IE + IT = ED? 19 August 2008

Is informal economy plus information technology a path towards economic democracy?

What follows is frankly autobiographical. It is an attempt to excavate the intellectual and political connections between my early and later work in economic anthropology.
The idea of an ‘informal economy’ grew out of a desire to communicate with development economists in the early 1970s from the perspective of my ethnographic research in a West African city slum. Its core was the belief, taken from the dialectical philosophy of Kant and Hegel, that no idea can fully grasp empirical reality; and out of that the seeds of change may grow. It was universally held at the time that only the state could engineer economic development; and this left out what people really did in the cracks of the state-made economy. I proposed to address this gap, but I did not anticipate how readily the development bureaucracy would take up my idea nor how large the social space occupied by ‘informal’ activities would eventually become. I did not set out to coin a concept – that was the work of economists and academic bureaucrats. My aim was to show that self-organized economic activities, growing out of people’s everyday lives, however irregular and inadequate they may seem to be, ought to modify the perceptions of economy current in development discourse. (more…)

The theft of history 10 August 2008

In 1900, about four-fifths of the planet’s land was controlled by people of European origin. Although European expansion was by then four centuries old, this land grab had largely taken place in the previous half-century and for most of Africa in the last two decades. It was manned by the world’s first population explosion, when European death rates fell faster than birth rates from the 1830s, and was enabled by rapid improvements in technologies for inflicting death on others. It is hardly surprising that the Europeans asked themselves how they came to enjoy what sometimes seemed like an effortless superiority over all-comers. This was also the time when modern anthropology was born with the aim of finding answers. The means seem obviously enough now to have been industrial capitalism, that combination of big money and machine production that took off around 1800 in Britain and a few other places. But where did this come from? It had to be something in the culture of Europeans that accounted for their successful application of scientific rationality to the task of world domination. Soon enough this cultural perception was given a biological foundation as a racial hierarchy with whites at the top, blacks at the bottom and brown and yellow people in between. So, when world society was launched by western imperialism in the course of the nineteenth century, it took the highly unequal form of a racial order which most people had been coerced into joining. Not only the anthropologists, but western historians, philosophers and social theorists set out to explain this European triumph in self-congratulatory terms. And most of them are still content to do so. (more…)

On commoditization: exchange in the human economy

In the wake of market fundamentalism

We have lived in the last three decades through an explosion of money, markets and communications and are now beginning to experience the consequences. Whatever else this hectic period of ‘globalization’ brings, it represents a rapid extension of society to a more inclusive level than the twentieth-century norm which identified society with the nation-state. In order to live in the world together, we have to devise new ways of doing things for each other that go beyond our attempts to achieve local self-sufficiency. I call this historical process ‘commoditization’ (Hart 1982), the evolution of methods for making work social, so that it can circulate in the form of commodities. This essay is one such commodity. It does not have to be sold, but it was written with the aim of finding some limited circulation in this form. So far in history commoditization has been closely linked to the extension of society by means of markets and money. But there are other means and they may become more important as a result of the digital revolution in communications — and no doubt other factors. (more…)

Malinowski’s heirs 1 July 2008

One Saturday morning in 1980, I found myself addressing a large, mainly black working class audience in Detroit on the subject of the Atlantic slave trade. I was claiming that, before the industrial revolution, relations between Europeans and Africans on the Guinea Coast were relatively equal. The Africans supplied the slaves and the Europeans bought them. At this point, a huge man sitting on the front row suddenly stood up:

Man: You sayin’ we slaved our own people, motherfucker?
Keith: Well, yes, I suppose…yes.
Man: How you know?
Keith: Oh, historical records – Portuguese, Dutch, French, British records.
Man: Any black people write them records?
Keith: Ah yes, good point. We do rely mainly on what white people wrote then.

He sat down and, rather shaken, I continued with my lecture. I start with this story because, although the contributors to this workshop have brought up the scientific, forensic and self-referential dimensions of evidence in a variety of media, I miss an explicit engagement with the politics of evidence, outside as well as inside the universities. (more…)

Conversation about money 24 June 2008

A Conversation on Money’s Politics, Pragmatics, and Promise

Keith Hart and Bill Maurer

Marina Del Rey, August 2007

KH: There are quite profound similarities and differences between us. My version of the dialectic is that, if we want the quite significant differences to remain under control, we have to establish a framework of sameness to start with, because I really think that we’re very different in style. So I would like to start by trying to establish how some of the questions that we’re posing are the same or similar, how we came to invest so much in the study of money as anthropologists.

BM: There is one similarity that struck me in reading all your work in advance of this meeting. Both of us refuse, as you put it, to demonize money. There’s no reason why it can’t be remade anew by us for some other ends. I’ve been very frustrated by the anthropological literature. It often presents a familiar story: capitalism comes to town and then all of a sudden all that is solid melts into air; things fall apart. It’s the end of the world. And we know what happens: the story is written as if we already know the end of it: dispossession, exploitation, wealth will flow up and so on. On the one hand, yes, that’s what happens. But on the other hand, if we say that it is what always happens when there is the kind of monetization or commoditization associated with “capitalism,” then we’re never going to see the unintended effects of it when they are right in front of our noses. (more…)

The human economy 10 January 2008

The new human universal

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 the name of human unity. We are living through another ‘Magellan moment’. In the second half of the twentieth century, humanity formed a world society – a single interactive social network – for the first time. Our world too is massively unequal and the voices for human unity are often drowned. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. (more…)

Interview with Patrik Aspers 19 November 2007

1. Professor Hart, could you please begin by telling me a bit about what you are currently working on?

In the last couple of years I have written several articles on money from different points of view. Four essays in press are ‘On money and anthropology: towards a new object, theory and method’, ‘The persuasive power of money’, ‘Money is always personal and impersonal’ and ‘Money in the making of world society’ (the last being the title of my inaugural lecture at Goldsmiths this coming October). I have also given keynote lectures at conferences and written several articles on the informal economy, a concept I contributed to development studies. (more…)

A short history of economic anthropology 9 November 2007

Economic anthropology is the product of a juxtaposition of two academic disciplines in the twentieth century. It would be wrong to speak of the relationship between economics and anthropology as a dialogue. From the beginning, economists in the ‘neo-classical’ tradition have rarely expressed any interest in anthropology and none at all during the last half-century, when their discipline has become the dominant ideological and practical arm of global capitalism. Anthropologists, on the other hand, when they have been concerned with ‘the economy’, have usually felt obliged to address the perspective of mainstream economists, sometimes applying their ideas and methods to exotic societies, more often being critical of the discipline’s claim to be universally valid. Since anthropologists in this period based their intellectual authority on the fieldwork method, discourse in economic anthropology has generally been preoccupied with the interpretation of economic ideas in the light of ethnographic findings. But civilization is often thought of as an economy these days; and some anthropologists, drawing on a variety of theories and methods, have offered alternative visions of the economy’s past, present and future. (more…)

Between slavery and emancipation in West Africa 7 November 2007

Jean-François Bayart says that African states, traditional and modern, have always practiced ‘the politics of the belly’; by which he means that they are distinguished by the ways their ruling classes routinely extract revenue from their long-suffering peoples. Catherine Coquéry-Vidrovitch earlier coined the expression ‘African mode of production’ to describe the most prominent of these methods — dependence on levies from trade monopolies. What both writers are seeking to express in these generalizations is in fact common to all pre-industrial states, namely that the politics of distribution (which usually adds up to what Goody in Technology, Tradition and the State calls control of the means of destruction) far outweighs the organization of production as the economic basis of power. In the case of West Africa, the abundance of land and low population density meant that nothing approaching feudal property ever developed there; and rulers had to look for their staple income to capturing people and goods on the move. (more…)

Money in the making of world society 2 20 October 2007

Humanity formed a society for the first time in the last half-century. Universal ideas can now be expressed through universal means of communication. As the first generation for whom world society is a fact, we have the means to study it and are indeed obliged to do so. Anthropology is indispensable to the making of world society: not the current academic discipline as such, but rather in Kant’s cosmopolitan sense of what we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a world fit for everyone.

Money is both the source of our vulnerability in society and the practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful. We must develop more effective public institutions at the level of world society as well as below. Money’s ability to sustain local meaning and universal connection at the same time is an indispensable means to that end.

A lot hinges on where in human evolution we imagine the world is today. I think of us as being like the first digging-stick operators, primitives stumbling into the invention of agriculture, but with no way of imagining its culmination in Chinese civilization. Future generations will be interested in us for the single interactive network linking all humanity that we formed. This has two striking features: it is a highly unequal market of buyers and sellers fuelled by a money circuit that has become progressively detached from production and politics; and it is driven by a digital revolution in communications whose symbol is the internet. So my research over the last decade has been concerned with how the forms of money and exchange are changing in the context of this communications revolution. (more…)

Money is always social, global and virtual 9 October 2007

Summary

The term “social money” suggests that some money, such as the form we are familiar with, is not social, even anti-social. With Mauss, I consider that money’s principal function, like that of the gift, is the extension of society, just as Simmel saw society’s potential for universality reflected in money. People have always made money personal and social by adapting it to their own special purposes, but this was in dialectical tension with its ability to reach the most inclusive levels of association. It is therefore mistaken for proponents of “Local Exchange Systems” (SEL) to imagine that the principles they wish to introduce are something new; and, by designing money as a closed local circuit, they have failed to harness money’s global potential. Too often, in unconscious mimicry of national currencies, these introverted initiatives stand alone and fail as a result. The movement to reform money needs to embrace the power of federation more wholeheartedly in future. This in turn requires us to engage with the virtual society opened up by the internet. Money’s ability to make social connection has been vastly expanded by the “network of networks” and those who wish to work for economic democracy cannot afford to turn their backs on these developments. Michael Linton, who founded LETS 25 years ago, is now pioneering this next phase — developing smart-card technology, new software and multiple domain naming systems as the means of sustaining money on an open source basis.  (more…)

Africa on my mind 14 September 2007

I’ve got Africa on my mind. Not an old sweet song, more a beat: ta-ta ti-ti ta-ti-ta. I hear it everywhere and it takes me back to those times I spent in Atinga’s gin-bar, tapping out the rhythm on a bottle while the guy sang to a one-string guitar.

I want to tell you a story. It’s about Africa and me. About the world too, I suppose. There are many stories, but this is one you haven’t heard before. Most of them are variations on the Heart of Darkness. Mine is about the coming of The Light. Yes, it’s a Christian story in part and also about the freedom that comes with Enlightenment. It’s about Africa’s coming liberal revolution. Or it could be a neo-liberal story, about a revolution from above, a second imperialism.

You might be an African, in which case you are unlikely to see Africa through the cracked mirror of race, ‘through a glass, darkly’, as St. Paul put it. But there is no guarantee that you know any history, so there may be something in this for you. You might be Asian, looking across at the ruins of Atlantic society and wondering what could be in Africa for you. But more likely, you are American or European and the moral of this story is meant mainly for you. (more…)

Toward a new human universal 1 September 2007

Rethinking anthropology for the twenty-first century

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 the name of human unity. We are living through another ‘Magellan moment’. In the second half of the twentieth century, humanity formed a world society – a single interactive social network – for the first time. This was symbolized by several moments, such as when the space race of the 60s allowed us to see the earth from the outside or when the internet went public in the 90s, announcing the convergence of telephones, television and computers in a digital revolution of communications. Our world too is massively unequal and the voices for human unity are often drowned. But if the twenty-first century is run on the same lines as the twentieth century, there will be no twenty-second. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. In this lecture, I will explore the possible contribution of anthropology to such a project. If the academic discipline as presently constituted would find it hard to address this task, perhaps we need to look elsewhere for a suitable intellectual strategy.  (more…)

anti-capitalism 16 August 2007

Extract from a recent exchange with David Graeber about an “anti-capitalist” conference on money.

 
KH: Just in case I never made it explicit, my resistance to the term anti-capitalist is as follows. First, it seems to me that capitalism has not yet fulfilled its historic task of bringing cheap commodities to the masses and undermining the insularity of traditional communities (when a third of humanity work with their hands in the fields and have never made a phone call in their lives). Second, when the grip of America and Europe over world economy is being loosened by a genuine globalization of capital accumulation in places like India, China, Brazil and Russia for the first time, anti-capitalism could be just the defense of white privilege in drag. Third, If Locke and Marx envisaged capitalism as a transitional phase between landed reaction and a future just society, we have to figure out where we are in that process and I think not all that far. Premature anti-capitalism leads to some nasty versions of social control. Fourth, for many parts of the world, such as Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, people languish under varieties of the Old Regime and are ripe for a liberal revolution. This to my mind usually involves some fractions of capital as well as progressive popular movements. Fifth, I never yet heard of a popular social movement with the capacity to launch communications satellites or to run a modern health service. So sixth, I would not wish to be against all capitalist firms. Some could be useful to a progressive movement (Red Hat Linux, HP’s 4 billion poorest initiative), while others are only concerned with developing neo-feudal monopoly (Microsoft, Halliburton). A lot of it has to do with timing. It's just that, after living through the last 60-odd years, I don’t get on particularly well with a bunch of rich white boys sounding off about being anti-capitalist. Individuals are a different case.

(more…)

The African revolution book project 2 August 2007

A new summary and table of contents for a book of 60,000 words that I hope to complete for Polity Press by next spring: The African Revolution: Africa in the 21^st century world. The two lectures posted on May 16 contain an outline of the argument.

What are Africa’s prospects for the coming half-century, viewed in the light of the century that has just passed and of its relationship to world society in the long run? Africa’s relative poverty has increased in the last half-century, but, from being the most sparsely populated and least urbanized major region around 1900, its share of the world’s population now equals its share of the total land mass; and urbanization there is fast approaching the global average. Our task is to understand the unprecedented speed and scale of this ‘urban revolution’; and specifically how the social conditions it has generated lay the groundwork for whatever lies ahead. (more…)

The Human Economy 30 July 2007

Proposal for a book that never took off (2003). Now I will be starting again through a keynote address for a conference on Rethinking economic anthropology at LSE in January 2008. The founders of neoclassical economics, such as Alfred Marshall, started out with the same broad style of questioning as their classical predecessors; but their speculations on human nature and society subsequently dropped out of the modern discipline, leaving it to anthropologists and others to pick up on these questions. Anthropologists aim to produce an understanding of the economy that has people in it, in two senses. First, we are concerned with what people do and think, both as workers or consumers in economies dominated by large-scale organizations and when left relatively free to be self-organized as farmers, traders, managers of households or givers of gifts. Second, our interest is — or should be — in the universal history of humanity, in its past, present and future. Somehow we have to find meaningful ways of bridging the gap between the two. There are of course many economies at every level, but economics is itself universal in pretension and so anthropologists too, in giving priority to people’s lives and purposes, aspire to a degree of intellectual unity. (more…)

Money: towards a pragmatic economic anthropology 15 July 2007

The mystery of money

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

(John Kenneth Galbraith)

Ours is an age of money. If human society has any unity at this time it is as a world ‘market’. There is nothing wrong with people exchanging goods and services as equals. Markets are indispensable to the extension of society. The problem is that they use money: some people have lots of it and most don’t have enough. Money marks social relations in capitalist societies. We think it makes a huge difference if a transaction involves payment or not. But we don’t ask why this should be so, even less where the power of money comes from. With the exception of a few whistle-blowers like Galbraith (1975), the economists prefer to keep us mystified; the media and the schools do little to enlighten us either. So we are sustained in our ignorance by vague beliefs and assailed by a mass of trivial facts, being left to build up our personal defenses against an impersonal system we regard as inevitable. (more…)

The urban informal economy in retrospect 8 June 2007

The term ‘informal sector’ (later ‘informal economy’ and now often just ‘informality’) arose almost four decades ago to describe the unregulated activities of the Third World urban poor. But the problem of proliferating urban masses, supporting themselves in invisible ways and at some perceived risk to public safety, is an older one.

(more…)

Two Lectures on African Development 16 May 2007

Lecture 1: African development in the twentieth century

1. ‘Africa’ and the question of ‘development’

2. Africa’s traditional societies and agrarian civilization

3. Africa’s urban revolution in the twentieth century

4. A note on the North and South African exceptions

5. Urban commerce and the informal economy

Lecture 2: African development in the twenty-first century

1. The story so far

2. An African liberal revolution?

3. The cultural sources for a liberal revolution

4. Classes for and against the liberal revolution

5. Africa must unite

  (more…)

Money in the making of world society 1 1 May 2007

Je dois d’abord rappeler que la France ne vit ni en vase clos ni dans un monde immobile. Nous devons prendre conscience que nous vivons une communauté de destin planétaire, face aux menaces globales qu’apportent la prolifération des armes nucléaires, le déchaînement des conflits ethnico-religieux, la dégradation de la biosphère, le cours ambivalent d’une économie mondiale incontrôlée, la tyrannie de l’argent, l’union d’une barbarie venue du fond des âges et de la barbarie glacée du calcul technique et économique. Le système planétaire est condamné à la mort ou à la transformation. Notre époque de changement est devenue un changement d’époque.

Edgar Morin, Si j’avais été candidat…, Le Monde, 24^th April 2007

I explore here the formation of ‘world society’ in our time and the relationship of money to this process. Clearly, as ‘capitalism’, money is both a creative and an oppressive force driving globalization. I believe that money and markets are indispensable to the extension of society, even if their contemporary form often conflicts with humanity’s common interests. My main precedessors are Kant, Durkheim and Mauss, from whom I draw what might be understood as an ‘anthropology’. After an ‘Introduction’, I first consider the rupture between self and society that resulted from modern society’s reliance on impersonal institutions and the conditions for restoring a measure of unity to that relationship – to live as a whole person in harmony with society. Then I examine why ours is a special moment in the history of world society. As the first generation for whom world society is a fact, we are equipped with the means to study it and are indeed obliged to do so, if we can overcome the myopia of nationalism. Next, I present my principal conclusions on money. Money was a human universal long before its current apotheosis as the ‘money markets’. Although capitalism generates economic inequality and injustice worldwide, its historical mission to produce cheap commodities and to break down the insularity of traditional communities still has a long way to go. We must nevertheless explore the possibilities for economic democracy today; and I conclude with some brief reflections on method inspired by Mauss. (more…)

The African Revolution: development in the 21st century world 23 April 2007

 Revised version of 'A liberal revolution for Africa?' below. 

From Pan-Africanism to national capitalism

I consider here Africa’s development prospects in the coming half-century, viewed in the light of the century that has just passed. Africa has seen extraordinary urban growth in the twentieth century and this, rather than the conventional view of the continent as a rural exporter of raw materials, should form the basis for thinking about development in future. This means exploring ways of linking present forms of urban commerce to the world economy, as well as to national and regional markets. Indigenous commerce has so far been approached mainly in terms of the ‘informal economy’. The concept tells us what these activities are not – not regulated by law and public bureaucracy – but little about what they positively are. This has led me to ask what social forms organize the informal economy and mobilize its resources, since they must surely play a significant part in whatever happens next.

What prospects do neo-liberal markets hold for the African continent as a whole? Could Africa sustain a liberal revolution of its own — sooner rather than later? What might be the social and cultural conditions for this? Africa’s experience in the twentieth century is often represented as a failure to ‘develop’. This perception obscures what actually happened, a development of extraordinary scale and speed that I call Africa’s ‘urban revolution’. If there is to be an African liberal revolution in the next half-century, it will be fed by social forces that have already taken root in the century that has just passed. (more…)

The Hit Man’s Dilemma 3 April 2007

Or business, personal and impersonal
Pamphlet No. 18 for Prickly Paradigm Press

Table of contents

“Don't take this personal, it's just business”
The moral dilemma in politics, law and business
Impersonal society as a modern project
Private property: a short history
The digital revolution
Intellectual property
The crisis of the intellectuals revisited
Conclusions

Further reading
(more…)

Marcel Mauss: our guide to the future 20 March 2007

Durkheim assembled a team to promote his vision for sociology, but he and Mauss were a double act like Marx and Engels. There was room for only one leader of the movement, so we speak of the Durkheimians and the Marxists. Mauss and Engels each assumed leadership of the movement they jointly founded after their partner’s death, but the intrinsic inequality of the partnership was made worse in Mauss’s case by age difference, kinship seniority and his inability to write books of his own. The publication of an abridged English translation of Marcel Fournier’s Marcel Mauss: a biography allows us to reconsider his historical relationship with Durkheim, as well as his legacy for anthropology, history and the social sciences today. French scholarship on Mauss is, of course, much more advanced than its Anglophone counterpart and it is less confined to academic anthropology. Fournier’s 800-page collection of Mauss’s Écrits politiques remains virtually unknown to English-speakers and the collective organized in his name, the Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales (with its journal, revue du MAUSS), continues the eponymous founder’s commitment to integrating progressive politics and intellectual work over a wide range of issues. In both cases, The Gift has iconic significance as Mauss’s most discussed work; but, as Sigaud has already pointed out, the Anglophone academy, with assistance from one or two leading French anthropologists, has taken up its message in ways that depart seriously from the author’s original intentions.

(more…)

The persuasive power of money 12 January 2007

Money talks, it’ll tell you a story
Money talks, says strange things
Money talks very loudly
You’d be surprised the friends you can buy
with small change

J.J. Cale “Money Talks” (song)

In this essay, I try to account for money’s power to influence our minds and social relations. It would be easy, but misleading to argue that money’s ability to persuade is a universal characteristic. The way money persuades is historically relative – very different for Adam Smith than for Maynard Keynes and even more for us who live in the digital revolution and the expansion of virtual society it entails. Moreover, the fetishism that grants money a quasi-independent role in human affairs needs to be exposed for what it is. People make and use money, not the other way round; but sometimes it feels like we are more acted upon than acting. Money conveys meanings at the same time as it negates them; it has – or is thought to have — both structure and agency at once.

(more…)

A liberal revolution for Africa? 8 January 2007

(Public lecture, 'The African Revolution: urban commerce and the informal economy', given at the University of Ghana in Accra, 8^th January 2007)

I spent over two years, 1965-68, living mainly in an Accra slum area, Nima 441. Not long afterwards and drawing on that research, I was credited with being the source of the ‘informal economy’ concept (Hart 1973, 2006). But the real sources of the idea were the mostly poor Ghanaians who took in a young English student and allowed me to share something of their lives. Everything I have done since has been inspired by that formative period spent here in Ghana. In what follows, I will not dwell at length on the informal economy concept as such or on the experience that gave rise to it.Rather, I will take advantage of the seminar series’ invitation to consider the next fifty years in this jubilee year of Ghana’s independence. If the ‘informal economy’ concept drew attention to a wide variety of hitherto invisible practices, at this stage we need to investigate more closely what these practices stand for positively. I will argue that they constitute a dramatic expansion of urban commerce, ‘the market’, which just might be the foundation for an economic revolution in Africa during the decades that lie ahead. (more…)

Informal Economy 18 December 2006

The term ‘informal economy’ became current in the 1970s as a label for economic activities that take place outside the framework of bureaucratic public and private sector establishments. It arose in response to the proliferation of self-employment and casual labour in Third World cities; but later the expression came to be used with reference to societies like Britain, where it competed with epithets of deindustrialization – the ‘hidden’, ‘underground’, ‘black’ economy, and so on. (more…)

Intellectual Property 20 October 2006

In this essay I address anthropologists’ concerns with intellectual property and relate them to the principal conflict in global capitalism today. The drive of corporations and governments to privatize the cultural commons has gained momentum only in the last two decades, a period when neo-liberal ideas and policies have dominated world economy. Most anthropologists intuitively oppose the interests driving this process (Benthall 1999), yet it has some affinity with the pursuit of cultural integrity by indigenous groups, heirs to the nationalism that spawned ethnography as our current method of choice. Once again, in the name of defending the victims of imperialism, anthropologists naturalize an enclosure movement that threatens to become a second feudalism. We need to be more self-conscious about how our ideas and practices are influenced by the interests shaping the current phase of capitalism. It will not do for anthropologists to claim innocence while reproducing the idea of intellectual property (IP) in whatever derivative form. If we wish to understand the wider implications of the key terms we use, there is no substitute for taking a more comprehensive approach to contemporary world history.

(more…)

On money and method in anthropology 17 October 2006

Introduction

This paper 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 and still call ourselves anthropologists. For when ethnographers are not restricting their research to fieldwork in a particular place, they still tend to be limited in scope to working in one country. Social anthropology was once remarkable for the unity of its object, theory and method; but this disappeared along with “primitive” societies. Anthropologists still cling to “fieldwork-based ethnography” as their professional calling, but the study of money needs more than this. I propose as anthropology’s new object the making of world society, adopting provisionally an eclectic approach to theory and method. Anthropologists must appropriate both common knowledge and that of other specialists, if we are to identify the “historicity” (Foucault, 1973) of our own intellectual practices. (more…)

British National Identity: The Roots of the Crisis 6 September 2006

‘Western values’ have officially remained more or less the same since the liberal revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, whereas society has since been transformed — first by industrial capitalism and the nation-state, now by corporations running amok in an increasingly integrated world economy. For at least a century western societies have been based on impersonal principles (the state, capitalist markets, science) which placed an intolerable strain on the idea of personal agency that underpins what we are told is our way of life. The result is considerable confusion, a mixture of passivity in the face of anonymous forces and craving for recognition as a unique personality. This existential crisis sometimes takes the form of questioning national identity. (more…)

Polly Hill Memorial in Cambridge 7 June 2006

A memorial celebration of Polly Hill’s life took place in Clare Hall, Cambridge on 28^th May 2006. She died peacefully on 21^st August 2005, aged 91. Chris Gregory, who partly owed his own conversion from economist to ethnographer to Polly Hill, provided the continuity; her grandchildren read poetry; Mark Hill and Caroline Humphrey made short speeches as family representatives; Keith Hart and Murray Last spoke of her anthropological work in West Africa and India; the Indian economist, Sunanda Sen, praised her book attacking development economists; Clare Hall’s President read out a letter from Nick Shackleton; members of the audience gave their personal testimony; and her son-in-law, Alastair Burn, wound up the formal proceedings. (more…)

Empire vs Nation-State 23 May 2006

Fred Cooper’s Colonialism in Question is mainly about changing fashions among the people who study colonial and post-colonial societies. But its third section, ‘The possibilities of history’, opens up larger questions, particularly in the essay, ‘States, empires and political imagination’ (the longest in the book). Here FC argues persuasively against the tendency to read modern history through its dominant political form, the nation-state, arguing that transnational associations, empires, have been and maybe still are just as important. I endorse the view that studying modern empires — and, by way of comparison, any empires – should be a salutary antidote to the contemporary obsession with national frameworks for doing history. And I quite agree that contrasting British and French styles of colonial empire, as I did for example in my book on West African agriculture (1982), is partly a way of reducing empire to the nation-state. My comments take off from this point of agreement. (more…)

Notes on Cooper’s Colonialism in Question 17 May 2006

Colonialism in Question: theory, knowledge, history

This book is about people who study colonialism. In particular, it asks why there should now be a mini-boom in colonial studies, when once it was virtually unknown. Beyond that, Fred Cooper is clearly fed up with much of this work and especially the conceptual language of recent colonial and post-colonial studies. He finds it faddish and often wrong-headed and he has a point. But it is risky to write about academics without locating them in a history of something else, like society, politics or Africa’s predicament. (more…)

Peopled Economies 11 May 2006

Staffan Löfving (Editor), Peopled Economies: Conversations with Stephen Gudeman Stephen Gudeman has earned the right, through a series of exemplary books published since the 1970s, to be considered the world’s leading practitioner of ‘economic anthropology’. His commitment has always been, under a number of labels, to bring an anthropological sensibility to the study of economies in the plural. Starting out from social relations and business studies at Harvard, his anthropology PhD at the other Cambridge diverted him from studying development in Panama to a structuralist analysis of compradazgo. But he reverted to his original topic in The Demise of a Rural Economy (1978); went on, in Economics as Culture (1986), to examine the cultural logic of some exotic economies and western economists; again juxtaposed the history of economic ideas and peasant ethnography in Conversations in Colombia (1990); and produced the nearest thing yet to a general textbook in The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market and Culture (2001). (more…)

Kate Fox’s Watching the English

Letter to the Editor, Anthropology Today

Kate Fox’s best-seller, Watching the English, is guaranteed to stir academic prejudices, because her style of writing is self-consciously designed to wind us up. David Mills’ editorial (AT 22[2]) is predictably dismissive:

Since when have the linguistic conventions and social rituals around alcohol consumption offered insight into national character, whatever that is?

But, for all her anti-academic bravado, Kate Fox did devote the first 22 pages of her book to explaining her aims and methods. This introduction raises some serious issues and deserves to be treated as such, even if the author seems to be indifferent to the possibility. Despite her self-satirizing, sometimes facetious tone, Fox is not just a wacky deviation from the professional norm. She poses a challenge to the guilds of late academia, and to British social anthropology in particular, that we need to meet. Mills’ review tells us more about the author’s personal history on the margins of academia than the contents of her book. So I hope to redress this omission here by summarizing her introduction before indicating briefly why this book should enter into professional discussions of the future of anthropology. (more…)

The Book: Table of Contents 3 May 2006

(A book of 60,000 words for Polity Press)

Introduction

Part I The idea of Africa

1. Africa today: ‘through a glass, darkly’

2. Africa on my mind

3. Africa in world history

Part II The engines of inequality

1. Waiting for emancipation: slavery, colonialism, apartheid

2. The intellectuals of the anti-colonial revolution

3. ‘Development’: the post-colonial counter-revolution

Part III What happened in the twentieth century

1. Africa’s urban revolution

2. ‘The informal economy’: the rise of the market

3. The explosion of the modern arts

Part IV Africa’s (neo-)liberal revolution?

1. Moral politics and the religious revival

2. The new diaspora in the information age

3. A second imperialism or emancipation at last?

Guide to further reading