A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
Transcription of a video interview with Ruben Oliven and Arlei Damo held at UFRGS postgraduate programme in Social Anthropology, Porto Alegre, Brazil on 27 May 2011. To be published in Portuguese in Horizontes Antropologicos 45, January 2015. Q: This is an interview with Professor Keith Hart who has already been here several years ago. The […] →Read more
MP3 of the Audrey Richards lecture in African Studies at Cambridge University, 22nd May 2014 This was an improvised talk lasting 49 minutes. It contains several verbal mistakes: Kreisler for Kreutzer (violin sonata) George for Peter Peckard (echoes of George Peppard?) The city of Nantes was part of Brittany in the 1790s and La Vendee […] →Read more
New Preface to Carlos Alba Vega and Gustavo Lins Ribeiro editors Globalization from Below: The world’s other economy (Spanish edition, Mexico City, 2015) Contents: 1. The great transformation 2. Globalization from above 3. Globalization from below (and above) 4. The informal economy has taken over the world 5. The digital revolution and intellectual property 6. […] →Read more
Europe is likely to be the main and permanent loser in the current world crisis. It is once again the focus of world attention; and its current plight has implications for all humanity. The European Union holds parliamentary elections later this month. These are generally considered to be much less important than national elections in […] →Read more
Keith Hart (London School of Economics and University of Pretoria) and Horacio Ortiz (Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, Paris) There is much talk today of a financial and economic crisis comparable to the 1930s. With the threat of a currency war and the euro’s collapse looming, the specter of the Great Depression’s bloody aftermath has […] →Read more
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, […] →Read more
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. […] →Read more
References Abolafia, M., 1996, Making Markets. Opportunism and restraint on Wall Street, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Agar, J. 2004. Constant Touch: A global history of the mobile phone. London: Faber & Faber. Akin, D. and J. Robbins (eds) 1999. Money and Modernity: State and local currencies in Melanesia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Appadurai, […] →Read more
What directions might the anthropology of money and finance take in future? Anthropologists have only just begun to address monetary relations as a global phenomenon. This means that fieldwork-based ethnography must be integrated with the study of world society and history. There are precedents for this, in addition to the legacy of classical founders like […] →Read more
Since the 1980s, anthropologists have once more begun to investigate the specific roles that money can play in different social settings. Research on the everyday uses of money in traditional “exotic” fields, but also at “home”, has vividly exposed the limitations of mainstream economics’ theoretical models. Yet, although these studies usually represent their efforts as […] →Read more
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.
