http://www.thememorybank.co.uk A New Commonwealth Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:32:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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’. ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2008/01/10/the-human-economy-2/ 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, ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/11/19/interview-with-patrik-aspers/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/11/09/a-short-history-of-economic-anthropology/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/11/07/between-slavery-and-emancipation-in-west-africa/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/10/20/money-in-the-making-of-world-society-2/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/10/09/money-is-always-social-global-and-virtual/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/09/14/africa-on-my-mind/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/09/01/toward-a-new-human-universal/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/08/16/anti-capitalism/ 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 21st century world. The two lectures posted on May 16 contain an outline of the argument. What are Africa’s prospects ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/08/02/the-african-revolution-book-project/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/07/30/the-human-economy/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/07/15/127/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/06/08/the-urban-informal-eocnomy-in-retrospect/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/05/16/two-lectures-on-african-development/   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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/05/01/money-in-the-making-of-world-society/  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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/04/23/the-african-revolution-development-in-the-21st-century-world-2/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/04/03/the-hit-mans-dilemma/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/03/20/marcel-mauss-our-guide-to-the-future/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/01/12/the-persuasive-power-of-money/ (Public lecture, 'The African Revolution: urban commerce and the informal economy', given at the University of Ghana in Accra, 8th 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/01/08/the-african-revolution-urban-commerce-and-the-informal-economy/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/12/18/informal-economy/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/10/20/intellectual-property/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/10/17/on-money-and-method-in-anthropology/ ‘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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/09/06/british-national-identity/ A memorial celebration of Polly Hill’s life took place in Clare Hall, Cambridge on 28th May 2006. She died peacefully on 21st 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/06/07/polly-hill-memorial-in-cambridge/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/05/23/empire-vs-nation-state/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/05/17/notes-on-coopers-colonialism-in-question/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/05/11/peopled-economies/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/05/11/kate-foxs-watching-the-english/ (A book of 60,000 words for Polity Press) Introduction Part I The idea of Africa Africa today: ‘through a glass, darkly’ Africa on my mind Africa in world history Part II The engines of inequality Waiting for emancipation: slavery, colonialism, apartheid ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/05/03/table-of-contents/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/03/13/humanity-between-national-and-world-society/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2006/03/06/april-2006/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2005/07/07/the-london-bombings-a-crisis-for-multi-culturalism/ Death of a Salesman seems to underscore the inhumanity of money–the relentless calculus of debt, disregard for human life and worth, enslavement to branded machines, the impersonality of ‘business’. But Arthur Miller was also concerned in this play with the other side of money--the magic and alchemy of Goethe’s Faust, ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2005/06/14/the-hope-and-reality-of-money/ France is notorious these days for two things – getting up the nose of the Americans (from French fries to ‘freedom’ fries) and banning the veil in schools. The second of these is a ‘total social fact’, something that taps into the deepest and most contradictory currents of modern French ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2005/02/15/february-2005/ The year I got my doctorate, in 1969, there were 23 lecturing jobs I could have applied for in Britain; and at least one had no applicants. The fifteen new universities that had just been created were still recruiting and their graduate students had not yet reached the market. The ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2004/12/15/december-2004/ Theory Culture and Society, PUBLICity I read about A Foreign Sound at the same time in Le Monde (1) and the New York Times (2). The CD is Caetano Veloso’s homage to the formative influence on him of American popular music (3). The 23 tracks, sung in ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2004/09/15/caetano-veloso%e2%80%99s-a-foreign-sound/ How can an economic democracy be built from the bottom up? One method is exchange circuits using community currencies of which the most widespread form is called Local Exchange Trading System (LETS). The idea of LETS is to foster exchange within ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2004/09/15/organic-trade-towards-a-global-green-currency/ 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 ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2004/09/15/nationalist-project/   …be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air. — The Tempest IV: I, 147 There is a shop near our local park ... http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2004/06/15/june-2004/