Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies
a book from 2004 – people didn’t get the title that much, but Derrida, Bataille (the best bit is on Bataille – reclaimed for the left). From books4you.…
Tag: capitalism
Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy
David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his…
Aurora Donzelli on her book, Method of Desire
interview by Setrag Manoukian https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/methods-of-desire-language-morality-and-affect-in-neoliberal-indonesia/ Setrag Manoukian: It is reductive to assign a narrow t…
Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgos Poulimenakos: The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%
In Greece, during the summer of 2021, we saw again a proliferation of wildfires that went on for days, like in 2020. While the climate change argument makes…
Digital Psychedelia: Hidden Experience and the Challenge of Paranoia by Tehseen Noorani
Introduction Over the past 15 years, several groups of researchers have sought to use clinical trials to reintroduce psychedelics to mainstream society, reporting impressive efficacy from trials a…
Jaime A Alves: F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology
‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility. The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing…
#BookReview: Terraformed
Terraformed by Joy White aims at making sense and contextualising the vulnerability and inequality experienced by the Afrodiasporic population of the UK. The author describes her effort as…
Felix Lussem: Alienating “facts” and uneven futures of energy transition
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past…
A Sandbox for a Specific Type of Narcissist – Clubhouse, the Allure of Live Audio and Dangerous Rabbit Holes
A nasal voice is rambling on in a long monologue about how to best pitch a startup on Clubhouse when I log on sometime in March. It is…
Entrepreneurship and Technologies
Everyone is an entrepreneur – a new ethos is sweeping through our economic world. While the promises of ‘being your own boss’ and ‘deciding about your working hours’…
Colonial Hyperbole, with gaps
There are some crimes that are longer-term than others… As I am finding from spending part of the morning exploring archival images, such as this one. A ‘British…
Class – and critique – in Bad Marxism, poking fun.
I was looking something up and stumbled upon a quote of me that I did not recognise – that class ‘does not make much sense’. I am pretty…
Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagisako on Fabricating Transnational Capitalism
Interview by Janet Connor https://www.dukeupress.edu/fabricating-transnational-capitalism Janet Conner: Why is fashion so good for thinking about capitalism? Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Yanagi…
Speaking for the Dead: Narratives of Genomics and Colonization
This is a paper that I wrote for a Ph.D. course: Nature and Capitalism. I’ve been sitting on it and I don’t think I am going to do…
Samuel W. Rose: Disconnected Development Studies: Indigenous North America and the Anthropology of Development
The purpose of this work is to examine and elaborate on the relationship between the people of Native North America and the material and ideological content of developmentalism…
Sarah Besky on her book, Tasting Qualities
Interview by Shulan Sun https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520303256/tasting-qualities What do you see as the main focus and argument of this book? My main aim in the book is to develop a…
First Sentence yet again, this time with a French accent
“La richesse des sociétés dans lesquelles règne le mode de production capitalistes’annonce comme une «immense accumulation de marchandises1».L’analyse de la marchandise, forme élémen…
#Failures: When things don’t hold: Anthropologies of failure, breakdown, and dysfunction
The fragility of our infrastructures and modes of living seldom become as ubiquitously palpable as they have with the current COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of the corona virus…
Abolition and the Colonial Amnesia of Caribbean Prison Systems
The need for alternatives to prisons and prison reform in the Caribbean is long past due IntroductionProcesses of historical erasure scar the Caribbean and remove transhistorical context. …
On Taking Credit: Textile Traditions and Fashion Rip-Offs
Below find a guest post by Carrie Hertz, Curator of Dress and Textiles at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. –Jason Baird…
Roberto J. González on his book, Connected
Interview by Patricia G. Lange https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520344211/connected Patricia G. Lange: According to your book, the people of the remote community of Talea in Oaxaca, Mexico have a say…
On the tendency to periodise capitalism through the event of the global pandemic
JAKUB CRCHA & SHACHI MOKASHI The coronavirus, by the virtue of its novelty, sudden unexpected appearance, and the scale of consequent disruption, has been easily incorporated into the…
Do this. [Ban Cars – NYT].
I think something like this needs to be done for most cities. I mean, not just prepare an article like this, but implement versions of it. Would be…
Don Nonini: Black Enslavement and Agro-industrial Capital
Don Nonini, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Insa Koch’s recent (2020) FOCAAL blog, “The Making of Modern Slavery in Austerity Britain,” reminds us that enslavement and…