… is the title of a review of anthropologists Jean and Jean Comaroff’s book, Ethnicity, INC. An excerpt of the review: From the very beginning of their study, the authors ask us to take a step back and stop thinking about ethnicity only as a political tool. Rather, we should extend new attributes and opportunities… Read More »
I am just about to finish reading anthropologist Karen Ho‘s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. She carried out seventeen months of fieldwork on Wall Street, interviewing and observing investment bankers. Actually, she started out as a rookie analyst working in management consulting in a hybrid investment and commercial bank. She had the intention of… Read More »
From the ASA blog, by Keith Hart: For Marcel Mauss, the years 1920-25 were packed and fruitful. His political party and the Left in general had a real shot at winning power in France and did so in 1924. Two-thirds of his occasional political pieces (Écrits politiques) were written in this period. He was able… Read More »
The first in a series of posts on the financial crisis by economic anthrologist Keith Hart, at the ASA Globalog. The series will engage: long-run historical questions like what this crisis is, with the news as it unfolds in real time and with issues that matter practically to people who don’t have to be reminded… Read More »
At the Association of Social Anthropologists Blog: Most notably, banking conferences – like marriages – provide a chance for a social group to assemble iin one place, in a way that reaffirms their common identity and enabled them to forge new alliances, often in opposition to others. It also provides a forum for the group… Read More »
If you are in London: The Dis/Order of Things: Predisciplinarity After Foucault An Interdisciplinary Workshop. The afternoon will end with a keynote by Professor Simon During (Johns Hopkins): ‘Lost Objects: Magic and Mystery in the English Enlightenment’ Saturday 24 October 2009 Birkbeck College, University of London This interdisciplinary research workshop brings together postgraduates, academics from… Read More »
Stephen Gudeman’s post on the Association of Social Anthropologists’ Globalog series on the financial crisis: Economists may see economies as flat or smooth plains consisting of markets and market-like behavior that lead to equilibrium situations, but I think they consist of overlapping and conflicting spheres of value and practices. I label these fuzzy-edged spaces House,… Read More »
Financial Times’ Gillian Tett reviews Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street: Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street By Karen Ho Duke Press £16.99, 392 pages When I first started covering finance for the FT, I used to get embarrassed when asked about my academic past. Before I became a journalist, I did a… Read More »
The rapid development of global communications today contains within its movement a far-reaching transformation of world society. ‘Anthropology’ in some form is one of the intellectual traditions best suited to make sense of it. The academic seclusion of the discipline, its passive acquiescence to bureaucracy, is the chief obstacle preventing us from grasping this historical… Read More »
Akin writes about Human Terrain System: In 2007 we learnt, the US military engaged anthropologists and sociologists in a programme called the Human Terrain System (HTS) for Iraq and Afghanistan in the two preceding years; this studies the complexities of human beings and their societies trying to appreciate how these communities work, how they make decisions, how… Read More »