Papers

The persuasive power of money (2006) Near to the published version of ‘If money talks, what langauage does it speak’ (see under Papers). Much revised and expanded, the latest stage of my Talmudic journey into the mind of Money (aka the God of capitalism).

Intellectual property (2006) An edited extract from The Hit Man’s Dilemma, submitted as a contribution to a forthcoming special issue of Current Anthropology on “Neo-liberal Keywords”.

Marcel Mauss: in pursuit of the whole (2006) A review article submitted to Comparative Studies in Society and History, based on Marecl Fournier’s new English translation of Marcel Mauss: A Biography (2006) and containing ‘The strange history of The Gift’.

IE + IT = ED? (2006) Is informal economy plus information technology a path towards economic democracy? paper presented at the workshop, ‘Clusters, network organization and the informal economy’, Bologna, 29-30 June 2006 in the series Rethinking Economies.

A Short History of Economic Anthropology (2006) Paper written with Chris Hann for a workshop, ‘Anthropological approaches to the economy’, held at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, 21-24 June 2006. Being revised for publication.

If money talks, what language does it speak? (2006) Draft of a chapter for Gudeman and Klammer, eds., Persuasion in Economic Life, Berghahn (forthcoming)

Informality: the problem or the solution? (2006) Presentation at the World Bank PSD Forum in Washington DC, April 4-6

The globalization of apartheid (2006) Presentation for the first in a series of ESRC-sponsored workshops on Rethinking Economies organised by Catherine Alexander and the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths College.

African enterprise and the informal economy (2006) Original English version of a chapter published in a French book, S. Ellis and Y. Faure, eds., Entreprises et entrepreneurs africains, Paris (1994). Reprinted in Paloma Gay y Blasco and Huon Wardle, How to Read Ethnography (Routledge, forthcoming).

The euro: a challenge for anthropological method (2005) Paper, given at L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (November 2005); Goldsmiths College (December 2005); Goa (December 2005); and Lille (March 2006).

Common Wealth: building economic democracy with community currencies (2005) Published in French in a report of the Walras Centre, Lyon on ‘Social money’, 2005-6.

Bureaucratic Form and the Informal Economy (2005) Chapter in forthcoming book Linking the Formal and Informal Economy: Concepts and Policies Notes Towards an Anthropology of Money (2005) Kritikos: an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image, Volume 2, June 2005

Agrarian Civilisation and Modern World Society (2005) A review of the life and work of anthropologist Jack Goody

Money: One Anthropologist’s View (2005) Chapter for a handbook of economic anthropology aimed at non-anthropologists.

The Hit Man’s Dilemma Abridged (2005) 7,000 words version of The Hit Man’s Dilemma.

Notes Towards an Anthropology of the Internet (2004) Examines the origins of the Internet and its political economy, and takes a Kantian approach to the dialectics of real and virtual social life. Published in Horizontes Antropologicos, a Brazilian journal.

The Political Economy of Food in an Unequal World (2004) Book chapter. Argues that global food politics is the central problem of development facing the poor countries and revives some ideas of mercantilist economics.

Teaching Social Anthropology (2004) Epilogue to D. Drackle and I. Edgar, eds., Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education, Berghahn, Oxford, 2004.

What Anthropologists Really Do (2004) This Anthropology Today article questions the claim that the discipline’s method is best summed up as ‘fieldwork-based ethnography’.

Formal Bureaucracy and the Emergent Forms of the Informal Economy (2004) Paper presented at the EGDI-WIDER conference, “Unlocking Human Potential: Linking the Informal and Formal Sectors”, 17–18 September 2004 in Helsinki

Some Reflections on Anthropology and Political Economy (2004) Majid Al-Haj, Michael Saltman and Zvi Sobel, eds., Festschrift for Henry Rosenfeld, University of Haifa (in preparation).

From Bell-Curve to Power-Law: Distributional Models between National and World Society (2004) For the Social Analysis Forum on Reductionism

Notes on the Counter-Revolution (2004) Several pieces on American politics written in Paris after 9-11, and in Chicago during and after the Iraq war. Shorter version published in K. Brown ed. Irak: de la crise au chaos.

Manchester on my Mind (2003) A memoir in ten episodes reflecting on the influence of my home city on my anthropological career. Mainly about movement and identity. Published in a special issue of Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs dedicated to Ulf Hannerz.

Organic Trade: Global Food Politics and Local Economic Democracy (2003) Keynote address to the conference of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), “Mainstreaming Organic Trade: New Frontiers, Opportunities and Responsibilities”, Bangkok, 6-8 November 2003.

Intangible Money Matters (2003) Long paper given to the University of Pennsylvania ethno-history seminar on the consequences of virtual money for subject-object relations.

Studying World Society as a Vocation (2003) Public lecture at Goldsmith’s College London, subsequently published as a pamphlet. How might we study world society? Draws heavily on Kant’s example. ‘The Highland problem’: state and community in local development (2000) Arkleton Research Paper No. 1 written with Gillian Munro (pdf file). Examines decentralized development in the Scottish Highlands and Islands.

World Society as an Old Regime (2002) Book chapter, originally keynote address to a 1999 anthropologists’ conference on elites. Combines revelations about a seventies career as a consultant with an expansion of the idea in the title.

Cultural Critique in Anthropology (2002) Entry for the International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Bevavioral Sciences.

The Euro: New Wine in an Old Jar (2002) Written for L’Observatoire de la Finance, Geneva on the occasion of the euro’s arrival in January 2002. Develops an analytical approach towards judging how new it is as a kind of money.

Anthropologists and Development (2002) Written for a Norwegian audience, it summarizes my main conclusions from a life spent as an anthropologist in and out of the development industry. From Norsk Antropologisk Tidsskrift, Vol. 13 no.1-2-2002 special issue on anthropology and development, pp.14-21

Money in an Unequal World (2001) A longish summary of the main argument of the book, for a special issue of Anthropological Theory on inequality. Addresses the question of world revolution more specifically than the book.

Indian Business in South Africa after Apartheid (with Vishnu Padaychee, 2000) Case studies of Indian enterprises in the 1990s placed within a context of South African and world history since the late 19th century. In Comparative Studies in Society and History.

The Place of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits in the History of British Social Anthropology (1999) Assesses the contribution of W.H.R. Rivers to British social anthropology. Lecture for a conference on “Anthropology and psychology: the legacy of the Torres Strait expedition, 1898-1998”. Published online by Science as Culture.

Clarkson, Cambridge and the International Movement for Human Rights (1996) Transcription of an improvised lecture given to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Thomas Clarkson’s death — on the history of abolitionism at Cambridge, the university as an institution, and the prospects for global humanitarian reform.

Waiting for emancipation: indigenous slavery in West Africa (1996) Paper given at the inaugural conference of the Tulane-Cambridge Atlantic World Studies Group

James, Tocqueville and Baudrillard (1990) Short note written by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart in preparation of C.L.R. James American Civilization (Blackwell, 1993), but finally not included in the Editors’ Introduction.

Kinship, contract and trust: the economic life of migrants in an African city slum (1988) Chapter in Diego Gambetta, ed., Trust: the making and breaking of co-operative relations (Blackwell, Oxford), the most mature reflection on my Accra fiedwork, 1965-8.

Informal Economy (1987) Entry in The New Palgrave: a Dictionary of Economic Theory and Doctrine Vol. 2, soon to be rewritten for a second edition.