up being more about anthropological method and money in general. Even so, a focus on the new European currency leads me to ask how we might study transnational or even global phenomena like this […]
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 […]
Published as Toward a new human universal: rethinking anthropology for our times in Radical Anthropology Journal No. 2, 2008-9, 4-10. Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At much the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas opposed the racial inequality of Spain’s American empire in […]
What would an engaged anthropology for the twenty-first century look like? A lecture in six parts given to an undergraduate course, Politics, Economics and Social Change, at Goldsmiths College, London on 26th March 2009. It was introduced as ‘The anthropology of politics’, but my intention was to speak about how we might engage with our […]
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 […]
Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, won a U.S. Professor of the Year award. I have been trying and failing to teach world history to anthropology students for 40 years. Here is a Wesch experiment to get students to condense world history into less than 5 minutes using Twitter. Let’s […]
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.
