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