A guide to my online essays, 2022-24
A = Academia.edu; S =Substack; O = Other
Preface
In March 2022, I published Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes (O), a project that took me five years and nine very different versions to complete. This led to two launches in London and Delhi. In the following year, I was stricken with three potentially fatal diseases but received an all clear in March 2023. I spent that year continuing to post essays online at my Academia page, a project that has now reached over 400 posts. I was so convinced that it was all up for me that I built a new website there in the hope of influencing my obituaries. Released from that threat, I have increased the pace of writing online essays in the last eighteen months, and started a page on Substack, A better world somewhere. I have also been writing Marcel Mauss: The Man is the Message (S), about Émile Durkheim’s nephew, a sociologist, interdisciplinary humanist, and the acknowledged founder of French anthropology. If I have gained anything from living in Paris for 25 years, apart from a new family, it has been getting to know him intimately. Writing about Mauss seemed the best way of applying what I have learned from writing Self in the World.
I have been an essayist and editor of collections more than a single or partnered author of books. After my “Lazarus moment” of spring a year ago, I now realize that the themes and some content of this recent spate of essays overlap considerably. I wonder where it is all going; and I have written this guide initially for my own benefit; but it may also be a convenient work of reference for some readers.
The individual essays speak for themselves; and I have not tried to add explanation or commentary here. Rather, I have grouped them under two headings: 1. Money, political economy, development, and world society; and 2. Human economy as a religious (moral) project for anthropology. The second includes three previous landmarks in forming the idea of a human economy. It concludes with a link between the two parts, ‘Money is how we learn to be human’.
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Part One. Money, political economy, development, and world society
Money and markets after capitalism: A new humanism for world society (A)
Economics and the human sciences: From modern dissenters to a human economy (A)
The political economy of food in an unequal world (S)
Organic trade: Food, money, and global economic democracy (S in 5 parts)
On responsibility in finance (S)
Economies connecting local and global humanity (Chapter 15, Self in the World) (A)
Africa and Europe at the crossroads (A)
Notes on the long counter-revolution (A)
The Memory Bank: Money in an unequal world (2000) (S)
The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or business personal and impersonal (2005) (A)
The rise and fall of national capitalism (A)
Money’s penetration into social life: a historical sketch (S)
The sexual division of labor (A)
Private property and the corporation (A)
South African capitalism: Conversations with Vishnu Padayachee (A)
Europe in the current world crisis (S)
Capitalism and our moment in the history of money (A)
Part Two: Human economy as a religious project for anthropology
The human economy (2008) (A)
Building a human economy together: Introduction to The Human Economy (2010) (A)
Human economy as a religious project (2020) (A)
Keith Hart’s anthropology: Auto-ethnography, world history and humanist philosophy (O)
Anthropology as humanist education (A)
Intellectual property and anthropology (A)
How my generation let down our students (S)
Anthropology as a revolutionary project: David Graeber’s political legacy (A)
An anthropologist’s journey: Trying to make a meaningful connection (A)
Connect with the world (by living in more than one place at once) (S)
Thinking new worlds: The anti-colonial intellectuals (Chapter 3, Self in the World) (A)
The case for climate reparations (S)
Studying the history of the world language: My motives for pursuing this investigation (S)
Beatrice Potter Webb (1858-1943): The making of a social investigator (A)
Germaine Tillion: The facts of her life and double apprenticeship (S)
Money is how we learn to be human (Chapter 19, Self in the World) (A)
Paris,
October 2024