Anthropology in the financial crisis

This editorial considers the opportunities opened up for anthropologists by the financial crisis of 2008. The chief of these is the exposure of cracks in the intellectual hegemony of free-market economics which contributed to an unnecessarily defensive posture on the part of most anthropologists during the period of neoliberal globalization. The authors claim that anthropology can bridge the gap between everyday life and the world at large by combining the study of ideas and social actions. We draw on Ortiz's research among financial professionals to show how working practices informed by economic liberalism can have extremely unequal consequences for the global distribution of resources. The perspectives of Mauss and Polanyi on political economy can help us to make sense of the current situation and to recommend a path forward beyond market fundamentalism. Their general ideas lend power to the concrete findings of field research. The mask of neoliberal ideology has been ripped from the politics of world economy. Anthropology's highest mission is to start from where people are and go with them wherever they take you. What better time to follow this imperative than when the model the world has been compelled to live by for three decades is in such disarray?     

The early section of the Worcester chronicle

The Latin chronicle traditionally attributed to Florence of Worcester is examined, and it is suggested that its early portion, down to the end of the reign of Æthelred the Unready, was compiled at Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire during the last two decades of his reign. The repercussions of this on the transmission of the vernacular texts of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle are explored.     

D/developments after the Meltdown

Abstract: Part of what makes the current conjuncture so extraordinary is the coincidence of the massive economic meltdown with the implosion of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, and the reappearance of US liberal internationalism in the guise of “smart power” defined in terms of Diplomacy, Development, and Defence. This essay engages these challenges through a framework that distinguishes between “Development” as a post‐war international project that emerged in the context of decolonization and the Cold War, and capitalist development as a dynamic and highly uneven process of creation and destruction. Closely attentive to what Gramsci calls “the relations of force at various levels”, my task in this essay is to suggest how the instabilities and constant redefinitions of official discourses and practices of Development since the 1940s shed light on the conditions in which we now find ourselves.     

The roots of the global economic crisis (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The world economic crisis should be seen as an episode in the history of money. “National capitalism” was the main way of organizing money in the twentieth century and its symbol was national monopoly currency. This system has been unravelling since the US dollar de‐pegged from gold in 1971. The result is a disconnect between politics which are still largely national and the money circuit which is decentralized and global. The work of Georg Simmel and Karl Polanyi is enrolled to explain this development which entails the loss of money's physical substance, a shift in the social institutions supporting it and a break‐up of the forms and functions of “all‐purpose money”. The euro crisis reveals the historical mistake of treating market economy as a driver of society and politics. Good intentions at this stage will not reverse what has become a Greek tragedy in more senses than one.