Metaphysics Is a Piece of Cake
…time is not natural: it is a social product. A year might be the duration that has elapsed as the Earth circles the sun, but our planet’s orbital…
Tag: capitalism
Valentina Napolitano & Kristin Norget: Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State
At the end of July, a remarkable event unfolded in three distinct but significant sites in Canada. Pope Francis, the Argentinian current supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic…
Robert W. Gehl and Sean T. Lawson on Social Engineering
Interview by Emma Briant https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/social-engineering Emma Briant: Cambridge Analytica often pitched their methods as a contemporary digital marketing firm –…
Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games
By Samuel Gerald Collins Patkin, Terri Toles (2021). Who’s in the Game? Identity and Intersectionality in Classic Board Games. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. After taking…
Focaalblog: New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism
Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology – IUAES, in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology…
Global shipping
sometimes these maps are so pro-capital its embarrassing. This one is of course, but its also informative. Here are the paths of need and greed, crime and time…
Perimeter Protection: The Resiliency of Plantation Infrastructures in the South Carolina Lowcountry
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2021 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the…
Profit over people? The ‘big business’ of tough immigration laws.
By Renata Carvalho As the new Nationality and Borders Bill sparks yet another wave of debates over the United Kingdom’s immigration tactics, it is important to ask: who…
A Trinket, a Trifle, and a Novel New Disciple: Fandoms and Consecrated Commodities
Religious commodification is an arena that has gained increasing interest among social scientists, especially where religious symbols and artefacts are being appropriated by both adherents and non-adh…
Andrew Orta: The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear
Responding to a question about future of the MBA (Master of Business Administration) in the wake of the pandemic, the Dean of a top program recently suggested that…
Love Scams
My (online) bank sent me the following five-pointed warning message about people online wanting to scam money from me, but there is something suspicious about this because each…
Beth Povinelli on her book, The Inheritance
Interview by Randeep Hothi https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-inheritance Randeep Hothi: The Inheritance is about many things — inter alia, your family’s migration to the US, your two parents a…
On Bernard Stiegler’s Marx-ish Work
Nice guy as Bernard was, a little self absorbed should never be held against anyone who had to grow up in France, no? But many loved him, and…
Gavin Smith: Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour
Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations]…
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (Book Review)
by Ellie Plumb In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Seth M. Holmes seeks to uncover the synergistic effects that citizenship, race, ethnicity, and…
Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea (Book Review)
by Connie Scott “Fish simply appear in supermarkets” (p.209), writes Penny McCall Howard. Most consumers have little or no awareness of where their fish comes from, or of…
Matan Kaminer: Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop
I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part…
Time, History, Politics, Art, Revolt – not being crushed to bits. This is a MUST SEE – of all things going on in the Integrated hyperventalated Spectacle this year, why, its Tom Buyard, a rare treat that will be worth doing the prep reading for and tuning in ready to roll.
Seriously do not miss this. Some call him Mr Modest, to others he is The Tattooist (with a nod to Raymond Redington’s Black List) but Tom Bunyards’s Spectacle/S.I.…
Coconuts
Sir Fancis Drake – whose lucre profits helped Queen Elizabeth get out of debt and invest in the Levant and then the East India Company, from which in…
Cleaver: concluding thoughts
Cleaver leaves with a final bit about education in his conclusion that also seems sensible (if still US-o-centric) : ‘We have many potential allies among our schoolmates or…
Predator journals target ISSH2021 – be warned.
So, a process warning to those not used to getting chatty friendly emails from parasite journals that will charge you to publish. The ISSH2021 conference gets hit by…
Opium and Political Economy in Bengal
On why I think Marx’s writing style is misrepresented by the all-too-dour and serious commentators on Capital – you know, the famous ones published by big presses or…
For those about to be assessed, Harry Cleaver helps cut throught he must…
To those doing assignments, be it single or collective projects, here’s a reminder to resist the stress and do it for your own reasons. This is another condensed…
Rafael Wainer: COVID-19: Complicity, complacency, and connections
Image 1: Social distancing signs. Photo by ©Acabashi CC-BY-SA 4.0 To understand the massive world-disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic we need a sociology of complicity. Since the different…