How the informal economy took over the World by Keith Hart – Part 3
The demise of national capitalism To talk of the world economy being “informalized” suggests that there is a global rule-system, whereas effective rules are now absent at all…
Tag: social anthropology
How the informal economy took over the World – Part 2 by Keith Hart
The dialectics of form “General Forms have their vitality in Particulars, and every Particular is a Man” (William Blake). Most readers of this book live substantially inside…
How the informal economy took over the world by Keith Hart
A la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time) The idea of an informal economy was born at the moment when the post-war era of developmental…
Seeing Culture Everywhere: A Book Review by Keith Hart
The authors of this well-written book tell how they were pushed by their editor into writing for a general audience. They have succeeded without sacrificing analytical rigor. They…
In the Journals – Prisons and Pandemics
Prisoners’ Round by Vincent Van Gogh via wikimedia Welcome back to In the Journals! My name is Ally, I am a graduate student beginning a Master’s in Anthropology at…
Why George Floyd Matters
With all due respect and no malice intended but the George Floyd murder is not the first time African American men have been wrongfully brutalized and killed by…
Pandemics: Agents of Global Change – Part 2
The Economic and Commercial Impact of Pandemics By now, the COVID-19 influenza outbreak has reached practically all parts of the globe. In the context of discussing the pandemic,…
Balancing Acts: An Ethnographer’s Thoughts on Studying Religion
Anthropologists sometimes study sensitive topics and it is therefore not uncommon for ethnographic work to attract serious criticism along such lines. In a recent social media thread, I…
New Preface to Globalization from Below: The World’s Other Economy by Keith Hart
IV. The informal economy has taken over the World The idea of an informal economy was born in the 1970s when the post-war era of developmental states was…
Pandemics: agents of global change
It was the early 1990s, while working at the American College of Physicians in Philadelphia, I became interested in epidemiology. With all the doctors around (there were twelve…
A Cultural Zoo: Shaligram Stone in an Ammonite World
Author: Holly Walters, a cultural anthropologist at Wellesley College, United States. Her work focuses on religion, language, and ritual practice in South Asia. Her current research addresses issues…
Ep #53 Making Meaningful Anthropology: Amita Baviskar on Maggi Noodles and Anti-Dam Movements
“It was a really difficult dilemma for me, because I felt that I needed to stand by my work, but at the same time what was more important…
Cultural Critique: Anthropological – by Keith Hart
Cultural Critique Cultural critique, the use of anthropology to draw critical attention to institutions that readers take for granted, is as old as the origins of the modern…
The Subjugation of Liberal Democracy
Are we witnessing in our lifetime the slow destruction of liberal democracy? Have we exhausted the limits of a political system that has served nations for more than…
Religious Colonizing in Brazil
After Bolsonaro was elected President of Brazil, I sort of lost the desire to write anything more about the country. As a gringo living in Brazil for more…
The Collapse of Societies
By now, the entire world is aware of the historic and unprecedented events occurring in the United States. It seems trite to characterize these events as…
Det oppgraderte mennesket.
Hvor sitter det som gjør deg menneskelig? I hjernen? I hendene? I sjelen? Og hvor mange deler av deg selv kan du bytte ut før du ikke lenger…
Agriculture in Human Evolution – by Keith Hart
In his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754) Jean-Jacques Rousseau was concerned, not with individual variations in natural endowments, but with…
The Political Economy of Food in an Unequal World-by Keith Hart
Food in a New Economic Order What is ‘new’ about neo-liberalism? It is a world economic order based on selective freedom, on the freedom of money…
Filtered Realities
In order to proceed, we must first acknowledge the more than three decades of work by a man who has been sounding the alarm concerning the…
The Mueller Report: Highlights
The Mueller Report is probably one of the most extensive legal investigations in the history of the United States. Certainly, the circumstances necessitating it are historic…
Neo-Evolutionism with special emphasis on Steward and White
Contents Background: Revivals: Julian Steward: Leslie White: Background: The “golden age” of social evolutionism had basically ended by the 1890s, and after that time a sharp reaction against…
The Horror of War – Part 3
Sometime in June 1971, an incident occurred that completely changed my attitude toward the US Army. In fact, I was never the same again. It all…
Eating Iran: From the delicious to the inedible
I was having second thoughts, but pressed on safe in the knowledge that I was performing an act that would raise my esteem in the eyes of those…