John Comaroff thinks not: Once upon a time, anti-neoliberal theory posited an opposition between state and the free market, arguing that the antidote to the latter lay in the active intervention of the former. But the opposition is false, just another piece of the detritus of the modern history of capital. As states become mega-corporations… Read More »
1. On Clifford Geertz’s contributions to the New York Review of Books 2. The other reason Americans should be angry with BP
POST-DOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS FOR RESEARCH ON ‘THE HUMAN ECONOMY’ UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA The Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria invites applications from suitably-qualified researchers for Post-Doctoral Fellowships to contribute to an interdisciplinary project on ‘The Human Economy’. People always insert themselves practically into economic life on their own account. But what they… Read More »
The idea is that standard economics is often too simplistic: But in most economic analysis, the decision makers’ point of view is quite narrow. It starts with what people like and don’t like. People may have a taste for oranges or bananas, or a preference for enjoying life today instead of saving for the future.… Read More »
On the law(s), see Black Look’s NigeriansTalk article. For a well-written deconstruction of the holy-prophet-laid-this-down angle, see Chxta’s NEXT article. H/T Jeremy.
Institutional analysis has been successfully used to study changes in property rights and the negotiation of the collective-action problem inherent in managing common-pool resources under a variety of property regimes. It is particularly well-suited to the analysis of socio-ecological systems, and is compatible with theories coming out of ecological and economic anthropology. Yet despite the… Read More »
Thinking Allowed: “Capital is the lifeblood that flows through the body politic of all those societies we call capitalist, spreading out, sometimes as a trickle and other times as a flood, into every nook and cranny of the inhabited world”, writes David Harvey, the world’s most cited academic geographer. He gives Laurie a radical critique… Read More »
1. Charitable giving and volunteering decline in England 2. Amartya Sen on the great misreading of Adam Smith 3. More Amartya Sen on Adam Smith (Planet Money podcast) 4. China’s first black news anchor 5. Angola’s biggest bank opens an office in Johannesburg
This is from Tatalo Alamo, writing for the Nation: Taking inspiration from the conflict tree paradigm, we can say that while the immediate cause and outward foliage of the Jos crisis is economic, ie a conflict arising from allocation of scarce resources and the distribution of political patronage, the root causes are cultural and historical.… Read More »
Bars of soap, lipstick and pitta bread are out; hair straighteners, garlic bread and Blu-ray disc players are in. The latest shake-up of the shopping “basket” used to measure UK inflation shines a light on Britain’s changing spending habits. Check the article here. Anybody knows of any contemporary anthropological studies of changes in consumption/spending habits?