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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

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.

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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.

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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…)

Humanity between National and World Society 13 March 2006

I want to start with Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch. He held that Cosmopolitan Right, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. In other words, we should be free to go wherever we like in the world, since it belongs to all of us equally. The contrast with our routine experience of international travel today could not be more marked. He goes on to say:

The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degree into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.

This confident sense of an emergent world order, written over 200 years ago by the man who coined the word 'anthropology', can now be seen to be a product of the high point of the liberal revolution, before it was overwhelmed by its twin offspring, industrial capitalism and the nation state. We now live in a less confident world, but it can still generate moments that touch our universal humanity, like the first man to orbit the earth in space or a Chinese man confronting a tank on global television. (more…)

French anthropology and the riots 6 March 2006

Didier Fassin began his commentary on French anthropology’s non-response to last year’s riots (AT February 2006) with a reminder that an army of Andean ethnographers likewise missed the rise of Shining Path in Peru. While his subject matter is specifically French, the issue of anthropology’s relationship to contemporary society is a general one.

Fassin’s editorial begs for a sociological analysis of the discipline’s national predicament. Some readers may have recently received a letter asking them to oppose anthropology’s apparent demotion within the administrative structures of the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). The discipline’s marginality in France is not new. The fast track into the national educated elite (competitive entry to the École normale supérieure, agrégation etc) never had a place for anthropology; and the country’s leading anthropologists (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Godelier) were often first agrégé in philosophy. The recent reorganization of the French universities has further entrenched sociology’s dominance over the smaller anthropology section. (more…)

The London Bombings: A Crisis for Multi-culturalism? 7 July 2005

The London bombings of 7 July have provoked an orgy of anxious introspection in the British media. Its chief focus has been the parlous condition of our national identity. How could four British men blow up themselves and scores of innocent commuters? If the second, failed round of bombings seemed to play into the phobias of the Tory press about parasitic and ungrateful immigrants, the first event undermined complacency about the British model of multi-culturalism.

It is not surprising that the right-wing newspapers would call for loyalty to crown and country, nor that this government would suspend the rule of law in order to be seen to be dealing with Muslim ‘extremists’. More remarkable were Polly Toynbee’s discovery, in The Guardian, that there might be something to the French ban on religious symbols in school after all, and Jonathan Freedland’s article in the same newspaper on 3 August, ‘The identity vacuum’, where he argued that Britain’s hold over its ethnic minorities is ‘weak’ and something should be done about it. (more…)

British Social Anthropology’s Nationalist Project 15 September 2004

We are all indebted to David Mills (Anthropology Today, October 2003) for his well-informed account, mainly of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth (ASA). [2] We need reliable histories if we are to make sense of our own murky times and chart a way forward. Mills, thanks to careful research, a dispassionate style of writing and extensive scrutiny from the profession, has produced what I hope will be a consensual basis for future debate about the forms of association anthropologists need today, if any. Here I bring a more subjective line to the reconstruction of our shared past, fragmented present and precarious future. I argue that British social anthropology drew strength in its prime from the twilight of empire, when it seemed that European thought could make a universal object of the world’s peoples, especially those who lacked their own history. [3] (more…)