Don Kalb

From flows to violence Politics and knowledge in the debates on globalization and empire

Recent globalization theory reflected a chain of world historical events since the end of the Cold War. Globalization theories were tools for the making of political alliances between market liberals and political liberals. From the mid-1990s a broad range of institutionalist social science programs showed that globalization outcomes were often better explained by institutional logics (including cultural ones) than by global flows per se. This is, among others, illustrated by the debate on global inequality data. The emerging debate on empire and imperalism is discussed as a logical offshoot of the globalization discussion just as the phenomenon itself is seen as a likely outcome of an epoch of market-driven globalization. Globalization was predicated on the emergence of a US-led transnational western state structure on behalf of the transnational capitalist class based in finance and the large corporations. Territory and space have become more important rather than less, but the explanation of regional trajectories must now be located more firmly in the interaction between local and global structures. This leads to a new agenda in the social sciences: one oriented toward common interdisciplinary programs with a limited range of core questions - about state formations, class formations, mobilizations, claim making, and associated cultural processes. Programs should be more theory driven, comparative, and in search of explanations of divergent spatial and temporal outcomes of universal process.

Anthropologies of class : power, practice and inequality

Introduction: class and the new anthropological holism Don Kalb 1. The concept of class James G. Carrier 2. Dispossession, disorganization, and the anthropology of labor August Carbonella and Sharryn Kasmir 3. The organic intellectual and the production of class in Spain Susana Narotzky 4. Through a class darkly, but then face to face: praxis through the lens of class Gavin Smith 5. Walmart, American consumer-citizenship, and the erasure of class Jane Collins 6. When space draws the line on class Marc Morell 7. Class trajectories and indigenism among agricultural workers in Kerala Luisa Steur 8. Making middle-class families in Calcutta Henrike Donner 9. Working-class politics in a Brazilian steel town Mao Mollona 10. Export processing zones and global class formation Patrick Neveling 11. Global systemic crisis, class, and its representations Jonathan Friedman.

The organic intellectual and the production of class in Spain

The unique and extraordinary character of working-class selforganization has been that it has tried to connect particular struggles to a general struggle in one quite special way. It has set out, as a movement, to make real what is at first sight the extraordinary claim that the defence and advancement of certain particular interests, properly brought together, are in fact in the general interest. That, after all, is the moment of transition to an idea of socialism. (Raymond Williams 1989 [1981]: 249)

Frameworks of culture and class in historical research

A discussion of Patrick Joyce, Visions of the people: Industrial England and the question of class, 1840-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); William M. Reddy, Money and Liberty in modern Europe: A critique of historical understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Gerald M. Sider, Culture and Class in anthropology and history: A Newfoundland illustration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

On Class, the Logic of Solidarity, and the Civilizing Process: Workers, Priests, and Alcohol in Dutch Shoemaking Communities, 1900–1920

There is an economic logic and a moral logic and it is futile to argue as to which we give priority since they are different expressions of the same “kernel” of human relationship. —E. P. Thompson, 1961 Class is certainly a key concept of social history just as civilization is for the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias and his followers. Each of these traditions needs to come to terms with the other. Notwithstanding fundamentally divergent assumptions, interests, and styles, both traditions would gain from a closer examination of each others concepts, subjects, and methods.

Oligarchy and State Capture: Soviet-style Mechanisms in Contemporary Finance Capitalism

The first edition of this unique Handbook was praised for its substantial and invaluable summary discussions of work by anthropologists on economic processes and issues, on the relationship between economic and non-economic areas of life and on the conceptual orientations that are important among economic anthropologists. This thoroughly revised edition brings those discussions up to date, and includes an important new section exploring ways that leading anthropologists have approached the current economic crisis. Its scope and accessibility make it useful both to those who are interested in a particular topic and to those who want to see the breadth and fruitfulness of an anthropological study of economy.

Velvet Revolution of 1989

It was the massive and peaceful civic eruption in Czechoslovakia in November 1989 which first generated the name “Velvet Revolution”: an accelerating wave of demonstrations and strikes, initially led by a handful of young students in the performing arts, which led within three weeks to the fall of the supposedly “hard-line” socialist regime in Prague. Subsequently, the name “Velvet Revolution” was extended to include the whole sequence of peaceful (except for Romania) revolutions in 1989 that initiated the fall of state socialism in Europe. Keywords: authoritarian regimes; borders; class; communism; democracy; elections; empire; human rights; revolution; state; Eastern Europe; Atlantic world