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?Self in the WorldTrying to Make a Meaningful Connection Keith Hart Preface IntroductionPart OneLife HistoryI come from ManchesterRemembering early childhood (1943-1954)Teenage years (1954-1961)Undergraduate student at Cambridge (1961-1965)Outlaw anthropologist in Ghana (1965-1969)Academic, development consultant and family man (1969-1976)Learning to fly in America (1976-1983)Marking time: down and out in Cambridge (1983-1986)Caribbean cubism (1986-1989)Rethinking anthropology, history and Africa (1989-1997)Paris, Durban and the world (1997-2018)Part TwoSome General ReflectionsThe eighteenth century’s revolutionary philosophersMovement and the globalization of apartheidThinking new worlds: the anti-colonial intellectualsThe democratic potential of the internetMoney is how we learn to be human Anthropology: back to the futureNotesReferencesAcknowledgmentsFor the magical twins, Louise and ConstanceParisSeptember 2018Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not the quality of goods or utility which matter, but movement; not who you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and how fast you are getting there.C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but tofind out who we already are and become?it. Steven Pressfield, The War of?ArtI’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got wings Coming down is the hardest thing Tom Petty, Learning to fly (song)Chronology1943Born1943-1960Parents’ home: Old Trafford, Manchester1954-1961Manchester Grammar School1960-1972Parents’ home: Timperley, Cheshire1961-1969St. John’s College, Cambridge1965-1968Fieldwork, Ghana1968-1977First marriage (one child)1969-1971University of East Anglia, Norwich1970Cayman Islands mission1971-1975Manchester University1972-1974Economist Intelligence Unit1972-2005Parent’s home: Kirkham, Lancashire1972Papua New Guinea mission1975-1979Yale University1976Hong Kong mission1979-1981University of Michigan1979-1982West African agriculture1981-1982McGill University1983University of Chicago1984-1998Cambridge University1986-1988University of the West Indies, Jamaica1987-1989C.L.R. James in London1992-1998African Studies Centre, Cambridge1993-1996Prickly Pear Pamphlets1994Cambridge University teaching prize1997-Family home in Paris1997-2018In-laws home in Geneva1998-2002University of Pavia1999-2001The Memory Bank (Money in an Unequal World)1999-2003Aberdeen University1999University of Stellenbosch2000University of Chicago2001-Second marriage (one child)2001University of Chicago2001-2002University of Oslo2002-2004International Labor Office, Turin2003Northwestern University2004-2008Goldsmiths, University of London2008-Secondary residence, Durban2008-2013University of Kwazulu Natal2009University of Chicago2009-2017Open Anthropology Cooperative2011-2018Human Economy Program, Pretoria2013-Berghahn Human Economy Series2013-2016London School of Economics and PoliticsPrefaceI am sitting at the dining table looking past my laptop screen and the laurel rose out of the living room window. It is la rentrée, the first week of September when all Parisian children go back to school. Soon my wife and teenage daughter will leave this place to me during most week days; but I will still contest use of the séjour when they are at home. I have a refuge in our bedroom, but it is cramped, has no view and the wifi is unreliable. In any case, my ideal working situation is to shut out their noise (conversation, phone calls, YouTube clips) when writing in the same room. I am afraid that listening too much to my own head will drive me away from everyone else. Hearing their babble beyond the wall of my concentration reassures me that I am connected. I have a family; I am not alone. I learned to do this from the age of four when my mum, dad, sister and me had one room for everything in the winter – baking, eating, drying clothes, homework, sewing, sitting, talking, listening to the radio, keeping warm. If I wanted to read, I had to shut them out and I did. But they were there.Ours is an old winding street, rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, the fish route to Les Halles. “Faubourg” means outside the city walls and a market developed there for those who didn’t want to pay the entry fee. Eventually a church was built for St. Anne, the patron saint of Breton fishermen; she is la Poissonnière, the fisherman’s wife. It was Marat’s political base before assassination by Charlotte Corday made him a revolutionary hero and her a heroine for the Victorians. The Gare du Nord (station to the North) is a few minutes’ walk away, with Eurostar to London and fast trains to Charles de Gaulle airport. The area was built up in the 1860s, Louis Napoléon’s belle époque before defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, the siege of Paris and the Commune; the buildings are more generous than Hausmann’s post-war designs, the ironwork of the balconies more ornate. Our neighborhood has an abundance of specialist food shops, bars and small restaurants. The original inhabitants of our apartment would have been a middle class bachelor or young couple. It is just under 90 square meters with three large rooms -- the living room is 20 square meters with an impressive marble fireplace -- and a nest of little spaces at the back. The main rooms have moldings indicating their function – books in the séjour, flowers in the front bedroom, fruit and vegetables in the dining room (our bedroom) opposite the kitchen. This was the maid’s workspace and personal quarters (now the “dressing”) supplied wih water for washing and sewage (our bathroom and toilet). The master of course used a commode and pot carried to and from his bedroom. The two zones are separated by an entry opening to the staircase. Sophie and I have been here twenty years.**********A bottle of wine stands on my bedside table. I bought it in a Lancashire supermarket when visiting my dad and the cheap vin ordinaire is well past its sell-by date. What is it doing there? The label says:MANCHESTER UNITED1995 CHARDONNAYPremier League ChampionsF.A. Cup WinnersOFFICIAL CLUB WINEOn the back it says: This wine is exclusively bottled for Manchester United. Like everything else about the World’s Greatest Football Club, it is unbeatable for quality and value. This 1995 Chardonnay is from the Languedoc region of Southern France and is fresh, crisp, with lots of fruit—another winner from United VIN DE PAYS D’OCMise en bouteille par Domaine Lafayette, Beziers, FranceUnited would be pushed to claim that they are “the greatest” right now, but they are certainly the richest and most profitable. So what is this bottle doing for me? It is a symbol of my own journey. It was no more foreseeable in 1945 that, half a century later, Manchester United would be flogging cheap French plonk to its supporters than that little Keithy from Old Trafford (the home district of their ground) would end up as a writer in Paris.I claim to have been formed by Manchester, but there is little left to tie me there. My extended family of origin has died or moved on. The city has become something I don’t recognize and I didn’t like it much when I lived there long ago. I suppose United and I have become citizens of “the world”; but what and where is that? All I can do to cling onto my roots is to follow their matches every weekend. It seems such a poor thing, but, along with my memories, it is all I have left.United’s story is not just onward and upward. Half the team was killed in an air crash when I was 14 and they didn’t win anything for another decade. They are in trouble now replacing their best ever manager, Sir Alex Ferguson. I too once crashed spectacularly and spent fifteen years recovering. I almost died two years ago and it prompted me to write this book. I don’t know when I became preoccupied with how my person was linked to humanity as a whole. But that is the question I explore here and I am not alone in asking it.Introduction: Self in the World is an account of my education for life in the broadest sense, an excavation of memory for the purposes of self-knowledge. I don’t suppose that all the facts and ideas presented here will be of universal interest. But in writing them down, I have made an object of them and that has enhanced my self-awareness. It is this quality of reflexivity that perhaps will merit your attention. I hope to encourage readers to reflect on their own lives and how we can and cannot fit our actions to our purposes. Autobiography is a humanist genre, but mine is not of the traditional sort. Humanism privileges personal agency, the idea of an autonomous self who rejects supernatural, natural and social conditioning. It is a tried and convincing antidote to alienation from the world we live in. There are severe limits to the scope for personal action, however. In the extreme, we are subject to natural disasters, social revolutions, wars and economic depressions that we neither made nor can influence much. This vulnerability extends to more mundane matters. Today we depend on machines that few of us understand and on rules and ideas that we do not generate ourselves; we are victims of pollution and environmental threats to which we can only offer token palliatives. The media confirm our plight every day with reports of disasters around the world. Aren’t we lucky not to be in that earthquake, air crash, massacre or flood? Yet we would like a more meaningful relationship with impersonal forces whose impact can be concretely personal as well as abstractly collective.Once the humanities showed us our common history by delving deeply into particular persons, places, events and relationships; and the popular arts continue to do the same. Religion has always been a means of connecting each of us as subjects to the object world we share with everyone. But the social sciences mostly promote partial and impersonal perspectives on the world. Students sign up for them in droves, hoping to learn how to improve society. They discover that the conditions of social improvement are impenetrable. Focusing on all the ways that we are divided obscures a more important question: how does each of us relate to a world that appears to lack any principle of natural or social order? The issue of how individuals belong to humanity has been sidelined.We each embark on two life journeys -- out into the world and inward to the self. Society is mysterious to us because we have lived there and it now dwells inside us where it is normally invisible. Writing is one way of bringing the two into some mutual understanding that we can share with others. Ethnography – writing about people we have lived with -- requires us to participate in local society while observing it. This adds to our range of social experience; becomes an aspect of our socialization; and brings living in society into our sources of introspection. One method for understanding world society would be to synthesize these varied experiences. This entails combining the fragments of social experience into a more coherent whole, a world as singular as the self.So there are as many worlds as there are individuals and their journeys; and, even if there were only one out there, each of us changes it whenever we move. This model of subjectivity, at once personal and cosmopolitan, cannot by itself help us make a meaningful connection with the world. We must try to understand the world as a social object too. For much of my professional life, I have shadowed the African diaspora through an Atlantic world whose defining moment was slavery. I trace my self-reinvention in mid-life to a spell in Jamaica during the 1980s. Caribbean people, whose history of movement has denied them the security of viewing the world from one place, developed a “cubist” perspective on it. The North Atlantic has some claim to being the crucible of modern world history; but it is not the world. The idea of life as a journey is seductive, but the progressive vision expressed by C. L. R. James in the epigraph is too rationalist for my taste and doesn’t fit my experience. I was driven by an overwhelming need for academic success until my mid-30s, when my train hit the buffers at the end of that track. I spent the next two decades suffering, learning some humility and recovering. Since the millennium (I am now 75) I have found family life again, embraced the internet, traveled the world and become a serious writer. I was always a teacher. Along the way I learned that being two-sided beats being single-minded. I even devised a pseudo-Maoist slogan: “Walk on two legs” -- it’s better than standing on one foot and falling over. What do I mean by that?There are two prerequisites for being human: we must each learn to be self-reliant to a high degree (I call this the “toothbrush syndrome”—who will brush your teeth if not yourself?) and to belong to others, merging our identities in a bewildering variety of social relationships. Much of modern ideology emphasizes how problematic it is to be both self-interested and mutual, to be economic as well as social, we might say. When culture is set up to expect a conflict between the two, it is hard to be both. Yet the two sides are inseparable and they may sometimes be reconciled if societies encourage private and public interests to coincide. But before pursuing this issue further, we should discuss what we are doing here together, you and me, reader and munication, memory, listening, readingI am a teacher, a professional communicator. Yet I entertain serious doubts about the ability of words to communicate. In my darker moments I wonder whether language communicates meaning at all. Music moves us; number lends precision to what we do; money renders social life at once abstract and concrete; the mechanics of gesture and the “vibes” are mostly unknown. So, when words formed in one mind are aimed at another’s as speech or writing, what chance is there that the sender’s intention will be realised? The receiver’s attention may be impaired, distracted or intermittent. Translation is inevitable – not just between national languages, but between individuals’ variable experience of the same language. You may know the word “father”, but each of us brings a unique history to its meaning. We are like ships passing in the night…sometimes, often, always, I don’t know. It is a miracle that we communicate at all; and much of the time, we don’t.But I have some good news. Most people have a huge stake in the notion that exchanging words is normally effective, that meanings are reliably transferred between people in this way. We could call it the will to suspend disbelief. We get irritated when someone claims not to understand us; and we nod agreement rather than interrupt the flow. Yet our world is multi-lingual. English is now like Latin in the middle ages when it broke up into national languages. The growing transnational elite use it as standard. But regional variations are many and getting stronger, as are specialist jargons. The status of English as the world language is inherently unstable.I conceive of the main audience for this book as speakers of English as a second language. It is the largest language pool. At Yale the students complained because my Northern accent was not BBC English. I soon switched to a mid-Atlantic version. I was once conversing with a young Finnish seaman on a plane from Aberdeen to Amsterdam: at one point he blurted out —“You know, I have understood every word you have said, unlike the English and Scots guys on the oil rigs, where I am lucky to get one word in three.” I have lived in Paris for two decades and my spoken French is poor. When I give a talk there, I speak in English with a PowerPoint in French and the discussion mixes languages for convenience. Playing contract bridge in a Jamaican club, I moved with my partner to a new table and only opened my mouth once to bid “two spades”. The woman on my left asked “What part of Manchester are you from?” Another time in Manchester, a shop assistant asked, “Where are you from, luv?” “Where do you think?” “Ee, ah dunno, but you’ve got a Yankee twang.” Most often we cut through the particulars and communicate, but prefer not to ask munication is fraught with politics. Parent-child relations are everywhere a metaphor for entrenched inequality. We all know when we are being addressed as an equal or as an inferior. John Locke was celebrated in 18th century England, not as a political theorist or epistemologist, but for his writings on education. His treatise began as private letters to a friend and was intended for “English gentlemen”. The book was aimed at a narrow social circle, yet it became a long-term best-seller. This was partly because of its tone, evoking a conversation between friends: “One ought to treat grown men, as well as older children, with familiarity and friendliness, since they resent formal instructions and those who affect great formality”. I hope that my book can emulate Locke’s personal and egalitarian style.For most of human history, information was scarce. It was handed down by political and religious experts. The print revolution put the bible in the hands of individuals who could now make their own connection to God. As long as books were handwritten, their circulation was restricted to the literate few who could copy and read them. In my old university, Cambridge, until the 16th century, teachers carried their own scrolls around in the deep pockets of their gowns and read them out for payment to students who ended up with a copy of their own. Copying was not in itself a major obstacle to the diffusion of texts; but the ability to interpret them was scarce and costly. Printing made it possible for many more people to get hold of written material; and it eliminated some of the ambiguities of handwriting. It took a line of business away from the hacks with gowns and shifted the emphasis in learning to interpretation and hence to understanding. The students who attended my first-year lectures at Cambridge sometimes complained of a “lack of structure”, meaning that they wanted to be told the dozen points that, when memorized by rote, would ensure a decent pass in the examinations. I would ask them to consider the success of Cambridge University Press over the last 450 years. This was built on putting books directly into the hands of students, so that they could make up their own minds what they meant, with the help of learned and sometimes inspiring teachers. Instead, these students wanted me to revert to the role of a reader of scrolls before the print revolution, passing signs from one person to the next without touching the minds of either.Newspapers, novels and pamphlets proliferated in the late 18th century. This abundance of information posed new problems for its recipients. Whereas before they were lucky to be told anything they hadn’t heard countless times before, people now had to learn to be selective in what they read. The process was replete with danger – who knows which powerful person would take offence at being ignored? This is the context in which Immanuel Kant wrote his three great Critiques, exploring the conditions for gaining knowledge and for making practical and moral judgments. Kant did the hard intellectual work of opening up these new social possibilities. Once choosing not to read something had become socially acceptable, the way was open for the mass media. He published a best-seller on “anthropology” as an academic vocation and source of moral education for the public. It is mostly ignored by anthropologists today.The relationship between sender and receiver in communications was still unequal, however. Today, in just three decades, the Internet and especially the social media have made available easy-to-use tools that provide a plethora of options for anyone to engage with the world as a communicator in their own right. These new social forms of self-expression, however, are still hamstrung by censorship in authoritarian states and by an outmoded bureaucratic capitalism whose command-and-control methods and intellectual property regime consistently provoke demands for open access to information and democratization of its production, distribution and consumption. The struggle against unequal communications still has a long way to go. I wonder what habits of ours will seem as outlandish to future generations as the eighteenth-century idea that you read according to the rules of social respect. Come to think of it, we haven’t shaken off that inhibition either.The main instrument for constructing any sense of “self” is memory. Old friends and family members confirm our claim to be the same person now as when we were young. I imagine my memory as a living ganglion, with large clusters, such as the one labeled “mother”, linked to smaller ones in a pulsating networked hierarchy. My working memory consists of stories, images and facts; for an item to find a home, it must connect with what’s already there. Another metaphor for memory is a pinball machine where the ball pings off fixed nodes, sometimes setting off lights in several or all clusters at once. A third is a cardboard tube open at both ends; late additions push out bits that have become redundant. In this version, memory is specialized -- mine is stuffed with raw material for oral performance and writing. If an item isn’t part of a story, it gets lost. When writing about “money in an unequal world”, I conceived of money as a “memory bank”. This was taken from computing of course; but the word “bank” links flows of water and money to those of information. All three refer to slower-moving residues of fast-moving flows. These residues appear to be static when compared with the chaotic movement of water molecules, cash in your pocket or a cursor on the screen. But in fact they are moving too. The physicist may tell us that, at the level of elementary particles, the river bank is moving; but if we are drowning, we put our faith in its relative stability. It is the same with banks and money. J.K. Galbraith tells us that “the process by which a bank creates money is so simple that it repels the mind”. This is because it is a shape-shifting activity, not the store of value that we want money to be. A computer’s memory banks are an infrastructure making countless operations possible. Yet information infrastructures perish too. The contrast between stability and movement, stocks and flows parallels that between ideas and life. Each pair is inseparable.The idea of modernity is that we have ditched the baggage of our previous history. In fact, we have never been modern. The institutions of agrarian civilization, launched in the Bronze Age with a passive rural workforce in mind, are, in form if not in content, our institutions today: territorial states, landed property, warfare, racism, embattled cities, money as objects, long-distance trade, an emphasis on work, and of course world religions and the nuclear family. This agrarian package has become even more lethal with the addition of machines. Meanwhile we believe that we are remaking society anew and that history is bunk. Yet teachers often rely on a conservative “hose and bucket” approach to instruction: open page one of your textbook; forget everything you think you know; and we will fill your mind with what you need.The last thing I want is to tell students and readers what they are supposed to think. My aim is to offer them material for reflection that could help each of them to become what they alone can be. I don’t think of my input as crucial, but as marginal to their whole life trajectory. Whatever they learn now is grafted onto what they have learned before. Getting something from a text depends on your preparation for it. I tried to read the first volume of Marx’s Capital four times between the ages of 19 and 34. I only got it the last time. I next turned to Marcel Mauss’s essay on The Gift, which had made no impression when I was an undergraduate, and took 25 pages of notes one weekend. These two have been joined together in my memory ever since. I don’t want to clone myself on my students. That would be a terrible responsibility. I want to store up credit with them, since they are going places that I would never reach by myself. They may later consent to my hitching a ride on their lives. I vividly recall going to the Hollywood Bowl with my daughter Louise when she worked for Sony Pictures. It was a concert by Beck. We drank champagne and ate strawberries in a private enclosure near the front. The stars came out; the lighting and sound were spectacular. I knew that I would never have had this experience without following her. Sometimes, out of the blue, a former student does something similar for me. In my late 40s I determined to improvise my lectures. Speech is the unity of thought and action; it is live. By the time a reader comes to a book, it is dead to its author; but reading and listening are always live. Many lecturers seem to pay more attention to reading their notes than to engaging the student audience. It kills whatever life there is in the ideas. I wanted to be a performer. I feel compelled to move when I speak; so I bounce around the stage waving my arms. The words I string together are lively and coherent; but they are not the main thing. The students see that I care about my ideas and express them energetically. They are part of my life. I hope that they will be enthused to go out and read; but, more than that, I want my performance to get them thinking for themselves. Occasionally a student would come up afterwards to tell me how important the lecture had been for him. I would ask what was particularly memorable, knowing what was coming next. Sure enough, I did not recognize the answer as something I had said. This is what I think happens: someone has been mulling over a question for a time and an answer comes to mind in the context of my lecture. The listener attributes this revelation to me; but he was its principal author while our two minds were connected in the live performance. I have no control over what students take away from lectures. All I really care about is that the experience raises their intellectual self-belief and stimulates conversation with their peers, since that is how we learn at university. Marcel Mauss gave well-attended public lectures in the 1930s at Paris’ Institut d’ethnologie. A trio of Surrealists (André Breton, Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris) found that they could not agree on what they were about; so they set up an experiment in which each would take notes and later compare them. Sure enough, they were quite different. They approached Mauss and asked him if he was indifferent to getting his message across to “the audience”. The great man replied, “It was never my intention to impose my thoughts on yours, gentlemen; I hoped to help you discover your own.”Writing and reading are both creative; but their relationship is still asymmetrical. Writers have a public; reading is private. In the sixties the French structuralist critic, Roland Barthes, attempted to dethrone authors as subjective agents. My counterpart would be “Death of the audience”. A book’s readership is wildly unpredictable these days. When preparing my first book I considered writing it just for the 18 professors in the Yale anthropology department; but their interests were so divergent that, if I succeeded, the book would have universal academic appeal. So I abandoned that idea. Later, The Memory Bank generated fan mail from Swiss bankers, Peruvian activists and others whose place in the world I could barely imagine, never mind write for. I have lived and worked in 24 countries for periods between two months and twenty years. I have internalized these social experiences as so many voices who could speak out if I write something false or incomprehensible. I am in society when I write alone. I hope that my text is already social enough to find readers out there. I just can’t predict who they are.I invite readers here to reflect on the common human dilemma to which we each respond in our own way -- the division between a world of personal agency and another where it generally doesn’t count. What accumulates between an individual’s ears in a lifetime is indispensible to creative thought. That is one reason why autobiography might well become more common than it is in the humanities and anthropology. And reading is more creative than writing. Writers often get stuck in a groove and repeat themselves, whereas each reader brings an entirely new and unique perspective to the text. That is how the human conversation moves on -- when living insight fertilizes dead prose.Becoming human and its negationBeing human, individually or collectively, is not a given, something we all inherit through our DNA; it is an unfinished undertaking. We have to work at becoming human, separately and together. Becoming is life, movement and process; whatever stops developing has become – it is a state, a dead thing like this book when it leaves my hands. Stability and movement are both indispensable to life; but working out a balance between them isn’t easy. My focus on “becoming human” -- on emergence – favors a historical method. But all of the principal humanities – literature, the arts, history, ethnography, dialogical philosophy, rhetoric, case law – are relevant. The most urgent task humanity faces now is to develop new social forms that might secure our survival as a species.Traditionally, there have been three general ways of engaging reflectively with the world—science, art and religion. If science is roughly the drive to know the world objectively and art a means of subjective self-expression, religion is a subject-object relationship, where something deep inside each of us is bound to a coherent vision of the outside. This is “society” or “the world”. What we know intimately – our everyday life – craves linkage to what we don’t know but depend on -- a vast universe that passes understanding.Modern universities divide training between the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and professional schools like medicine, law and engineering. In all but the third, knowledge is assumed to be impersonal, objective and based on disciplined observation of established empirical trends. The German Romantics, in an age of world war and revolutions before and after 1800, argued that if the world is falling apart, there is no point in learning how to adapt to it. We must each try to discover what is possible under actual conditions. That means being more explicitly committed to self-education. The humanities once cultivated personal judgment grounded in extensive and idiosyncratic reading of the western literary canon; but, facing a collapse in public interest, they now focus on their own fast-breaking and jargon-ridden fashions. I have drawn inspiration from Martin Heidegger. He says that “world” is an abstract category for each of us and corresponds to no objective reality. Its dialectical counterpart is “solitude”, the equally fictitious idea of the isolated individual. Every human subject makes a world of his or her own whose center is the self. This egocentric world opens up only to the extent that we recognize ourselves as finite and this should lead us to start from “finitude”, the concrete specifics of time and place in which we necessarily live. So “world” is relative both to an abstract version of subjectivity and, more important, to our particularity (seen as position and movement in time and space -- quantum). The point is that, for all the primacy of our finite existence, the ideas we have about “self in the world” do influence what we do in it. We can only be fully human if self and society are combined in each of us as a unity. To achieve this condition is a real, but largely unconscious need for most people. But there are profound obstacles to such a project. I will touch briefly here on three individuals who illuminated this aspect of the human predicament. They are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon who lived in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively. They each believed that unequal society had corrupted human nature without eliminating our chances of redemption. Our task therefore is to become whole again by tackling the root causes of inequality together. For Rousseau, unequal society was the arbitrary class divisions of agrarian civilization; for Marx it was the class structure of the new industrial capitalism; for Fanon it was the racism of colonial empires that he believed were on their last legs. In all cases, people were reduced to being part-human since they were denied the chance to participate in society as whole persons.Rousseau was the first to show humanity its history in his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men?(1754). This work launched modern anthropology and his example was later taken up by men like Lewis Henry Morgan and Claude Lévi-Strauss who are thought of as the discipline’s founders today. He was not concerned with individual variations in natural endowments that we can do little about, but with the conventional inequalities of wealth, honor and the capacity to command obedience that can be changed. He constructed an image of original human equality, a hominid phase of human evolution when men were solitary, but healthy, happy and above all free. This freedom was metaphysical, anarchic and personal: the first human beings had free will; they were not subject to rules of any kind; and they had no superiors. At some point humanity made the transition to “nascent society”, a prolonged period whose economic base can best be summarized as hunter-gathering with huts. This represented his ideal of life in society close to nature.The rot set in with the invention of agriculture and private property. Unequal property relations culminated in the move to political society (the state) which then evolved through three stages. The establishment of law and the right of property was the first, the institution of magistrates the second and the transformation of legitimate into arbitrary power the third and last stage. Thus the status of rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of strong and weak by the second and by the third that of master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality and the stage to which all the others finally lead, until new revolutions dissolve the government altogether and bring it back to legitimacy.One-man-rule closes the circle. “It is here that all individuals become equal again because they are nothing, where subjects have no longer any law but the will of the master”. For Rousseau, the growth of inequality was just one aspect of human alienation in civil society. We need to return from division of labor and dependence on the opinion of others to subjective self-sufficiency. His subversive parable ends with a ringing indictment of economic inequality that could serve as a warning to our world. “It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined…that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities”.Alienation means separation from something that belongs to us (land, personal integrity) or the attribution of agency to forces beyond our control (the gods, the weather). In either case, the unity of self and society is weakened. The great achievement of the eighteenth century was to challenge religious alienation and to some extent overcome inhibitions imposed by spiritual beings. Rather than look for redemption in the afterlife, they focused attention on the here and now – “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Karl Marx nailed Victorian capitalism, especially in Capital. But the issue of alienation was prominent in his earlier writings. The section of the first chapter of Capital on “The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof” is his most mature reflection on this subject.Marx held that in capitalist society most people are estranged from their own human nature (“species-essence”). Alienation comes from being a member of a social class who can only work under conditions imposed on them by the owners of money, machines and plant, thereby estranging workers from their own humanity. Work is how we experience our self socially; but, under a private system of industrial production, a worker is a tool, not a person. Products are designed neither by workers nor consumers, but by capitalists who keep the lion’s share of their market value after deducting costs. The work process is reduced to repetitive, often meaningless acts. Human potential lies in realizing our intentions by producing objects that have social value – but capitalist relations of production make that impossible.The good news, according to Marx, is that we cannot fight religious alienation, since spirits are an invention of our own minds. But capitalist production takes place in real time with real people. The workers can overcome their servitude when they understand the causes of their alienation. A revolution would restore the unity of self and society we have lost, bringing money, machines and the workplace under social management. But the main event of the last century was the anti-colonial revolution, wherein peoples coerced into joining world society by European empires won their own independent relationship to it. Frantz Fanon, a Caribbean psychiatrist, joined the Algerians in their war against the French, became a leading figure in the Pan-African movement and died of cancer aged 36. He approached damaged humanity through the critique of racism.The final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth reports on Fanon’s work with patients from both sides in the war. His case studies include two 12-year-old Algerian boys who could not cope with having killed a European schoolmate; and a young French soldier driven mad by memories of torturing insurgents. Fanon concludes that, for the victims and the victimizers on both sides, violence is humanly impossible to live with. His own death was probably brought on by the terrible stress he faced as a doctor facing both ways in that war.Race defined two highly unequal and separate worlds in colonial society. The dehumanization of belonging to an inferior race, when combined with capitalism, made for an explosive recipe. Fanon used psychiatry as a means of personal rehabilitation; but he also developed an original vision of social history in which oppressed peoples would gain emancipation through their own collective efforts. This is important. Identifying the alienation of subordinate classes often entails assuming their passivity. But Fanon believed that colonized people were possessed by a drive for freedom; and this resistance to alienation would defeat alienation itself. The classes whose humanity was denied by colonial racism were not passively alienated, but offered proof of their active drive for self-emancipation. This is a major theme of my book, told largely, but not exclusively through my personal history. What are the means at our disposal for overcoming alienation?I don’t ask you to accept these stories in any detail; but they are good to think with. We like to imagine ourselves as competent actors with a singular identity; but much of the time it feels that we are broken, out of touch with ourselves and others in a world that seems to be running away from us. We feel disabled, a puny self lost in a meaningless universe. We are parts, not wholes. St. Paul put in this way:Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.“Charity”, in Christian theology, is love directed first toward God but also toward oneself and others as objects of God’s love, that is, love of humanity. Paul says here that we mostly make do with knowing little about people and guess the rest. In any case it’s usually wrong. We don’t understand ourselves and we project onto others an image of our own dark side. One day we will be able to recognize the humanity in everyone, when we meet face to face, not through the distortions of identity politics. Humanity is a historical project for our species. What will it take to succeed in this project? Belief, hope and love are all we need.We can use this Christian message without buying the whole package. It could also be read as an ethnographer’s charter: when we interact with others in particular places, we want to see people and be seen as we really are, not as a dissembling crook or white oppressor. Perhaps we will eventually find our way to humanity; but we can’t do that now because we are only part-human, deformed by class divisions, condemned to see the world through the cracked mirror of race.The road mapThe book has two parts: my life story told more or less in chronological sequence (two-thirds); and six essays on topics that are part of that life and are presented here in a general, but personal way (one third). To describe my method as “dialectical” is to risk putting English readers off, since the word smacks of impenetrable German philosophy or, worse, Marxism. But humanity has devised two main ways of expressing thought as movement – story and conversation – and both are part of everyone’s mental equipment in any culture and at any level of education. The first is one-sided, the teller and his audience, and there is plenty of that in what follows; but I have sought to undermine that bias by playing up the agency of listeners and readers. The second is inherently two-sided: ideas do not stand alone, but exist in pairs (black/white, right/wrong) that together provide a flexible range for discussion. This passes unnoticed in concrete conversation, but is made explicit in abstract intellectual discourse; and that is partly why “dialectic” is thought to be difficult.An article on money illustrates my approach to this issue. The post-war watershed of the 1970s separated an era of developmental states that regulated national economies in the public interest from their neoliberal successors who put free markets were in the driving seat. Policy shifted from Keynes’ ideas to those of Milton Friedman. I argued that states and markets were both indispensable to money, a relationship expressed in the coin’s two sides, heads and tails. If markets are uncontrolled and states downgraded, politics will go underground, thereby avoiding the public scrutiny it deserves. It is madness to oppose states to markets. Rather we should be discussing the merits of different combinations of the two.For present purposes the conceptual pair that matters is the relationship between ideas and life. Ideology holds that life depends on ideas; I have been suggesting here that life – individual human lives – should take priority over ideas. There is no idea that covers all human situations. But ideas are as much part of my life as eating. The life history section reports lots of action, initially with few ideas, but as I grow older, ideas assume more prominence in the story. When it comes to the general essays, my presence is less obvious, but they share with readers some of what I have learned along the way. The balance of the book moves from life to ideas, always I hope showing the historical relationship between the two. The book is both about my own education and what I try to teach. But I have often left the connections implicit. This is after all not a pedagogical tract.Time and place play a dominant, but not exclusive role in organizing the eleven chapters of Part One. I start with my family of origin in a poor part of Manchester, England; then with memories of early childhood. The first break was winning a place at Manchester Grammar School, a fact that dominated my teenage years to a degree that I came to regret. The next break was becoming an undergraduate student at Cambridge University, where I switched from reading classical languages to social anthropology. This led to my spending two years of anthropological fieldwork in Ghana for a PhD. Betting on the horses had already given me a taste of the Cambridge underworld and, living in an Accra slum, I decided to cross the line to the other side of the law. I was only 22 years old when I arrived and digesting the whole experience is an unfinished project.I soon married on returning to Cambridge and embarked on a career that combined teaching anthropology and policy advice on development. This eventually took me to the United States and to my next major upheaval after West Africa. My marriage broke down and I broke with it, resigning a tenured position at Yale before taking up a series of temporary jobs. My mental illness persisted and I returned to Britain, where I soon got a lowly job teaching anthropology in Cambridge. I stayed there for 14 years and finally recovered my mental health. Towards the end I hit a creative streak combining African Studies, teaching anthropology, publishing, researching the history of Cambridge and Lancashire and becoming a network entrepreneur online.The third major turning point after Ghana and Yale was a two-year secondment in Jamaica that I have already referred to. The years that followed (1989-1992) were not just the making of my mature intellectual and political identity, but also a time of fundamental change in world society – the collapse of the Soviet Union, the globalization of money and markets, the rise of China and India as capitalist powers and the internet going public. In the late 1990s I moved to Paris and a new family, the fourth caesura in my life. France and South Africa are the twin poles of my life now and make an interestingly different pair from Britain and North America earlier. I have published a lot since the millennium and the focus of my intellectual and social engagement has shifted to the internet. The six essays in Part Two address the general conclusions that I take from my life’s journey. The Enlightenment philosophers planned a democratic revolution and developed its intellectual means by focusing on education, anthropology and the self, as I do here. I examine Locke, Rousseau, Franklin and Kant. Movement and inequality are conceptual opposites. If our world has seen the globalization of apartheid -- the restriction of movement in the interest of maintaining inequality -- perhaps movement should be made the next human right. The anti-colonial intellectuals of the last century can teach us how to think new worlds. I focus here on three Pan-Africanists – W. E. B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James (who I think of as my mentor) and Frantz Fanon. But the greatest of them all was Mohandas K Gandhi, the first truly global thinker since Kant. Future generations will only be interested in us for what we did with the internet. I recapitulate the history of my own engagement with it. Despite Facebook, Google and the Chinese Communist Party, I believe it is still our main tool for advancing the democratic revolution. Money has become the topic to which I give most attention. This is linked to developing the concept of a “human economy”. Against the widespread belief that money is the negation of our humanity, I claim that its ability to span the extremes of human experience makes it a prime training ground for us to learn how to be human, to bring self and world into a meaningful relationship. Despite everything, I am an anthropologist and I harbor an aspiration to influence its future direction. The final chapter, which draws on two forgotten founders, Kant and W.H.R. Rivers, summarizes where I have reached on that score. Part OneLife HistoryChapter 1I come from ManchesterI never thought I was growing up in a culture. That was something I found in books about other people. Where I lived was a wasteland, scarred by bombsites; Manchester’s industries were in free fall; the penury of post-war austerity was stifling; the weather was all dark clouds, rain and fog; the few trees were grey with coal-dust. I couldn’t wait to get out. And then, in my 40s, I saw Terence Davies’ film, Distant Voices, Still Lives, the second of his trilogy about growing up gay in Liverpool after the war. One feature was fairly predictable: lots of singing in pubs, a reminder that solidarity can be fun. But the other came as a shock: it is midday Sunday; the camera is fixed on a room with a table and no people. The radio broadcasts familiar BBC programs: two-way family favorites, messages and record requests linking soldiers in Germany with their families back home; the Billy Cotton Band Show with its raucous theme tune (daa-di-di-daa-daa-daa); and Round the Horne with comedian Kenneth Horne and his stock characters. After decades of wandering, I realised with moist eyes that I grew up in a culture too and its spine was national radio.There was still a lot of local pride in Manchester. Self-organized music-making was vibrant when I grew up – church choirs, brass bands, operatic societies, drum and fife bands -- and all classes thought of the Hallé orchestra as their own. The local culture was recognizably the same as the one described by Elizabeth Gaskell a century before, with a flat accent to go with our open egalitarian nature. This continuity has been picked up by a DJ/social historian in accounting for Manchester's remarkable self-reinvention during the 1980s and 90s as “Madchester”.Manchester suffered a terrible economic defeat after the war. Profound changes, favoring London and Southeast England, have since transformed the national economy, with the industrial North and Midlands left out; but Manchester, at least its center, is a net beneficiary. Even the derelict cotton towns of its hinterland have refurbished the abandoned textile mills as shopping and entertainment centers or apartment buildings for yuppies. Manchester is enjoying a boom as Britain's second city in the new information services economy, even if the heyday of the Hacienda club, ecstasy and Oasis is now gone. I like to ask, “What do Manchester and Philadelphia have in common?” They were both once industrial cities and the largest employer is now the university. The Harts of Old TraffordTrafford Park had been a large deer park, part of a manorial estate belonging to the de Trafford family since before the Norman Conquest. It was bought for development in the 1890s and became the first industrial estate in the world; it is still the largest in Europe. In the Second World War, it was a major supplier of war material, including Spitfire fighter planes and Lancaster bombers. It was a German bombing target then – and by extension so were we. Old Trafford next door is a working class dormitory area three miles south of the city center. It contains Manchester United’s football ground and an international cricket ground. Twice a day a claxon (the “buzzer”) summoned the men to work and announced their imminent arrival back home. This, along with the roars of 50,000 men at United’s Saturday game, was a raw reminder of male power for the women and children left behind.As a baby, I offered some diversion for adults trapped overnight in bomb shelters. Later I played football on a bomb site (“croft”) whose floor consisted of cinders, broken bricks and glass fragments; anyone who fell over cut his knee. Access was controlled by a gang of boys and my mother preferred us to play in the local park, a miserable patch known as the “rec” (recreation ground). Most often we played in the street. The bomb damage was not made good until the late 1950s, when the British economy regained its 1939 level (the Great Depression!), and in many cases long after that.We lived in a small terraced house opposite my grandmother and my father’s two unmarried sisters. Ours boasted minor symbols of gentrification: a bay window with tiny garden and privet hedge at front. But the back yard had a bomb shelter, outside loo, shed, dustbin and a patch of soil struggling to support some flowers and a low wall offering little privacy. There were three rooms up and down and a cellar. A small toilet and bathroom were later carved out of the children’s bedrooms; the master bedroom was at the front. Downstairs, the front room had a fireplace, piano and a large lounge suite covered in brown imitation leather; it was used mainly for visitors at weekends. The main room had a coal fire with two ovens, a dining table and chairs, a rack for drying clothes and I forget what other seating arrangements. The scullery behind was unheated; it was for washing dishes and clothes, cleaning equipment and food cupboards, none of it mechanized. The cellar was fed coal through a covered hole on the street and kept other items immune to coal dust. The dust was everywhere, not least in the air. My mother dusted all surfaces three times a day.My great-grandfather, James Hart, came to Manchester from Belfast, Northern Ireland around 1870 and bought a pub in Hulme, The Travellers’ Rest. There was talk about his being a junior son of a landed family. Soon after his arrival, James married Elizabeth, a Manchester native, and they had seven children of whom my grandfather David was the first. I have a silver fob watch inscribed in 1837 to David Bowes, Elizabeth’s grandfather, in recognition of his services as secretary of the Wellington lodge of a friendly society, the Manchester Unity of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. The Odd Fellows were founded soon after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and then split between supporters of William and Mary (London) and the Stuarts (the North). They supplied welfare to their members and communities; a Baltimore spin-off from the Manchester lodge became the largest fraternal association in the United States in the nineteenth century. All James and Elizabeth’s children received a private education. My grandfather chose to be an artisan, an upholsterer. Before the Great War he married Harriet Harrop from Altrincham in Cheshire. Their four children were born between 1912 and 1924. Our branch of the Harts was downwardly mobile in my father’s generation, especially between the wars, when David suffered from chronic bronchitis and never worked consistently. He died the same year my parents were married in 1941, so I never saw him. Grandma had to carry the family in the interwar years and my dad had to leave school at 14 to earn a wage. She and her sisters were inseparable -- Bertha, Harriet and Maud. Grandma was an “angel in marble”, a working class Tory who considered herself superior because she came from Cheshire, but she knew that Manchester’s money, even if she didn’t have much of it, beat the feudalism in which her ancestors had been trapped. After 1945 she rejected the Labor order that echoed the gift economy her family had escaped from, when the landlord offered a chicken at Christmas to cancel out what he took from them. “My money is as good as anyone else’s”, she would say. “If you can’t pay, don’t go”. She would not borrow books from the free library (she didn’t read much anyway) or order spectacles through the National Health Service. Dad visited her regularly after work when we moved out of Old Trafford, but got a fright one day when she didn’t reply to his call. He found her on a stepladder hanging wallpaper in her bedroom at 84! She went to live with her daughters. I loved her dearly and now credit her with some of my basic attitudes to money, especially its ability to equalize as well as to polarize. Three of her children made a committed and ultimately successful run at becoming middle class. The exception was Norman, my dad’s younger brother, who never showed any aspirations for upward social mobility.Uncle Norman was a really sweet person, soft-spoken and not at all combative, unlike his three siblings. He went to live near his in-laws when he married Hilda. He trained as a carpenter before the war and worked for a time in the St. John’s Ambulance afterwards. He made me a wonderful box of handcrafted wooden tools lined with baize. I can’t remember ever using them, but I cherished his present. Then he became a postman. He and Auntie Hilda rented council housing and showed no sign of wanting to own one or a car for that matter.Norman’s family bought expensive furniture on hire purchase. He dispensed alcoholic drinks lavishly, but didn’t drink himself. Their lifestyle seemed more affluent than ours because they were not hooked on accumulation through saving to buy a house and car. Norma and Hilda believed in giving generously, so that their Christmas and birthday presents were often more expensive than our parents’. My mother couldn’t stand this inequality or the pressure to reciprocate. She tried to place an upper limit on presents to nephews and nieces; but she didn’t succeed. In retirement they moved to the Northeast, where Norman had a fatal heart attack after eating fish and chips late one Friday night. Visits, usually at the weekend, always involved two nuclear families sharing a tea party with sandwiches (in neat triangles); salad items were presented separately; desert was tinned fruit, cake and scones. Mum, like married women everywhere, took a leading part in organizing and monitoring this round of gifts and hospitality, but she couldn’t ignore the threat of dangerous leakage from funds earmarked for status enhancement.Auntie Muriel was my favorite and I hers. She left school later than 14 because she lost two years with repeated surgery on her working forearm for osteomyelitis; but she still managed to become a dressmaker. At 20, during the war and after a year’s training in aeronautics, she became the first woman production line inspector for Lancaster bombers. She also produced the drama society’s lunchtime shows, learned to drive a car and had a good time, I think. At five, I was a page boy when she married her fiancé, Albert Coldwell, an accountant whose solidity complemented her mercurial nature. He was a great piano player and the sisters sang in an internationally famous choir. At the time of writing, Muriel is 98 years old.Alice Wrigley, my mother, was the middle of three children born in quick succession (1916-1919) to Harold Wrigley and Mary Short. Harold was a distant, severe man whose first wife died of cardiac failure in her late 40s. We called her successor “nannie”. Harold came from deep Lancashire around Bolton and spoke the dialect. My mother knew this dialect and seemed to speak mainly in proverbs. I only discovered that this was not normal English when quizzed by my grammar school teachers. Grandpa Wrigley came from mill engineering stock and rose to be sanitary engineer for Stretford. He had no known relatives and was brought up by an “aunt”. On mum’s advice, he retired to the Blackpool coast, but soon died from the first of three NHS failures that saw off my mother and sister as well. He had a septic toe and ended up having his gangrenous leg cut off in hospital, whereupon he died from the shock. The Wrigleys were affluent in the interwar period, with a large 1930s semi-detached house and a Ford car long before most people had one. Alice went to grammar school, as did her brother; their younger sister was deaf and educated at a special boarding school. We weren’t as close to mum’s side of the family. Uncle Harold lost a leg at Dunkirk. He was married twice and had five children. Auntie Marion married someone from the deaf school. Deafness is not hereditary, but both their sons, David and Roy, became deaf at the ages of three and one. Mum took great care of her younger sister and her tragically vulnerable family. Mum and dadThis Be the Verse by Philip LarkinThey fuck you up, your mum and dad.?????? They may not mean to, but they do.???They fill you with the faults they had??? And add some extra, just for you.But they were fucked up in their turn??? By fools in old-style hats and coats,???Who half the time were soppy-stern??? And half at one another’s throats.Man hands on misery to man.??? It deepens like a coastal shelf.Get out as early as you can,??? And don’t have any kids yourself.I love this poem; but its message doesn’t apply to me. I have always thought I was the author of my own destiny, a self-made man. I suppose I wouldn’t be writing this book otherwise. History shows me that I was not; but the attitude dies slowly. Generally speaking, my parents gave me a free hand. At 15, I was drinking a lot, smoking ten to twenty cigarettes a day and betting on the horses; but they only cautioned me mildly. I may say some hard things about my parents as a couple, but the 1950s were the heyday of the breadwinner/housewife model. They were good to me because I was the self-motivated social climber they wanted me to be – or just because they were themselves good people. They offered me unflinching support and consistently expressed pride in my achievements.The Harts always claimed that I owed my brains to my dad who never had my chance to get a decent education. As grandma’s first child, he could do nothing wrong. His sisters sometimes called him, with mixed sarcasm and respect, “Saint Stanley”. The year after the General Strike, at 14, he took a job with a Trafford Park electric cable manufacturer. For the next seven years he studied electrical engineering at Manchester Technical College after work. His Higher National Certificate was later reclassified as a degree when the “Tech” was upgraded to a university. Soon after qualifying, he joined the General Post Office (GPO), telephones branch. There he got stuck in the manual grades for two decades. Then suddenly he was promoted to the non-manual grades and shot up the hierarchy so that, when retiring in 1962 with a very generous pension, he was coordinating plant planning for the Northwest region. His long retirement was comfortable and, until near the end, fulfilling.I learned from him that you don’t have to be an expert to explore any field that interests you. He loved numbers and science; but he also hired out as a solo singer in church oratorios and Gilbert and Sullivan operas. He won the heart of my mother because he was a great dancer (she said). He was obsessed with games and sport, still played tennis and badminton when he was sixty and was the oldest active member of his golf club in his late eighties. He taught himself to play the flute and later the piano, took up Spanish and loved the novels of Alexandre Dumas. He was fascinated by the stars and studied them through a powerful telescope. Pinned on the bedroom wall was the world at night lit up by cities, urban sprawl and the Japanese fishing fleet. He brewed beer and made wine at home, keeping records of dates, alcohol content and specific gravity. He taught me that the whole world is open to each of us and we should never agree to be excluded from any part of it. We can enjoy doing anything we want, without having to be expert – a lesson that I was slow to learn. Above all, he taught me that life is a game we should learn to play well.My mother became the personal secretary to one of the executives in Manchester’s main post office. My parents met at church. Alice and Stanley were engaged for five years while they accumulated the furniture they needed (buying a house was out of the question). They married in 1941 and rented upwardly mobile accommodation in a suburb. Mum gave up her job when she got married, as was expected then. She soon got pregnant and decided that she wanted to have the baby where she was born. Grandma Hart told them of a vacancy opposite her and they moved in for the next 18 years.This was a fateful decision for mum. Dad wanted to keep an eye on his mother and sisters, but they were at best polite with mum. This downward mobility left her marooned in a lower-class neighborhood with no job, two kids and a husband whose career was going nowhere. Dad wouldn’t let her earn wages since it diminished his status and exposed their children to maternal deprivation. He gave her housekeeping money and paid for everything else himself. She never had access to his bank account. They were certainly poor and had to practice minute economies until money suddenly became more plentiful in the mid-1950s. Her first significant outside income was a state pension at 60. She became something of a revolutionary as my father approached retirement and she saw the world opening up for her daughter and daughter-in-law, both of whom she felt were less deserving than her. “I have wasted my life on a selfish man and two ungrateful children” she would say. She used her pension for driving lessons, since dad wouldn’t let her drive either. She passed on the fourth attempt. She got him to agree to take her out at least once a month; but he couldn’t manage even that. When she died at the age of 70 (a minor operation on her urethra revealed defunct kidneys whose condition had not been examined before), I felt an incoherent desire to avenge her somehow. It was mum who helped me with my homework. They studied German at evening classes for their first foreign holiday in the 1960s. One day grandma was visiting us and dad said, “Guess what mark I got in the German class, mother…80%”. “You always were such a clever boy, Stanley”. “Why don’t you ask Alice what mark she got?” “Ah yes, what did you get, Alice?” “85%”. Turning to dad, “How could you let her do that? Oops”, putting her hand to her mouth. I had several mothers in Old Trafford, including elderly women neighbors. Whenever mum disciplined me – and she had a fast hand for the back of my legs – I would take refuge across the street for emotional compensation. Both my parents were starkly puritan. They were willing to accept great personal sacrifices to give their children the best possible start in life. The neolocal formula in my father’s words ran: “We take responsibility for you until you are 18. After that you are on your own. And don’t worry about us later; your responsibility is to your own family.” Of course his own protective attitude towards his ssters contradicted this; but he had to be a substitute father to them and felt no obligation to accept my ministrations when he became very needy.My sister JaniceMy constant companion from the age of two was my only sibling, Janice. She often claimed then and later that I ruined her childhood. I was never convinced that it was that simple, but I hoped to make good the damage in later life. Our interaction as adults was friendly, but we often lived far apart; and I looked forward to a shared old age when we would be each other’s closest supporter. This dream of companionship and reconciliation was snatched from me when she died without warning, just before the millennium, aged 52. This was the deepest blow that I have suffered. She left a hole in me, an emptiness that can never be filled. When we were children, we spent so much time together with little to do. Boredom often led to squabbling, but was displaced by playing games, especially card games of great variety, and more squabbling. We both soon became expert card players. Mum was the only one of us who wasn’t skilled. I guess she found other ways of wasting time when she was young. Mostly it was just the two of us and Janice knew that if she cried and yelled “He hit me!” our mother would come in to slap me with no argument. It mattered little whether my crime had been physical or just verbal. Weapons of the weak… Arguing over who got what at the dining table was endless, not least because food was scarce during austerity. We worked out some Jack Sprat deals: Jack Sprat could eat no fat. His wife could eat no lean.And so between the two of them,They licked the platter clean.Thus, Janice liked the whites of fried eggs and I the runny yoke which I spread on toast.Our temperaments had very little in common. Janice was placid and kind; I oscillated between hyperactivity and abstraction (usually reading). Mum had her own explanation for the contrast: we came out of the womb with entirely different personalities. I later wondered if mothers protect themselves from feeling responsible for how their children turn out by insisting on this genetic fundamentalism. I have another theory: in utero socialization. I was mum’s first child and she was understandably nervous about it, whereas for Janice she was already an experienced mother and approached the event calmly. Mum emphasized unequal treatment of siblings by parents, since she felt that her older brother and younger sister got more love and attention. I prefer the outside influences on a fetus before it emerges. In any case, Janice and I were not as unlike as we were made out to be. I have a photograph of us both, at maybe 10 and 8 years old, standing in front of a castle. Our body language is very similar, standing confidently with legs crossed and smiling without affectation. That’s how I choose to remember who we were.When my first daughter was a baby, I had a chat with my mother about breast- versus bottle-feeding. She let slip that she gave me and Janice a 2 am breast feed every night until we were each two-years old. Hang on, I thought, the age gap between us was 2 years 2 months. That means I was evicted from my mother’s breast to make way for this uninvited newcomer. It cast my relations with both of them in a new light. I took pleasure in habitually subverting my mother’s rules, the rules of our home; and Janice always claimed, especially in adulthood, that I treated her as a non-person. Maybe the breast was a side issue. I was the only child in the Hart family for two years. Losing that status would be bad enough.The first television I watched belonged to another family; it was in 1953 for the coronation and, more vividly for me, the Stanley Matthews cup final between Blackpool and Bolton which ended 4-3 in favor of the bandy-legged maestro. Janice went on to the local girls’ grammar school and got her A levels in French, German and Latin, soon after I went up to Cambridge to read classics. Throughout my teenage years, my parents would not buy a television since it would distract me from my homework. As soon as I won my scholarship, they bought one. Janice asked “What about my homework?” In retrospect I am sure that the breadwinner/housewife model of our parent’s marriage in the 1950s had more to do with Janice’s experience of gender inequality than me. A four-year old boy can’t set up the conditions for sibling rivalry all by himself. In any case Janice never wanted children of her own. Philip Larkin would have approved.After university, Janice joined IBM in the 60s and became a computer analyst on the big mainframes. She was so good at it that they made her a “trouble-shooter”, sending her around the country in a taxi to solve problems quicker than the locals would be likely to. She drove a small white sports car and hung out with a fast crowd. Then she married a divorced mill engineer, twenty years older with two young sons. He persuaded her that they were both being exploited and should become self-employed. They moved to the Lancashire coast and opened a boarding house. Later they became small-time real estate rentiers and gave up the boarding house. I lobbied consistently for the revival of her career in some form. I bought her a personal computer which she didn’t open: “I’m used to the mainframes and too old to unlearn what I knew then. All I am interested in is budgerigars, carnations and doing the Telegraph crossword”. She could floor me with observations like this one: I might say,“Guess what my favorite Beethoven symphonies are these days?” “I already know what they are”. “But they are not the same as when we were young. OK, what are they?” “The 4th and the 7th”. “How did you know?” “Because the 1st, 2nd and 8th are too slight and the 3rd, 5th, 6th and 9th are too well-known”. That is the sister I lost, who knew me better than I did myself and never felt obliged to show the world her intelligence.I was poleaxed by Janice’s death, because it was wholly unexpected and so cruel. It was February and I was at the University of Pavia in Northern Italy to teach a short course. I had joined Sophie in Paris less than six months before. It was dark, cold and misty when I reached that venerable campus on the River Ticino fairly late on a Sunday night. I had difficulty raising anyone or finding a phone. When I got through to Sophie, she said, “I have terrible news for you – your sister Janice has died.” “No, it’s not her; it’s her husband, John”. But it wasn’t. Janice and I had been on the phone a lot in the previous week. John was very ill in hospital and she told me she wasn’t sure he would pull through. It was only at the funeral that I got the real story of her death. Janice was visiting her husband frequently and so was worried and stressed. On Thursday she had an unusually severe headache and went to her local hospital. She was given no diagnostic treatment and was told to come back for a specialist clinic on Saturday morning. She turned up then and was told there had been a mistake – the clinic was being held in Blackpool. It is only seven miles, but Blackpool is a fairly large city; the Saturday morning traffic was heavy. She had difficulty parking and, when she asked about the clinic, she was told that it was indeed where she had come from. On her way back she stopped at the home of an infirm old lady she shopped for every Saturday, did the shopping and delivered it before driving off again. She parked the car in the original hospital car park, stepped out and keeled over dead from a cerebral hemorrhage. She had no previous history of cardio-vascular problems.Chapter 2Remembering early childhood (1943-1953)We all know that some durable features of our life story were formed when we were barely conscious, in early childhood, and we have no direct access to them short of psychoanalysis. For some reason I recall a scene in a movie I saw when I was eleven. It was Knock on Wood starring Danny Kaye. I don’t recall the story at all, but it was about a ventriloquist whose dummies wreck his love life when they become jealous and are then used to transport secret plans. At one stage he is subjected to hypnosis and, while under the influence, says “I’m five, five. I want to be the greatest explorer in the world. But mummy won’t let me open the front gate”. I thought it was very funny then and still do.Fact and fiction have always been mixed up, but we may now be emerging from the cultural attempt to split them apart in the English language, basing truth on scientific investigation of the empirical world as opposed to your and my muddled experience of it. In late 18th century England, “experiment” and “experience” were synonyms, but half a century later one referred to how scientists acquire knowledge and the other designated the existential soup that most people absorb haphazardly from life. It is curious that expérience is now French for experiment; but generally speaking European languages retain a broader conception of “science”, something more like systematic knowledge, without the emphasis on objectivity that the word implies in English. A revolution elevating scientific truth above fiction began around 1840. In that year William Whewell – a polymath who soon after became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and, with the geologist Adam Sedgwick, launched a Natural Sciences course there – published an attack on English empiricism of the sort associated with John Locke and the word “scientist” appeared there for the first time in print. Whewell was by no means a dogmatic positivist: for example, he thought guesswork played a major role in Kepler’s discovery of his first law and this led to a fierce debate with John Stuart Mill who disagreed. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Edgar Allan Poe took up the cudgels in defense of literary imagination. In 1844 he published in a New York newspaper what became known as “the balloon-hoax”, a fiction replete with scientifically plausible information about a gas balloon crossing the ocean from England in three days. This was a pioneering example of science fiction that may have inspired Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. It was soon withdrawn. My friend John Tresch, a historian of science who wrote up this story, later published a remarkable book about French science in the period 1815-1848. His point was that science, art, magic and fantasy were still closely entangled there, offering an alternative to English positivism and perhaps a model for our own transitional times. The poet, Charles Baudelaire, took up Poe and became his main French translator, thereby providing a transatlantic bridge between critics of the new science.If the dominant theory of knowledge is now contested and probably in transition, then the grounds for my explorations of memory here are hardly firm. On balance I follow Poe’s example, itself a replay of the German Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment. The idea that our moment in world history is pregnant with unknowable possibilities -- not least because the settlement forged after 1945 is in disarray -- has many takers now. So the conditions that provoked Romanticism around 1800 may have a counterpart in our world. The Enlightenment philosophers are now less revered, since they sought to base a revolution against the Old Regime on knowledge of what was unchanging. They called this “nature” (what has become rather than is becoming) and, in looking for a foundation of a new democratic constitution, were particularly keen to discover what all people had in common, their “human nature”. The Romantics claimed that the best anyone can do in an uncertain world is to concentrate on improving their “education” in the hope that it would help them to cope successfully with crises that they couldn’t possibly predict. I adore the Enlightenment, especially Rousseau and Kant, but temperamentally I am a romantic and so were they. I am in any case interested in transformation, not forms as such. French influencesExcavating my early childhood leads me to reflect on a lifelong engagement with French literature and cinema. In the 1960s I ran my college film society; well, I was its treasurer since no-one else wanted to handle the money. The important thing was to choose the films; and each term, week after week, a quarrelsome committee eventually drew up a list that they handed over for me to order during the vacation. I would look it over, replace half with my own selections and let them keep the rest. Next term I explained that some were not available. They never supplied a backup list. This was the height of French New Wave cinema, but I sometimes went mainstream instead. Once I inserted a Jean Renoir season (Grand Illusion, Marseillaise, Rules of the Game); on another occasion John Ford. No-one noticed. They were too busy maneuvering to pick the next list.Triangles were a New Wave specialty – most memorably in Last Year at Marienbad and Jules and Jim. I loved the sumptuous décor and pure mystification of Marienbad. In it a man tries to persuade a woman that they fell in love there last year and she made him promise to wait a year. She is with another man, maybe her husband, and resists this story; at one point the husband shoots her, at another he doesn’t. What sticks in my memory is a French television program where Alain Robbe-Grillet, its co-writer, was quizzed by journalists about that movie. One of them became excited and told Robbe-Grillet, “I know what really happened. They both died the previous year and are now ghosts”. The auteur replied, “What interests me is that you need to know what really happened”.I know now that Marienbad was an early application of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism. What mattered for Robbe-Grillet and writer-director Alain Resnais is the triadic structure of the story – the lover, the loved one and the authority figure -- not any empirical manifestation of it. Art lies in the author’s head, in the writing process, not in reality, whatever that is. Structuralism was developed for the Marxist mainstream by Louis Althusser. His mission was to expunge German philosophy from Marxism: history, the subject and above all dialectic. He later killed his wife and confessed that he had only ever read Capital Volume 1. Several structuralists came to a sticky end: Poulantzas killed himself by jumping out of a window; Barthes was run over by a laundry van. But Lévi-Strauss celebrated his centenary.Nathalie Sarraute was a Russian Jew born as Natalya Chernyak in 1900. Her parents divorced when she was two and she shuttled between France and Russia before settling in Paris with her father at the age of nine. By this time she had changed names, parents and nationalities several times. In middle age she was a leading figure of the nouveau roman (new novel) movement – to which Robbe-Grillet also belonged -- and was honored for her experimental writing but not widely read. At the age of 83 she published her only best-seller, a reconstruction of her first twelve years. There she explored memory through an interior dialogue between two voices whose identity is never disclosed. My daughter, Constance, read and discussed the book for her class in Paris when she was 13. She was sure that she knew what the book is about because her teacher summed it up, as they tend to do here. I once I met the eminent philosopher, A. J. Ayer at a Cambridge cocktail party. He was in his 70s and had published his memoirs not long ago. I discovered later that his father was a Swiss Calvinist financier who moved to London as a teenager and his mother was a member of the Dutch Jewish family that made Citro?n cars. But this interesting life story didn’t come up then. He told me that his first 14 years were the only part of his life that interested him now, since everything afterwards seemed to be preordained by what he had become by then. He also claimed that in old age memories of his young self were more vivid and plentiful, something I have not yet experienced. This conversation stuck, since I too, like many people I suppose, peer through the fog of my childhood for clues to what I later became.Memories of my first decadeAt three I was allowed out onto the street by myself. I entered primary school at five and passed exams to secondary school at ten. These points of transition structure how I make sense of those years. Fragments of memory from this period are invariably isolated and lack context. In one episode I am holding my mother’s hand well above my own head, so probably at 2-3 years old. We are in a butcher’s shop with sawdust on the floor. It is the age of austerity after the war. Because we had visitors, mum wants the fat old butcher to give us more than our usual ration (a few ounces of meat each per week). I can feel the shame travelling down her arm to my hand. She was young, pretty and shy; pesumably she didn’t like his attitude.Next, two episodes when I was four. There was a church outing by motor coach and at one point I was offered some fresh salmon. I refused since “I only eat tinned”. Cue in universal merriment. The other was a nightmare. Mum and dad woke up to hear me screaming while staring at the wall catatonically. I was watching a dream projected onto an imagined screen. In it my parents were being killed by “cowboys and Indians”. My visual imagination, whether in dreams or waking, is impaired. I have been blind in one eye since birth, so that could be the cause. But the early twentieth century psychologist and anthropologist, W.H.R. Rivers, reports that he was molested when five and lost his ability to visualize as a result. After that frightening dream experience, did I unconsciously shut down my own powers of visualization?As soon as I was old enough, I received three pence a week as spending money. I rarely kept the money long; I spent it on sweets. Money was an external object of unknown social origin, passing much too quickly through my hands, a tantalizing symbol of my childish powerlessness. I was a regular customer at Mrs. Hewitt's shop and always went there with my weekly spending money. This meant that she reserved my favorites for me and sometimes gave me extra measure. When she sold the shop, she spent two weeks with the new owner introducing regular customers and their tastes. "This is Keith and he likes wine gums, pear drops and liquorice allsorts.” Thanks to rationing everyone was entitled to the same meager share. So, in addition to my three pence, which bought two ounces of sweets, I handed over a coupon entitling the bearer to that precise quantity. One day, when I was five, mum announced that sugar rationing was over. From now on, people could buy as many sweets as they liked. I rushed to Mrs. Hewitt’s and ordered sweets up to the limit of my imagination, three bags of two ounces each. “That will be nine pence, please.” “But I only have three pence. They said you could now have as much as you like.” “Well, you need the money too.” That is how I learned the bitter lesson that money, at least the stuff I grew up with, is also a rationing device. Markets are democratically open to anybody; all you need is the money. Some people have lots of it and most of us have hardly any. But that is a deep mystery we should not seek to penetrate.Fast forward to when I was nine and admitted to a children’s hospital in the early days of the National Health Service to have my tonsils removed. I had a huge bribe -- two 4-ounce packets of my favorite sweets. I was anaesthetized soon after I was admitted and eventually woke up with a raging thirst, aware that my throat had been got at. I turned to my bedside cabinet for some consolation and found that the sweets I carefully stowed there had gone! I hunted high and low for them, and then shouted frantically for the nurses and eventually one of them came. She couldn’t understand at first that I was concerned about property, not pain. She told me that it was hospital policy to pool patients’ goodies so that everyone had an equal chance of enjoying them. She was sure that I would be glad to know that poor little boys and girls – many of whom were there for much longer and with more serious problems than me -- had been able to enjoy my sweets. I was not; I was outraged. They had drugged me into unconsciousness so that they could steal my sweets. And what chance had I been given to have a share? I demanded restitution. My protracted tantrums eventually forced the nurse to bring back some sweets she had found; but they were much inferior to those I had lost. My grief and loss on that occasion far outweighed the pain of recovery. I missed my sweets much more than my tonsils. Ah, the NHS in its heyday, how decent it all was then. Remember that my mentor then was a working-class Tory and Cheshire-bred snob. Sweets played an enormous part in the behaviorist game of reward and punishment of the adult-child regime I was formed by. Mrs. Herniman next door kept a jar of them on a high shelf. One day, when Janice and I went in, I tried my best to be verbally seductive, but my sister just stood looking at the jar. Eventually she got what she wanted “for not asking”.The breadwinner-housewife model had been re-established after the war. I don’t think mum needed much persuading to give up her job; but she became less compliant when she realized what she had signed up for. I grew up believing that gender inequality was the most bitter of class struggles. For a year in the 1970s I chaired the women’s studies program at Yale, only because there were no qualified female candidates. When I was eight, mum took me to the cinema one afternoon during the school holidays, since she wanted to see the movie Showboat and could not leave me unsupervised. This was the musical made famous by Paul Robeson in the 1920s for the song “Ol’ man river”. Mum found ways of saving out of the housekeeping. I was petrified that my dad would find out. During the movie, I became aware of feelings radiating from mum that I definitely wanted nothing to do with. I contrived an excuse for us to leave early. This memory hinges again on invisible energy waves (“vibes”).In the summer of the same year, the three of us (without dad who was working) visited Auntie Muriel near Bedford. It was my first excursion to Southern England. We caught a bus and within minutes mum was car sick. We had to be dropped off and wait for the next one. The rest of the journey was a revelation, all that greenery of middle England for hour after hour! I was besotted. I had never seen anything like it before. I couldn’t wait to get out and embrace it. At last we arrived in my aunt’s village. It was still a bright afternoon and the hedgerows were verdant. Wearing only a short-sleeved shirt and short pants, I threw myself into the grassy bank nearest the bus stop. The bank was a bed of nettles and I spent the first week of the holiday in bed with a terrible body rash. The other memory from that trip is socially constructed. We all went on an outing to Cambridge University, some 20 miles away. At one point I asked “Why do they have so many churches here?” and was told “They are schools, not churches”. I followed up with, “When I grow up, I want to go to a school that looks like a church”. I don’t remember any of this, but the episode became enshrined in family lore as “Keith wants to go to Cambridge”. And so began the mainstay of my passage to adulthood, passing examinations. I didn’t need much persuasion. When I was ten, I won admission to three grammar schools of which Manchester Grammar School was a top producer of Oxbridge scholarships. I was the first boy from my part of Manchester ever to win a place there and made it onto the front page of our local newspaper as a result. I know that because dad kept the cutting. What I did with my timeI don’t have much at stake in my first decade compared with what happened in the next one. I started out as a secluded solitary. I soon realized that my mental processes were faster than most of those I lived with. This gave me a confidence in myself that I have never lost. Joining the other boys to play on the street came as a shock. I was small, clever and introverted. That made me a target. I had to find ways of avoiding the taunts and blows. I used my quick mouth to some effect; was funny and sociable; made friends and allies. I joined in ball games and became quite skilled at them. I soon took the lead in quasi-criminal activities, like raiding richer neighborhoods for conkers and stealing milk bottles from doorsteps. This tendency was accentuated at primary school, where I had to mitigate being an outstanding pupil. So I visited the headmaster’s study for punishment more than anyone. At least that meant I was not teacher’s pet.I liked being top of the class at primary school. I wanted to “win” and the schoolroom was one place that I could be sure of doing that. But I couldn’t help noticing that this estranged my fellow pupils and I wanted to be liked by them. The combination I found was to be smart, funny and naughty in unpredictable ways. I courted the academic approval of my teachers and just as assiduously made their lives difficult, something similar to mum’s regime at home. This has turned out to be an enduring pattern. One day I walked around the room during class believing that I was invisible. Now I see this as the first sign of my brain’s ability to make a separate world of its own. The speed and totality of connection that served me so well in everyday thinking and communications could also make me lose touch with reality.Here I want to look more closely at how I occupied my free hours at this time. From the beginning I much preferred school to the summer holidays when I was generally at a loose end. My main diversions were four: reading, ball games, playing cards and music, especially singing. The first naturally involved me alone; the second took place with my peers in the street and parks; the third was a family affair, either the four of us or me with Janice, grandma or my dad; the fourth was a preoccupation of the Harts. My father hired out part-time as a soloist; my two aunts sang in a famous choir; I was the head choirboy at our church. But engagement with music went beyond singing.I could read well by the time I was four. Our home was pretty crowded, as I pointed out in the Preface. So people tended to get in each other’s way. Also mum could recruit us kids for any domestic task, such as clearing away the dishes or running an errand. This is why, as soon as I was allowed, I spent as much time as I could out of doors. But from an early age, I discovered something else: if I happened to be reading when told to help out, there was a good chance that I could ignore the order. Instead of getting a thick ear, I would hear mum say to dad, “When he gets into a book, he’s deaf to the world”. Janice was not granted this exemption. She was little more than a baby when I was working this out, but also a girl; and I collaborated in the unequal treatment.I was encouraged to pursue what I now think of as a social strategy of abstraction. I could escape from domestic routine into the world of books. Perhaps I wanted to get away anyway. But in order to do so I had to be able to read in that crowded living space. Of course I learned to shut it all out. While I practiced indifference to my surroundings, mum would clear up the mess: “I’ll do less for you before I do more”. But she did more and we both knew she would. Books, newspapers, comics and magazines offered me a way out. They helped me to extend the time and space limits of my narrow existence. I valued general knowledge for its own sake. I liked murder mysteries for the chance to second-guess the author and science fiction for a window on the future. I consumed massive amounts of information about sport. I memorized the particulars of history and geography. I was not attracted to the worlds of nature and technology. I was very keen on crosswords and quizzes. Within the fixed grid of the crossword puzzle, the solver explores his mastery of words, irony and cultural allusion. Our family played pencil-and-paper quizzes a lot, especially at parties. At nine I was assessed as having the reading age of a 14-year old. My strategy of abstraction through mastery of the book entailed a strong contradiction. Linguistic virtuosity and accumulation of written knowledge gave me both social power and individual freedom. I could even escape from my home surroundings to inhabit a world of the imagination. Parents, teachers and adults of all kinds lavished praise on me for this. But I knew that the escape could only ever be partial. I had to live on the street and in the playground, with the other kids. It wasn’t that I had to; I wanted to be one of them. The abstract world was frightening since it drew me away from people. Today I can concentrate on my work at will, but while I am abstracted, the family noises in the background reassure me that I remain connected to the real world.Playing cards was for indoors and ball games, obviously enough, for outside; they involved respectively family and the boys of my neighborhood. The historian, A. J. P. Taylor, who grew up in Southport on the Lancashire coast, once wrote: A thorough grounding in advanced dominoes was, I think, the only useful?instruction I received from my father….Harry Pollitt, the former Communist leader, revealed his Manchester origin when, kidnapped by Fascists, he spent the weekend playing solo whist with his captors.I learned a lot more from my dad than this, but it is true that the Manchester I grew up in was crazy about playing cards. As soon as I could read and count, when I was three, dad taught me to play cribbage. It was played in pubs, involved scoring on a board with pegs and had its own vocabulary (“one for his knob” -- a jack, “Morgan’s orchard” -- two pairs etc.). You had to keep a hand offering the best fit for cards turned up at random or discarded by your opponent. I often wept or threw a tantrum. I would hear mum saying “Why don’t you let him win for once, Stanley” and he would reply, “He will only win on merit”. I won my first game when I was six or seven. This led to other games: whist, the ancestor of contract bridge, and gambling games like Newmarket and pontoon played for Smarties or beans. I played rummy with grandma and everything with Janice. My training as a card player was thorough and I sometimes put it to profitable use later.When I was nine-months old, my mother noticed that I didn’t see her when she approached from the right side. Nowadays eyes are tested at three months when my condition is still reversible. It is called acute myopia and involves the progressive transfer of muscular control from one eye to the other. For the next four years I regularly shuffled my bottom on the Royal Eye Hospital’s polished benches, but eventually the doctors concluded that nothing could be done for me. I couldn’t see a torch light from an inch. Dad refused to let this divert me from my future as a sporting hero, especially as a cricketer. From 18 months he had me catching tennis balls in the back yard. In fact stereoscopic vision matters for close work but not for assessing the speed and direction of moving objects. I was a precocious cricketer at five, but under-coached peers soon overtook me when their natural ability had a chance to develop. I had the equipment and superior knowledge, however. I played soccer a lot and hit a tennis ball against the end wall of our terrace for hours. From the age of nine I watched international cricket and some United games. For all my focus on school work as a teenager, I found time then for lacrosse, rugby, soccer, cricket, tennis, badminton, golf and cycling; at Cambridge I captained my college occasional cricket and darts teams, played squash and coxed a rowing eight. I forgot that I had only one eye.Singing joined me to the music-making traditions of my class and region. Quite often, dad, my two aunts and I, with Uncle Albert giving a strong lead at the piano, would improvise (from memory or reading scores) a repertoire of hymns, psalms, arias, spirituals, pop songs, nursery rhymes, anything and everything. Church was of course a main focus for organized singing. I had a good voice and once sang “The holly and the ivy” solo on the radio. But my exposure to music went beyond this. Dad couldn’t go to work without a dose of classical music from the BBC Third Program. He also had a box full of 78s, most of them collected in the 1930s. We had no record player; but grandma did – a standing cabinet wound up manually and with a rose thorn needle – so I played dad’s records there. They were mostly by singers: Benjamino Gigli, Paul Robeson, Deanna Durbin; La donna è mobile, Nessun dorma, the chorus of the Hebrew slaves, overture to The Magic Flute and so on. But the star turn was Dvo?ák’s New World Symphony conducted by Toscanini. It never failed to sweep me away, with unfathomable consequences for America’s place in my imagination. Reading allowed my imagination to escape from where I lived and nourished my intellectual ambition. Ball games gave me motor coordination and teamwork. What did I learn from playing cards? Perhaps it indirectly provided training for participation in markets: facility with numbers, fast calculation, managing risk, partnership. And for sure, my childhood experience convinced me that all the music in the world was open to me as a performer and consumer. Living in that crowded space at home taught me to focus on one thing at a time and to finish it while I could. People often tell me that I must have been a bright kid. I know lots of bright kids who didn’t make it. I think of my intelligence as natural and therefore nothing to brag about. My most cherished qualities are moral: concentration and perseverance, my ability to see something through to the end. The abiding contradiction was between my mind’s ability to abstract and remaining rooted in the real social world. The balance between these poles has oscillated dramatically. I was mainly solitary until my late teens; mainly social until my mid-30s; solitary again until my early 50s (because of mental illness); more balanced from my mid-50s to early 70s. As I write this book, I can feel the pendulum swinging back towards my solitary nature. My default character is to be a loner whose main pleasure is in sustained work towards a remote goal, even as it raises a deep fear of becoming detached from the rest of humanity. Sociability is something I found as a way of making myself acceptable to those I lived with. This too has its contradictions, but it was trumped by the first tendency.Chapter 3Teenage years (1954-1961)The escalatorI have only once been single-minded for an extended period and that was during my teenage years when I was determined to ride the escalator to social recognition that entry to Cambridge University would guarantee. That meant passing examinations. I wasn’t sure what I wanted or would find if and when I got there; but I was prepared to do whatever it took to have that chance. I felt later that I had wasted my youth and remembered only the pain and sacrifice. But there was more to my teens than just working to pass exams. I found religion; consumed lots of fiction and music; took an active interest in sport as spectator and performer; found ways of making some money for myself; began betting on the horses; and acquired some adult vices like drinking and smoking. My sexual education was deferred indefinitely; but I had a bunch of male friends my own age. All of these allowed me to explore my own and others’ humanity outside the classroom, homework and examination hall; but only within the narrow limits set by the main goal.When I was growing up, children were divided after 10 years old (“the eleven plus”) between “grammar schools” offering the prospect of non-manual employment, to which entrance was by competitive exam, and “secondary modern” schools which had no intellectual aspirations and expected their pupils to leave early for a manual job, if they were lucky. Manchester Grammar School (MGS) was classified as “independent” along with exclusive establishments for children of the rich and merely affluent known confusingly as “public schools”. MGS was founded in 1515. By the 1950s it was ranked in the top two or three British schools for the number of scholarships won to Oxbridge. I first took the entrance exam at the age of 9, just for the experience, and of course I failed. The school recruited from a radius of 40-50 miles around Manchester. In order to sit the exam, a candidate had to be recommended by his primary school head master. 10,000 boys entered each year and were reduced to 2,000 by the first exam. The second exam selected some 200 winners from these, so the odds against a place were 50 to 1 and thousands to one in the age cohort for the region. Private schools in the suburbs trained their pupils just to take this exam, so that winners and losers constituted a sort of residential apartheid. This is why no-one had won a place from where I lived before.On the second try, I passed. Having chosen the classics side, I was placed in 1 β. We were tested every two weeks; one teacher returned three marks: our current result, the highest mark in that test and our own previous highest mark. For many boys it came as a rude shock to discover that they were mediocre or worse in that rat race. This generated a strongly negative ethos, so that we had to pretend that we did little work and cared nothing for our scores. I was promoted to 2 α in my second year and from then on was always in the top three or four on our side.A place in an Oxbridge college could be won by interview and recommendation or by a competitive scholarship exam. In the nineteenth century, some schools bought closed scholarships in one or more college. MGS once had many of these because of its milling monopoly in Central Manchester. But by now there was only one left, the Patchett classics scholarship at St. John’s College, Cambridge. I was told that I would be nominated for it as a reward for intellectual performance and good behavior. I was guaranteed a place if I reached the scholarship standard, regardless of how many were successful that year. There were major and minor scholarships, with different prestige and financial rewards. Eventually the telegram came: CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAVE WON A MANOR SCHOLARSHIP. I am a half-glass full person, so I interpreted this as ‘major’, but ’minor’ was a likelier error and it was that. I soon got over the disappointment. I was in!I have been coasting ever since on the cultural capital that I laid down as a teenager. I had no idea how much work was required to get me where I wanted to go; and this problem became more acute as I got nearer the final tests. I lived a monastic life: it took me half an hour each way to get to and from school by bus. At times of peak pressure, I got home around 4.30 pm, went for a 25-mile time trial on my racing bike, and did four hours homework every night, Monday to Thursday. At weekends, Friday to Sunday, I allowed myself to take off one period out of seven: a movie on Friday evening or a soccer match on Saturday afternoon, but not both – up to 40 hours homework a week in total.This required thought as well as application. Breaks in attention span were the main problem. Once I got up, it might be an hour before I returned. The solution was to play pop music on Radio Luxemburg non-stop. When my attention broke, it would go straight into the music, which had already been there in the background and with luck I would soon go back to my homework. Nowadays, I am a visible presence in the social media and people ask me, “Where do you find the time, Keith?” The answer is, “It keeps me at my work station”, the same laptop for both activities. I may be blocked in my professional writing and, when I move into email, social media, the newspapers etc., what I was writing sometimes pops up and I can move seamlessly back to into it.Confessions of an examination-passerI had a ten-minute walk to and from the bus stop through a rough area with unemployed teenagers hanging around and I was forced to wear the school uniform. I had to present myself as a difficult target and to review my options constantly. This experience shaped me for life. It prepared me for living as the sole white man in poor black communities. It gave me the air of a street fighter. When I was 17, my mother asked (again) why I never brought any friends home from school; I blurted out, “Because I am ashamed to”. She burst into tears. I told her I wasn’t ashamed of the home she had made, but of the district I would have to bring them through. Within three months we moved to a semi-detached house in the suburbs. The main problem wouldn’t go away, the examination process itself. I couldn’t bear knowing that all this work and native ability were at risk in an impersonal system. I constructed an image of my examiner, in his 50s, after midnight, on his fourth whisky, with a backlog of scripts to mark. I knew that my work would be good enough; but what if he started skipping to get to bed? He might give me a B without even reading my script. How to get his attention, slow him down, make him want to read? I studied calligraphy and found that forward-sloping is extraverted, backward-sloping is introverted and big loops are psychotic. After many experiments, I settled on upright, legible, medium-size handwriting, with a few low-key mannerisms, pleasant to read. But I needed more than this. Eventually I had the idea of inserting a joke on the first page. Either he liked it and I was ahead or he didn’t, but at least he was reading my script. This didn’t seem peculiar to me then, but it does now. All my adult life I have been trying to make a personal connection with impersonal society. It began then, when I was 15.I am a sentimental movie-goer and tear up at the slightest provocation. I was watching the film, Billy Elliot. Billy is a miner’s son in a Northern town during the great coal miners’ strike of 1984-5. He wants to be a ballet dancer and you can imagine how that goes down with his family and peers. He wins some acceptance for his ambition and tries for a place in the Royal Ballet School. The panel of bigwigs who interview him is suitably aloof. Then he has to wait for the result. Every day he looks for the buff envelope, but no luck. Then one day his father has it, “Go on, Billy, open it!” Billy refuses and storms out of the room. I broke into racking sobs. Access to the good life should not rest on an impersonal mechanism. I knew Billy Elliot’s ambivalence intimately: he wants it so badly, he would rather not know the result than face rejection. He gets in of course. This is a movie after all.In my last two years at MGS, I read everything I could lay my hands on in Greek and Latin, so that by the time I reached Cambridge, I had covered a fair amount of all the significant authors. I had my favorites, the Greek tragedians (especially Aeschylus) and Latin lyric poetry (especially Catullus). But I did not then appreciate literature, history and philosophy in general. I was a translation machine, a technical linguist, whose focus was on accuracy, not meaning. I might have to translate some Victorian bombast into 4th century BC Greek prose: “We must not sacrifice our principles on the altar of expediency”. Ancient Greek had an eighth of the vocabulary of modern English and preferred verb- to noun-forms. I had to grasp the basic meaning of the sentence, see if the metaphor could be retained and throw in a phrase or two from Demosthenes, if possible.This training has stood me well as a writer and editor in later life. I have discovered that there are pitfalls to reading for meaning: you often speed up when think you know what is coming. Reading for technical language slows you down and requires concentration. I grasp the meaning of a piece more effectively then than when reading for meaning. When I am blocked in my writing, I fiddle technically with what I have written and this usually sends me back to the first draft with renewed enthusiasm. Religion, culture and sportSomething had to give and it did. I found religion. Dad was the vicar’s warden (lay official) of our church. I was chief choirboy until my voice broke at 13. I was later told that my mature voice, a light baritone, was mediocre and, since I couldn’t be the best, I gave up singing. I had not internalized my dad’s principle of doing what interests you, even if you are not the best. I was to be confirmed in our church when I was 12, but I stalled. Then I learned to read the Greek New Testament at 14. The Greek bible synthesized religion and intellectual life for me. At 16 I won a competition against older contestants for translation and commentary on the Greek New Testament. The St. John Gospel and St. Paul’s Acts, both originally written in Greek, made more sense than the King James version. “In the beginning was loghos” (the principle of rational order in the universe, not “the word”); “faith, hope and kharitas” (not “charity”). I took from this the idea that we should love all of humanity, but are unlikely to do so before the second coming. I felt strongly that we shouldn’t have to wait to recognize what is human in all of us when we meet face to face, to see and be seen as what we really are. Later, when I lived in an African slum for two years, I knew that, if I couldn’t get beyond the binaries of race, class and power that divided me from its inhabitants, my research project would fail. I had to find the means of human connection that mitigated the social inequality and I did.After we moved South of the River Mersey, I asked my dad why we didn’t go to church anymore. He said, “Oh, St. Brides was politics; if I didn’t take on the warden job, a rival family would.” This was almost as shocking as voting Conservative in an election: “When I earned under the average, I voted Labor because they wanted to make the poor better off. Now I earn more than average, so I want to keep it”. Facing this cynicism, I signed up for the Christadelphians. They were bible fundamentalists who didn’t believe in the Trinity or the immortal soul. For them Archbishop Ussher was right to calculate the world’s origin as 4004 BC. It was a joke; but they were nice people who knew how to party. So I went regularly on Sundays. When I went up to Cambridge, I sought out the Christadelphians there and found a girlfriend immediately. In that first term religion just faded out of my life. I needed someone to bat for me in my MGS years and it turned out to be God. Once I got where I wanted to, religious belief vanished and has never returned. I thought I had transcended my Puritan upbringing and was particularly proud when a New York Jew once mistook me for a New York Jew. When I was 16, I decided that the Harts were Moriscos, Sephardic Jews posing as Northern Irish Prods. Manchester Jews were the custodians of high culture; the conductor of the Halle Orchestra was a Jew; Jewish kids at MGS were all rich and more civilized than me. In terms of culture, class and public reputation, there was no competition. So for a while I wore black clothes with gold-rimmed spectacles and posed as a Left Bank Jewish intellectual, complete with roll-neck sweater and a permanent cigarette. But the Jesuits were right; the Protestants got me early and it stuck. This became more obvious from my 40s on.There were other crutches than religion that got me through my teens. Consuming fiction, music and sport sustained me. I internalized at MGS a profound division between “analysis” and “story”, associated with compulsory advancement and personal freedom respectively. English literature was a free subject, that is, unexamined. We had some great English teachers: one became an Oxford don who wrote books on Dickens and Trollope; another had been head of BBC North radio drama! I have always had a passion for novels, movies and plays, but at that time never contemplated mixing my two main interests.Shakespeare seemed to be obsessed with my dilemma -- how to be yourself and participate in impersonal society. How can someone be a king and also a man? Shakespeare signed up for an aristocratic clique, but the logic of working out this problem, made him a man of the people for all time. It helped that his vehicle made social contradictions personal. By the age of 17 my favorite novels were Crime and Punishment, Passage to India and Jude the Obscure. Raskolnikov was my hero, another deracinated student who lost sight of how to be himself in society. The police detective Porphyry says, “I read an interesting article of yours. Do you still believe that if someone would do something new, he must be a criminal”? I pumped the air with my fist and shouted “YES!” Two decades after Poe invented the genre was invented, Dostoevsky made a reverse murder mystery -- not whodunit, but how long it will take the murderer to crack under the contradictions of killing someone? Forster lit in me an abiding passion for India that has only been consummated recently. I don’t know why I liked Hardy then; I now find his vision of the world cruel and repellent. Janice learned to play the piano well as a teenager and had a fine appreciation of classical music, but she stayed out of our male games. I asked dad once why he had been so rough with me in those early cribbage years and he said “I wanted you to be my friend” – his own father refused to play cards with him because he was just a kid. Stanley and his mate Vernon developed an agonistic friendship and that was the model he had for me – but at 3 or 4? It worked a lot better for us to identify the music on the Third Program over breakfast.The rock ’n’ roll revolution seemed to be meant just for me. When I was 13 or 14 I preferred the black singers coming out of rhythm ‘n’ blues – Little Richard, Fats Domino and Chuck Berry – to Elvis or Cliff Richard. At 16 I found Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and was hooked for life. At the millennium, I found myself sitting in the back of a small car in Brazil. The top 100 pop songs of the century were being played on the car radio, mostly American and some British from the last half-century. I was singing along happily when the driver said “He knows all the words!” I did, at least from the 1950s to the 70s. My daughter kept me I touch with the 80s and her sister performs a similar role now. I sometimes wonder if I secretly nurture the dream of being a rock ‘n’ roll star. When my mother died I realized that I have always wanted to play the bass guitar, the heart-beat of the band (an echo of her womb). When I got drunk as a college student, I would sometimes stand on a pub table and do Mick Jagger impressions crying out “I’m the greatest dancer in the world”. But I will always feel uniquely blessed to have entered my teens when black music went white, pop and mainstream.The third leg of my cultural diversions was sport. At this stage I was above all a cricket fan. The pièce de résistance was the test of 1956 against the Aussies and I saw every ball of it. The off-spinner Jim Laker took 19 wickets, a record. It was glorious. Then there was United of course. After the war, United’s progress was inexorable and most kids my age plumped for them. It was interrupted, if not ended, in February 1958 when half the team was killed in an air crash. Mum and dad came with mefor the big games, like the European Cup semi-final against Real Madrid in 1957. Mum was an avid cricket follower and the captain of her local ladies’ crown green bowls team, a game that all four of us played quite well, rarely as a family. Dad played tennis and badminton until he was 60. I signed up for lacrosse when I first went to MGS, but found entry to the school teams too competitive. I took up tennis and golf with my MGS friends. We went to Rugby League games together and once to Wembley for a cup final between Wigan and St. Helen’s. I was a keen cyclist at this time with a racing bike whose ideal components I discussed endlessly with my local friends. We sometimes went to a velodrome. The last race was a “devil take the hindmost”, where the last rider to cross the line on each circuit dropped out; anyone could take part. It was lots of fun and quite healthy for a housebound book worm. I had always been a fat kid, but I went slim at 15 for the next 20 years. At 17 I went with two friends to the West Country and then continued to the other side of the country, to Auntie Muriel’s in Essex. She still feels the exasperation of me doing nothing for several weeks but lie on the couch with the curtains drawn and watch the Rome Olympics on television. In my last years at MGS, I worked for wages in the holidays, notably nights at a Mother’s Pride bread factory and for a couple of months at a Manchester wholesale haberdashery emporium. My betting habit (of which more below) expanded accordingly, as did consumption of booze and cigarettes. The most striking feature of these jobs was working with mature women. In the bakery sexual harassment was normal: “How about you and me in the toilets, luv?” I found it wearing. At the wholesale emporium, most of the customers for haberdashery and the bulk of the employees were women; but the innuendo was less obtrusive. I made some good friends there, as well as learning more about knitting wool, buttons, zips and the rest than I cared to know. From the age of 15, I drank and smoked quite heavily without concealing it from my parents. This was a time when social smoking was normal (dad did, mum didn’t) and there was a pub on almost every street corner in inner Manchester; but I was allowed to drink there only occasionally. My parents didn’t try to stop me, but they constantly warned me against addiction. I had my own method for keeping control. I didn’t pretend to give up; but delayed buying a new pack some times. Teenage drinking and smoking were probably for me then the social equivalent of rule-breaking in primary school. It made me one of the boys and not just a swot, which I certainly was.DialecticMy teenage years were to some extent defined by the poles of passing exams and betting on the horses. When I was 12 years old, I realized that the last thing I wanted when I grew up was a job like my dad’s. Most evenings, when we had our family meal after he came home from work, he would vent his frustration about his job to our mother, while Janice and I stared steadfastly at our plates. I was about 13 when he was suddenly promoted and our family fortunes took a rapid upturn. But none of that changed my mind about taking up betting. I was gripped even then by the fear of becoming a proletarian. I had already embarked on a career of passing exams; but what if I failed the exams? I had to find enough money to live on by doing something other than normal work. How do you make money without working? The only method I could think of was betting on the horses. Of course I had no money to bet with, but I set out to learn about horse racing. My father’s Manchester Guardian was no good, but grandma got the Daily Express, which devoted several pages to the topic and had the best tipsters (The Scout and Peter O’Sullevan), so I borrowed it from her every day. I made notional bets and kept a record of the returns in a notebook. After three years I was making a regular profit on paper. I also now had some money, from a paper round and fiddling my daily expenses for food and travel. I started making small cash bets, while accumulating knowledge of the horses. In my last years at MGS I sometimes had real wage jobs and my betting expanded accordingly. What I lacked in capital, I made up for in deep knowledge of the horses. So I scraped by. It was never a case of wanting to win – but who doesn’t? I developed early a deep-seated fear of being tied down to one job and place. However much I focused on passing exams, I also needed to get off that escalator sometimes to meet my human needs. The distractions I turned to were plural, not just a pair of opposites; and that has tended to be my life strategy ever since. I turned to betting in the hope that I could live by making money with money if I failed to pass my exams. Equally, my recreations – and they included betting – were necessary for examination-passing, since it dehumanizes its slaves. I was never wholly focused on academic advancement; I made human connection through religion, fiction, music, sport, gambling and drinking in company. I cultivated friends who were not high-flying academics and tried to find the means of bridging the gap between our trajectories. It is easy, but misleading to oversimplify my life in those years as driven by a singular purpose.Chapter 4Undergraduate student at Cambridge (1961-1965)I moved to Cambridge in 1961. Nothing could have prepared me for the shock. The gap between my college and my home was huge and I had to move between them three times a year, while trying to preserve an identity. My years as a college student were very happy and I came to love Cambridge University for reasons that I only understood later. But I must begin with the absolute strangeness of the place. I spent four years there as an undergraduate, two years as a classicist and another two reading social anthropology. Switching to anthropology was part of the solution; I would use Cambridge to get out into the wider world.Today Cambridge is the hub of Britain’s third industrial revolution, a decentralized network of technology start-ups and college-financed science parks, mostly located in the surrounding villages. Unlike Oxford, it is predominantly a science university. Newton, Darwin, Babbage, Maxwell, Rutherford and Crick/Watson were all there. The 2001 UK national census recorded that the five fastest-growing enumeration areas in the last decade were all in Cambridgeshire. Cambridge University (led by Kings’ College Chapel) is the sixth biggest tourist attraction in Britain. If Manchester suffered a terrible economic defeat after the war, Cambridge was still a feudal backwater and pretty depressed in the early 1960s, beautiful but commercially backward. For example, there were three tobacconists on King’s Parade, reflecting the purchasing power of male dons. Social relations were feudal too; but I will come to that. St. John’s College was founded 500 years ago this decade by the circle that followed Henry Tudor’s mother, as was Manchester Grammar School. It occupies a large space, with buildings from the 16th to 20th centuries. Nowadays visitors pay ?13 for the privilege of making a restricted tour of St. John’s. In the early 1960s there were fewer visitors and no restrictions. The dining room and chapel are the main meeting places. St. John’s has a world famous choir and a choir school to supply the boys needed for it. My room was directly on the river. There were Junior and Senior Combination Rooms for students and fellows respectively (nothing as common as Common Room). The small college bar (“buttery”) was opposite the dining hall; we could only buy on credit and if we spent too much there, we were summoned to see the Dean.Across the river was a 19th century monstrosity called New Court. The Cam had been a working river until then, with warehouses and barges that offloaded the Fens’ agricultural products. Seen from behind, New Court looked like a work house or barracks; but the front was designed to be an ornament – a “wedding cake” tower and a fa?ade that left no room to move inside. It was designed to be seen from a distance, while its internal space for users was cramped, just like my least favourite Paris building, Sacré Coeur in Montmartre. I shared a room in New Court in my second and third years. Another complex was added behind it in 60s, the Cripps Building; I had a room there after I returned from doctoral fieldwork in Ghana.Social lifeMy biggest problem was learning how to live away from home. I can’t say it was “to live by myself”, since I was granted a sort of licensed dependence. The college undertook many responsibilities for me and I could always fall back on my parents’ home during the vacations (which took up more than half the year). Even so I had to manage on my grant and scholarship, which came to ?420 a year in three installments. My first move toward budgeting was a leather-bound ledger in which I listed every tin of baked beans and ball pen that I bought. This lasted for two weeks. It took me about that time to discover the bathroom hidden away in the courtyard behind some gardening implements (I was too shy to ask). I discovered credit in the college bar and began to think of how to use my stipend windfall to supplement my income.The practical business of looking after myself was mitigated by having a bed-maker (“bedder”) to tidy up my room daily. These were local middle-aged women of unassailable virtue, not that any of us would have wanted to bed them. Although I was used to my mother in this role, I was not prepared for Mrs. Pleasance. She combined deference (calling me “sir” which no-one had before) and an air of wary circumspection with a kind of patronizing familiarity that I had never encountered before. But I would soon see plenty of it in that town.Many first-year students were forced by lack of space to live in lodgings outside college. They might hang out in the Junior Combination Room pretending to read newspapers or, if they knew someone with a college room, go there. On my staircase, one pole of attraction was a first-year history scholar whose friends were mostly Catholics from London. A Scottish graduate student lived opposite me and we both tended to gravitate towards this cluster. I found my future room-mate in this way, a mathematician whose family was downwardly mobile from the Trinidad white aristocracy. Like migrants everywhere I hung out at first with homeboys from MGS of whom there were a dozen in Cambridge that I already knew. But there was also the language problem. In England it is well known that the main indicator of class is accent, with regions also typecast in class terms. Until the mid-1950s, if BBC radio needed a Somerset blacksmith, they would hire an actor for the job, since the national audience couldn’t understand the raw speech of working people from the regions. Dennis Mitchell pioneered programs with real People Talking and went on to film classical documentaries like Morning in the Streets in Liverpool. This coincided with a cultural movement mentioned earlier, known as “kitchen sink drama”, in which lower-class protagonists were (a) “angry young men” and (b) spoke in regional accents – Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning etc. Then the Beatles made regional accents fashionable in the mid-60s and even BBC newscasters were allowed to speak with their native accents. This took place in Britain between 1958 and 1964, in my late teens, then as an undergraduate student. Language had become political. Accelerated social mobility was amplified by the post-war baby boom; and an unprecedented numbers of regional grammar school boys found their way into the elite bastions of higher education. Within a matter of weeks I found my MGS homeboys adapting their speech to local norms, while Cambridge (town and gown alike) was immune to this wider cultural shift. On a bus while paying my fare, I overheard a woman say to her companion, “Ooo, doan’ ‘e talk fanny!” In college a student once asked me “Are they all like you where you come from?” I replied “Yes, but they don’t all win scholarships to Cambridge”. I don’t recall making a conscious decision, but I gradually exaggerated my regional accent and began pretending to be a “working class hero”, as John Lennon – another lower middle class grammar school boy -- did.Much later, the eminent social anthropologist, Sir Edmund Leach, Provost of Kings’ College, with family connections in Argentinian meat, Caribbean sugar and Lancashire textile mills, asked me “Do you think you are different from the rest here, Keith?” I replied yes. He shook his head, “You don’t think the aristocracy and high bourgeoisie have the brains between them to keep a place like Cambridge University going, do you? No, they have to scour the country for bright lower class provincial boys like you. We then teach them how to speak and behave as if they grew up in the milieu. You are normal, except that, unlike most of them, you are in two minds about joining the upper middle classes. I really am different; I had wealth and power to start with!” (Insert emoticon for joke).I was not a rebel, idiosyncratic perhaps, but generally committed to rubbing along. I did my best to learn the customs of the place and to practice them. It began in my first week there when I attached myself to a group of lower-middle class boys in the JCR. We went out for a meal together one evening. Until then, I had never ordered for myself in a restaurant. I had hardly ever been in one before. The menu looked straightforward enough. Then someone asked if we should share a bottle of wine. We chose a bottle of Liebfraumilch white wine, the kind that non-drinkers like my mother would choose. Perhaps I was louder than the others, but the waiter extended the bottle towards me on his arm with the cork half drawn. I grabbed the bottle and extracted the cork. Much hilarity all round. The first college feast I attended, I watched what others did with all the cutlery, plates and glasses, but relaxed too soon. Near the end a large silver dish, containing water, ice cubes and rose petals, suddenly appeared at my right shoulder (my blind eye). I was again flummoxed and, rather than wave the guy away, the smart move, I tipped some of the water into a glass. Then I discovered that you were supposed to dip your napkin (never “serviette”) into the water and wipe your brow, an upmarket precursor of the cold paper towels airlines now hand out.At first I met new people when eating in the dining hall; but before long I just sat with the few I knew well. The main melting pot was the college bar. There were several cliques there, but I found that I was accepted in most of them. The big divide was between “aesthetes” and “hearties” – the literary types and the sportsmen. My inclination was to spend time with the rugby players and oarsmen, since they drank beer and went in for rounds (the norm in Manchester); but I enjoyed talking about books, art and music too. The friends I had made on my staircase decided to join the boat club’s novices eight and they needed a cox. I asked my classics’ tutor, an “old heavy”, and he told me I should do it for six days a week. So I did. Lady Margaret Boat Club was always a contender for first place in the races. Next term I was promoted to second boat cox and in the summer vacation coxed a boat made up of crews from two other colleges at the Henley Regatta. All of this made a big difference to my social life.I stuck it out with LMBC for another year as second cox and then quit. In the meantime I had discovered The Willows, our college occasional cricket team who played village sides at the weekend and drank in the local pub afterwards. I also played for and sometimes captained the college darts team which had tournaments with Cambridge pub sides. And I took up squash which was organized as a ladder in which you could challenge players ranked near you. I did alright for a man with only one eye. That time the highest ranked player in England was a student at St. John’s. I even played for a term as a hooker in the college fourth rugby team, mixing it up in the front row.Back in the bar, I was semi-detached from a Northern working class clique who wore their team’s football scarves and drank Newcastle Brown Ale. I got on fine with the aristocrats; our mutual enemies were the bank managers’ kids from Surbiton and no-one doubted that I was a prole because of my accent. We shared an interest in horse-racing and playing cards for money (bridge with them, three-card brag with the Northerners). The toffs threw parties to épater les bourgeois, sometimes early when hardworking students had to cross the courtyard to the bathrooms before going to lectures. Their preferred drinks were “black velvet” and “champagne cocktail”. The first was a mixture of champagne and Guinness (“the best wine and the best beer”) which the middle classes wouldn’t drink because they couldn’t bear to mix dear with cheap; the second combined champagne with Remy-Martin cognac, anomalous for the same reason. I loved black velvet and won enough at cards to pay my share of party expenses.This makes me sound like a chameleon. Of course I was, since the conversational styles and preoccupations were very different. I never felt I was pretending to be someone else than me, but in that strange society I could hardly feel at home. There was also the question of women. This was before the revolution of the late 1960s when all the colleges went co-ed. There were then only three women’s colleges, plus a teacher’s training college and the nurses at Addenbrookes Hospital. Ros, the Christadelphian, didn’t last long. The occasional date with a girl from the town varied from not working out to a disaster. It was easy enough, given the variety on offer, to settle for male-bonding in the bar and the sporting life.I returned to St. John’s for the first time in 14 years and made for the college bar (larger now). One of my classics teachers, an evolved Cockney, was propping up the bar alone. He shouted out (in a fake Yorkshire accent), “Eee bah goom, it’s ‘Art!” He had never forgiven me for deviating from his chosen path of upward mobility. Except that, by now, I had gone upmarket myself, if not as far as him.Academic workI soon realized that I had massively overshot the requirements for an undergraduate degree in classics, both in terms of how much I had read and my own ability to translate in both directions. The only student in my year with comparable skills was from Eton. I graduated to verse translation and composition, once converting Dante’s Italian into Homeric hexameters. We were encouraged to read commentaries in other European languages. At MGS this meant French and German and once Dutch. I only realized much later that our Cambridge classics lecturers were among the best in the world: A. H. M. Jones on Roman history, Kirk and Raven on the pre-Socratic philosophers, Dennis Page on Greek tragedy, W K C Guthrie on Greek and Roman philosophy. But I didn’t attend many lectures. Generally I coasted on coursework, so that I could devote myself to drinking beer, betting on the horses, playing cards, reading novels, watching movies, college sports and sleeping in. I soon figured out that classics didn’t offer good prospects for an academic career. My field was literary criticism which was still limited to expanding the manuscript tradition. There was no way I could work on Aeschylus or Catullus for a PhD. I would be lucky to get some fragments of a 4th century Roman satirist. Seminar discussions were nit-picking in the extreme. That was bad, but the labor market situation was worse. There was a glut of bright provincial classics students at Cambridge, many of whom were as bright and worked a lot harder. One of them, when he completed his undergraduate degree, had reconstructed a play by Menander from fragments and eventually became the university orator. Moreover, it seemed that academic jobs teaching classics were drying up. That was the push side, but in the 1960s social sciences were enjoying a belated boom at Cambridge too. I thought of sociology, but it was part of the Economics Faculty and that put me off. I had as a rowing coach a geographer from Turin who spent the winters in Sicily or Lebanon studying desert erosion in the Mediterranean basin and then returned to Cambridge in time for the May festivities. That looked like a good plan to me; I then heard that social anthropology was sociology with travel thrown in. The clincher was when Jack Goody, our college social anthropologist, told me he was running a seminar on clientship. I offered to make a presentation on Roman clientship and then forgot about it. He reminded me with two days to go, no time to mug up on the original Latin writers. Now I only had time to consult some secondary sources in English. It would have been thrown out as a tutorial essay. My talk was greeted very positively, however. I thought, “These people have no intellectual standards!” Anthropologists could study anything in the world. The only knowledge rule seemed to be “I have been there and you haven’t”. It didn’t take much thought for me to sign up. That long vacation, I burnt in the incinerator of my parents’ new suburban garden all the writing that I had kept until then – notes, essays, exam cribs, letters… I now think that I resented bitterly those teenage years devoted exclusively to academic advancement. I never had a girlfriend; I neglected sports and cultural events. I wanted to put all that irrevocably in the past, to make a cathartic break with that self-made prison by destroying its tangible remains. I have never worked so hard or as single-mindedly again. But at this distance, I am grateful to that teenager for accumulating the capital that I have lived off ever since. My apprenticeship in bettingI had never thought about how I would be paid in Cambridge, I supposed by the month or the week, like a wage. Receiving my grant and scholarship in advance three times a year was wholly unexpected. National currencies have depreciated so much in the last half century; it is worth recalling that each of these payments of ?140 would now be almost ?3,000. I now had capital for the first time in my life and six years of grubbing around the bottom end of the market for horse-race betting paid off at a new level. I had acquired great knowledge of the British “form” over a continuous period. Of course, I hardly wanted to get thrown out of Cambridge for bad debts. But I knew that occasional bets made on a hunch would sooner or later have that result. I would have to make a science of betting. I knew that three variables mattered most in an extended betting sequence: the total fund available, the risk of losing it all and the size and speed of making bets. Most punters have only a little money and they try to win a lot occasionally. So they lose. The winning recipe is to have a lot of money in reserve and to bet to win a small amount often. This is in fact the recipe for capital accumulation across the board and it now drives stock markets in a computerized form. I devised a method from scratch that has some well-known features, but they were not well-known to me then. They also have well-known flaws (not to me at first) and I found my way past those through trial and error. My basic method was something called a martingale, an 18th-century French system of doubling up on bets with a 50 per cent probability of winning, such as the toss of a coin. The binomial theorem tells us that the chance of losing such a bet 10 times in a row is 1 in 512 (2 to the powers 0–9). If I placed bets to the value of a 500th of my stake on horses starting at around evens, I had a 0.2 per cent chance of losing the lot. I figured that I could reduce this risk by drawing on my knowledge of horse racing (six years’ worth by now). This meant that, with a fund in the bank of ?100 (?2,000 today), my initial stake on a bet should be no more than 4 shillings (?4 today).The next problem was to make these bets fast enough. I chose to bet on all favorites starting between evens and 2 to 1 against. This allowed for the payment of betting tax on winnings. Odds-on bets made doubling up on losses impossibly risky. Favorites in Britain win one in three races on average. I could not afford the time to select bets based on studying form, so I made them mechanically until I reached four consecutive losses. The fifth bet in a losing sequence meant placing a bet around 16 times the original stake to win it back. At this point I slowed down and picked my bets, using my knowledge and best guesses. In four years as an undergraduate, the longest losing sequence I had was seven bets, meaning that the seventh bet cost over 60 times the original stake in order to recoup my losses (?12 or an eighth of my total fund, ?250 now). It wasn’t a pleasant experience – my hands were shaking and I was sweating -- but I only had to endure these extended losing runs two or three times.Operating this system wasn’t even the main problem. In Britain the gatekeepers (bookmakers, casinos) have the legal right to refuse anyone a bet. They are especially likely to do so if they believe he is operating a scientific system like card counting at blackjack or using a martingale on red or black at roulette. When my system settled down, I made an average 8 per cent on turnover. I disguised the regularity of this return by spreading my custom between three betting shops and varying how much I won or lost at each, so that I came across as a high-volume punter who didn’t cost them much. I stopped keeping a record after a while since I knew by then that I couldn’t lose.I made occasional bets outside my system. I had an ally in the college kitchen manager whom the students condescended to (he had a fake posh London accent that didn’t conceal its working class origins) by addressing him with his surname. I called him “mister”. We shared a consuming interest in betting on the horses. He would give me tips he got from Newmarket, racing headquarters only a few miles from Cambridge. Once he told me that three horses from the Jarvis stable were going to win at Yarmouth that day. They would start at short odds, so it was worth betting on them as an accumulator treble. I put ?5 on the treble (which was a lot then, ?100 now). The first horse won at evens, the second at 6-4 on. The third drifted out in the betting to 8-1…and won! The treble paid off at 30-1: ?150 (a term’s stipend, ?3,000 today). My friend liked me enough to introduce me to the Cambridge underworld which met in a large mobile home that doubled as a strip club on the Newmarket Road. The main currency of Cambridge crime then was food, supplied by college kitchen managers to Cypriot restaurateurs. Students paid for their meals in advance, but these were so bad that they sometimes paid to eat at the Cypriot restaurants instead. There was an incipient Italian mafia based on cement, construction and pizza. Otherwise the denizens of the strip club included the usual bent policemen and former jockeys from Newmarket. One of my side lines was playing three-card brag with Northern working class students and bridge for high stakes with the rich boys. My first decade, when I learned to play cards really well for my age, paid off at this time. Overall, I roughly doubled my grant each year. In all my time as an undergraduate, I never worked for wages, took no money from my parents (although I used their home for free board and lodging) and had enough money to pay for my drinking bills, buy a lot of books and cinema tickets and take two-month holidays in the Aegean every summer. My social anthropology supervisor, Jack Goody, suggested Newmarket horse-racing as a suitable topic for my doctoral research; but I didn’t fancy ending up under a truck on the Newmarket Road and went to Ghana instead, which I laughably thought would be safer.Spending two years on fieldwork in Ghana ruined my betting career. I lost track of the British horse-racing form and no longer received a regular grant check when I returned to write up. I kept betting on the horses at first, but unsystematically and without a capital reserve. Eventually, I was forced to acknowledge that my net returns were under a few shillings an hour. I was also married to someone else who lacked an income. It made more sense to write my thesis and get an academic job. A PhD required more work than my undergraduate degree in any case.A fallI was concussed six times between the ages of 3 and 50: dustbin lid; bike crash; falling on my head; slipping on ice (twice); and being mugged. Only one of these was life-threatening. Concussion is a fear reaction, shutting down consciousness when a blow to the head or body threatens life. The brain records these events, so that each blow has a cumulative effect. Professionals exposed to major shocks, such as jump jockeys or boxers, in time they suffer prolonged blackouts from minor knocks. Something like that happened to me.It was the beginning of the Easter term, 1963. I had been drinking beer with friends since 5.30 pm. At 11 o’clock we went to an Indian restaurant for a curry. I was already plastered. Soon after midnight I left the others mid-meal. The entrance to the college was closed; I had to climb over the 20-foot railings next to the chapel. What happened next is a blur; but I must have stood up on the top bar and tipped forward onto the cobble stones below. Fortunately bikes were parked closely together in concrete blocks at the bottom and these broke my fall. I ended up wedged between two of them with my head on the ground and my legs in the air. Around 3 am one of the porters heard me breathing through my own blood and called for an ambulance. In hospital I had over twenty stitches, lacerations on my face and woke up mid-morning with the king of all hangovers.I had to wear a cap made up of bandages and was told not to use my brain for three months. So I was excused from sitting that year’s exams. My supervisor that term was a visiting fellow from Sri Lanka. I told him that I was banned from intellectual work and couldn’t read. Years later he told me that he had heard stories about student pranks and wanted to yank the bandages off my head. I am glad he didn’t.The college council knew that I could have been killed and changed the rules so that students could come in through the lodge after midnight . Many years later I relived that fateful scene in flashback. I stood with both feet on top of the railings, instead of putting one leg over and then the other, I looked up into a starry sky before tipping forward. I do not recall how I hit the ground, but one bike was completely wrecked.Two civilizationsI never got over that primal scene, juxtaposing life in Manchester with feudal fenland society. They seemed to me then -- and still do -- two completely different civilizations. In all my subsequent world travels, I have not come across a greater contrast. It took me fifteen years after my doctoral fieldwork in Ghana to figure out the question that drove my research there. I was fascinated by migrants who performed demeaning jobs in the city but still considered themselves to be the sons of earth priests and lineage elders back home. In fact, they did not suffer from the status anxiety that Manchester and Cambridge provoked in me. I was studying a negative image of myself there in order to find out how to become whole again. The peculiar sense of inverted hierarchy that I perceived in my relationship with my first bed-maker was built into Cambridge University’s social structure. College “servants” and figures of authority in the town such as porters, shopkeepers, policemen and other service-workers, were both generationally senior and treated as socially inferior by students who had barely started shaving. Grown men were addressed by their first name or by surname alone; and they addressed us, the little lords, as “mister” and “sir”. This was the opposite of interaction between the generations at home. Yet there was a surly undertone to their deference – sometimes expressed as heavy sarcasm (“That wasn’t very clever, was it, sir?”). Privacy in college was a virtue, so that if you wanted to shut out unwelcome visitors, for reasons of study or (rarely) dalliance, closing the outer door of your rooms would keep everyone at bay (it was called “sporting the oak”). Because social obligations might interfere with the supreme object of Cambridge life (“work”), you could converse with people on some festive occasion who would cut you dead in the street next day. The public framework for private activity was narrowly circumscribed, even within the same college. In Old Trafford our front door was left open in the summer and on the latch when it was colder. Neighbors and extended family members could breeze in unannounced whenever they liked with “It’s only me” (sung loud in a high register). Closing doors inside the house was also informally prohibited, especially bedroom and bathroom doors. When we still had outside loos in the back yard, the men, taking their morning shit with a newspaper before work, would chat across low walls with the loo door open. After the loos went indoors, you might stumble across an old lady in the toilet because she couldn’t bring herself to close the door. The message was clear: privacy undermines the solidarity that is our only social weapon against the bosses.This emphasis on dualism should itself be queried. If the social structures of Old Trafford and St. John’s were so polarized, how did I find social networking in college so easy? The conditions for peer group interaction should be inspected more closely. I may need to revise how inflexibly polarized these two places were. Maybe the split was in me more than out there.Chapter 5Outlaw anthropologist in Ghana (1965-1969) I’ve got Africa on my mind. Not an old sweet song, more a beat:?tá-tá ti-ti tá-ti-tá. It takes me back to those times I spent in Atinga’s gin-bar, tapping out the rhythm on a beer bottle while the guy sang to a one-string guitar. I don’t know when or how Africa first got into my mind. Dad was keen on Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs when he was young, but he didn’t pass on that enthusiasm to me. Nothing in my background prepared me for a world society based on racial inequality. The nearest we go to it was the Irish problem.I went to Accra with my head full of notions about rural-urban migrants learning how to be active citizens through voluntary associations, politics and public propaganda. We did that kind of thing in the 60s. I believed then that African independence from colonial rule had launched political experiments from which the whole world could learn. It was my first trip outside Europe; I was 22 years old. One of my teachers wrote to my supervisor, “God knows what Keith Hart is going to do, because he doesn’t.” My first task was to hook up with Jack and Esther Goody in a small town 500 km North of Accra. The driver had a girlfriend near the Volta River ferry, so we spent the night there in the bus being eaten alive by mosquitoes. I arrived in Bole next day in the early afternoon. It was very hot, but I found their living quarters out of town. There was no response to my knocking and shouts, so I went indoors and found the whole family (with two small daughters) sleeping naked in water on the bathroom floor. This wasn’t the only primal scene Bole had in store for me. Jack decided that, since my topic was migration, I should stay a few days in the strangers’ quarter (zongo) with an army sergeant-major’s family. I was given a small room with an unmade floor and a table where I unpacked my Safari camp bed and mosquito net, with some clothes and writing materials. In those days I wore knee-length black leather boots that a colonial outfitter in Manchester had persuaded me to buy. I looked ridiculous. The one reason that white men visited the zongo was for sex and the only available female in the house was the sergeant-major’s sister, a trader twice my age. Needless to say, communications were difficult; but I got the message that she thought we could be an item. One night, as I was sleeping under my net, she came into my room. I was terrified and this got through to her, since she withdrew and left something on the floor. In the morning I discovered it was a papaya – the inside is thought to resemble you know what. I felt the least I could do was to eat it for breakfast. When I cut it open, the inside was seething with maggots. I have never eaten papaya since.My third surprise, the day we were leaving town, was that Jack told me I was to have one of their cooks, a thin, middle-aged man with a moustache who, it turned out, had been given no more notice of this arrangement than me. I thought it was a crazy colonial anachronism, but apparently I didn’t have the time to shop, cook and clean and they only needed one cook in future. Salifu was with me for more than two years, a man of considerable dignity except when he was drunk. He told me later that he had served British army officers and normally wouldn’t put up with treatment like that, but he decided that I needed looking after. When we returned to Accra, I set about looking for a place where Northern migrants lived.NimaNima in the 1950s had been a thinly populated cattle camp and refuge for criminals on the outskirts of Accra. Then it started filling up with cheap housing for the flood of low-skilled migrants from the interior. The original leadership remained in place and the police treated it as a no-go area, except for occasional raids with trucks, guns and dogs. I was told that lots of Northerners lived in Nima and I was offered rooms by a Frafra man I met in a place that sold millet beer (pito). Asaa was a small-time crook then recovering from a short spell in prison that had left him broke, save for a house he had bought before he was locked up. He had just cleared out the previous tenants so that strangers could not spy on what he was up to. I have often wondered why he risked taking in a white youth like me. The likeliest reason is that, when he was a cook for a British official, he had formed a lucrative partnership with the man’s teenage son, filling their van with all kinds of bootleg stuff. It didn’t take us long to make a similar relationship.Colonial society was built on the premise that if one of us is harmed, we destroy three of your villages. That regime was still close enough in time to feed my sense of being untouchable. Compared with Nima’s inhabitants, I was rich, white, educated and powerful. I realized soon enough that, unless I broke out of that stereotype, I would be socially dead, perhaps literally so. I had never been beyond the Mediterranean, I was young, culturally inept and desperately lacked human warmth, which my new neighbors had in abundance. I began to exchange what I had for what they had. I wrote letters, intervened with bureaucracy and gave people rides on my scooter, while they made me feel at home, gave me food and drink, conversed in Pidgin English, let me play their games badly and laughed and smiled a lot. I played up the fact that I was young, raw and a poor student.I found no political activity worth investigating. Ghana was a one-party police state and that side of things was all locked up. Nima’s migrants found government to be predatory and remote. No-one wanted to discuss politics with me. Casting around for another topic, I could not help noticing the vitality of street commerce, not just roadside vendors, but mobile dealers in everything from refrigerators to marijuana. I was being drawn into local society through a variety of economic transactions -- exchanging currency, shopping, paying rent and wages, making gifts, loans and bribes, gambling -- all of which challenged my assumptions concerning what is normal. So I embarked on the road to what became eventually the informal economy. In retrospect, Nima revived my liberal economic upbringing in Manchester and, for the time being, modified the socialist politics of my youth. My fieldwork style was conversational. A woman might come to me for money to help her sell sugar lumps outside her door. I would ask her about the selling price – four lumps for a penny. A quick calculation showed that five for a penny would still make a profit and she would undercut the competition. Yes, she said, but the other women would beat me up. That’s how I learned. But I was ignorant of the history that might help me to account for my commercial skills. Ghanaians wore cloth from my home town, Manchester, but I had little idea what it meant.I soon realized that I would have to learn an indigenous language. Hausa was a lingua franca, but most people spoke their own language at home. I decided to pick a group that had been studied intensively in the countryside, preferably by one of my teachers. It did not take long to choose the Tallensi, who were now known as Frafra and whose ethnographer was Meyer Fortes. I was fascinated by the migrants' ability to combine mundane urban occupations -- shit collector, taxi driver, pimp, and houseboy -- with a strong sense of their traditional vocation. They seemed able to contain this diversity -- or what seemed to me a contradiction -- with ease. This led me to trace their relations with home, 800 km away in the West African savannah. Eventually, over more than two years, I carried out further fieldwork in Ghana's second city, Kumasi, in Bolgatanga -- the main town of the Frafra homeland -- and Tongo, the village where Fortes was based in the 1930s. In this way I shadowed the migrants’ translocal society, spanning rural and urban areas.I had two rooms, one for sleeping and working, one for eating and storage. There was no running water, electricity or sanitation. We used buckets and kerosene lamps. At first I was committed to using statistical methods. But, after compiling a sophisticated questionnaire asking respondents to rank local notables of various kinds, no-one would answer it. “We are small people; we can’t talk about big men”. I dropped that idea. I hired a language teacher for formal instruction, but didn’t seem to get anywhere. Then I fell ill with hepatitis B and on my way into hospital collected the three biggest paperbacks I could find in the university bookshop. These included T. E. Lawrence’s Pillars of Wisdom. At one point he asks, “How can a white man with limited language skills pass for an Arab?” His answer was to talk fluently and your mistakes will be attributed to being from the wrong tribe. When I recovered, I set out to learn my adopted language orally like a child, with fluency my motto. Before long, one visitor said he had never heard an anthropologist speak an African language so fluently…with a Manchester accent.Nima was a tough place. The first night I slept there, a corpse was found hanging from a tree outside my window. It was not suicide. The police made intermittent raids to snatch some felon or another. Then the post mortem would try to identify the informant and I was the number one suspect, the only white man for miles around. And my presence interested the authorities. The Special Branch was on my case, with half a dozen operatives put on my case. Their leader once asked me, “Do you understand what is meant by code, Mr. Hart?” I nodded. “We have to know six languages to get into the Special Branch and none of us knows the one you are learning. So we think you want to send messages in code to the opposition in exile.” People I spoke to were often harassed afterwards. It got so bad that I feared being deported. I asked the head of the sociology department at the University of Ghana for a letter saying that I was not a CIA spy. “How do I know you are not?” was his reasonable reply. Later he told me he had seen my name on a list for deportation and decided I was already a lost cause. I could see my research career going up in smoke, but I was saved by the February 1966 coup against Kwame Nkrumah’s government.Crossing the lineThe president’s palace was nearby and we could hear the bullets pinging off the zinc roofs in the valley of slums below. Next day a small patrol came to fetch me. The corporal, sweating and high on something, pushed his Kalashnikov into my stomach and made me raise my hands. “We understand that you are a Russian agent who escaped from Flagstaff House to plot subversion here.” “I don’t look Russian, do I?” “Yes, you do – you have a beard.” “I don’t talk like a Russian.” “You Russians are very good at learning languages.” “I have a British passport.” “You Russians are good at forging those things.” “The local police know I am a research student.” “Our police are very corrupt. You must have bribed them.” By this point, a crowd had gathered, as they do. A friend was making signs at me past the corporal’s shoulder and I smiled weakly in defeat. “So you think we are funny, do you?” He jabbed the gun into me and my legs gave way. They took me off for the weekend to a police station now doubling as an interrogation center. I was beaten up badly, but all I could think of was saving my graduate career. It never occurred to me that I might not survive. On Monday morning a British-trained army officer came and told me to get lost. My fieldwork took off after that. The crisis forced me to rethink my relationship to the law. I couldn’t stay in limbo where I was, neither one thing nor the other. I decided I would have to leave or cross the line to their side of the law, with the same risks and vulnerability. My landlord was always short of money and this was a handicap for a receiver of stolen goods. Sometimes, rather than send a thief away empty-handed, he would borrow cash from me. So we became partners, not just in crime, but in a series of once-off enterprises, where I put up the money, Asaa supplied the expertise, I got the field-notes and we split the profits 50-50. We had two gangs, “night people” (burglars) and “day people” (pickpockets). I once went out with the latter. One of them identified the mark and provided obstruction if necessary; the other was the pick. I noticed that the first pointed to the mark while rubbing his nose. Afterwards I asked why this gesture and was told that they fear most a mark who is local. Locals look at the ground in front, strangers look around with their noses in the air. I became a moneylender and foreign currency dealer; forged receipts for stolen goods; and fenced drugs seized by the police. I was one of only a few people, apart from Lebanese shopkeepers, who knew the difference between hard and soft currencies; the thieves certainly didn’t.We tried “legitimate” speculation, such as hoarding maize against seasonal price fluctuations. Asaa hadn’t done this before, but it seemed that every year the price doubled between harvest-time and six months later. We found hidden expenses and worse. First, a porters’ ring took a cut just for lifting each bag onto the ground. The bags needed to be turned out periodically to avoid rot and we bought insecticide against the weevils. Then, just when the price had doubled, American PL480 aid flooded the country with maize and the price went back to what we paid originally. To recover our costs, we had to sell the bags on credit with all the hassle that involved. I learned the hard way that there is more to trade than the headline rate of profit.I never had another grant after the first year; I financed myself. The money I made became an embarrassment. I tried giving it away. At one point I employed seven research assistants; hosted sheep, rice and beer parties; made gifts of blankets and sandals to old people. But this redistribution only increased my renown as a big man. There were two social positions in the migrant community – a floating sea of single young men and married elders whose houses were islands of stability in the flow. I moved over time from one class into the other. I did manage to get rid of the money before I left. It just took extra effort.I was arrested four times, twice by the army for espionage and twice by the police for receiving. The last of these was the most serious. I had been away for the weekend and came back to what sounded like a football match. The center of the crowd was our house and police dogs were keeping onlookers at bay. Asaa told me quietly, “They have got the radio, but it’s alright, they only want chop (to eat bribes)”. The radio was a Grundig Satellit that I had fenced and then sold to a neighbor, a Muslim priest called Mallam Hamidu. He later pawned it back to me as security for a loan. I had given him a false receipt, as I did for all Asaa’s stolen goods. (I signed them with the name of an expatriate academic who had just left the country). I also took the precaution of filing off the number from the radio’s identification plate. Now I had been caught without any documents and they had the radio on a list.There is a position in the police force designed to handle bribes -- the Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP). If you need to bribe your way out of a situation, it is no good throwing money at all and sundry. You must pay off someone senior enough to control all the small fry, but not too expensive. That’s the ASP. Also, you don’t say, “OK, I did it. Who do I need to pay?” We sat around his swimming pool, sipping gin and tonic while loudly proclaiming my innocence.A Ghanaian lawyer once told me, “I don’t mind our police being corrupt. What offends me is that they are so cheap!” “I know that you are a man of integrity”, the ASP said. “But unfortunately the police force is full of mean-spirited men who will make trouble for you unless I persuade them with money.” We agreed on a sum of G?135 (or almost two years rent). The desk sergeant must not have received his cut, since he made life difficult for me. There has to be a legitimate story to protect the corrupt policemen. Ours was that I now had a receipt from Mallam Hamidu (who in turn had one forged by me). The sergeant claimed that an Arabic signature was not valid without the presence of the signatory. I had to bring in the Mallam. But he had gone missing. He went on a money-doubling expedition in Accra’s rural hinterland. This means turning up in a village, impressive in white robes and red fez, and offering to double any money placed overnight in a suitcase. The villagers are suspicious, but someone tries depositing five pounds. Next morning it has miraculously become ten and everyone else piles in. The Mallam then does a midnight flit with the full suitcase. This time Hamidu had been caught and was now being held in custody. So I needed someone else to be him. I had a friend in the drugs trade, only in his twenties, but a pious Muslim with good Arabic. When I asked him to put on some robes and come to the police station to validate my receipt, he flatly refused. But a few subtle threats changed his mind. The sergeant reluctantly gave me back the radio. Before I left Ghana, I sold it to the military governor of the Upper Region. After all, what could be cleaner than a white man’s goods off-loaded at the end of his tour of duty?I never told these stories in print before. Imagine what it was like in those pre-postmodern times, trying to conjure a doctoral thesis out of this material. I had to convert all my stories into the third person. I gave a talk in Chicago in 1983 where I revealed some of it. I was told by several senior professors to shut the hell up or I would compromise Anthropology Inc. as well as myself. This was the general attitude when I started out with my PhD, so I joined the development industry and saw the world another way.Money in my Ghana fieldworkAs soon as I arrived in Accra I headed to the university to meet an American professor who knew Jack Goody. I expected him to be interested in my research, but he just wanted to know whether I had hard currency. The official exchange rate was 1:1, a Ghanaian pound for one pound sterling, but he said he could get me an exchange rate of 1.5:1. I left it vague and asked around the town. The unofficial exchange rate was 3:1! This was the first of several culture shocks in those early days, usually involving economic transactions. I couldn’t believe that a senior academic would cheat a graduate student, newly arrived in a foreign country. I soon realised, however, that I was the cultural dope. I had swallowed the idea that academics were an aristocracy of intellect who valued money less than ideas. This was not the last time when my assumptions about money and morality were challenged there.After I set up business with Asaa, I made regular trips to the university to check the exchange rates in the British newspapers. I knew the difference between hard and soft currencies and the petty thieves who brought us their pickings didn’t. This led to a tense moment just after the military coup that displaced Kwame Nkrumah. Around midnight an army truck turned up with some heavily armed and excited soldiers. They had found many boxes of Egyptian pounds in the bedroom of Nkrumah’s wife. They wanted us to buy them. I pointed out that she could spend the money when visiting Egypt, but it had no exchange value outside that country. What do you say to a disappointed soldier with a Kalashnikov? It was quite a relief when they left.A lot of the business was mundane. But one evening Asaa was over the moon. “We’re rich”, he shouted. He had just bought US$1650 for a bit more than ?50 (less than a tenth of the official exchange rate). At first, I thought it must be counterfeit and I complained that he didn’t wait for me. On closer inspection, I discovered that the dollars were in four notes: $1000 + $500 + $100 +$50. Odd. Only later did I notice the important part. The banknotes were issued by the Confederate States of America in the civil war. They were “greybacks”, not “greenbacks”. If they were ever legal tender (they weren’t), 1967 was more than 100 years after their issue. I gave Asaa his ?50 – he was used to the ups and down of informal commerce -- and kept the Confederate currency as a memento. They are somewhere in a box of field notes at home. There is quite a market for them today, on eBay and elsewhere. They may end up being an investment. Great efforts were taken with this 1861-64 issue to make each note highly particular, so that some have the value of rare books. It was inevitable, I suppose, that receiving and this currency trade leaked into moneylending. Here we enter an even greyer area—morally, ethically, and economically. But it was quite an education and I can’t imagine learning what I did without participating in it actively. I already made small loans to members of my household. Thus Atinga often borrowed from me to sustain his impoverished gin bar business. One day, I found that he had lent on some money that I had just loaned to help him tide over. I was pretty mad, but he pointed out that people often dunned him for repayment of loans and he could now send them after his debtor! The only way I could find out more about this ancient craft was by doing it myself. I decided to lend money formally to relative strangers. This was an eye-opener. We often read about the headline interest rate in informal finance – and they are astronomical, like 50% a month. But the key factor is the default rate, not the interest rate. No moneylender would admit to his default rate, since he needs the mystique that he does not allow default. I had a friend, a beer brewer, who was thought to be the richest Frafra woman; but she sold most of the beer on credit and sometimes could not find the cash to start a new brewing cycle. What she was rich in were young male clients who owed her money and could be put to various casual tasks, such as heavy lifting and sharing her bed.I concealed the dodgy source of some of my field notes when I returned to Cambridge. Those Confederate greybacks turned out to be an emotional rollercoaster, as did the Egyptian pounds in a different way. Money-changing and -lending expanded my network of thieves, confidants and friends. Money is a means of communication. I don’t know how I would have managed in Accra without it.Some enterprising friends in NimaPersonality and personal relations are indispensable to economic organization and especially to building something new. The term “entrepreneur” has many meanings. Families predominate in business history. But I prefer to think of “family” as a metaphor for people you know very well and are stuck with. What matters is not whether people are genetically related, but whether their mutual knowledge and trust can be the foundation of a durable partnership. Love and friendship serve the same purpose, often more reliably. This aspect of the modern economy hinges on the personal basis for making durable economic relations.The Frafras were fighting hill tribesmen who grew sorghum and raised livestock, an egalitarian people huddled together in densely packed settlements. Only a few were converts to Islam or Christianity and even fewer adults had some education. Their traditional society was based on descent groups, earth cults, clan alliances and marriage exchange. A pervasive ideology of kinship and ancestor worship provided the social glue linking larger corporate units to the flux of domestic life. Elders controlled most collective assets, such as land and cattle, and raiding between neighbors had traditionally reinforced group solidarity; but self-made men were commonplace.By the 1960s the Frafras were dispersed throughout Ghana. They worked as domestic servants, soldiers, petty traders and general laborers, but were stereotyped as thieves. They circulated between town and countryside, usually retaining an extended family network based on their home village. Out of a quarter million in Ghana, some 10,000 Frafras lived in Accra, many of them in Nima. My research gravitated towards the self-organized economic activities that sustained the majority of Nima’s inhabitants. I was captivated by what seemed a paradox: on the one hand the banal individualism of a Dickensian mob of water carriers, bread sellers, shit collectors, taxi drivers, pickpockets and bartenders; on the other the communal spirit of hill tribesmen who expected to end their days as custodians of ancestral shrines. I was impressed by the energy and ingenuity of their efforts to enrich themselves and by the inevitable failure of all but a few. It seemed as if the economy was being made, unmade and remade from day to day. The central task for everyone was to find a durable basis for livelihood and perhaps for accumulation. That was why even a poorly paid job was valued, as a stable core in the chaos of everyday life, an island in a sea of ephemeral opportunities. I came to think of this as the search for form, for the invariant in the variable, for regularity in a world constituted by flux, emergence and informality.I built up case records on 71 individuals. One in five had assets of more than ?10,000 when the minimum wage came to ?100 ($250) a year; half had accumulated more than ?2,000 or 20 years’ unskilled pay. Three were rich on a national scale. They usually maintained a diversified portfolio of investments on a part-time basis; few were committed to managing a single enterprise. In Nima a third were still employed for wages and a further half had been employed recently. The most common medium of investment was housing for rent, followed by trade, bars, construction, machinery for hire and moneylending. A third of the sample owned commercial transport, the riskiest and most lucrative form of investment. Many included illegal enterprise in their portfolio. There were more Muslims and Christians than the national average for this group. I never thought of them as a class, but rather as individuals. That came later. The following examples are two petty operators in more detail, a medium-sized entrepreneur who was a sociological curiosity and a rich soldier with scores of hangers on, discussed here only briefly.Atinga lived in the same house as me; in return for occasional loans, he allowed me to keep records of his economic transactions. He was given a medical discharge from the army at Christmas 1965. He was 28 years old, had been in Southern Ghana for nine years and now lived with his wife and a brother’s teenage son. He was without work and had not yet been paid any gratuity; but he had ?10 from his last pay packet. At first he thought of going home to farm; but the prospect of getting another job in Accra was more attractive. This meant that he had to finance the period of his unemployment, so he set up as a retailer of crude gin (akpeteshi).First he converted his room (rent ?3 a month) into a bar-cum-living quarters by hanging a cloth down the center and piling his possessions on both sides. Chairs and a table, bought for 15s. (20 shillings to the pound), occupied the public section. For next to nothing he got hold of some small plastic glasses, an assortment of used bottles and an old, rusting funnel. These were placed on the table. Atinga then went to a distiller nearby and bought a four-gallon drum of akpeteshi for ?5.10s. He handed over what was left (just under ?4) to his wife for food, borrowed ?4 from me to help pay the rent and opened up his business on New Year’s Eve.The retail price of gin was fixed throughout Nima at 6s. a bottle and smaller quantities in proportion. Allowing for wastage, receipts from a drum ought to come to ?8. Profit margins could be increased by buying the gin for as cheaply as ?4 a drum, depending on quality and method of payment (cash or credit). Atinga bought the best gin at first, in order to attract a clientele and because he knew that high turnover compensated for reduced profit. His main problem was with extending credit. Because his customers were poor and improvident, he could only keep up sales by offering generous credit facilities. But he also needed cash to replenish his stock and feed his family. His average daily expenditure was 7 - 8s. or ?14-15 a month, including rent. So he had to sell a lot of gin. He also tried to diversify; but his wife’s attempt to sell sugar lumps foundered under a saturation of local competition and his own Coca Cola business failed for lack of a refrigerator.After a few weeks Atinga faced a major crisis. He had overextended credit to the tune of ?14 (a third of total sales) in order to keep up a turnover of one gallon a day. Some of his customers were clearly out to take him for a ride before they moved on to the next inexperienced operator. Others simply did not have the money to pay. His gin supply ran out just before January payday and he lacked the means of replenishing it. He weathered this crisis by borrowing again; otherwise his clients would have taken their custom and their debts away. He secured enough repayment of credit to go on and started insisting more often on cash from his customers. This slowed down business, but he kept a small, regular clientele (mostly young men from his home village) who came to him whatever the quality of his gin. This allowed him to economize by buying gin at ?4 a drum.By now Atinga saw that his bar could only ever be a side line, a supplement to a more substantial source of income, in other words, a job. Moreover, his wife was pregnant. He tried to get back into the army, leaving his wife to look after the bar. Attempts to diversify in trade failed for lack of capital and expertise. When things were bad, his landlord’s wives helped out with food. Meanwhile he lent and borrowed money to roughly equal effect, in the hope that he could pass on his creditors to his own debtors. A backlog of rent was his greatest debt. After his narrow escape, turnover steadied out at four or five drums a month, giving him a monthly income of between ?10 and ?12, rather more than the minimum wage. Moreover, this income was being eventually realized as cash, since he was only owed ?12 in April (of which some ?5 had been written off as bad debt).The remainder of 1966 saw a gradual decline in the fortunes of Atinga’s bar, if not in his total income. In September he took a job as a watchman at 8s. a day, leaving his wife to look after their customers. Turnover, however, slowed to a trickle and his wife consumed most of the gin. Occasionally trade was boosted by a once-off enterprise, like the purchase of a stray dog for sale as meat and soup. At times like this the bar did roaring business for a brief spell. More often, it was empty at night because he had no gin to sell or his customers no money or both. In December Atinga’s wife gave birth to a son. In February 1967 the military bureaucracy got round to paying him ?40 as an advance on his gratuity. The bar took on a new lease of life, ?20 being spent on wood for a counter, partition, door and shelves. Atinga even bought a gin-seller’s license. He did not, however, pay off any of his accumulated debts. For a few weeks he used the remainder of his capital to keep up an artificial rate of business; but he was soon back in the vicious circle of credit and turnover.In May he lost his job as a watchman, but was lucky to be accepted almost immediately for training as an escort policeman (a colonial hangover distinguished by wearing a red fez and khaki puttees). This took him in June off fortraining and he could only visit his wife and child at weekends. On one of these visits, in August 1967, his landlord threw him out of the house on suspicion that he had been the informer behind a police raid on the premises. The room and all its wooden fittings were seized in partial compensation for ?32 owed in rent. Atinga left Nima with his family and the gin bar enterprise was at an end. His landlord’s wife took it over, but she was unsuccessful since she offered no credit whatsoever. Some twenty months of unemployment and intermittent wage employment had been negotiated by means of an informal operation which was always rickety, but it had been the main basis of Atinga’s family’s survival in the city. His story shows that being “out of work” in a society entirely devoid of social security need not lead to destitution or dependence on others. Atinga was rather unimaginative, well-suited to the lower orders of the army or police force. Even so, he showed some economic initiative in the face of adversity.?Atia had been hawking a camera around with intermittent success: the problem was that his customers did not like to wait for the film to be completed and business was often slow. His breakthrough came when he persuaded the principal of a girls’ secondary school to let him take the girls’ photographs at weekends. Many others had tried without success; but his “sweet” approach worked. He spent ?10 on chickens, eggs and gifts of money before receiving permission. Trade was brisk: every weekend he got through two or three rolls of film “cutting” the girls. Whenever they saw him, they all wanted to send photos to their boyfriends and families. Some asked to be taken in the nude: “I was trusted by all of them. They knew that I was there for the money, that’s all. If one of them asked me to stay and do something with her, another would call for a photo before anything happened.” He generally asked for an advance payment of half the cost. Those who paid an advance wrote their names in a book, although he was himself illiterate. This was to stop any false claims; but he usually worked on the basis of mutual trust. If the photos he had developed were refused, he could not force them to pay. He rejected force, he said, because they might gang up on him and stop buying his pictures altogether. So he relied on good will. If he heard that a girl had paid for a picture she did not like and later tore it up, he would do her a new set free.Sometimes Atia “fell down” when he spoiled the whole negative and had to refund all the advances. He claimed that his average rate of profit was 50% on expenses. Good photos fetched more or less whatever he asked for. If a customer was pleased, she might not ask for change from a large banknote. He reduced his production costs by buying from the same wholesale supplier and using one enlarger, both of whom sometimes extended credit. So the profit from two films in a single weekend, although variable, could be substantial, adding up to more than a full week’s wages as a domestic servant. Later Atia had to give up photography after joining the army. He was put on a charge for spending too many weekends outside the barracks. Despite the increases in army pay after the 1966 coup, he was chronically in debt and looked with nostalgia to those secondary school weekends as a time when he was free. Atia’s enterprise was short-lived and unstable. He depended on the patronage of a headmistress and on his ability to step through a minefield of adolescent girls. Having failed to place his enterprise on a more secure footing, he fell back on a reliable job. Even so, his willingness to invent the conditions of participation in the market economy, rather than accept passively whatever its formal institutions had to offer, was typical of Frafra migrants in Nima.Atibila was an army sergeant in Accra. His father had been a soldier. In his youth he had known great hardship; but during the 1950s and 1960s he had accumulated two houses, a mini-bus, a corn mill and several other income-generating assets. A monogamous Christian, he lived with his wife, a trader, while his five children attended missionary schools. He tended to stay aloof from the migrant community. Atibila had not been home in the North for twenty years, wanted to have nothing to do with Frafras and sought only to provide for his conjugal nuclear family’s security through his own endeavors. He rejected traditional religion (“You cannot vote for two parties at the same time”), co-operation with kinsmen and all the institutions, like mutual aid societies and funeral parties that promoted ethnic solidarity in the city. Rather he was a model exponent of rational economic behavior, monogamous seclusion and personal asceticism. Atibila had not been reading functionalist sociology at evening classes. There was enough observable fact to make his story credible. He was certainly perceived as being socially isolated. But I later discovered that he was heavily involved with kinsmen and other Frafras; visited home regularly; wanted his children to retain their ethnic identity; and, as a lineage elder back home, had a much more equivocal attitude towards traditional religion in practice.Anaba was 40 years old, the second son of a poor farmer, and now a staff sergeant in charge of army meat supplies in Accra, a job with built-in opportunities for personal profit. He owned five houses and nine commercial vehicles which, together with numerous trading and investment activities, brought in an annual income of around ?20,000. He had 11 wives and 17 children, a household of 80 people, scores of clients and dependents. In addition to these outgoings, he financed a successful bid by his brother for the chiefship of their village. Soon afterwards he left the army and went home to farm. There he suffered a catastrophic economic decline and lost most of his wives and hangers on.Transport is at the other end of the spectrum of migrant enterprise. The abandoned hulks that litter Ghana’s roadsides offer silent testimony to the risks involved in running a truck, an estate wagon (“Peugeot”) or a minibus (“Benz”). But the potential rewards are high. If you buy a commercial vehicle, there are three things you can do with it: drive it yourself, hire a driver, or sell to a driver on a hire purchase basis (“work and pay”). No-one who spends his days behind a wheel is in a position to accumulate. Most naive operators would opt for hiring a driver, since the prospective profit is greater and the wage costs are fixed. This is why they often fail: a wage employee has no incentive to maintain the vehicle or to be honest with the takings. One alternative is to make a driver pay the owner an agreed sum daily; but again he has no stake in the vehicle and there is nothing to stop him making common cause with a fitter to supply inflated repair bills or to say that the truck was off the road when it wasn’t. The most secure method is to sell the vehicle to its driver on an installment plan and make him responsible for maintenance. This method was pioneered in Ghana by Lebanese traders. Some owners would run the risk of paying wages to a driver while a vehicle was new and later sell it second-hand on a work-and-pay basis.Anaba evolved his own method of running a transport business after several false starts. He would buy driving licenses for young men from his home area and let them serve an apprenticeship on someone else’s taxi until he was convinced they were a good risk. When he had enough cash in hand to buy a vehicle for ?2-3,000, he would pick out one from his pool of clients, many of whom lived in his large household. He would then write up a contract, adding ?1,000 to the price, and sell it to the driver at a rate of repayment of ?10 a day, with a clause giving him the right to seize the bus if the driver missed three successive days’ payments. The driver was responsible for maintenance; but, if he got into difficulties, Anaba would pay for the repairs and add the cost to the total bill. This arrangement minimized the length of time a vehicle might lie idle. Most drivers took up to one and a half years to buy their bus or taxi. Anaba stayed aloof from the lorry park system in Ghana which was controlled by Muslims. Kinship ties, self-reinforcing agreements and legal contracts played a more important role in his enterprise than friendship or trust. He was not a trusting man, in contrast to Atia, the unsuccessful photographer; and this was why he preferred hire purchase over employing drivers.Most impersonal written contracts were worthless at our end of society. But personal relationships are created over time; so that exchange in Nima was largely a learning process. People found out by trial and error what worked for them; and the failure rate was extremely high. Accordingly, although the market economy was what most economists would think of as competitive, ease of entry was severely restricted by the need to develop effective social tactics and techniques of information management. The contrasting cases of Atia and Anaba make it clear that there is no straightforward relationship between successful enterprise and an ability to make friends or engender trust. Anaba, the rich transport entrepreneur, relied on a combination of kinship and contract, while Atia the hustler made trust the cornerstone of his activities. Frafras relied on trust as a last resort, for good reasons. Trust is essential to dealing, as the game theorists know, with their suckers, free-riders and lemons. But the routines of productive enterprise are not easily managed by an ethos of personal freedom. Kinship and contract each offer a more durable model for hierarchy and control, parental and legal sanctions respectively. This is why traditional rural society has room only on the margins for achieved relations of friendship and why trust accumulates in the cracks of mass societies organized by states and markets.Back to readingTwo years in Ghana revealed that I was programmed to think my education made me superior. This came home when I visited a remote village in the northern savannah, 500 miles from the coast. It was infested with river blindness (onchocerciasis) and people were dying who had been pushed by land shortage to settle too close to the Volta River. It had just stopped raining when I arrived; the thatched roofs were bedraggled, the air was hot and humid; no-one was to be seen. I felt that I had reached the end of the earth. I was bringing the outside world into these villagers’ drab lives. It was 1967 and I was 23 years old.Eventually I found the chief under an awning outside his compound, wearing only a jockstrap, while a woman and child played a bead game that I played well. He invited me to play with them and I won. He then agreed to talk. By then I spoke the language with some fluency. After a while he suddenly asked, “What do you think of Vietnam?” I was shocked. “What do you know about Vietnam?”“My son goes to secondary school and he listens to the BBC World Service. So who do you think is going to win?” “The Americans of course, they have all the money, weapons, machines…” He shook his head, “I don’t think so – too many trees. The people will hide behind the trees.” “How do you know about the trees?” “I fought the Japanese in Burma during the war. We drew them into the jungle where we fought better than they did.” By now my bubble was well and truly deflated. Most of my information came from Time magazine. This guy had seen more of the world than I had. But he wouldn’t let me go yet. “Do you know how long it took you British to get us out of our hills when all we had were bows and arrows? 25 years! In the end, they had to bring up heavy artillery to get us out. I don’t think the Americans will stay in Vietnam for 25 years, do you?” He gave me a guinea fowl to strap onto my scooter and I left, feeling less confident than when I came. Ghana taught me in so many ways not to assume that I knew better than people with less academic exposure than me. Global and local are not separate spheres of knowledge and experience; we all live in the world and have our points of local anchorage. Many of my anthropologist colleagues are among the most parochial people I have ever met; and I have known a number of working class autodidacts in Lancashire who could put them to shame.My doctoral fieldwork in Ghana was the last time that I did ethnographic research for a lengthy period. I found it impossible, despite trying for seven years, to convert my thesis into a monograph. In contrast, a decade after I completed my doctorate, I found it easy to write a literature review on West African agriculture, something I knew nothing about. When combined with my training as a student of ancient literature, this experience set me on a course than I have never abandoned since. I read books in order to write about them. At least that way I control the means of intellectual production rather than depending on funding bureaucracies. Half a century later, that time in Ghana shaped me more than any other. Africa will always be on my mind, a song to light up my darkness, like the Hoagie Carmichael tune made famous by Ray Charles.Chapter 6Academic, development consultant and family man (1969-1976)After completing my PhD in social anthropology, I decided to join the development industry in order to know more about the macro-political organization of the successor to colonial empire. While employed in universities during the 1970s, I moonlighted for The Economist and undertook several high level consultancies on development policy. I was accredited with the discovery of “the informal sector” at this time.Anthropology and developmentWhen I returned from Ghana to Cambridge, I was told more than once that studying the low life of an African slum was “not anthropology”. I responded by producing seminar papers on life histories of individuals such as Anaba and Asaa. I was frustrated by the intellectual level of the department’s weekly seminars. Fortes, Leach and Goody would snipe at each other while we, the graduate students, sat quietly at the back taking notes; and comparative discussion often consisted of swapping ethnographic stories. Once I complained about this mindless empiricism; Meyer Fortes told me privately, “You are too rational, Keith; anthropology is not a rational discipline”. He was kidding, of course, especially in relation to himself.My sense of drowning in a swamp of exotic trivia was confirmed by another seminar series that Jack and Esther Goody ran for students of Ghana. Everyone was so familiar with the terrain that the conversation consisted mainly of named persons, places and identities without conceptual analysis. One year, two distinguished Ghana specialists visited Cambridge, a historian and an economist; they were not invited to join us because “they would ask distracting questions”. I thought of this as the “Ghanaiology” seminar and resolved never to become a regional specialist. Then Professor Fortes raised with me the possibility of a post-doc fellowship at Kings College where we would collaborate on Tallensi studies and I would get the next available department lectureship. I could teach “primitive and peasant economics, like Raymond Firth”. I declined the offer.When I finished writing my thesis, I felt that I understood Accra’s street economy as well as its denizens. But, like them, I had no explanation for the great events that had shaken Ghana a decade after independence: the collapse of the world cocoa price, the ensuing scarcity of goods, the army coup that overthrew Nkrumah, the political shift to the right. I had an elective affinity with the lawless trade of Accra’s slums. My method had been less to record the practices of Nima’s inhabitants than to participate in and challenge them as an entrepreneur in my own right. I knew nothing of the history that might help me to account for my situation there. So I set out to learn more about the history of colonialism and of its successor, “development”. I wanted to enter the world of governments and international agencies. I joined an academic consultancy organization at the University of East Anglia; and for much of the 1970s I carried out an intermittent ethnography of the development industry as a high-level policy adviser. While at Norwich I transformed my Accra ethnography into a way of entering debates with economists about urban unemployment in the Third World. The lasting success of the informal economy concept in development studies is still a mystery to me. I undertook development consultancies in the Cayman Islands, Papua New Guinea and Hong Kong and West Africa, while lecturing at the Universities of East Anglia, Manchester, Yale and Michigan. I tried unsuccessfully to convert my doctoral research into a published monograph. My first book was instead a literature review of agricultural development in West Africa commissioned by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). I had married as a graduate student almost as soon as returning from Ghana to Cambridge. My wife, Nicky and I moved house four times, accumulated some real estate wealth in a period of inflation, had a child and were divorced before the decade was out.My Norwich job combined teaching with paid development consultancies. My first lecture was on Karl Marx and Max Weber. I had rehearsed this topic countless times in Cambridge tutorials, so I decided to improvise the lecture. I was shocked on arrival to discover that the room was arranged as a rectangle of tables. In Cambridge I lectured from a raised podium. The room was almost full and I had to squeeze in among some forty students. Worse, I had agreed that my wife and her mother could attend. After 15 minutes, I dried up; I asked for questions and an American graduate student posed one. I spun out an answer for four minutes and stalled again, then wound up the lecture and left the room. I hand-wrote my lecturers for 20 years before launching myself as a performer again.Most of my colleagues were development economists, so I had to talk to them. Our exchanges would go something like this:Economist: Is the marginal productivity of agricultural labor zero in Northern Ghana?KH: What do you mean? E: I am thinking of Arthur Lewis’s dualistic theory of labor migration between traditional and modern sectors. He assumed that people could leave the former without reducing total output there. K: Does it make any difference what they make from working in agriculture? E: What do you mean? K: Most of the farm work is done by young men, but their elders control distribution of the product. If they leave to work in the town, whatever they get there is their own and more than what they have at home. E: What do you call that kind of organization? K: Unilineal descent groups. A French Marxist, Pierre-Philippe Rey, has written about the “lineage mode of production” in West Africa. E: And you say economists like jargon! There is a new version of the Lewis model by Harris and Todaro that makes migration hinge on rural-urban income expectations. K: Maybe we should collaborate on an article, “The lineage mode of distribution: a reflection on the Lewis model”. I could make a satisfactory livelihood by acting as a broker from anthropology to economics and back again. But I wanted to change both disciplines by synthesizing them. I used to half-joke that I wanted to win the Nobel prizes in economics and literature -- for the same book! I would have to learn to communicate in the economists’ language, since they were professionally dominant in development. “The informal sector”My Norwich conversations had the unexpected consequence of launching me as the contested founder of a major concept in development studies. It was known initially as the informal sector, later as the informal economy and nowadays just as informality. The idea saw light during the world crisis of the early 70s – a sequence of events that took in America’s losing war in Vietnam, the dollar’s detachment from gold in 1971, the invention of money market futures the following year and the dismantling of the Bretton Woods regime of fixed parity exchange rates. This was soon followed by a world depression induced by the oil price hike of 1973, then by a glut of petrodollar loans that ended up as the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s. “Stagflation” in the West (high unemployment and inflation) prepared the way for Reagan, Thatcher and their imitators from 1979-80 onwards. After the “modernization” boom of the 60s, the notion that poor countries could become rich by emulating the West gave way to gloomier scenarios around 1970, fed by zero-sum theories of “underdevelopment”, “dependency” and “the world system”, not to mention French Marxism. In development policy-making circles, this trend manifested itself as fear of “Third World urban unemployment”. Cities there were growing rapidly, but without growth in “jobs”, conceived of as regular employment by government and business corporations. At this time, Keynesians and Marxists alike held that only the state could manage development and growth. There were a few liberal economists around, but none influenced policy. The question was: how are “we” (the bureaucracy and its academic advisors) going to provide the people with the jobs, health, housing etc. they need? And what will happen if we don’t? The specter of urban riots and even revolution raised its head. Some advocated forcibly returning the urban mob to the countryside where they could do less damage. “Unemployment” evoked images of the Great Depression, of broken men huddling on street corners (“Buddy, can you spare a dime?”).This story didn’t square with my fieldwork experience in the slums of Accra. The people I lived with were working, often for inadequate and erratic returns, but they weren’t unemployed! The result was a paper for a 1971 conference on “Urban unemployment in Africa” at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. I called it “Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana”. My aim was to persuade development economists, from the perspective of my ethnography, to abandon the “unemployment” model and accept that there was more going on in the grassroots economy than their bureaucratic imagination allowed for. I had two sections: the first was a vivid description of the economic activities I had witnessed (“I have been there and you haven’t”); the second sought to engage their interest in development theory, using a jargon picked up from colleagues in the Norwich development group. I had no ambition to coin a concept, just to insert a particular vision of irregular economic activity into the debates of development professionals. It was a classic move in the genre of “realism”, making visible what had been hitherto invisible. I left it open whether the activities I presented contributed substantially to development or not. Many conference participants seemed to be enthused by my paper, but not the organizers, led by two famous development economists, Richard Jolly and Hans Singer. A book of the conference was envisaged and we all went home.A year later, a team of authors led by Jolly and Singer published a book. This addressed the perceived Third World economic crisis within a framework, “growth with redistribution”, recently articulated by Robert McNamara, head of the World Bank. The report’s central plank was “the informal sector”, a sphere of small-scale, self-employed, non-mechanized economic activities which, they felt, alleviated the unemployment problem there. Not only did it add to the urban poor’s resources, but it could promote significant bottom up development. The authors made no mention of me. At the same time, we were told that the book of the conference had been scrapped.This caused a minor scandal. Several conference participants published notes or mentioned that “the informal sector was Keith Hart’s idea”. This wasn’t strictly true, since I didn’t like the term – it suggested that formal and informal activities were in different places, like agriculture and manufacturing, whereas they were inseparable dimensions of the modern economy, weighted towards informality for the urban poor. I had identified some aspects of economic life, but not an autonomous field; and it would not solve the development problem. But I became more closely associated with the concept than if my role had been acknowledged in the normal way. Peter Worsley, professor of sociology at Manchester, urged me to publish a Penguin reader on “the informal sector” since “this could be your most important contribution”. If it was, I said, I would rather give up now. I had recently converted to Marxism. But he was right, if by important we mean what we are best known by. The Sussex team in 1973 published a 450-page Penguin reader on the employment problem that included the second half of my conference paper, but not the vivid ethnographic description. A reviewer commented that “the essence of the author’s thesis is blunted considerably in….Hart’s article on the informal sector in Ghana”. I don’t recall being consulted on the inclusion of my truncated unpublished paper. David Kimball, the editor of the Journal of Modern African Studies, was outraged by all this and wrote to me saying that he could publish my article on a fast track. It came out with the same title as my conference paper and is now routinely cited as the original source for a new field of inquiry. Later at Yale, I asked my head of department how I should support a claim for a raise; he told me to get an offer from somewhere or use the Citations Index. I eventually located one and discovered that my article was already famous. I still get scores of citations for it every month. The ILO Kenya report did want to coin a concept and that is what the informal sector became, a keyword helping to organize a field of intellectual politics. The “informal economy” has a double provenance reflecting its two sides, bureaucracy (the ILO report) and the people (my Accra ethnography). I dropped the idea until the late 1980s, when its persistence encouraged me to reclaim it. Sometimes plagiarism pays off for the victim.Back to ManchesterI returned to Manchester to teach in the university’s department of social anthropology. I combined this with writing reports for The Economist, working as a development consultant and establishing my reputation as an author of “the informal economy”. For much of the time I lived in the Pennines hills some 15-20 miles from the city, mostly in the Rossendale Valley, a place I later got to know better when teaching in Cambridge. This was a purer version of working class culture than anything I had known in Manchester. Economic life was more diversified there than the conventional picture of early industrial capitalism implies. I did some amateur ethnography and local history and read more systematically about Lancashire in the nineteenth century. I reached a clearer understanding of class as I experienced it when growing up.By the time I arrived, the Manchester School of social anthropology was almost over. Max Gluckman himself was in Israel most of the time and he died there in 1975. A new department of sociology had been created out of former members not long before. Emrys Peters was head of a department that contained members of the next generation trained by himself and Gluckman. Peters pursued a policy of diversification, bringing to Manchester a group of four outsiders who were grafted onto what had been a homogeneous group. My task, ironically, was to teach a joint course on urban anthropology. The Manchester School had by then moved on.I had heard the stories about how Max Gluckman forced his lecturers to go to Manchester United matches. The tradition was still alive in my time. I found it odd to join a group of foreigners shouting ineptly for my team and I soon dropped out. This was an interesting moment in British cultural history. In the 1950s, on radio and television discussion programs, A.J. Ayer broke new ground by confessing publicly to his abiding passion for Spurs. British intellectuals did not admit to an interest in popular culture before. Soon others followed suit, with Max Gluckman prominent among them in Manchester, giving radio lectures on serious topics that were laced with references to Bobby Charlton. Max was a pioneer of this transformation from the ossified hierarchy of the 1950s to the synthesis of high and low cultures in the sixties. We moved to live in Manchester when my wife was pregnant. I married Nicky while were both Cambridge graduate students and, when I got a job in Norwich, she moved her PhD there. The Manchester job soon followed and we bought a house in Saddleworth, but after a year moved to Rawtenstall in Northeast Lancashire when she got a research job in Preston. I recall the energy crisis of 1973. For the first time taking jobs wherever they came up and commuting any distance in two cars seemed already outmoded. Nicky was appointed lecturer in sociology at Salford University near central Manchester; so we decided to make our fourth move in five years. This was a time of housing price inflation and, starting out with no savings, we soon accumulated considerable equity by borrowing more than we could afford and recouping more than our debts in a seller’s market.Moonlighting in the Cayman Islands, The Economist and FlorenceMy closest friend and interlocutor at Norwich was the economist, John Bryden. We later joined together in Aberdeen to write a book tgether. He knew the development situation in the Caribbean well and arranged for me to undertake a “manpower survey” of the Cayman Islands. In summer 1970 Nicky and I spent three months in Grand Cayman; we shared the fieldwork and I wrote up the report. This was early in the Cayman Islands’ rise as a notorious offshore facility for laundered money, gambling and tourism. Living in a beach hotel was idyllic; but the society was truly obnoxious. It was run by white racist crooks from North America, abetted by the bureaucratic detritus of the British Empire finding refuge from the anti-colonial revolution in a colony of 10,000 people. The Cayman Islanders believed that they were “white”, but they were not accepted as such. The workforce for the hotels, banks, construction and public services came from the surrounding Caribbean region, especially from Jamaica next door. And that was the problem. They were “black” and, if immigration continued for long at the present rate, they would become a majority in a society descended from British pirates.The British Development Division appointed me and Nicky to address this problem. After research of exhaustive virtuosity (I was an amateur then), my report concluded that reserving the Cayman Islands for Caymanians meant cut back on planning permission for new banks and hotels. Imposing an immigration quota on Jamaicans was not just disgustingly racist, but it would generate a labor shortage and wage inflation. Within a few months of submitting my report, permission was granted to Holiday Inns to build a hotel that added a third to the island's tourist capacity and an immigration quota was imposed on Jamaicans.Another social anthropologist was living on Grand Cayman at the time. Ulf Hannerz from Stockholm was engaged in fieldwork for a book. He largely avoided my crowd, choosing to stay with the natives in a low-rent, but respectable quarter. We met again in London next year at an anthropologists’ conference. One evening we were out drinking and Ulf left at 9 pm to prepare his presentation for tomorrow. We chided him for the waste of good drinking time, but he said he didn’t want to be typecast by the poor standards of anthropology conferences. He was a hit and they asked him to join a panel of worthies to sum up. I took his lesson to heart. I joined the Manchester department soon afterwards.Meyer Fortes was once asked in Chicago if anyone else had studied the Tallensi. There was someone, he said, but he gave it all up to study tourism in the West Indies. My baptism as a consultant in the Caribbean led to excursions in the high politics of development: a mission in 1972 to help write the development program for Papua New Guinea’s forthcoming independence and an enquiry into Hong Kong’s labor situation in 1976. In the first case I was listed as a “labor economist” and the second was a clandestine operation. They both advanced my ethnography of development policy elites. *******Soon after taking the Manchester job, an economist there asked me if I would be interested in writing reviews for the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) on some English-speaking West African countries – Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. The reviews were written in The Economist’s style. This was a high-priced product, sold to embassies, government departments, banks, and corporations with regional interests and any academics who could afford it. I was interested. The handover was done on the nod and I wrote five reviews a year for three years.EIU staffers would send me large envelopes stuffed with newspaper and magazine clippings, bank and government reports and some regional documents. I used this material to compile something I hoped would seem worth the money. I learned to write “economese” -- how to sound like an economist with no training in the discipline. But it went beyond that. Authors were anonymous and encouraged to be opinionated. The Economist cultivates an air of omniscience; and I simulated that air. When I sent off a report, I would bin the source material and move on with my life. This habit once got me into serious trouble.The government of Sierra Leone wanted to nationalize its iron mines. I read somewhere that the mines were stockpiling iron ore to keep up the asking price. I had just co-written the development strategies report for Papua New Guinea’s independence, where we found out how impenetrable were the figures supplied by the mining companies to the government. I wrote a paragraph based on this “intelligence”. My editor soon received a threatening letter from the Glasgow-based company that owned the Sierra Leone iron mines. They denied my assertions vigorously. She replied that the author’s scholarship was impeccable and he would soon supply the sources. But I had thrown them away! I no longer had the material, but certainly didn’t make it up. My editor bluffed it out and we never heard from them again. Perhaps they didn’t fancy confronting The Economist’s owner or the bad publicity, since the story was true. ******Also while at Manchester, I was invited to join the scientific steering committee for an international conference on economic anthropology in Florence. I found that it consisted of very famous people – with me the obvious exception. How this unknown Brit got onto the committee was a popular question. An organizer had asked Jack Goody about the best economic anthropologists in Britain and he said “If you want an older person, Mary Douglas, but for someone new, try Keith Hart.” The word got to Mary who opened up her presentation by saying “Keith Hart’s approach is old, mine is new”, then to me afterwards “Sorry about that, my real target was the French, but in the interest of the entente cordiale….”The Italian organizers had issued a manifesto about how economic anthropology could help to reform or even end capitalism. But the distinguished speakers just stood there and said “This is what I do and I am great” -- none of which addressed the issue of capitalism. Mary Douglas was right: my prepared paper was a pedestrian effort meant to endorse Meyer Fortes against his critics. I presented on the second day. During the first I noticed that the main speakers spoke too fast for the simultaneous translators and the large audience of young Italians couldn’t follow them. So I got up at 6 am, scrapped the paper I submitted and prepared a speech about the audience’s interests delivered at a translatable pace. It was much appreciated. At the tea break, a stunning Italian woman told me, “you must be a gangster” which I took as a compliment. When Nicky arrived at the end for a short trip to Venice, she was told, “Your husband stole the conference, Mrs. Hart”. We were all entertained by an aristocrat in a Tuscan town. I will never forget the food or his name: Duca Simone Velluti Zati di San Clemente. It was a wonderful trip.Papua New GuineaIn 1972 I joined a team appointed to draw up a development program for Papua New Guinea on the eve of its independence. It was headed by Mike Faber, a general economist, and the other three members were an agricultural economist, an industrial economist (mainly mining) and me, with a wide remit for employment, labor relations, education, health, social policy and local government. We spent three months in Australia and PNG, wrote a preliminary report and returned for discussions with the newly elected Pangu government. The second time we were reduced to two since the agriculture and mining experts had dropped out because of the “lunacy” advocated by Faber and Hart.We arrived in Australia when some 25 years of Liberal/Country Party rule was expected to give way to Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party. The Ministry of External Territories had been a Country Party fiefdom. We moved to PNG where we were given a whistle-stop tour. The agricultural economist had written his report before arrival. He handed in requests for the numbers he needed to the agriculture department before sunning himself on the beach and clubbing at night. I decided that PNG was nowhere as densely populated or commercially advanced as West Africa, but East Africa might be a more fruitful comparison. I pushed for a rural socialist government aiming at national self-sufficiency, like Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania.We soon ran into opposition on all fronts. The World Bank representative was a career officer who had an annual first-class ticket with Pan-Am to carry on his golf clubs so that he could head straight for the watering holes of the local elite on arrival. He believed in the World Bank’s mission to maximize the profits of transnational corporations. We proposed a strategy of grassroots development favoring the income of nationals. The government should license only a few foreign extractive enterprises and extract the highest possible revenues from them. The resulting central fund would be disbursed to rural regions for local development. The Bank’s man called this a “racist” deviation from the principle of leaving the “free market” to maximize economic growth.We met with hostility in the Commonwealth government and at the Australian National University, since both bureaucrats and academics resented our interference with their arrangements for stitching up PNG. The colonial administration was even worse. There were three secessionist movements in outlying districts. It looked like a reprise of the Congo, where the foreign powers colluded in Katanga’s independence to save Union Minière from interference by a left-wing national government. In PNG, however, the Australian government threatened to close down the operator’s Queensland nickel mines if they fostered rebellion in Bougainville. The stakes were enormous: an Australian subsidiary of Rio Tinto Zinc ran a huge copper mine in Bougainville that was also the largest gold mine in the world. When Nixon took the US dollar off gold, the gold price increased eightfold. The colonial government had signed a notorious contract, including a tax holiday that encouraged CRA to accelerate ripping the stuff out of the ground. We proposed scrapping this deal and starting again with nationalist assumptions. (Mike Faber was responsible for the 51% nationalization of Anglo-American’s copper mines in Zambia). The World Bank man, who believed that a contract was a contract, the Department of External Territories and all the rest treated this proposal as the end of the world. In this climate of confrontation, the team found itself reduced to two. Our return to Canberra saw more of the same. I walked into the glass doors of the hotel, smashing my spectacles and had to replace them with shades. Moving between air-conditioned offices and the steamy tropics gave me bronchitis. I appeared at meetings looking like a mafia don with shades, swigging from a bottle of cough mixture and barely able to speak. It was rough going. But one evening I was told, “You’re doing a great job, Keith. Let me buy you a drink”. It was the senior civil servant in the Commonwealth Treasury who had pushed for our appointment by UNDP. He explained why. He told me that PNG was a redistributive device for siphoning A$500 million a year from Australian taxpayers to three interest groups: trading oligopolies, civil servants and farmers (who dumped subsidized rice and dairy products in PNG). Faber and I were challenging this extractive system, while advocating both national autonomy and lower rates of Australian subsidy. Moreover, the bureaucracy was unusually fragmented given the opposition’s expected electoral victory.On the way back to Australia, Mike Faber and I stopped over in Singapore and I went out shopping. I lost my passport, wallet, travellers’ checks and air tickets. I figured one shop, where I had been trying out pens, was a likely candidate. But my things were not there. I drew a blank everywhere. It was 5pm on a Friday afternoon. The British High Commission said they were closing down for the weekend and recommended that I throw myself on the mercy of the Australian government. The Singapore government wouldn’t stop me leaving. I decided to go to the airport. When I reached the Qantas desk, the official reached under the counter and pulled out my missing valuables. “Is this what you are looking for?” It was indeed. The Chinese owner of the pen shop, who had been absent at first, discovered that his assistants had kept my things. He felt his honor had been impugned, looked at the time on my air ticket and drove out to the airport. I was flabbergasted and asked how I could thank him. The official suggested that I write a letter to the Straits Times mentioning his name, Thomas Ong, a name I will never forget. I did just that.Whitlam’s Labor did win the national election; and the first election of an indigenous PNG government was won by a left of center party that campaigned on the “Eight points of development”, taken from our work. The prime minister, Michael Somare told Faber and me, “Gentlemen, before you came, we only knew of one model for development. Now we know there are at least two.” The World Bank official and the head of the colonial administration’s planning office insisted that they had been in substantial agreement with us all along and hoped that the new government would use them to implement the development program. Mike and I, who had been close neighbors in a Norfolk village, drank a toast to ourselves in champagne on the return flight to Hong Kong. Outsiders usually think of government and corporate bureaucracies as intimidating and monolithic; but they are often fragmented and incoherent. Although those in charge defended the status quo, others who wanted their places were prepared to support us. On this occasion, it was possible to run an idea through the bureaucracy and win. Generally consultants legitimize decisions taken already; but sometimes they can make a difference, however temporary.I was struck in Ghana and Papua New Guinea by my unequal social power as a young white ignoramus on the fringes of colonial independence. But both experiences demonstrate how much research conditions are affected by the roles we are assigned by the societies we study. We should tell our students more often that the positions they occupy in a host society will affect the outcome of their research far more than theoretical approaches cooked up in the classroom. Hong KongOne day in 1976 H.A. (Bert) Turner, professor of industrial economics at Cambridge, phoned me up: “I need someone who can bullshit about Third World cities at a moment’s notice”, he said, “and I thought of you”. The story went as follows. James Callaghan’s Labor government was under pressure from the left to do something about Hong Kong. It was held scandalous that a Victorian capitalist colony could exploit cheap Asian labor under a socialist UK government (and undercut British competition). Callaghan promised a commission of enquiry into Hong Kong labor along the lines of a similar one on British labor relations. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office hit the roof. Britain maintained the fiction, for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), that Hong Kong was not a colonial state, but a municipal authority. A parliamentary enquiry would imply three Chinas, not just two. So the idea was quietly dropped and a low-key academic enquiry was proposed, unpublicized and even secret, whose report might be delayed until the heat went out of the issue. Bert Turner and I were the academic enquiry. I spent a few minutes considering the ethical and political dilemmas. But a month in Hong Kong overcame my doubts. Always the intrepid ethnographer!Hong Kong was going through the long boom of its transition to prosperity in the 1970s (Turner et al 1980). One reason was the gap between local and global inflation rates. The latter were running at 15% in 1976, whereas Hong Kong’s domestic rate was only 1%. This was largely attributable to rent, since wage goods (water, food, clothing etc.) were supplied by the PRC at prices set for their internal market. Almost all Hong Kong’s production was for export and employers could distribute the inflation bonus between profits and wages. The riots of the Cultural Revolution era were still fresh in mind and the bosses handed out wage increases freely to avert what they supposed was labor resistance directed by Beijing. So a Communist state and a Labor government colluded in creating the conditions for one of the world’s most successful capitalist economies. I envisaged writing a report saying that Hong Kong’s workers needed no help from the British government. But I had been commissioned to investigate Hong Kong’s labor market. This was supposed to be as free as anywhere. Milton Friedman made a television documentary highlighting Hong Kong as the best example of a free market in practice. Employers said that any attempt to rig wages would be thwarted by the mobility of workers who could use their lunch hour to shop around between factories in the same buildings, ready to exploit minor differences of pay. I didn’t believe it; but the contrary evidence was hard to find. Bert liked to show off, but I preferred stealth.In exchange for lunch and flattery, I advised businessmen on sending their daughters to Oxbridge or the Ivy League. One of them was the Director of Human Resources in Hong Kong’s second biggest company. We met for drinks at his golf club. I was later invited for dinner and a game of bridge. His wife was an English aristocrat (“You must be a clever boy to be at Cambridge and Yale”); they had a pile in Worcestershire. If I passed the cultural test, I might be treated to some confidences. In the middle of the game, my host said, “Didn’t you say you were a classicist once, Keith? I like to read the Oxford Book of Greek Verse before going to bed. Let me show you my favorite poem.” I couldn’t believe that my competence in ancient Greek would be tested, 14 years after I gave it up. But that was what he had in mind. My heart sank when he picked a passage from Pindar, the most obscure of poets. But the passage he singled out showed he was a bluffer too, who could only read schoolboy Greek. The passage was very simple and I congratulated him on the profundity of his choice. After the game, my friend asked me to stay behind for a brandy and said, “I believe you would like to know how the labor market works here.” He then revealed that the top dozen firms met every Wednesday lunch time and filled in a huge questionnaire, agreeing between themselves the wage for every job in Hong Kong. This was passed on to the government’s Labor Office who published it as their own survey. Everyone then negotiated on the basis of these published findings. The cotton spinners from Shanghai met in a tea house every Tuesday afternoon for the same purpose. I used this information in my report to undermine Hong Kong’s laisser faire capitalist image. But, by then, as predicted, the heat had gone out of the issue in British politics. A book came out some years later. I offer this example, warts and all, as a way of asking what anthropologists are prepared to give up in order to gain entry to “the flower of society”, whose conditions for playing ball with us are more stringent than poor people’s. My most vivid memories of that trip are both linguistic. I was interviewing a Shanghainese textile manufacturer with the help of a Cantonese interpreter. I asked where he got his raw materials from and the interpreter didn’t understand his reply. So he whipped out a used envelope and pencil for the manufacturer to write the character. “Ah! Swisserland”, the interpreter said. I was staying at the university on Victoria Island, but most of my work was in Kowloon, so that I had to take the Star Ferry. The taxi drivers claimed not to understand English and took me on an expensive joy ride round the island. I complained to some Japanese visiting scholars at dinner. They said, “Why don’t you say you want ‘the end of Kotewall Road’ in Cantonese?” They taught me to say yaw waw doo meh. Next day, coming off the ferry, I strolled up to a taxi and said yaw waw doo meh. He looked at me incredulously and asked, in perfect English, “What are you speaking Japanese for?”CrisisNicky’s pregnancy was straightforward. We were suspicious of mechanized treatment and leaned to the Natural Childbirth Trust’s methods. Yet we signed up at St. Mary’s, a Manchester University hospital specializing in women’s health. Nicky was admitted a week later than predicted; she was given an epidural; and we sat in the waiting room. Our only company was a machine registering the fetal heartbeat on a printout. Suddenly the machine became agitated -- the pen was drawing jagged peaks and troughs. A nurse confirmed that the baby was in some distress. Nicky was to have a caesarean operation and I was left to twiddle my thumbs.Mother and child were pronounced healthy. Until then my outlook on life had been short-term, even opportunistic. Now I found myself thinking of the twenty years ahead of responsibility for my daughter, Louise. Parenthood surely is the fastest way of growing up. Three days later I arrived as usual at their room to find it being fumigated. Nicky was in a hospital next door with a major genital infection. Louise was now in the special care baby unit upstairs since she was likely to have been infected while breastfeeding. I raced to the Royal Infirmary and soon had news of Nicky. Her temperature was well over 100F and her pulse was 160. They were bringing both down with a drip; but if this failed, she would be dead in half an hour. It worked and she was transferred to a room there. This freed me to check out Louise. She was squalling in a plastic box. A very calm and lucid senior doctor updated me on the situation. The chance of the baby being infected was high; if so, she would probably succumb to meningitis and die. But they wanted to give her a lumbar puncture for a more accurate diagnosis. This procedure was painful and carried significant risk for a child of her age. They recommended the lumbar puncture, but the decision was mine. I was in shock – I could be about to lose the family I had been so proud of days before. The decision was an impossible one. I fell back on rationalism: Louise could be infected or not and if infected, would likely die. The lumbar puncture could do her harm and would be unnecessary if she wasn’t infected. I said no. After I left my precious daughter in the special baby care unit, I took the backstairs, sat down and cried. I had been on the run for an hour. I could hardly think, never mind feel. Now the fissures inside that I had been holding together broke. After 20 minutes sitting in that stairwell, I crawled home. In a few days Louise was declared fit to leave St Mary’s.Nicky’s infection was a mixture of streptococcus, staphylococcus and something never seen before, one of those superbugs incubated in hospitals. She would be on penicillin for six weeks. There was no question of her seeing Louise in that time. I was working and her mother was staying with us. I visited Nicky twice a day. This was my first child and I was worried that the whole show would collapse if I didn’t get enough sleep. I developed a routine. If Louise slept in the afternoon, she would be kept awake in the evening. We had a bed-time ritual: at 10 pm she had bath and a full feed. If she fell asleep while feeding, I squeezed the milk in regardless. When she lay down, I got into bed and paid no attention to any crying unless it persisted. Something similar (without the bath) was repeated when she woke up in the small hours; and with luck she slept until 7 am. Within 5-6 weeks she was sleeping through from 10 to 7 without a nocturnal feed.The time came for Nicky to be taken off penicillin. Surely six weeks’ treatment would have killed off the bug; but no. The fever started again and she had to go through the whole cycle again. Now she took no interest in the process of recovery and became morose and passive. She stopped asking me about Louise. Three months after being admitted, she returned home “cured” and thoroughly depressed. She was thrilled to be reunited with her baby, but the depression persisted for months. Normal domestic life was resumed eventually, long after that catastrophic day when the infection declared itself. The contrast between what we originally imagined the birth process would be and the savagery of its denouement led us to seek partial therapy in writing a paper together. Nicky later became a specialist in the sociology of health.******Less than a year later, disruption of the new boys’ solidarity in the Manchester department led to another crisis which ultimately spilled over into my family life. None of us was planning to go anywhere; and then Emrys Peters struck to break us up. We were content to remain lecturers, when he promoted one of us to a senior lectureship. My strategy was to advance my career through movement based on publications. But our little clique was divided soon enough, as Peters intended. I wrote a letter to the Vice-chancellor reporting blatant favoritism and corruption. I didn’t get a reply.This set in train a sequence of events that had devastating consequences for me. I wrote to the anthropology departments of Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Northwestern Universities informing them that I was in the market. Amazingly, Yale and Chicago offered me interviews in mid-1975. Yale was first in line. They said they were not sure whether to offer me Associate Professor with or without tenure. Having in mind the British system, where tenure was granted automatically after two years, I told them I would not cross the Atlantic without tenure. The offer I asked for came eventually.I had already been invited for the next academic year by the Centre for the Advancement of Social and Behavioral Studies in California. Nicky suggested that we should go there together and apply for whatever positions we could get in the US. Meanwhile, Yale’s anthropology department was sounding out sociology for a position for her. She just had a good book out – on marriage and divorce. I was compelled to accept the Yale job. I was 32 and had been offered tenure at Yale -- with hardly any publications at the time. Nicky didn’t want me to go – we had a young family, a beautiful house, two secure jobs in the same city; I felt that I had to go – America on my mind! It was the strongest compulsion I had ever known. Maybe Dvo?ák was partly to blame. I had felt American since the birth of rock ’n’ roll. The stalemate dragged on until I felt that I had to make a decision. I wrote two letters, one saying yes, the other no, put them in their envelopes and stuck a stamp on each. I walked to the post box. I would trust my unconscious mind. I posted one and tore up the other. I had accepted the job.Chapter 7 Learning to fly in America (1975-1983) I like to be in America!?O.K. by me in America!?Ev'rything free in America?For a small fee in America!? Stephen SondheimI felt confined in Britain, held back. I once gave a seminar paper critical of Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics. Afterwards I overheard a colleague saying “Sahlins is a big man, Keith is a little man – he shouldn’t challenge him”. The Americans, on the other hand, told me “Show us your stuff, big boy, and run with it.” I felt a tremendous surge of liberation when I arrived at Yale. The scope of anthropology taught there was impressive -- the four fields of cultural, biological, linguistic and archaeological anthropology. A Cambridge education equipped confident ignoramuses with a fast mouth, whereas American scholars accumulated rows of filing cabinets stuffed with documents. I was then influenced by French structuralist Marxism, although I was likened to an “English empiricist Marxist like E. P. Thompson”. I once got drawn into a labor dispute. A young thug in big boots and a hunting jacket came to collect my waste bin instead of the elderly black lady who normally did it. I asked him who he was and he ran away. The contract for unskilled workers was negotiated every three years in the autumn and this often took some months to settle. The conflict focused on the power station supplying the prestigious scientific experiments. In 1971 students had laid down in front of the fuel delivery trucks. In 1974 the Teamsters refused to deliver the oil. In 1977, the students complained about not getting their breakfast. The union leader, a local Italian-American, was being prosecuted in California and the Teamsters showed no interest. When I tried to join the cause, I was the only professor to do so. I went on local TV to accuse the Provost of lying. It seemed that the union was in league with Yale to save them wages with a lock out, bringing the mostly black workers back for Christmas. I learned a lot, but politically it was a waste of time.I soon found myself in the unusual position of becoming Chair of the Women’s Studies Program. There were no qualified women candidates and it was understood that I would step down as soon as one appeared. My French Marxist pitch went down well with them. I argued that there was a structural similarity between class struggles based work, race and gender. I was in any case a card-carrying feminist and wrote several papers on the position of women in Ghana and Britain. I had a minder, Catharine MacKinnon, then a graduate student in political science and trainee lawyer, now a prominent legal scholar and activist. She was only a bit younger than me and we got on well. Sure enough, I was replaced in the following year with no hard feelings. I was proud to have been given responsibility by those committed women.The mid-1970s was a disorienting time for gender relations in the US. Conferences seemed to be occasions for the crowd to pair off at a moment’s notice. In the anthropology department everyone was sleeping with everyone else – assistant professors with full professors, graduate students with professors and each other. I was once invited to dinner by a female colleague and after the desert she proposed that we go to bed. I declined and she went into a long diatribe about how repressed I was (which was no doubt true). My line was that women had only recently been admitted to the academy in significant numbers and an incest taboo should be observed while men and women learned how to work together and manage sex within the group. Otherwise, as I could see, internal social organization would suffer. For example, senior professors hesitated to confide in the head of department because he was sleeping with an assistant professor. Much later, in Chicago, a graduate student made a similar proposal to me which I turned down. I was drinking with some senior professors and gave my standard reason. One said, “What is it with you and power? Here’s a young woman offering you her love and all you can think of is the power difference”. They were turbulent times; things have settled down a bit since then.The Yale department had the reputation of being hostile to the social sciences. The university administration found my links with economics to be refreshing. With Frederick Jameson and David Apter, I founded a new graduate program, The Council for the Comparative Study of Culture and Society, a vehicle for the big humanities professors to teach outside their own department (in Jameson’s case, French) and for the social scientists to rub shoulders with them. Umberto Eco was the visiting fellow in our inaugural year. Then my department was given two new full professorships to be filled by people who spanned anthropology and the social sciences. We appointed the Jamaican political anthropologist, M. G. Smith, but the cultural anthropologists apparently felt that appointing another social scientist would upset the balance of power.The downside was pretty dreadful. My first apartment was small, noisy and smelly. Nicky was turned down by the sociology department. We looked for a pile in Connecticut with our small daughter Louise. I then moved to West Haven, a working class area on the sea front, which was known principally for a seafood restaurant. I bought a second-hand blue Ford Torino for $2,000 that had a 302 cubic inch straight eight engine and got 9 miles to the gallon. My landlady was a Lebanese matriarch. No other Yale professors lived there. I loved it. Then Nicky was offered a job in Essex University; and I encouraged her to take it. We sold the Manchester house and bought one in Constable country. I knew by now that my American sojourn was unsustainable, especially when I found out that my wife had a lover.During my years in North America I made many friends. Most were students and young academics, since I was single too. One of them has stayed with me through thick and thin ever since, Donald Billingsley. There was a knock on my office door; it was a Black American around 30 years old who stretched his legs out and opened up confidently with “I am interested in Africa and economic anthropology; and they tell me you’re the man.” Don was from Cleveland, one of a large number of brothers, and won a scholarship to Yale where he specialized in German and history. Now he was registered for a PhD in the new anthropology department at Johns Hopkins, working with Sidney Mintz who was my predecessor at Yale. He hoped to study peanut farming in Senegal, but needed to do a lot of reading first. His wife taught at a university nearby in Connecticut and they had a small child. Don proposed that I take him on informally as an advisor. “I will read anything you tell me to. You will find that I am not lazy”. Many years later we coincided in Paris, where he was head of the American School. Don was best man at my second wedding and I was best man at his third.My years at Yale were an intellectual turning point. My students wanted me to discuss the controversy over anthropology’s current direction symbolized by the Columbia and Chicago departments. The first took a materialist evolutionary path (“cultural ecology”); the second stood for intellectual purity influenced by Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. One day in the shower a voice spoke to me: “Why read Marvin Harris when you haven’t read Immanuel Kant?” I am bipolar, not schizophrenic; but the voice came from outside my head. I then jumped into reading the philosophy greats. I also began to develop a method for studying world history. I read an article about a revolution in Ceylon, by Muslims against the Portuguese and Dutch. It was in 1848, the same year as the failed revolutions in Europe. I wondered if there was any connection and began to construct a periodization that would help me to explore synchronicity across the world’s regions. None of this contributed to writing a book or, for that matter, scholarly articles. I was having too much of a good time. The bubble bust soon enough.DisasterI spent a summer with Nicky and Louise in our new Essex home and thought I had succeeded in repairing the marriage. But I hadn’t and, not long after leaving Manchester for Yale, it was over. Louise was three years old. The divorce process was reasonably amicable, but I didn’t have much interest in the outcome beyond getting the best deal for our daughter. Until then I had never encountered any serious check on my will or ambition. I believed that I could resolve any strains caused by the transatlantic move. The idea that I destroyed my family for career reasons was unthinkable. But that is what happened and it tore me apart. I had never imagined that pursuit of the best jobs in the world could jeopardize my family life; but Nicky had seen it coming for years. I swallowed my grief rather than expressing it; and that was my undoing.The signs of a breakdown multiplied. My apartment became a tip and my routines collapsed. One day I was due to drive into the Connecticut countryside for dinner with a friend. I drove off in “the blue bomber” in the late afternoon and followed the colors of the cars in front as signs – red, blue, white and black indicated turn right or left, overtake or slow down. This brought me to an upmarket rural suburb. I was cruising past some substantial houses whose front lawns, in New England fashion, were not divided by fences when a piercing scream brought me to a jarring halt. All I could see was a small child supervised by a large German shepherd and I decided to take a look. Perhaps I was embarking on some latter-day labors of Hercules; and my first task was to take a white plastic baseball from under the dog’s watchful gaze. The kid meanwhile disappeared indoors. Whatever emanations I was projecting, the dog stayed rooted to the spot. I returned to the car and turned the ball in my hands. I was looking over a valley with a red flashing light on a pylon opposite, probably for New Haven airport. Directly above it was the only star in the twilight sky, Venus. Understanding came to me suddenly: the point of this journey was to make contact with extra-terrestrials.I came to a Moon Pond Tavern. I parked and stood on the edge of the pond looking for meaning in the muddy imprints of ducks’ feet. At one point I saw a big spaceship overhead. I decided to check out the pub. It was almost empty and I sat at the table of three young women. I asked them if Nicky and Louise were coming. They complained to the barman and two policemen asked me to leave the table. They took me to the men’s room and started beating me up. I began to wonder if this exercise was benevolent. I decided to fall on the floor. If it hurt, bad; if it didn’t, good. The space was narrow and one of them caught me when I fell. Good. Eventually an ambulance picked me up and took me to Yale New Haven hospital. It was now night time.They put me in a wheelchair and pushed me through a subway which I interpreted as the underworld. My story now took a new direction. I was entering Dante’s Inferno; but that wasn’t bad. Human civilization had gone through innumerable boom and bust cycles. Some guiding agencies -- probably extra-terrestrial since we are primitives – took the precaution of removing some promising individuals and storing them underground so that they could restart the whole process after Armageddon. Why me and why here now? I decided that I would either excavate a prehistoric fish from the Connecticut River and prove that humanity came from fish, not apes or discover a new hormone in the liver. I actually saw a picture of my skeletal fish discovery in a newspaper lying around.They doped me and told me I would be in there (“sectioned”) for around three weeks. I had some interesting mental excursions to while away the time. One day I sat watching the TV screen while moving my head like the infinity sign (∞). It was absurd to imagine that we could go chugging around the universe in little boxes like cars, buses and planes. The reason we think we are alone is because we still have a long way to go before we can communicate with more developed species. The ants think they are alone, but we can tread on them and they can’t communicate with us. When we have developed the means to coordinate ourselves, we will take the planet and drive it wherever we want, with the help of others that we have learned to talk to in the meantime.Tom Petty has a great couplet:I’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got wings/Coming down is the hardest thing He must have been somewhere like I was in Yale New Haven. Psychosis, at least my variety, is attractive at first. Life is impossible and the mind finds its own way out of the problem. My unanswered question was how I had been stupid enough to wreck my marriage and lose my daughter. The sacrifice had to be worth it, hence extra-terrestrials, Dante etc., the total victory of abstraction over social connection. But then the doubts crept in. What if this isn’t a new life, but death, the end of my connection with humanity? Gradually I began to make contact with the real world. I devised empirical tests. I would decide to slap my thigh. I slapped it and felt the slap! This feedback loop could be elaborated: I would decide to call someone, make the call, they answered; it was them, bingo! It was painful, since the line between madness and reason was blurred. As Tom Petty says, flying is (relatively) easy; coming down is harder. Then one day I remembered the test with the policemen: I would fall down and if it hurt, I was really in the shit. This time, however, I was in a wide corridor with a marble floor and no-one near. The shock of the impact was unbearable. I screamed and kept on screaming until they jabbed me with something. When I woke up, I was over it. They let me out a few days later. I thought that this episode was one of a kind and went back to work. The mechanics of divorce ground away. Nine months passed when I did several self-harming things like renouncing my share of the conjugal property and resigning from my Yale job. I was all washed up with nowhere to go. Then I had second thoughts about my resignation and was told that I couldn’t rescind it. The shock tipped me over into another breakdown. No doubt I had been cavalier about taking lithium. This time I was scared for my life from the start. Two breakdowns in less than a year suggested chronic insanity. Perhaps I would never be able to work normally again.I was approached by a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He told me that he could sue Yale for damages on my behalf. I had obviously been sick for some time, including when I resigned, and they had not exercised their duty of care for me as an employee. As he put it, all I had to do was go sit on a beach in the Bahamas for a year or two and I would be a millionaire. But his special interest was in tenure law: was tenure a medieval contract where one party gives and the other renounces without reciprocal acknowledgment, or a modern contract entered by both parties signing and exiting together? Yale offered me employment to which I did not make a formal response and they had not made a written reply to my letter of resignation. I didn’t want to be a cause célèbre. Then the department told me that they would keep me on until the end of the academic year without any obligation to teach. Finally, my friend Skip Rappaport, who was head of the anthropology department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, said he thought he could arrange a one-year visiting professorship for me there. I took the Yale/Michigan option.Gun for hire, will travelMy possessions consisted of a reclining armchair, a TV, a large number of books, clothes, kitchen utensils and a thick Bakhtiari rug, the only piece I brought from England. I bought it from a Dutch hustler in a Manchester auction. I asked him who the Bakhtiars were; “Iranian nomads”, he replied, “at least until the Shah put them in factories to make these carpets”. I did the American thing and hired a U-Haul van with my car behind (“Don’t ever back up”, they said). I learned that the Great Lakes are up. I kept climbing from Pennsylvania to Ohio and never came down; the plains were a high plateau.I liked Ann Arbor. Unlike the Ivy League, the University of Michigan was not obsessed with competing for status; it had the fourth biggest library in the US, was ranked first in anthropology, history and political science, had introduced an egalitarian version of the seminar system from Germany and featured Big Ten college sports. Detroit with its rock music and fabulous Arab food was only 40 miles away. The archaeologists used up two half assistant curatorships for me to teach their students economic anthropology. It was that kind of place. I liked hanging out with archaeologists because they took a longer view than the ethnographers.The first term at Michigan was very full. I ran a seminar course on Mediterranean society in the first millennium BC attended by distinguished professors of Roman history, economics and Assyriology. That was winging it, I can tell you. Somehow I found the time to write my USAID report in all this. My social life was more relaxed than at Yale. Skip was writing his magnum opus on religion and we discussed it often, especially the pre-Socratic philosophers. We met for the first time at Manchester when he came to give a seminar paper. His opening line – “Like Durkheim, I will tread the thin line between profundity and banality” – marked him as a real player. I drove him back to Cambridge in an open sports car, just to extend the time I could spend with him. Only when he died did I realize what he meant to me. He was the senior brother I never had. Peter Yates was a photographer, a stringer for UPI. He came from Preston, Lancashire and entered the US illegally from Canada as a 17 year-old John Coltrane groupie in the 1960s. He ended up in Ann Arbor at the time of SDS and the Weather Underground and stayed. Eventually there was an amnesty, but he had to prove that he had never left the US. His mother had kept all his letters, so he passed. With Peter’s help, I got to sit on the basketball touchline, an empty Nikon slung round my neck, with the cheerleaders’ legs flashing past my nose and Isaiah Thomas of Indiana dribbling past a yard away. My daughter Louise spent a term with me attending an 80% black primary school. These people brought me back to something like life. But I had another breakdown while I was there. At Yale I joined a research project on the pre-state origins of Indus Valley civilization. I next proposed to study the industrialization of agriculture in Uttar Pradesh. Both folded for lack of funding. At Michigan I switched my attention to Egypt: Sadat was having trouble with big landlords in the South. I learned Egyptian colloquial Arabic for two years and fell in love with the formal beauty of this language invented by monks on the edge of the desert. Then Sadat was assassinated and the project was cancelled. I once drove to Indiana University through a heavy storm. I switched on the radio for weather warnings and got the 1 pm news. “A rebellion in Luzon has reduced rice supplies from the Philippines. Cairo reports a hold up of wheat supplies from Southern Egypt…” The farmers of the Great Plains are probably better informed about world politics than almost anyone.I was renewed for a second year, but didn’t get the professorship I hoped for. Then I saw an ad for a 5-year associate professor post in anthropology at Harvard’s Institute for International Development (HIID). I applied, was shortlisted and was offered the job. The Harvard anthropology department had not taken part in this appointment, but now they wanted it to be re-advertised as a full professorship held between the two institutions. I competed with the leading American candidates in the field and again won the position. Then everything went quiet. At last, a member of the appointment committee from outside Harvard phoned me up. “I’m sorry, Keith, you are not getting the job, but it’s not your fault” and hung up. All I got from the department was a letter saying they never offered me the job. Luckily I saw a temporary position at McGill University in Montreal and settled it with a phone call. Years later I heard one version of what happened at Harvard. The senate sent for outside references and one wrote that I was a communist and a maniac. HIID wanted to go ahead, but Anthropology pulled out. My mental problems were common knowledge at the time. I like to say that manic-depressives bounce back; and I did.My lasting memory of Ann Arbor was of Skip Rappaport. I was very fond of Roy (“Skip”) Rappaport and his family; but, apart from my time in Ann Arbor, we spent little time together and communicated only rarely. In 1996 I received a hand written letter from him announcing that he had been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and might not have long to live. I thought of his unfinished masterpiece on ritual and religion that we had once discussed intensively. I felt compelled to help him finish this book and jumped on a plane to Detroit. Skip was in fairly good shape, but he tired easily and his manuscript combined many layers of revision as if it was compiled by a psychotic typist. We agreed on a new title and list of chapters. One morning I wrote out a Preface. We corresponded across the Atlantic and reached a complete text a year after starting.Skip died soon afterwards. I agreed with Cambridge University Press to act as surrogate author in editing the book. I had to make 3,000 corrections in all, most of them very minor and many introduced in the typesetting stage. I co-wrote Skip’s obituary for American Anthropologist. The book came out at the same time. I felt that it was the most important work in the anthropology of religion since ?mile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious life. Eleven of 14 chapters provide the most exhaustive treatment of ritual ever written and the final two chapters launch the vision that ecology would be a better cosmology for a new world religion than physics. News of Skip’s death came as a huge blow. I didn’t understand why – after all we had known it was coming for a while. But I felt his absence as an empty hole inside me. Then I read the dedication to the book.I dedicate this book to four anthropologists who have very much influenced the ideas expressed in it and who have been otherwise important in my life and career. In the order in which they entered my life, they are:Robert Levy, Eric Wolf, Mervyn Meggitt, Keith HartAll of them have acted like elder brothers to me, even Keith who is many years my junior.I was greatly moved by this, but I still didn’t understand what was going on. Skip always said that the two people he learned most from were Gregory Bateson and me. He went out of his way to bring us together and one day managed to do so. It was a disaster. There were contrasts of region, class, accent and manners between us that I had difficulty getting past. In any case Bateson didn’t make it to the list of dedicatees, which surprised me.Skip’s reference to me as an elder brother puzzled me; but I could accept that he had been a kinsman to me to whom I did defer as a junior. I never had a natural brother and perhaps he filled that gap for me. Of course we learned a lot from each other; but I continue to search for other explanations of why he meant so much to me. Our friendship started out as unequal in age, status, knowledge, wealth etc.; but we always hit it off as equals. I wonder if Skip validated my desire to know the world more fully than is usual. Certainly the letters of reference he and Marshall Sahlins wrote for my re-entry to Cambridge were extravagant. Maybe Skip personified the social recognition that I craved for; he filled the slot of co-author of my existence that was God’s role in my teenage years. Certainly he objectified the place religion occupies in my turbulent life. I miss him terribly, even more because I still don’t know what made our remarkable bond so strong.******I drove the blue bomber to Montreal. The McGill department of anthropology had already found me a place on Esplanade facing Mont Royal. Leonard Cohen had an apartment four doors down. It had been a Jewish quarter. The street behind was celebrated in one of Mordecai Richler’s novels and behind that was the Boulevard St Laurent with its wonderful bakeries, fish shops and the best cooked meats in the world at Schwartz’s. The patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods was wonderful walking territory, always with new secrets to show. My landlady was a feisty Southern Dutch catholic. I held Thursday soirees with wine and snacks. I had the happiest moment of my life in Montreal and knew it then. I was walking near the port with a companion and saw a cardboard sign “to the beach”. It was a tug boat anchored at the head of a huge derelict loading bay with some sand scattered in front. The great ships of the St. Lawrence Seaway passed across the open end. The boat had pretty young women in low cut blouses serving beer to Cajun rock music. The sky was blue and the sun shone. I felt completely happy there. Why? It was a vibrant assertion of the joys of life against industrial decay, the blackened girders and empty loading bays echoing Lancashire’s post-war decline. The place was open to ocean transport and had a beguiling mix of beer, sex, music, irony and sunshine – all with a French slant. Like happiness, the moment was transient of course.I spent a lot of time writing at home, including poetry. Here is a corrective to the euphoria.Refuge(A lazy neurotic)All day I layin a self-imposed twilight,Longing for night,Resisting the day.The clock strode through timewith lengthening paces.Its digital clicks covered vast arid spaces,Deserts whose emptiness fathered this rhyme.At first I imagined the heat of my brainwas building a fire and Forging the ironTo cauterize festering sources of pain.But the tumbling streamsof my guilt-ridden fearsReduced fiery ideasTo the dark stuff of dreams.In the greyness of those hoursI recalled how the brilliantmoments of dalliancelive in the memory, vivid as flowers.Then the black holeof vulnerabilityFilled me with pity,Enveloped my soul.And so I slept,A dried-up husk,As day wore on to weary duskAnd never wept.Tout enfant, j’ai senti dans mon c?ur deux sentiments contradictoires, l’horreur de la vie et l’extase de la vie. C’est bien le fait d’un paresseux nerveux. (Charles Baudelaire,?Mon c?ur mis à nu). In Montreal and the next stop, Chicago, I read a lot about writing screenplays – Joseph Campbell, William Goldman etc. I wrote a three-part TV drama based on Rousseau’s Confessions, but did nothing with it. Louise Sperling and I co-wrote a 400 typed-pages treatise on East African herders (her specialty) as a template for research in comparative economic anthropology. The reader rejected it on the grounds that he didn’t get a “whiff of the camp fire smoke” from our text. The University of Chicago wanted someone to teach three courses in economic anthropology for a year’s pay. I was interested. Chicago really caught my imagination, with its panorama of skyscrapers, seen from Lake Shore Drive inside the city. I was excited by the symbiotic evolution of its financial markets and its immense agricultural hinterland and came to believe that Chicago had carried on Manchester's mission to bring commercial civilization to the world, but on a vaster scale and with much less interference from central government. I had another mental breakdown soon after I got there and that ruled out a permanent job. I enjoyed the teaching, especially a fieldwork methods course in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Money derivatives were invented there a year after the dollar was unpegged from gold. Agricultural markets are the most volatile of all and the farmers who sold pork bellies to German supermarkets could not predict what they would receive some months later. I dabbled in dollar-deutschmark exchange rate futures, using the $25,000 gambling fund that I kept in case I was unemployed. I went out drinking on Fridays with the Old Farts Club (as an honorary youth member). Hyde Park was an island of privilege in the world’s biggest black ghetto. I was advised not to go North of 50th St at night, but I did, sometimes as far as Elijah Mohammed’s temple on 30th St. I went into small out-of-the-way bars where old men just up from the Mississippi Delta sang the blues to their own guitar and always had a friendly welcome.Once I came across a Scientologist handing out a long quiz. I like quizzes and my cousin Richard was L. Ron Hubbard’s personal assistant for a time. I filled it in and handed it over to the guy. Next week he gave me the results: “I have never seen a case like yours before”, he said, “your energy level is off the charts and yet you also score big-time on depression”. This echoed a comment made by the shrink I was seeing. One day he told me he wanted to give me my money back since he had gravely misdiagnosed my condition. He had been misled by my energy and missed how deeply depressed I was. I told him it was alright, since I didn’t expect him to understand me. “Watch it, smartass. When did you ever hear of a Chicago shrink offering you money?”I threw a party for my fortieth birthday. Friends lent me pans from their commune. I made pasta al pesto and salade Ni?oise with strawberries and Spanish Cava. It was a happy occasion. Until then I had been flirting with leaving academia – I felt I could be a journalist, businessman, politician, anything really. But at that party I told myself “Who are you kidding, Keithy? You have been in school for half of your expected life. If you were going to get out, it would have been before now.” This revelation gave me a tremendous sense of freedom. Once I accepted the necessity of being an academic, there were so many ways it could be realized. I soon found out what that meant.West African agricultureOn my way to Michigan in 1979, I was offered a job by the development branch of the US State Department, USAID. They wanted a handbook for their rural officers in West Africa, a digest of the available literature on agriculture there. They were willing to pay me $10,000 – by far the largest sum anyone had offered me then. I spent a month in Cambridge University library with an assistant and returned to Ann Arbor in time to start teaching. What followed was truly manic. I taught my courses, hung out with two other visitors, played bridge twice a week in a club, watched the World Series on TV and wrote a book-length manuscript on West African agriculture in three weeks. One Sunday I started at 6 am, didn’t move from my desk until 9 pm and wrote a chapter of 14,000 words on the state’s role in agriculture.I took a long historical overview; 16 countries, four colonial traditions, three centuries and more, 4 million sq. km, 150 million people. I enjoyed selecting and commenting on key sources and loved challenging conventional wisdom with anecdotes like these:The Sudanic civilizations of Ghana and Mali were rich and powerful by any standards. An Arab geographer reports seeing in 951 a bill of credit made out to a trader from Ghana for 42,000 dinars, a sum unheard of in the Muslim world at the time. When Mansa Musa, the King of Mali, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, he spent so much gold In Egypt as to cause runaway inflation there for several decades.I described this exercise as “anthropology from a Boeing 747”, since there were hardly any people in it. I knew little about agriculture and too much about urban lowlife. A decade in the development industry allowed me to see the role of West Africa’s rural civilizations in shaping urbanization, whereas I had been unable to move from a static slum ethnography to historical political economy before. Moreover, the prevailing theory of development in the 1960s had been “modernization”. Poor countries could become like us (the West) by focusing on six factors: cities, free enterprise, technology, democracy, education and the rule of law. What these were not (“tradition”) constituted so many obstacles to development. Although I had focused on urban economy, I noticed that countryside and city were seamlessly connected in the lives of migrants. My literature review forced me to acknowledge that, unlike much of Central, East and Southern Africa, where colonists built cities in their own image, the colonial presence in West Africa was slight and the Africans built, provisioned and organized the large coastal cities that grew up during the last century. A focus on agriculture showed me that urban and rural areas in the region were complementary, not contradictory. The cities were an outgrowth of societies that had not yet been displaced from their home lands.My main conclusion was that post-colonial West African nations were built on a ruinous contradiction. Large modern states were supported by small-scale, low productivity agriculture, whether commercial or not. Either some sectors of the economy would add significant machine production to their repertoire or these states must devolve to a level compatible with peasant agriculture. The 1970s, my decade as a part-time denizen in the development biz, were a watershed between the post-war period of developmental states and its successor, neoliberal globalization, inaugurated by the election of Thatcher and Reagan in 1979/80. Not only was development in real terms abandoned then, but the Third World debt crisis made the 80s a “lost decade” for many. The World Bank and IMF, for the sake of the free flow of global capital, imposed “structural adjustment programs” that effectively marginalized governments in their own national economies. Many West African states went bankrupt, succumbed to civil war or just “failed”. The “political kingdom” did not unlock the gates to prosperity and the first 50 years of independence saw economic regression in most of Africa. The informal economy expanded to fill the gap between promise and reality.I sent a copy of my USAID report to Jack Goody and he published it in a Cambridge University Press series. I spent an additional month adding copious notes and references; but the text remained the same as in the USAID report. My first book came out in 1982. I told Meyer Fortes that I didn’t understand why anthropologists always made their first book a fieldwork-based monograph, since I couldn’t write one, but I found a literature review easy. He said, “Anthropologists are peasants, Keith. They like digging holes. But they need someone to tell them where to dig. That’s where you come in.”Goody and Fortes in retrospectI dedicated that book “for all my teachers, especially M.F. and J.R.G.” I was beginning to revise the idea that I owed nothing to the senior generation. Jack Goody and Meyer Fortes were both mentors to me, but in very different ways. Jack was a shambolic teacher and Meyer cultivated a superior aloofness from students; so my hypothesis that I had nothing to learn from them was confirmed. I only found out later how much Jack molded my intellectual trajectory. In the short preface to the first of his many volumes of world historical comparison, Production and Reproduction, he summarizes his own formation in the Second World War and the run-up to Ghana’s independence before laying out some principles of his own mature approach to anthropology. “How could we provide historical, sociological and humanistic studies with a more universalistic base, a less European-centered framework?” He had chosen to cross “different academic fields, techniques of investigation and ways of understanding”. He always told us, in contrast to Meyer Fortes’ emphasis on social anthropology as a guild discipline, to find a good question and follow it wherever it leads. In this book he uses the Ethnographic Atlas to place intensive local studies within a framework of systematic historical comparison. Finally, “it is time we tried to fit the numerous detailed investigations of social life in different parts of the world with the larger speculations on the development of human culture.” Reading this came as a revelation to me. I agreed with every point and this could not have happened by chance. Jack had taught me -- by example, not by instruction! In later life I published four articles assessing his work in homage to his stature as a formative influence for me. He never thanked me for them. My relationship with Meyer Fortes was more complicated. I never attended his seminar for final year undergraduates, so that when I got a first-class degree, he had to write to me as head of department, but didn’t know me. I recall when, led by a Berkeley graduate student, we occupied the department coffee room in 1968. Fortes asked us what we wanted – we muttered about writing our own examination questions and letters of reference. “Alright,” he said, “I’ll sit at your feet!” He had built up one of the best anthropology departments in the world and was worried that, when Jack took over as head, he would take social anthropology into an alliance with the sociologists and political scientists. I left for Ghana after graduating with no further training; and some months later announced that I was going to restudy the Tallensi. Meyer later admitted that he thought Jack was using me to undermine him for the sake of the sociology merger. I wrote five letters without reply. When I went up North, he wrote me voluminous letters with suggestions for fieldwork questions.He was my doctoral thesis examiner and promoted me heavily with Cambridge University Press, but I let him down. He was upset when I didn’t accept his offer of a postdoc and decided that I must be in development studies for the money. Nevertheless he encouraged me to write up a family of earth priests who were successful entrepreneurs. I thought they were not representative and I said so in an article wickedly entitled “Cashing in on kinship”. I got back a seven-page hand-written cri de coeur. “I have always known that you are a Benthamite (utilitarian) with hedonistic tendencies, but I had not grasped before how foreign is the idea of filial piety to you”; and it went downhill from there. When I left Britain for Yale, he told me, “They will lionize you there. Look what happened to Vic (Turner) in America”. Over coffee one lunch time, he interrupted me to ask “What do you mean by ‘time’?” Within seconds I was floundering, but I had been promoted from the status of young ignoramus. Meyer was a labor organizer manqué and once, when visiting Cambridge from the US, he asked me to give a lecture and I said he needn’t worry about paying me. “You working class aristocrats will be the death of me”, he complained. “When I first came here, I had to struggle to get my staff paid for outside teaching; and now you tell me to keep my money.”All of this was guaranteed to install Meyer in my pantheon as the anthropologist that I respect most. I published a paper on the Tallensi that had its origin in the 1974 Florence conference reinforcing Fortes’ position on kinship and economy against detractors such as Leach and Worsley. In 1983, when I was teaching in Chicago, I received a postcard from him. He wrote that, having recently read that article, he now understood that my work on Tallensi economy was an original contribution. He had been wrong to think I was an opportunist. I was entirely serious is pursuing development issues. The postcard was sent from the grave -- in the time the postcard took to reach me, he had died in hospital.Chapter 8Marking time: down and out in Cambridge (1983-1986)Goodbye to all thatI stood on a street corner in Chicago, with the wind whistling up my ass, and felt that there was no-one within a thousand miles who knew or cared much for me. For all the disasters, I had found personal freedom in America. I had been given a chance to spread my wings both before and after they were clipped. The idea of freedom runs deep in the United States and is synonymous with movement. I would never have grasped what “free” means and how it can be expressed aesthetically and socially if I had stayed in the Old World, where the past weighs so heavily. Freedom goes with conformity in the US, just as culture generates ties there that a dispersed and fragmented society cannot. I embraced aspects of the common life avidly, especially American sports, but didn’t understand what made those strange people tick or how I could become one of them. The flip side of being given a chance to expand was that I now found myself alone, overstretched and without prospects. In Ann Arbor, when I knew that I was going crazy, I called up my best friend just before midnight and told him that my skull was bursting; I didn’t think I would make it through the night. He said, “Thanks for letting me know, Keith. Call me again if you have any problems.” I was in the slammer two hours later. When I got out, I asked him why he abandoned me then. “We are academics”, he said, “and all academics are borderline crazy. We are afraid of madness and don’t know what to do about it. So, if we can, we avoid it, in others and ourselves”. Apart from enjoying some freedom and suffering the consequences, I had read the great philosophers and developed a systematic view of world history in America. I felt that I had two things in my favor here. I had mastered the classical origins of western civilization and most humanities scholars felt nervous of us because they hadn’t. And Manchester had launched the industrial revolution and I felt that this gave me an edge on the modern age.In this context I found the following words by William Hazlitt: “Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves for a while from the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth”. I thought I knew what he meant: emigration, the life of an expatriate, offers freedom from social obligation; whereas to insert oneself as an adult into the conditions of one’s formation is tough, but a more reliable way of getting to know oneself. I knew that I had to go home; but where was that? Manchester? Cambridge? Anywhere else in Britain? I had spent half my life in Manchester preparing to go to Cambridge. I was an intellectual more than a football supporter. My betting stake had grown to $30,000 thanks to money futures. I would go back to Cambridge without a job and see what turned up. Second time round in CambridgeThe years 1983-86 were the worst in my life. I felt angry about my professional humiliation and I could barely muster the concentration to write. I worried that my mental condition would bar me from doing sustained intellectual work when I should be at my peak. I was isolated and lonely. My daughter Louise, who was now 10, lived not far away and came to stay with me on alternate weekends. She was too young to allay my loneliness, anger and grief; but she was all I had. Bipolar types often question the objectivity of their condition and resist taking their medicine; I was no exception. But I saw a professor of psychiatry, a Peruvian called Berrios, who gave me a two-hour interview that changed my life. He set out to establish the reality of my “disease”. My only hope was to take scientific medicine seriously. I came of age in the 1960s when R.D. Laing, in books like The Divided Self and Sanity, Madness and the Family, argued that schizophrenia and other forms of mental illness have social, not medical causes. But, while beating into my skull the necessity of taking my meds, Prof. Berrios also gave me hope of escaping from my condition in the long run. His method was epidemiology. Bipolar individuals of my variety had psychotic episodes in their late teens or in their mid-thirties. In the first case, there is no redemption; but in the second, there is a possibility of regaining sanity in one’s fifties. Lithium had only been introduced around 1960 and they didn’t yet know how it affected this. But traditionally, psychosis became more frequent and slighter with age, so that the victim lives out his years in a buzz usually taken for eccentricity.My illness kicked in when I was 35, so that was positive. Berrios said my version was quite common in Britain and rare in the US. The two British regions with the highest incidence of it were the Northwest and East Anglia. The typical body type was “pyknic”, short and stocky with strong legs for climbing mountains. He asked about bipolarity in my family (and psoriasis, the skin condition I contracted with it). It went on: I ticked every epidemiological box he listed. The effect was powerful. I now knew that I had an objective, scientifically identifiable disease. I would take my pills religiously and hope to get over it eventually. Thank you, Professor Berrios, you have one satisfied customer -- out of many, I am sure.I still needed medical help. For ten years it was a daily struggle just to get by. I would get wound up very easily and tranquillizers at night often left me in a stupor the following morning. I had a wonderful GP in Roger Irons (brother of the famous actor); and I found a therapist who literally saved my life. Sedwell Diggle was trained as a Freudian and Jungian. I didn’t want psychoanalysis since it made me sad. I needed help to get through the days, which Sedwell provided. We discussed whether I should watch TV late or take a bath with sweet-smelling oils. I recall the pragmatics most, plus her calm wisdom when confronted by my mood swings and tearful confessions. It was such a privilege to talk to her once a week for eight years. Sometime during my first year, the Cambridge department of social anthropology advertised two low-paid three-year teaching appointments, the bottom of the Cambridge ladder. I didn’t think of applying. Then an American friend persuaded me to put in for these jobs. I had no income and determined to give them only their money’s worth. I was appointed and stayed for 14 years with the exception of two years’ unpaid leave in Jamaica. I had six more breakdowns in that time and then the restlessness evaporated when I passed fifty. I couldn’t concentrate for more than half an hour and travel risked forgetting the lithium. My colleagues treated every episode with kindness and sympathy; but the lead-up to mania was always self-destructive. I have been told that I could hold the record for keeping a professional career through ten manic episodes. Because my writing was handicapped, I decided to make myself a first-class teacher so that he students could come to the rescue if my job was threatened. My main commitment to stabilizing my life was to buy a house in 1984. It was a terraced street, once working class and now subject to rapid gentrification. As soon as my parents visited, they pointed out that it was exactly the same as ours in Old Trafford. Apparently there were only a few models available to British builders after 1900. I hadn’t noticed, except perhaps subliminally; but I soon recognized identical features, like the step between the middle and back room downstairs where I used to sit polishing my shoes as a kid. My gambling stake was intended to facilitate movement, if I lost or gave up my job. Now I converted it into a deposit for a house and some furniture, thereby ensuring that I would have to stay put. I thought of myself as “the Kant of Cambridge”, not because I was up to producing great intellectual work, but because I wasn’t going anywhere.I felt bitter and frustrated that I was so limited in what I could write at a stage in my life when I should be in my prime. I thought that I could shrug off being a temporary assistant lecturer at 41, when I had been a tenured Yale professor at 32. But I couldn’t. I was miserable. I dreaded also being reviewed for tenure. So when Ray Smith from Chicago asked me out of the blue to replace him for two years as professor in a new Consortium Graduate School for the social sciences in the English-speaking Caribbean, I bit his hand off. It was based at the University of the West Indies near Kingston, Jamaica. Jamaica seemed like a good place to sit it out my review. Ernest Gellner, my department head, called me into his office before leaving and told me he would not support my reappointment. What he actually said was “Have you ever considered becoming unemployed”. I left convinced that I was not coming back to Cambridge.Chapter 9Caribbean cubismThe sun was already high when I drove my Japanese car round the last bend before the junction. It looked as if a pile of rags had been left in the road. Rather than run over them, I stopped. It was a very thin man, a beggar with tangled dreadlocks, apparently asleep. I got out and tried to rouse him. It wasn’t easy.“Hey! Get to the side of the road. You’ll be run over here.” “It’s warmer in the middle than the side.” (In desperation) “What’s your name?” A beautiful smile lit up his face. “Joseph. No-one has asked me my name for twenty years.”“OK, Joseph. How about moving to the side?” He moved. “Have you had anything to eat today?” “No”. “Here, take this and get some patties down at Liguanea.”I gave him a small banknote which he put straight in his mouth. He began to eat it pensively. I ran to the car and drove away as fast as I could. As Dr. Johnson says, “Smile with the wise, eat with the rich”.Jamaica 1986-88I was invited to visit the University of Cape Town in South Africa before I left Cambridge. I asked a senior official at the Commonwealth Secretariat if it was OK to go to South Africa, given the embargo. He was sure it wasn’t meant to keep people like me away. When I arrived at UWI and mentioned that I might be going to South Africa, they looked at me aghast. Jamaicans were sitting on the edge of their seats while the cops shot rebellious black youths in Soweto on the TV news. The British Empire abolished slavery in 1833; but the land made available to the ex-slaves in Jamaica was too small to sustain them, so they had to return to the sugar plantations as “free” wage labor. They rose up more than once, but were defeated. In the last century many migrated, first to build the Panama Canal, then to the fruit farms of Central America and Florida, lately to London, Toronto and other northern cities. They received “independence” from colonial empire, but knew that full emancipation was still far away. Now they saw the struggle in South Africa through Pan-African eyes. If the apartheid regime was defeated, it would be a victory for Blacks everywhere and might bring their own freedom nearer. They told me that I should not come back if I went to South Africa. So I stayed.I had not yet come up with a narrative that made sense of my voyages through the North Atlantic, perhaps because I saw each leg of my journey separately. I have already noted the huge gap between America and Europe. West Africa seemed familiar: it was an old society, like Britain, where people knew who they were. America was new alright, but I still had not digested its significance. The Caribbean was all of the other three combined. Like the United States, it had been created from scratch by adventurers, the aboriginal population destroyed. But Africa and Europe remained a conservative force in the Caribbean which the Americans had broken with decisively. Sometimes I had the impression that Jamaica was frozen in the 18th century. I had come there as the last leg of the quadrilateral made by the slave trade; what I learned about Jamaica and the Caribbean helped me to integrate the whole set of places where I have lived. A new relationship with C.L.R. James and his assistant, Anna Grimshaw, was a catalyst for that synthesis. In shadowing the African diaspora, I had absorbed their perspective on history as dispersion and movement. I came to think of this vision as “cubist” (without the geometric shapes), following the Parisian avant-garde who, at a time of unparalleled movement of people around the globe, abandoned traditional perspective and placed the viewer inside the picture at different points. The Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade spawned the first truly modern people, as James insisted, a people formed by dislocation and dreams of emancipation who could hold in their heads perspectives from several places at once. I learned to place myself imaginatively where I had been and, sure enough, the world changed as I did so. The triad Cape Town, Cambridge and Kingston triggered this revelation.Epiphany on a beachI was sitting on a beach in North Jamaica reading a collection of James's occasional writings on cricket edited by his assistant, Anna Grimshaw. The place had once belonged to Errol Flynn. My daughter Louise, now 12, was playing on the edge of a turquoise sea. James had been a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in the 1930s. I found myself reading about my dad’s heroes in the Lancashire cricket team then as if it was today’s news. I had devoured everything I could by James since I came to Jamaica. I knew that he had lived in Lancashire when he left Trinidad for Britain and left London to join Learie Constantine, the West Indies’ best cricketer, in Lancashire. We had been to the same places in a different sequence, at different times and with very different trajectories. Now, watching my daughter play on that exotic beach, with my father's stories from childhood coming alive again, the gap between me and that old black man was collapsed by the compelling immediacy of James's prose. Generation and racial difference were erased in an epiphany of timeless connection. I felt compelled to meet him and so I wrote the first and only fan letter of my life.Dear Mr. James,Like you I have lived in Britain, the United States, Africa and now the Caribbean. I started out from Lancashire. In the last few months I have read many of your writings, as well as a large number of West Indian novels (mostly Trinidadian). I feel energized by the experience and would very much like to talk with you when I return to England for a break in August. I would not place the scope of my life on a par with yours; but there are numerous parallels which give me insight into your writings and allow them to speak directly to me.I was born and raised in Old Trafford, Manchester, so that first-class spectator sport was a convenience I took for granted. I learned to play most games with enthusiasm, discipline and varying degrees of skill. I went to Manchester Grammar School and won a scholarship in classics to St. John's College, Cambridge. My favorite ancient authors were Aeschylus and Catullus; I consumed Russian, French and English novels voraciously. I captained my college's occasional cricket team and sometimes played bridge with Mike Brearley. I switched to social anthropology and spent over two years in the slums of Accra. I dreamed of writing a novel like Minty Alley, but wrote a PhD thesis instead. My academic work focused on migration, urban economy and ethnicity, without knowing that I was exploring my own migration from the streets of Old Trafford to Cambridge.I returned to teach at Manchester University and lived in Rossendale, where I found a purer form of Lancashire working class culture than any my background provided. About this time I began to read Marxist philosophy seriously. My politics have always been broad left. I wrote the development program for Papua New Guinea on the eve of its decolonization. I also worked as a part-time journalist for The Economist. Eight years of teaching at Yale, Michigan, McGill and Chicago followed. America has made a more profound and disturbing impact on my life than Africa. (Jamaica is having a similar effect in a much shorter time.) After some fairly shattering experiences, I returned to Cambridge. Now I have taken up a two-year secondment as visiting professor at UWI to help start up a new research school in the social sciences. The work is demanding, often frustrating; but I share your vision of the potential of West Indian intellectuals and culture; and so I bat on.I am particularly interested in your experience of the United States, perhaps because I have read less of your writing from that period. In the Melville book [Mariners, Renegades and Castaways] you refer to an intention to write about "American civilization". I can understand that you never found the time to sit down and write that book. But your comments on baseball and American culture in general make me wonder if you have a manuscript tucked away; and this was confirmed by a brief reference Anna Grimshaw made to such a manuscript [in the Cricket book]. I am sure that I will be drawn back to America before long. The idea of coming to terms with that great society, with all its contradictions and reasons for hope, is more powerful than the seductive insularity of Cambridge.I am teaching a course on society and culture this term which rests heavily on your work. Caribbean students must somehow find their own vocabulary for addressing the universals of modern social history. A masters’ student here is doing a thesis (with heavy reference to Gramsci) on West Indian cricket and politics. This is a receptive moment for your work. More to the point, you have set off incalculable reverberations inside me. It would be more than an honor to meet you. In some ways for me it is a necessity.As a result, I received a letter back from Anna Grimshaw in Brixton, London; and I arranged to meet them both in August.On my way, I stopped over for a job interview in the anthropology department of Washington University, St. Louis. After friendly discussions, I received the best job offer I ever had: full professor, $80- or 90,000 a year, half-time teaching, a fellow of Douglass North’s Institute of Political Economy, possibly one semester a year residence and the main say in five new appointments in anthropology and political economy. I said that I would let them know when I returned to Jamaica.My visit to Brixton was very successful. C.L.R. was in his late 80s and frail, but lively when he was awake. Anna Grimshaw had been Edmund Leach’s last PhD student at Cambridge. She worked in a Ladakh nunnery and wrote a wonderful book about it. She took a job in Manchester with Granada TV, but was persuaded by the old man to work with him for a pittance. She and I discussed pooling our resources in future. Anna was committed to living with C.L.R. until the end; so, when I returned to Kingston, I phoned up St. Louis and said I was turning their offer down. A tenured job was available to me in Cambridge after all. I spent much of 1988-89 in and around Brixton. Anna and I edited James’s American Civilization. in the course of which he died, precipitating an ugly dispute with his literary executor. Later we produced and marketed ten pamphlets in the Prickly Pear series which were later preserved online. Anna trained as a documentary film-maker and took a lectureship in visual anthropology at Manchester University.Snapshots of my life in the CaribbeanI had a romantic conversion in Jamaica: hated society, loved nature. I took a lot of photographs of flora, vegetation, sea and skies. Rural areas were hospitable, but Kingston was tough and often brutal. I took an apartment in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. Again the situation was beautiful, but the society ugly. One title for the poem that follows is “Ishmael at the masthead”. According to James, Ishmael, the narrator of Melville’s Moby Dick, is the epitome of a useless intellectual.View from a Balcony, Kingston I The evening sky parades its wonders just for me:Here towering columns, residue of rainclouds,Boiling black smoke, hellfire of blast furnaces;There thin purple islands, feathered archipelagoFloating in an unmapped, turquoise lake.Encircling hills, reduced to pristine dormant shapes,Stretch out familiar fingers to the golden sea.A forest city spreads its winking lights beneath my feet.This surge of elevated power intoxicates,Brings on wild fantasies of flight,Makes all things possible from here.IIWe clasp cold Red Stripe in the still warm air,Hands slipping on the bottles’ icy dew,Our senses captive to the evanescent spellof sunset’s lurid melodrama,Brief recapitulation, daytime’s curtain call.But Herman was uneasy.? “It isn’t rightto be up here when they are all down there.”The godlike seeming was dissolvedand cooling beer now mixed with clammy sweat.III My home’s a hillside fastness, garden paradise,Container walls like fortress ramparts,Far more lovely, twice as safe as any bank.Here yelping curs outnumber people,Harass dark strangers night and day.White mansions show the world a surly shuttered face.Grim burglar bars, sham rococo,Cannot disguise the prisons that they make.Guns guard the inmates, rich inviolate,From unseen dangers, bleak reminder of their wealth.IV The restful cool of breezy nightis shattered by rounds of canine choirs,Redundant drone of air conditionersand TV movies broadcast for the world to hear.Then daylight brings the peaceful sunto light this magical profusion —Royal palms, wild ferns and clinging vines,Banana’s crazy leaves, cascading banks of flowers—and then at last to lull abandoned dogs to sleep.V Each morning sleek new German cars,Evading potholes and debris of rainstorms,Carry the masters down the winding, unkempt road,Past servants trudging slowly up that steep incline,Eyes averted from their rulers and the sun,Their unpaid journey almost done,An hour or more from Kingston slumto bright, fantastic cages on the hillVIFor all their fortifying bulkthis colony’s foundations are not firm.The fluid earth escapes the shoring wallsand leaks away in swift corrosive streams.The race threat grasps them by the throat.The sound of distant jungle drumsDrifts up to fill the owners’ restless dreamsof dread invasions, crime and death.Subversive nightmares are transformedIn frantic talk of hurricanes and landslides,Elemental cataclysms, nature’s revolutions,Displaced symbols of a deeper terror,Monstrous fear of fellow men.VIIThis fragile platform on the edge of empty spaceSuspends me over chasms of despair,Until the evening sky parades its wonders once againand idle torment shifts to fantasies of flightWhere contradiction’s black and white,Made gaudy by the dying sun’s strange light,Fade into nothing and the night.I became obsessed with dogs and there were plenty around. A vertical cartoon strip in the Daily Gleaner showed: 1. the boss beats up on a worker; 2. the worker beats up on his wife; 3. the wife beats up on their kid; 4. the kid beats up on the dog; 5. the dog beats up on a beggar with dreads. I started collecting material for a book called A Whole Other Story. I read somewhere of the islands: “Of course dogs eat the same things as people, so this affects the population/food ratio; but to go further into this would be a whole other story”.I read a lot in Jamaica. After starting with history, social science and anthropology, I gave up because of the poor quality. In two years I read about fifty Caribbean novels and they were a much more reliable source of insight. Most western first novels are about a young man’s early adventures, but here several had children as narrators, such as George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. This reflected the parent/child metaphor of colonial empire and the child’s estrangement from adult society. Half of these novels came from Trinidad, starting with the Beacon Circle to which James once belonged. I got hooked on V. S. Naipaul who wasn’t very popular locally or India. Marjorie Thomas published an article in a Trinidad literary review -- “Naming in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance” – where I made use of my knowledge of Greek mythology.At home I listened to music a lot, especially operas – Der Rosenkavalier, Madame Butterfly and La Traviata. I consumed Black American novels. I read three of them in one weekend with Debussy’s piano music on continuous playback -- Chester Himes’ Lonely Crusade, Ralph Williams’ Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son, all about black men who ran foul of the Communist Party. I was building up to another breakdown. One day in the car I was listening to Cindy Lauper’s “True Colors”:And the darkness inside youCan make you feel so smallBut I see your true colorsShining throughI see your true colorsAnd that's why I love youSo don't be afraid to let them showYour true colorsTrue colors are beautifulLike a rainbowShow me a smile thenDon't be unhappy, can't rememberWhen I last saw you laughingIf this world makes you crazyAnd you've taken all you can bearYou call me upBecause you know I'll be thereThe colors outside the car started moving in kaleidoscopic patterns. Something chemically unusual was happening to my brain. I drove to a friend’s house. She had a barbecue going with beef and chicken. Digesting meat and alcohol uses up a lot of energy and make us drowsy. I often drank beer or wine at lunchtime to slow me down. So I ate a huge amount of meat and drank half a bottle of rum. It slowed me down alright. I fell asleep for a couple of hours. I was scared, given the reputation of Jamaica’s mental hospitals. So I called Anna in London. “Who is your best friend?” “Ronnie, an Irish woman” “Ask her to buy you the first available British Airways ticket to London. I’ll wait for you at Heathrow and we’ll take a taxi to the Maudsley hospital.” For a week she looked after me while I was treated with drugs as an out-patient. By then I was over it. This was the only occasion when a breakdown didn’t end up with me sectioned. I was back in Jamaica three weeks later.I was close to the feminist academics in Jamaica, as I was at Yale, co-organizing a conference on Caribbean women and editing a book for publication. My main watering hole was the staff bar where I always found congenial company.James on revolution, America and the struggle for happinessC.L.R. James often said after 1968 that there were only two world revolutions left – the second Russian Revolution and the second American Revolution. In American Civilization he argued that the contradiction between totalitarian bureaucracy and the struggle to bring democracy into people’s lives was strongest in the United States. He always believed that Americans would play their part in any future world revolution. I watched Tiananmen Square on television with him in April 1989. He was 88 years old and died soon afterwards. The students were protesting because of an international meeting there. The world was gripped by the spectacle, not least by a young man holding up a line of tanks. James said the Chinese would put down this protest easily, but “The Russians will find it hard to hold onto Eastern Europe after this”. The Berlin Wall came down six months later and the second Russian revolution began – or so we thought before Putin hijacked it.On this subject, here are two occasional pieces by Lenin and James. In January 1917, Lenin gave a speech to Swiss socialists where he said he did not expect revolution in his lifetime, but hoped that the younger comrades would fight in one. The Russian revolution got going in February/March, when the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets took to the streets and the tsar abdicated; in September, Lenin wrote a letter explaining why he called for revolution then, but not in July; and by October the revolution was a done deal. Between July and September, two million Russian soldiers quit the Eastern front and returned home, many with their weapons. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution takes 1300 pages to cover nine months in 1917. I was the first book written by a Marxist that James read, in his 30s – he was lucky. James returned to Lenin’s role in a 1981 speech to Berkeley students about the Guyanese academic-turned-revolutionary, Walter Rodney, who was blown up in a car by an agent provocateur.He tells them that they don’t understand revolution and neither did Rodney. No revolutionary organization should have left its leader unprotected. James was the leading British Trotskyist in the 1930s, dodging the bullets of Stalinist assassins in Paris, while researching the Haitian revolution; he had firsthand experience. Lenin once advocated a vanguard party; but he abandoned that idea when he arrived at the Finland station and found the soviets in the streets. Until then, he said, I was just another bourgeois politician with a line in extremist rhetoric. Revolutions change people. He says in his September letter that insurrection is an art, not a science. James summarizes from it three components of any revolution. The party has nothing to do with any of them. Firstly, there must be a clash, a revolutionary upsurge of the people. Then, secondly, there must be a turning point, when the activity of the advanced ranks is at its height; and thirdly, the enemy must be vacillating.James then recalls a conversation with Trotsky in Mexico in 1938 when he asked:“How come, time and again, the revolutionary party – this is the party, not the mass movement — was wrong in its analysis of the situation and Lenin turns out to be right and set it the correct way? How did that happen?” I expected him to tell me how Lenin knew philosophy, political analysis, psychology, or just knew the revolution. He did not. “Lenin always had his eyes upon the mass of the population, and when he saw the way they were going, he knew that tomorrow this was going to happen”.Louis Antoine de Saint-Just brought the revolutionary principle of happiness from America to Paris: “happiness is a new idea in Europe”. It never really took root there. James drew heavily on this idea in American Civilization. Happiness appeared repeatedly in his writings, from asserting that Marx and Hegel “believed that man is destined for freedom and happiness”, to emphasizing the centrality of happiness to American society and culture, in contrast to Europeans’ sense of the tragic. The notion of happiness lay too at the heart of his Modern Politics (1960), but there he called it “the good life”. Conventionally, happiness has been understood to be a moment of fleeting pleasure. It now often means just material satisfaction. In the eighteenth century, however, the pursuit of happiness in this life was contrasted with religious passivity in the face of earthly suffering. James held happiness to be as essential as the desire for freedom and equality. It was the desire of the modern age, “what people want”, expressive of complex and deeply rooted needs of human beings for integration, to become whole, to live in harmony with others in society.For James then, happiness had two facets, the freedom to be a fully developed, creative, individual personality and part of a community based on principles conducive to that end. This was the unity of private interest and public spirit that Alexis de Tocqueville found in the early American democracy which James believed was still the palpable goal of the American people. The integration of individuals in modern society requires a fundamental reorganization of how people experience work; and this is “the struggle for happiness”. The US contributed the idea of happiness to our understanding of civilization itself. Today it has become a universal goal; and the peoples of the global South serve as potent symbols of the collective force of humanity in opposing the forces of oppression. Happiness is inseparable from the active struggle for its attainment.Both Tocqueville and James visited the New World after the political landscape had been transformed by a major event, the French and Russian revolutions respectively. Each thought that democracy is the moving force in modern history and that America played the leading role in that movement. Their faith was not based on laws and formal institutions, but on the common people, on their pragmatic political sense. They saw ordinary Americans’ customs and attitudes to life as the safeguard of democracy’s future. The structure of both Democracy in America and American Civilization reflects this premise. Each has two parts, the first dealing with the ideas and outward appearance of America’s public institutions, the second with the inner life and social practices of the American people. Each book contains a movement from form to content that mirrors the historical contrast between European civilization and its American successor.James’s study builds on Tocqueville’s. In American Civilization he takes up the themes of liberty, equality and the forms of association; and examines their meaning when he thought the pursuit of material wealth had peaked in Henry Ford’s system of mass production. For James the society’s original ideals of freedom and equality had been sacrificed to an oppressive work regime that nevertheless allowed many to aspire to the material means of achieving these goals. Whereas Tocqueville made equality central to the new democracy, James was preoccupied with freedom or rather with awareness of its loss. Moreover, the worldwide struggle of popular forces against totalitarian bureaucracy had brought Tocqueville’s prediction of rivalry between America and Russia to the nightmare conclusion of the Cold War. Thus, for both writers, the pursuit of happiness can only take root in a democratic society whose institutional forms and cultural content support the self-expression and free association of equal citizens. The late 1980s, when I lived in Jamaica and met C L R James and Anna Grimshaw, were a turning point. I found my mature intellectual vision then, a more explicitly political version than before, one founded on anthropology, history and literature. The first practical applications of this vision were American Civilization, the African Studies program at Cambridge and Prickly Pear Pamphlets.Chapter 10Rethinking anthropology, African Studies and history (1988-1997)African StudiesComparative historyCambridge decentralization: Anna, CLR and Jimnetwork approachBlack students and Abolition Intellectuals, history of activism and world society todayHistory of Manchester and LancashireI felt out of time and place for most of the 1960s. Self and world did not fit. People said that there was a cultural revolution (“sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll”) going on; but I was a career academic caught time in betting shops. This was the peak period of national capitalism in the West – full employment, low inflation, “a man on the moon and color TV”. My upper middle class friends could drop out for a year or two and indulge the fantasy that they were “orphans”, knowing that a good job was waiting for them whenever they wanted it. They took up Trostskyist politics, while I drove old ladies to vote Labour in elections.It didn’t get any better in the 70s when my idea of entryism was to moonlight for the World Bank, the Foreign Office and The Economist. The world was changing alright, but not in any progressive way: the dollar going off gold, the collapse of Bretton Woods, Vietnam, stagflation, Israel’s wars with the Arabs, two OPEC oil price hikes etc. I probably failed to write the book of my Ghana fieldwork because it was stuck in the 60s and I was riding with the punches in the 70s. You are relatively free in your twenties and you retain the idea of an open future in your thirties, but the world is closing in because of decisions already made. It is a terrible time of accumulation: family, house, car, work, learning your trade. I believed that I had something to say about where the world was going, but I couldn’t say it yet.Reagan’s and Thatcher’s neoliberal counter-revolution definitely got the world moving, even if in the wrong political direction. I perked up, abandoned the idea of writing a urban monograph and published a literary digest of West African rural history instead; but I only felt really in sync with the world’s movement from the late 1980s. As I have explained, the catalyst was my Jamaica trip and meeting CLR and Anna in 1986-1989. But the world took off at the end of the Cold War and I found the means of connecting with it, especially from 1989. I recall watching Tiananmen Square on TV with CLR, a few weeks before he died. He said “The Chinese Communists will put down this rebellion easily, but the Russians will find it hard to hold on to Eastern Europe after this.” The Berlin Wall came down six months later. There are intellectuals of structure and of transition; Marx nailed Victorian capitalism and Lenin was the other, interested only in how to get from A to B. I was with Lenin.The years around 1990 saw the most profound changes of my lifetime: the collapse of the Soviet Union, one-world capitalism, the rise of China and India as modern powers, money’s escape from political constraints and the internet going public, topped off by the birth of the World Wide Web. I knew from the beginning that the digital revolution in communications was epoch-making on a grand scale and I devote Chapter 15 to this topic. Here I will focus on my other preoccupations in the second millennium’s last decade.Jamesian enterprisesAnna Grimshaw came from Lancashire and did an anthropology PhD at Cambridge; but for a good part of the 80s, she worked with and for C. L. R. James. He had very little money and had been given a bedsit with the Race Today collective in Brixton. Anna took it on herself to organize his affairs and to prepare for the continuity of his legacy, including the appointment of a literary executor. She found a staunch ally in Jim Murray who founded the C.L.R. James Institute in New York to collect, catalog and distribute his papers. I had read only James’s published books and once chose to write something on him using the unpublished papers; but I gave up when I discovered that the latter were more voluminous than his published out and equally rich. Jim died horribly and much too early in 2003. He was like a brother to me.The two years that I spent on and off with Anna and C L R in Brixton were amazing. He saw me as a rival for her attentions and called me “professor”, not a compliment. But our conversations, for example about revolutionary heroes in history, were electric and sometimes he would send me out for refreshments: “Go Selfridges and buy some fine claret, wood pigeon and some Schubert”. After he died, Anna plunged into publishing collections of his work; we edited American Civilization together (James had approved our title, The Struggle for Happiness); an later she updated the Cricket book. Perhaps the most spectacular product of our collaboration was Prickly Pear Press (or Pamphlets – it varied). These were Anna’s idea; she would say ‘Pamphlets!’ and I would wonder what and why. She one day found the name on a letter from Trinidad (4 Prickly Pear Alley). Prickly pears are a cactus found growing wild in semi-arid zones like Mexico and Sicily, where they provide food for the poor. Eventually, we produced ten pamphlets in three years (1993-1996), launching the series with a jointly-authored essay, Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals. There we write: “Somehow, all of us must devise ways of inserting ourselves meaningfully into the most inclusive versions of human history.” I guess the title of this book goes back at least to that time. I see Anna’s spirit very strongly in our manifesto, printed on the back of each copy:The prickly pear is a humble fruit which grows abundantly in arid places. It may be spiky, but it is refreshing too. The inspiration for the series is the eighteenth century pamphleteer. We emulate the passionate amateurs of history who circulated new and radical ideas to as wide an audience as possible; and we hope in the process to reinvent anthropology as a means of engaging with society. Essayists will be free of formal convention as they seek to give expression to the content of our world. The pamphlets will be provocative and entertaining, cheap and pocket-sized. Like the prickly pear, they will come in several colors—red, yellow, green and more besides.I was chief editor and business manager. Patrick Verdon, the teenage son of an anthropology colleague, did everything technical. Salah Bander was our graphic designer. Later Ruth Van Velsen and Michael Ward helped with the administration. As Jim Murray used to say, “small-scale publishing is about fulfilling orders (putting stamps on packages for the post) and most intellectuals think it’s a bore. That’s why they fail”. We sold 7,000 copies of ten pamphlets in three years, out of a print run of a thousand each. I then handed the enterprise over to Matthew Engelke and Mark Harris. It struggled on for a while and then Matthew joined Marshall Sahlins in the more professional and longer-lived Prickly Paradigm successor imprint in Chicago. Justin Shaffner, then an undergraduate student, was crucial in preserving the earlier pamphlets online; he later became steward of my website and colleague at the Open Anthropology Cooperative Press.Back in the saddleGranted a full lectureship in anthropology, I also took on a teaching fellowship at Girton, once a women’s college and now co-ed. My mental health was still vulnerable and I had two or three more breakdowns before my illness cleared up when I was 50, around the launch of PPP. Soon after my return, I had sabbatical leave to write for a year. I decided to write an autobiography, not for immediate publication, but when I was still nearer to my youth as a resource for the real thing in my 70s. It was over 200 pages single-spaced and I have used some of it here. I showed to a friend who said “Don’t ever show it to anyone else, Keith; it’s too brutal”. So I moved on to the next project – my Ghana monograph, twenty years on! I failed miserably, had a breakdown and ended up in hospital.In the department, now with Marilyn Strathern (my precursor at Girton) as head, I specialized in external relations – with the archaeologists and biological anthropologists, the sociologists, African Studies and information technology. For two years I chaired a university committee investigating the uses of IT for research and teaching. Given my interest in world history and experience with the American four-field system, when the Faculty failed to reach agreement on a new first year course, I took over as chair of the relevant committee with a paleoanthropologist and an archaeologist as my colleagues. Our solution was a compulsory course each for archaeology, biological anthropology and social anthropology and a choice for the fourth between sociology and an interdisciplinary course, “Becoming human”. It passed unanimously. In 1994, the university awarded teaching prizes for the first time ever and I won the prize for the humanities and social sciences. Teaching, like writing, is a lonely profession; and we rarely find out how effective we are. A Deputy Prime Minister once confessed that he was radicalised by my first-year lectures. His subsequent political career turned that compliment into a poisoned chalice.In 1992 I took on the job of Director of the African Studies Center (see below). It suited Marilyn to have my on the fringes, while she controlled internal affairs. One day I decided I wanted to resign from one of hats, I forget which, in order to run another hare somewhere; and she exploded “God save me for your enthusiasms!” As C.L.R. once wrote, anyone can be a poet occasionally if the moment is emotional enough; but he great poet does it every time on demand.I never let go of the idea of improvising lectures and in my mid-40s I was prompted to try again. I spent a year training myself to conquer fear of public failure and to tap into my unconscious mind. When in Manchester I discovered that I was a morning person. It usually took me three hours to write a lecture, so, when I had one at 9 am I got up at 5.30 and it only took half the normal time to write. Now 1-2 hours preparation was already stretching the limits of my concentration. I gave the big first-year introductory anthropology lectures for social scientists. Training to improvise them took a year. I reduced the time for preparation to one hour, then 45 minutes and 30 minutes. Next I just jotted down a few notes. Eventually, I thought about the lecture over breakfast (20 minutes), then while walking to the lecture theatre (10 minutes) and finally when waiting for the class to settle down before I started. This process took 9-12 months. Only two things matter: what is the big idea and where to start? An improvised performance is like a wave; once you are on it, you can’t get off and the movement is sustained by the energy exchange between performer and audience. I would run over three or four possibilities for the start while soaking up the energy of those chattering students. The last couple would realize that everyone else was quiet and then I would begin.Teaching anti-colonial anthropologyWhen I returned to teach in Cambridge, I asked myself how I might give my students access to the other side in the war against colonial empire. The intellectuals I had in mind were only rarely anthropologists themselves – they wrote novels, poetry, history and political tracts, while films were as important a source as books. So for several years I put on a course called “Voices from the Third World” which always began with a TV documentary featuring Edward Said, “The idea of empire”. A Palestinian of high family brought up in Egypt, Said was both a socially hybrid figure and the leading critic of “Orientalism”, a distorted western perspective on the East. The film included some shocking footage of forced labour in the colonies (with musical backing by Elgar’s Enigma Variations!). I chose three novels, one each from Africa, Latin America and Asia – Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Gabriel?García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981); clips from Richard Attenborough’s movie, Gandhi and Jean Rouch’s Les ma?tres fous; Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963) and James’ History of Negro Revolt (1938).I soon ran into a road block. The students had been trained to write essays based on ethnographies whose truth was vouched for. They didn’t know how to read novels or for that matter biased political works that they considered to have been “made up”. They wanted to know the relationship between these fictions and what really happened in history, whereas I was interested in the global vision animating their art. The students found it unproblematic to read Edward Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer as God’s truth, even though I told them that the Nuer made him pitch his tent outside their villages, since they were being bombed by the British at the time. Writing Culture was all the rage at the time, but that revolution had not yet penetrated to the level of college supervisions.I made some modifications the following year. First, we would discuss only how these works were made. What “world” did each author create and how? What was the narrative voice; the organization of tense; the treatment of race, class, gender and generation; how was political authority portrayed; what is magical realism? Second, we would include a couple of ethnographies for comparison: one by E-P along with Clifford Geertz’s commentary in “the anthropologist as author”; and Marjorie Shostak’s biography of Nisa, a !Kung woman (1981). We would apply the same method to analysing the worlds they made. And exploring combinations of magical and realist thinking in novels and ethnographies provided endless fun. The course eventually settled down into something enjoyable and instructive. It was put on in the Department of Social Anthropology, but attracted a crowd of mixed discipline and region, as is usual in Cambridge.Two decades later I put on a course of improvised lectures on “Africa in World History” in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria. “What does world history look like from an African perspective? These lectures are not a survey, but each will examine one or more outstanding books addressing various aspects of this topic, arranged in historical sequence. Every one of these books, many of them written by Africans and members of the African diaspora, has inspired the lecturer. This is lecturing for belief, not lecturing for knowledge. The improvised lectures are intended as a guide to reading and stimulus to personal research.”The authors chosen were: Cheikh Anta Diop, Walter Rodney, Gordon Childe, Martin Bernal, C L R James, W E B Du Bois, W Arthur Lewis, Frantz Fanon, Vishnu Padayachee, Michael Cowen & Robert Shenton, Moeletse Mbeki, Jean-Fran?ois Bayart, Charles Feinstein and Keith Hart. African Studies at CambridgeAs Director of the Cambridge African Studies Centre in the 1990s, my self-appointed mission was to shift its focus away from Africa as a land mass to the common history of Atlantic societies formed by the slave trade, colonial empire and unequal development. Soon after starting, an offer came from Nigeria’s head of state, a former general called Ibrahim (“IBB”) Babangida, to fund a ?1.5 million research fellowship on African women through the Centre. The fellowship would be named after Babangida’s wife, Maryam. IBB came to power in a bloodless coup. He organized presidential elections only to have them annulled. He resigned and was succeeded by another general, Sani Abacha, who was a monster. Babangida had been rich before entering politics, allegedly through smuggling drugs. Others claimed that he just stole from the Nigerian people in the usual way. It seemed obvious to me that the fellowship offer was tainted and could embarrass the University for several reasons: crimes against humanity, fraud and embezzlement, unconstitutional behaviour, the drugs trade etc. I was alone in taking this view. The Centre’s management committee felt that the offer was too good to turn down. Feminists told me that I would be a marked man if I refused a unique initiative in African women’s studies. A women’s college was keen to host the fellowship. Nigerian students accused me of double standards: “The whole of Cambridge was built on dirty money”, they said. “What’s wrong with Black people’s dirty money?” I began seriously to doubt my own judgment. But I was rescued by a visiting Yoruba professor who told me, “Ask him why this award is coming to Cambridge”, he said; “an equal grant to a Nigerian university should be a condition for accepting the offer.” I wrote along these lines and never heard any more on the subject. The African Studies Centre was and is a small cog in the Cambridge University machine. My judgment was political -- based on the responsibilities of my office -- not moral or ethical. It seems that most academics when faced with a free lump sum will grab it. I found Nigerian military rule and the ill-gotten gains of dictators personally offensive; but the threat to my institution’s good name was decisive. Elihu Yale, “an English merchant and philanthropist,” bought his university with the loot he gained as President of the East India Company in Madras. The college was pleased to change its name to his. If “primitive accumulation” of this sort was acceptable then, it ought not to be now. Yet evidence of the universities’ continuing reliance on tainted money suggests that the practice is still commonplace. There is something absolute about the prestige enjoyed by Cambridge or Yale – which is why so much dirty money flows into their coffers. But this prestige may be used for good or ill and is not immune to revelations of malpractice, as the London School of Economics discovered when its Director had to resign over a scandal involving Libya’s Gaddafi family.I launched some public initiatives that went to the heart of Africa’s contradictions. The most dramatic came after an Italian associate came into my office one day and said “They are killing my friends in Angola. What are you going to do about it?” Usually the most I did for visitors was to sign a form for a library card. The thirty years war which had cost a million lives there was reopened when Unita, led by Jonas Savimbi, attacked a hospital where Italian doctors who supported the MPLA government worked. I wrote a letter, signed by over a hundred British academics and published in The Independent, in which Unita was described as a “genocidal organization”. Later, the Angolan government suggested that we hold a conference on Angola in Cambridge. I persuaded Unita’s foreign affairs spokesman that their side should come too. It was the first time that the opponents had appeared together in public for several years. The conference, Why Angola Matters, brought together the deputy foreign minister and other government representatives, Brigadier Samakuva of Unita, the British ambassador to Angola, a wide range of academics and students, extremely vocal Angolan “economic migrants”, anti-land mine activists, journalists, diplomats and businessmen – discussion was lively. Conferences like this have unexpected outcomes and I happen to know one. I hung a poster of the Mines Advisory Group on my office wall: it showed the Earth encircled by barbed wire with a warning triangle in front and gruesome pictures around the edges of land mine victims with their limbs blown off. An undergraduate student, Richard Moyes, was fascinated by this poster, especially since MAG’s base was his home town in Cumberland. After graduation he ended up in Cambodia trying to save children who thought that land mines were toys. He returned home and formed an NGO, “Article 36”, to promote action against weapons that were or ought to be illegal. In 2010 he drew up a sketch to get nuclear weapons banned by the United Nations working around the nuclear powers, not with them. The movement crystallized as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons (ICAN). In 2017 122 out of 193 member states accepted in principle a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. ICAN received the Nobel Peace Prize later that year.In 1995 the Nigerian writer, TV producer and environmental activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, was tried and hung by Abacha’s military. He belonged to the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta which has long seen oil production (mainly by Shell), local resistance and military repression. I organized a conference bringing together government spokesmen, Shell executives, Ogoni activists and other interested parties. One session was chaired by Jack Gowon, a former Nigerian president. A senior Shell official made an unconvincing defence of the company’s policy in the Delta. The mid-1990s were also the time of the Rwandan genocide and of South Africa’s first election for an African majority government. We always enrolled a wide range of professionals, activists, scholars and students in discussing these events. When trying to attract participants, I found that Cambridge University had enormous pulling power.A network approach to Cambridge UniversityIn my North American perambulations, I held a weekly soirée at home and the international interest provoked by these African Studies events encouraged me to hold one at home on Thursday evenings. They were more difficult to manage than in Montreal. The English students sat drinking quietly in twos and threes, whereas the Africans felt uneasy if I didn’t make a formal speech. Every week I met disillusioned graduate students -- Indians, Africans, Southern Europeans -- often natural scientists, serious people who wanted to change the world in a material sense. They felt they had a duty to overcome the world’s inequalities; and they were often depressed. “Isn’t Cambridge awful?” they would complain. “It is so conservative, so heavy in its traditions, so establishment-oriented. Everything moves so slowly; everyone lives in the past; they don’t want to touch anything that is relevant in this world. They break us up socially and farm us out to highly specialized disciplines. Physicists in one research group can’t talk to the others. They split us up into colleges, stick us with public schoolboys who just drink beer; and we end up feeling lonely, depressed and isolated. We are not getting what we want.” I would say “This place is full of people like you -- progressive and engaged people with extraordinary backgrounds who come from all over the world, especially the graduate students and junior research fellows. If you are not looking for them and don’t know how to find them, or if you keep to your preconceived model of how to build a social world, you will spend your time here seeing nothing outside your own blinkers. When I was a student, I thought that Cambridge was just Conservative party politicians at the Union and rugby types who made noise in the streets. I didn’t know that Crick and Watson were discovering DNA then or that Cambridge was changing the world in many ways. “Cambridge is very decentralized. The departments, colleges and institutes are semi-autonomous. If you find one oppressive, you can move to another. You must make your own social world and many people have no idea how to do that. There is no social structure to adapt to here. You are a scientist. How did Cambridge come to be a famous science university? The Natural Sciences Tripos was invented in the 1860s by a couple of Northerners, William Whewell and Adam Sedgwick. Then James Clerk Maxwell launched the Cavendish Laboratory and changed what the world thought science was. Charles Darwin’s son Horace set up his instruments factory and supplied the equipment. By 1900 Cambridge University was remaking modern physics. Meanwhile male students were ripping up Newnham College's gates to protest allowing women any academic rights. The Senate House debated for decades whether dons must have a religious affiliation. A casual visitor would see only this reactionary stuff and miss what the scientists were up to”. A fair proportion of the world’s leading scientists were at Cambridge: Newton, Darwin, Babbage, Maxwell, Marshall, Rutherford, Keynes, Crick/Watson. Cambridgeshire is the heart of Britain’s latest industrial revolution, thanks to college-sponsored science parks and village start-ups in their hundreds. Cambridge University encourages innovation by leaving small self-organized networks to do something new. It helps that it is a medieval institution without a strong bureaucracy. The monks who split from Oxford and then formed the first college, Peterhouse, broke with the official church and set up their own place because they rejected an orthodoxy that was narrow and backward-looking. They sought universality, a wider sense of relevance and connection with the world. The provincial notables linked to Henry VII’s mother who founded St. John’s College wanted to open up educational opportunities to lower class provincials like me. The puritan divines who founded Emmanuel College thought that their peers had abandoned their original goals, so they confronted society in their own way. Each new college made a difference and later fell back into protecting the status quo. They broke with the establishment and opened up to the world. This dialectic is still intrinsic to the development of Cambridge University, although it does wax and wane over time.Cambridge between Africa and the worldI wanted to show that Black students have a long history at Cambridge University. The pioneers included George Bridgetower, Beethoven’s violinist. He was thrown out for playing African drums in the market square on a Sunday and later became director of George IV’s orchestra. Alexander Crummel was an American Baptist minister sponsored by Cambridge abolitionists, who coined the term “Pan-African” and launched settlements in Liberia. Then, with my collaborators (especially Salah Bander), I found a whole social movement based in Cambridge. Thomas Clarkson of St. John’s College developed many of the methods of single issue politics that we are familiar with today. He led the abolitionist network that flourished in Cambridge around 1800, crossing divisions between academic life, the town people and national politics. The anti-slavery movement is the matrix from which the international movement for human rights grew. Our nearest equivalents now are the movements for Black emancipation in the United States and South Africa. Peter Peckard, Master of Magdalene College, was 70 when he became Vice Chancellor. He advocated religious freedom and human rights for Jews, Gypsies and Methodists. In 1784 he gave a sermon against slavery, “Am I not a man and a brother?”, the greatest preached in Cambridge since the Reformation. It galvanized everyone. Peckard led a team of subscribers that published the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo freed slave (Equiano 1789). The book went into eight editions and sold thousands. Peckard, an academic churchman apparently in his dotage, organized and financed the leading black activist literature of a revolutionary era. The movement to end slavery united people of disparate religious and political views, ranging from high Tory churchmen to non-conformist dissenters and evangelicals. George Tomline was Master of Pembroke, William Pitt the Younger’s college, and later became a bishop with Pitt’s help. He was Pitt’s chief of staff throughout his political career. Pitt and William Wilberforce went up to Cambridge together when Peckard gave his famous sermon. Clarkson drew Wilberforce into the abolition movement and Pitt became Cambridge University’s MP and prime minister at 24. He encouraged Wilberforce to become the parliamentary leader of the movement. Benjamin Flower owned and was chief writer of a radical magazine, The Cambridge Intelligencer. He advocated slave emancipation by revolution, a brave stance in the Napoleonic wars. Thomas Clarkson (Brogan 2004) won an essay competition on slavery and decided to devote his life to its abolition. He went on a series of fact-finding and publicity trips on horseback, a total of 35,000 miles over seven years. He was beaten up and thrown in the sea in Bristol and Liverpool, but was met by a large enthusiastic crowd in Manchester and left with 10,000 signatures to an anti-slavery petition. What was his method of campaigning? First, these were fieldwork trips; he insisted on going to see for himself. Second, he wanted evidence, but he also wanted to show it to people, so he bought bits and pieces -- thumbscrews and whips -- and built up a portable museum that he hoped would shock his audiences, a chest containing symbols of the slave trade’s evils and the benefits of legitimate trade with Africa (export crops). Clarkson pioneered the single-issue politics that we know so well. He knew too that someone needed to personify the movement. These remarkable people reveal that Cambridge was not an isolated fenland town, detached from the world and national politics, divided by an irreducible gap between town and gown. Cambridge University was a lynchpin of the British Empire in the nineteenth century; but as a centre for training evangelical missionaries (as well as natural scientists), it was also a crucible for a revolutionary ideology and movement combining anti-slavery, free trade, economic individualism and evangelical Christianity, explored comprehensively by Boyd Hilton (1991). The relevance of this history of activism for usWorld society is being formed in our times. Now is when the world became unified for good or ill. We are all connected through a single network for exchanging goods, services and information. Our generation has discovered universal connection and movement. We just need to find the forms of association that can put them to good use. Imagine what Clarkson would do with the internet and cell phones! The poor man had to go charging around the countryside on a horse over bad roads; he was beaten up; he had to print and distribute books and pamphlets by hand.What do we do with our means of communication? We write trivia to mailing lists, tick likes on Facebook, put selfies on Instagram. Of course a few use the internet to mobilize networks, pass on important information and transform the nature of knowledge. Ours is a new stage of human society. Maybe we can’t see it, but what is going on is not obscure. The 1990s, launched by the end of the Cold War, the rise of China and India and the internet going public, were as pregnant with possibility as the 1790’s, if not more so. The other main feature of our world is inequality amplified by machines. Indifference to it is made possible by separating ourselves from others, through the international controls that keep poor people out, while we demonize those who slip through (Sharp, Hart and Laterza 2014). We know that we can’t keep them out. Yet we support territorial states run by politicians who appeal to racism and promise to ban the world’s poor, while preserving the illusory homogeneity of decadent national societies. We are all implicated in this. It was once fashionable in British universities to advocate disinvestment in apartheid South Africa or to boycott grapes from Pinochet’s Chile. Inequality is especially intolerable when it can be located elsewhere than at home. By all means decolonize the curriculum as part of an assault on the unequal British education system.So there is a role for engaged intellectuals today. First, we must acquire a better grasp of what is going on in the world. The universities are poorly placed to do that. How disciplines are organized, the curricula and courses, makes it impossible for them to address this question. But Cambridge University still has small networks in its institutional cracks, people who are not defined by the official syllabus, who are driven to seek a new and expanded universality, who know that normal academic life is dying. Cambridge pioneered modern physics and molecular biology; but they won’t help us to understand the 21st century world. Social movements could once be personified as Clarkson did his. For us, however, individual personality will matter less than before. If we would compare that period with our own, we need new forms of association as frameworks for intellectual life (Barone and Hart 2015).If the world of society and nature is devoid of meaning, being governed by remote impersonal forces known only to specially trained experts, that leaves each of us feeling small, isolated and vulnerable. Yet modern cultures tell us that we are personalities with significance. How do we bridge the gap? Gandhi devoted a large part of his philosophy to building up his own personal resources, but also to teaching the Indian masses to believe in their individual capacity to change the world.In conclusionThe stories I have told here support a view of intellectual politics in a university that is radically decentred. Throughout its history the vast bulk of Cambridge University’s members, both faculty and students, have been ardent supporters of a rather insular version of the establishment. But its institutions are Janus-faced, if disproportionately so. Just as the majority adhere to the status quo, there is a permanent tendency for self-organized individuals and small groups to go in the opposite direction, to open up to the world and do something new that matters.The guarantee of this dialectic is the university’s organization into distinct spheres of influence which ensure that no adult must buckle under to a single central authority and students have much more room for independent manoeuvre than elsewhere. The internet has brought with it an enhanced appreciation of the potential of networked social relations as opposed to fixed structures. At Cambridge there is no reason to sit still and take it, unless you have already been programmed to do that. The local environment provides abundant possibilities for self-starting initiatives. There is no need to wait for a faculty board to change the examined syllabus or to choose that route yourself as the path to meaningful change. Reading is not the only activity available in a science-based university.I have lived through the anti-colonial revolution. Colonized peoples fought for their freedom, for independence, for the nation. I never saw a placard or banner with “We Want Decolonization Now!!” The term expressed rather a feeble attempt for the departing powers to assert their own agency – “You didn’t win this, we gave it to you.” Reading about the struggle to expand the canon of English literature, I recall those soirées in Clare Street and how hard it was then to persuade frustrated foreign students that Cambridge University can sometimes be more mutable than they think.I worked with Anna Grimshaw on various projects stemming from that period. Her family lived in Northeast Lancashire, so our collaboration opened up a new perspective on Manchester. Historical roots: Manchester and LancashireWhile I was at Manchester in the 1970s, I gave a seminar talk on development strategies for Papua New Guinea's independence, featuring my new idea, the informal economy. It was written in “economese”. A Marxist economist asked me: "Why are you giving us this neo-Keynesian rubbish? Have you never read Karl Marx, Adam Smith or any classical political economy?" Well, I had and I hadn't read Marx; most academics know the situation. But this outburst shamed me into taking the project more seriously and before long I converted to Marxism. I was thrilled by Engels' book, mostly about Manchester, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and took friends and visitors on an Engels tour of the inner city. None of this had been familiar to me when I grew up. It sowed the seeds for placing Marxist theory in Lancashire's social history during the industrial revolution. I knew western history as so many second-hand abstractions to set against my own concrete experience of Africa as an ethnographer and comparative historian. My return to Manchester gave me a chance to remedy that, through reading and first-hand experience. Ever since, I have run the social theories of Marx, Weber and the rest through what I learned about Lancashire's factory system in the mid-nineteenth century. Marx and Engels thought that the industrial working class would, in time, overthrow capitalism. They reached this conclusion when writing The German Ideology (1848) together in opposition to Hegel. Yet Hegel predicted more accurately the dominant institution of the last century, the attempt to manage markets and accumulation though central bureaucracies in the interest of citizens -- national capitalism. He found that industrial work routines were alienating and capitalism, left to its own devices, entailed escalating poverty. He saw no way round capitalist markets’ ability to generate wealth. Capitalism’s contradictions should be contained by a public apparatus representing the general interest and managed by a “universal class” of university-trained bureaucrats. Marx and Engels could see only one candidate for such a class. The state was an archaic institution rapidly being made obsolete by industrial capitalism. The factory system was driven by the cumulative addition of machines to human labor, rapidly concentrating workers in new manufacturing centers. There they could organize more effectively and offer a counterweight to the power of the owners' money. The new universal class was working people in general, led by the factory proletariat. The workers had no property save their labor power, but they had the potential of combination, unwittingly provided by the owners. They were separate from both the small urban proprietors and the dangerous classes who lacked stable employment. Unlike the capitalists and their administrator stooges, the workers would represent society as a whole. Why did Marx and Engels imagine that working in a factory endowed anyone with the potential for revolution? The Lancashire cotton famine of 1861-64 was caused by the Union navy’s blockade of Southern ports during the American civil war. The supply of raw materials to the textile industry dried up, causing massive unemployment in towns wholly specialized in cotton products. The owners petitioned parliament to send battleships to relieve the blockade; while the workers held demonstrations in support of the North and the freedom of labor. People died for sure, but not as many as would have if the workers had no resources other than their factory jobs. What sustained them materially and socially at that time? We know about the ideology and activism of Lancashire workers from the agitators who flourished at the time of Chartism. Lancashire was empty before the industrial revolution and the workforce came mainly from the Celtic fringe, from Ireland, Western Scotland and North Wales. We might assume that they were formed entirely by their new conditions of employment; or maybe they brought with them the qualities of migrants whose lands had largely avoided feudal domination. Lancashire shares with the rest of North and West Britain a wild landscape offering a temporary means of escape from the dark satanic mills. I once took a prominent French Marxist onto the hills overlooking Oldham. He marveled at being above it all in that bracing wind. “I never knew; they never told us”, he said. The buoyancy Marx and Engels noted in Lancashire's workers might have had several sources. Working in a factory was unlikely to be one of them.Later work by Marxist historians, especially E.P. Thompson, emphasized the contrast between rural and urban work conditions. At first the new wage laborers brought peasant attitudes into the factories. If a sheep was sick, they stayed at home to tend it. The owners could not put up with such slackness; the steam-driven machines used up fuel continuously and human work patterns had to be adapted to them. The imposition of time discipline was often brutal. Gradually it became established that workers were paid for precisely how long they worked and how much they produced. The sociologist, Neil Smelser emphasized the institutions Lancashire workers created outside the factories to mitigate their lot -- friendly societies and similar mechanisms of social insurance. Most impressively, Beatrice Webb (a leading cooperative socialist and, with her husband Sidney, founder of the Fabian Society for left wing intellectuals) reports in My Apprenticeship the shock she had when she left London to visit her Northern relatives. Used to the East End rabble depicted so vividly by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist, she found a whole new working class civilization in the North. This was built, she says, around three institutions made by the workers themselves: the chapel, the union and the co-op. Each of these united collective and individual interests: the congregation was offset by protestant individualism; solidarity at work by private ownership of tools; combination in the marketplace by private property. It is unsurprising that Lancashire’s bourgeoisie and working class joined there to help the Liberals sweep to national power in the 1880s and after (Clarke 1971). We must combine studies of the workplace with the institutions people devise outside it. The informal economy was as much a strategy of the Lancashire factory workers as it is anywhere in the world today. In Rossendale, self-employed activities included strip mining, quarries, transport, catering for pilgrims and keeping animals in “pens”. That is how they survived the cotton famine (and downswings in the business cycle ever since). And Marx and Engels missed it, reifying a contrast between working class collectivism and petty bourgeois individualism that was never there. The great merit of Malinowski's functionalist ethnography is that it should reflect what people do in their lives, not what intellectuals choose to highlight in their theories. If being human means to be individual and social at the same time, Marx and Engels’ class analysis falls down immediately. The lines between the proletariat, petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat dissolve. We must be free to make public associations conducive to private self-expression; and the latter leaks across the boundaries imposed by bureaucracy. Napoleon or whoever was right about the British. We are a “nation of shopkeepers”, but with an ingrained attachment to fairness and conformity. There is a huge population spanning the so-called working and lower middle classes, moving up and down as I described for my family earlier. This prefigures what I found in Ghana, once I discarded my project to study politics there.Chapter 11Paris, Durban and the world (1997-2018)In my youth Paris was the gateway to the Ancient Mediterranean. We never stayed there for more than a day on our way South. Paris was the capital of European civilization, the most sophisticated city in the world, but I only knew it through literature. French was a dead language I had read since I was 15, as a classicist, cineaste, West Africanist, Marxist, world historian and consumer of novels. I sometimes review French books for possible publication in English translation. I thought I knew the language well. My mental illness eventually cleared up -- it is hard to say when exactly, for sure by 1994. I thought of myself until then as the Kant of Cambridge, at least in terms of immobility. I even dreamt of my coffin being winched out of the back bedroom window when I died. I wasn’t going anywhere.Sophie spent two years as a postdoc in Cambridge; she was trained as a lawyer in Geneva and as an anthropologist in Paris. In 1996 she wrote saying that, if I was ever in Paris, she would give me a meal. I went there in February 1997 and was invited to dinner. I remember that meal vividly. Her small flat was located in a quartier populaire, meaning that lots of low-class Blacks, North Africans and students lived there. She served five courses: oeufs en cocottes (poached eggs with herbs); quail braised in brandy with raisins; salad; five cheeses; and an ice-cream cake (bombe). I thought I was getting special treatment. I have since learned that she goes over the top for any dinner guest. I returned for a few days a couple of months later; she visited me in Cambridge; we spent three weeks In Ireland together in July. In late August I joined her in Paris, while she was in Bulgaria. She handed in her notice to leave in December and in April 1998 we moved into the 9th arrondissement apartment that is still our base. We were married in 2001; and our daughter Constance was born in 2002.I have never known so much domestic continuity since childhood or had the chance before to bring up a child. At my age, this is a huge blessing. Freed from the inhibitors of mental illness, I entered a hectic life of writing and globetrotting, anchored by the virtual social life in my laptop and my home life in Paris. It still surprises me that I would live here for so long.In the last two decades I have taught and researched in a dozen universities around the world. I have given public lectures in Germany (ten times in the last two years), France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Czech Republic, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Zambia, Ghana, India and Thailand. Engagement with the internet during the 90s expanded once my laptop became my main connection with the world. I launched a website to promote the book I wrote when I arrived in Paris; and I participated avidly in the social media revolution after 2000. Mental health and the move to Paris allowed me to sustain a cosmopolitan life-style that dwarfed in scope anything before. A major illness in 2016 forced me to cut back on travel and prompted me to write this book. But I have been preparing to write my story all my life.When I returned after that dinner, Sophie showed me around Paris for a few days. I experienced not one, but three epiphanies. The first was at the great basin next to Stalingrad, a docking area for barges on the canal system linking Paris to the Seine, with a lovely eighteenth century customs house and cinemas on either side. Stalingrad is Paris’s communist heartland. It was between late afternoon and twilight; the pink and blue sky was reflected in the still water. I felt profoundly at ease. The second was in the Beaubourg Café next to the Pompidou Centre. The customers in casual black uniform nursed their tiny cups of coffee, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback or newspaper, mostly alone – like a scene in a Woody Allen movie. This was the lifestyle that I had imitated when I tried out as a Left Bank Jewish intellectual at 16. The third was in the rue des ?coles next to the Sorbonne, this time with a strong Third World slant: Présence africaine, bookshop of the legendary Pan-African journal whose authors included Gide, Sartre, Camus, Leiris, Wright, Senghor, Césaire and across the street L’Harmattan, a left-wing bookshop/publisher with an even more global reach. This sequence was less a coup de foudre than a “triple whammy”. Shaken and stirred, I knew that anyone who could lead me to experiences like these was worth hanging onto.We later took three weeks holiday together in Ireland. I can’t believe that I was so reckless to propose it. But it didn’t rain much. I particularly liked Yeats country in County Sligo (“I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree”). But the most spectacular spot was Skellig Michael, a rocky outcrop on the tip of Kerry that was once the westernmost place in Christendom and had a monastery for 500 years. It was home to seals, puffins, cormorants and gulls aplenty. In the latest Star Wars movie the last Jedi lived there. When we finished this magical mystery tour, Sophie announced that I now had a totem: like the indigenous Australians, I was a puffin of Skellig with a postcard to prove it. This was brilliant symbolism: puffins are Britain’s favorite bird; in French they are called macareux moine (monk with a colorful badge); they are at once attractive and ridiculous, with their plump belly and the awkward flapping of their wings when they jump in the sea. “Puffin” has been her pet name for me ever since. I can’t think of a more unusual or better gift.I was offered a sabbatical year and grabbed it so that I could spend more time in Paris with Sophie. I arrived on the day that Princess Diana was killed. I planned to be a freelance writer, if things worked out for us. They did. I couldn’t hear or reproduce the music of spoken French. Perhaps I had become less flexible with age or had stayed too long only with the written version. I left everything I had in Cambridge. My existence in Paris consisted of domestic life and roaming the city – no job, institution or circle of friends, just the English language lodged between my ears. A little voice inside was telling me not to let speaking French undermine my only working asset. In my 20s and 30s, I learned four African languages and spoke some Dutch, German, Italian, Greek and Turkish. But that was then – I was young and needed to reach out to the world. The older I get, the more introspective I have become. The attitude of the French to people learning their language was another handicap. After a while, I got by in “basic French” for purposes of transport, shopping, restaurants and in matters medical. I was too slow to insert myself into the fast, competitive flow of dinner table conversation. For presentations, I speak in English with a PowerPoint in French and take questions in French. I have translated a score of articles and chapters from French to English. Translation is the highest intellectual activity. But I can’t express sophisticated ideas orally in French.I took readily to the food and drink, the Metro, 300 movies showing every week, the buildings and walks, the palpable sense of a “public”. We live five minutes’ walk from the Gare du nord, with Eurostar to London, the fast train to Charles de Gaulle airport and Thalys to the Low Countries; ten minutes’ walk from the Gare de l’est for Germany and Switzerland; 20 minutes by Metro to the Gare de Lyon for Geneva, Marseille and Barcelona. I live on the Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris-Geneva-Milan axis, a land of fast and reliable trains with multi-lingual conductors. As a transport hub for the world, Paris is hard to beat. It certainly beats Heathrow, British rail and the Channel ferry.I feel lucky to have been in Paris during an explosion of economic sociology. Philippe Steiner and Fran?ois Vatin edited Traité de sociologie économique, where you will find 15 masters each with a chapter on what he knows best. My closest collaborator has been Jean-Louis Laville whose familiarity with left-wing social thinkers in Latin America and Europe has been a real education for me. There is a lively network concerned with alternative approaches to money. I helped to organize a conference on anthropology, economy and globalization and you really couldn’t tell a presenter’s discipline from the topic, style and references – anthropologist, sociologist, political scientist, institutional economist or historian. I joined the scientific committee of the Journal des anthropologues and advised on informal economy research for the Ministry of Culture. But these activities tailed off when my French didn’t improve and my engagements elsewhere were so many.Living in French opened me up to the life and thought of Marcel Mauss – I still read French fluently. English-speakers largely stick to their own bowdlerized version of what he is about. Alain Caillé welcomed me into his group and journal based on Mauss’ idea of the gift; he and I organized a large international conference in a Normandy chateau. For example, Mauss’ political writings (1994) reveal him not only as an activist interested in cooperative socialism, nationalism and the Bolshevik revolution, but also as a financial journalist. I believe he was closet gay, but that would take another kind of research.I hired a maid’s attic room to live out the dream of being a bohemian writer in Paris. But I couldn’t work there in isolation. Instead I write on the table in our living room and draw sustenance from Sophie’s chatter on the phone and Constance watching YouTube on her iPad. I can shut them out, just as I did as a child in Old Trafford. Their background noise anchors my mind in reality while it roams free in abstract space. The rediscovery of family life, along with world travel and virtual communications, have made this extended lease of active life the most productive period I have known. The suffering of my middle years perhaps made me more humble and stored up expriecne to draw on now. Life in Paris isn’t just intellectual. I hang out regularly with Troy Henriksen, a painter and musician. Troy comes from a family of Massachusetts fishermen. He had little formal education; went AWOL for quite a while; then started painting and decided to move to France, where he claimed to be the reincarnation of Arthur Rimbaud. I helped write his biography for an art book collection of his paintings. These have the feel of Basquiat; they combine words and images; he is a fine colorist. He sells a lot of paintings at good prices. He has also formed a small rock band with two older British musicians who have played with rock stars; he is the lead singer and writes the songs. His French is worse than mine, but he is open-hearted and makes friends wherever he goes. Our free-wheeling conversations in the Petits m?mes café are essential for me.Marriage againIf I entered my first marriage in the spirit of buying a lottery ticket, I felt married to Sophie long before we tied the knot four years after we started living together. Continental Europeans do not share Anglo preoccupation with the married couple as the basic unit of kinship. There is a stronger sense of intergenerational attachment; the property of spouses is more separate and there is less emphasis on “doing things together”. Whereas my family is diminished and dispersed, Sophie belongs to a three-generation clan descended from one woman, her four daughters, their 11 children, their 30 children and spouses. I came to see that marriage depends on durable complementary interests, while affection varies. Sophie was attracted to the English-speaking world and she was my passport to knowing the French. We have a protestant upbringing in common and raise our daughter for independence not attachment.Living in France as Swiss and British citizens with all our international engagements would make it complicated if we had a child. So we decided to get married. This was in two stages: a civil ceremony in May and a big bash in July. My father was now in a home in Lancashire because his forgetfulness had become a danger to him. I went to see him on the way to Geneva. There was one Easyjet plane a day from Liverpool and I hired a taxi well in time for the 40-mile ride. I still don’t know what the driver was suffering from, but when we missed the obvious turn from the motorway, I assumed he knew a better way. By the time we crossed the Mersey into Cheshire, I became quite vocal. He ignored me. Eventually I got him to turn round near Stoke, 50 miles South of Liverpool. We were now late and he drove like a maniac through the suburbs, narrowly missing women and schoolchildren. I got to the departure desk 20 minutes before the scheduled time. They asked to see my passport and ticket, then told me the last bus had left for the plane.I called Sophie from a public phone, told her I would get a flight from Manchester early the next day and booked one from 7 am. The ceremony was at 3 pm. Sophie’s family house was only 10 minutes’ drive from the airport. I booked a taxi for 4 am and was at Manchester airport by 5.30 am. Safe at last, I walked up to the desk. “Passport, please.” I opened my wallet, no passport. I must have left it in the phone box when I was panicking about missing the Liverpool flight. British Airways were exceptionally kind. They gave me an empty office and free phone calls, but I could raise no-one in Liverpool who knew anything about my passport. BA said any other country but Switzerland, they might be able to swing it, but the Swiss were rigid about passports.Soon after 6 am (7 am her time) I felt I had to call Sophie. “Look, darling, I know it’s awful, but I won’t be there for our wedding today.” No expletives or recriminations, just ”How long is it before your flight leaves?” Then “We have photocopies of your birth certificate, divorce certificate, passport etc. for the marriage license. I’ll go to the airport with them, tell the wedding story, throw a weepie and they will let you in.” 20 minutes later BA were called to say that I would be let in with my wife-to-be’s marriage documents. Their top man didn’t believe it, but a return call confirmed the arrangement. There followed a dash with a stewardess through the airport to catch the plane. In Geneva the personnel had changed and at first I was refused entry, but Sophie harangued the guy in French and he gave in. I was married at 3 pm, reflecting on what it meant to join the Swiss high bourgeoisie. Maybe they are not all as tough as Sophie.Sophie’s family home is next to vineyards on the outskirts of Geneva. It is large and has a lovely garden with a wide range of bushes and trees and a big swimming pool. The summer bash was for 70-80 people. It was like a scene from a Hollywood movie or Bunuel’s The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie. There were two huge tents supplied by a top-class catering firm; then a massive thunderstorm broke out in the early evening, so we needed them. It was certainly spectacular and entertained the guests with its flashes and bangs. The first course was a huge mound of seafood on ice. To my dismay the British guests piled up their plates and some went back for more, as if this was all they would get; but a five-course meal had been prepared. Afterwards I sat alone surrounded by detritus late that night, with the moon shining bright, in awe of the new life I had contrived. I thought of Karl Marx marrying Jenny the aristocrat and spending the rest of his life trying to catch up without any money of his own.I really like the Swiss. When I meet someone at a party and tell them that I study money, it interests them and not in a narrow way. It reminds me of the American artist, J. S. G. Boggs (Weschler ref) who satirized modern money by drawing pictures of bank notes and selling them as art objects. He started this act in London but couldn’t find any buyers. When he visited Basel, they saw the joke and the potential profit; so he sold all his banknotes and his controversial career was launched.At first, I was put out when Sophie discussed Christmas arrangements with her brothers, but not me. I was her husband! But husbands don’t count for much, at least in her family. This both disturbed and liberated me. I wasn’t expected to do anything, so I could do what I liked. At home Sophie does most of the work because no-one else can do it as well. All I do is supply drinks, set and clear the table, tidy up the kitchen, make the bed, carry bottles from supermarkets and perform some polluting tasks, like taking out the rubbish. After dinner, we each go off and do our own thing. There is no pressure, as with middle class British couples, to share each other’s company. The kinship model suits me, even if my amour propre sometimes shows.The “matrifocal family” (Smith ref) hinges on three types of relationship: mother-child, siblings and relations between any two women. Men as husbands and fathers are marginal, but not as sons and brothers. Swiss kinship has some of these features, but with patriarchal power and property added. Women rule the home, as they do elsewhere -- the French, Indians and Jews for example -- and this lends a matriarchal counterpoint to the male property complex. In opting to live in a Francophone country and marry into a high bourgeois clan, I chose the marginality and freedom of an expatriate male in a matrifocal household. But above all I found family life at a stage when I could have been stuck in a bedsit, college room or a retirement home. Since joining Sophie, I have enjoyed unlimited world travel and the freedom to write. That seems like a bargain to me.I noticed the unconditional loving care that Sophie lavished on our baby. She said it was “normal”. This provoked introspective comparison. Maybe the English are more concerned with keeping social distance from their children. In the local park French mothers sat in the sandpit to keep their child within reach, whereas I was often chastised for letting mine wander too far away. I took charge of Constance’s sleep. I am good with babies, dogs and madmen. My method is studied indifference. My key point is that they all want to stay in and get out of the situation at the same time. Childcare in France is organized by the PMI (Protection maternelle et infantile). The government’s wish to boost the country’s population means that women encouraged to work and have children by having access to well-organized and cheap childcare. Fees are graded accorded to income; we paid the top rate, but it was small compared with Britain. Children can be left between 8.30 am and 6 pm. The service is Stalinist, but terrific and affordable by everyone. We landed on our feet with a middle class Togolese lady married to a former French colonial magistrate and beautiful grown daughters. This arrangement worked wonderfully for 18 months, when we transferred Constance to a Montessori crèche and at three to a Montessori kindergarten where learning focused on making the children familiar with objects. I must end with an anther brief example of my wife’s fortitude. We landed in Paris early from the US one Sunday morning. The train was almost empty and I put my computer bag in the rack. Two men walked by, obviously casing the joint; but they passed us. Later one asked me for directions, while the other stepped on the seat and grabbed my computer bag. Sophie yelled “Oh no, you don’t!” and grabbed him. He dropped the case and they both ran out of the train.DurbanVishnu Padayachee visited Cambridge as a visiting fellow and decided to check out the African Studies Center. We hit it off immediately and extended our first meeting to a meal and drinks in the Eagle Pub. He is an economist from Durban, South Africa and we spent that evening chatting about Gandhi, cricket and the Indian Ocean trade. It was the beginning of a long friendship that included working together spoadically. He was then head of the School of Development Studies at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban; had been an economic advisor to the African National Congress (ANC); held diverse public appointments; and owned Ike’s bookshop, a national cultural attraction. He told me I would be welcome in his home city any time. Durban is the largest Indian city outside India, with a million residents of Indian origin. They came there originally as indentured workers in the sugar industry that the British had installed in Natal after the emancipation of Caribbean slaves in the 1830s. I saw that Durban offered me a chance to connect with India while remaining in Africa. So I filed the invitation away.It was risky to spend my sabbatical year with Sophie in Paris, but I am a gambler. I am also a Manchester man and I hedged my bet by setting up a trip to South Africa, in case she threw me out early. As things turned out, she didn’t; and I spent a month in Durban and Cape Town, ostensibly to check out African Studies in South Africa. I was captivated by Durban with its exotic campus on the hill, the atmosphere in Vishnu’s School which was more amiable than I had met in academia before, the Indian Ocean, port and beach, the mixed white, brown and black population. I determined to come back and for the next decade I did most years. Vishnu and I wrote a long paper together on Indian businessmen in South Africa after apartheid and then embarked on a much longer study of the history of South African capitalism in national and global perspective. We took breakfast in an upmarket colonial hotel or sat on the veranda of Ike’s sipping Sauvignon Blanc and exploring the overlaps and contrasts in our personal histories.Then Vishnu, wearing his bookseller’s hat, told me had seen a fantastic apartment on the beach when buying the library of a UKZN economist who was moving out. I went to see it and decided on the spot to buy it. I had sold my house in Cambridge, our flat in Paris was pretty crowded and I wanted a place of my own where I could express myself. Continental law does not assume that property belongs indivisibly to a couple and I was free to use my British retirement lump sum for that purpose. The building was 1930s Art Deco, right on the beach near the port end; 150 sq. m with Norwegian pine floors; eleven windows looking out on the ocean; a huge living room, three double bedrooms, two bathrooms, a study, kitchen and washroom. I stocked it with basic furnishings in two hours at an all-purpose store and have added some nice colonial furniture and art work since. Cable television allows me to OD on English football and world cricket in stark contrast to what is available on French TV. As in Paris, I have become a connoisseur of local wines. The first night I slept there, I woke up to the sound of urban traffic, but it was the sea.Not long afterwards, I joined John Sharp at the University of Pretoria to set up the Human Economy Program there. In the meantime, Sophie decided to switch her ethnographic interests to Durban and our family now spends as much time as we can in the Durban apartment. In 2014 a Swiss film crew connected to Sophie’s online multimedia ethnography journal, – Alice Sala and Grégoire Mayor -- came to interview me in Durban, starting out in my apartment. The conversation was substantially about why having a second home in Durban pleased me so much.Alice Sala: I would like you to identify the elements that have been important in your life. In “Manchester on my mind” you discuss your social origins and migration to Cambridge, then the long journey you made from Britain to West Africa, the US, Caribbean, and back to Cambridge; and now to Paris and Durban. Some questions have been following you along the way: “What am I doing? What am I supposed to do? What can I do?” This came out in your Ghana fieldwork when you tried to engage with what people actually do. But also when you shifted to the macro side of the problem by joining the development industry, or when you were writing for “The Economist”. At that time you were building a bridge between economists and anthropologists, by learning how to write in a language you call?“economese”. Later we see it in the enthusiasm with which you embraced the Internet and the new opportunities it opens up. Finally, these questions underpin what you are doing today with the Human Economy Program.These are all different ways to ask those questions and to try to act on them.? I can see here an anthropologist who never gives up, for whom personal engagement with?building a better world, even if it sounds a bit na?ve expressed like this, is important. In any case, you have always been doing it. So, in discussing your career and personal life, I would like to bring out this active dimension. I’m impressed that you can be so aware of our world’s predicament and still so positive and active. We can start with Durban, as a place that pulls together different moments and aspects that have been important in your life! What does Durban mean to you?KH: Everywhere I have stayed, including Durban, takes its meaning from the other places that I have been. I want to be in the world as a whole, so I need to be able to go wherever I want. I don’t want to be stuck in one place. I have always been frightened that some company would own me and I can’t move as a result, as my father was. The society that I feel I belong to is global and I must always retain the freedom to move in it. If I don’t like where I am currently — which is often the case — my first response is to complain and if that doesn’t work, I move. In order to move I had to have qualities and assets that enabled others to support me in moving.Since I was a teenager I was attracted to India, but in fact I ended up working in the North Atlantic, going to West Africa, traveling to the United States, the Caribbean and so on. So I became a specialist in the society that created Atlantic slavery, you could say “The North Atlantic societies”. When Vishnu and I met and hit it off, I saw that he could help me realize the possibility of retaining my interest in Africa but also opening up to India again. I came here the year that I left Cambridge for Paris. So France and South Africa came into my life together. In the first instance, I found it increasingly difficult to live in my own country and the obvious alternative was North America. I feel that my spirit is American. Americans have a music that moves — road music, it’s going somewhere. I too feel that I am going somewhere and am not stuck in one place. It’s obvious, if you compare Britain and the United States, which is the old society and which is the new one, and I found myself moving between them. Sometimes I would feel oppressed or stifled by Britain and when I went to America I could open up: ?they encourage you there, whereas in England they say: “You can’t do that, you are not big enough to do that”. So I felt I was being held back in England and released in the States, but also England was more comfortable, people look after you more than they would in the States. The freedom I got from being in the States could easily become vulnerability, just being on my own in that vast country. I was attracted to the newness of what was possible in the United States but sometimes I was glad to go back to England where people knew me better and could care for me. That’s the model, living in two places, which have complementary features, both positive and negative.When I moved to France I simultaneously opened up South Africa as a new place to explore, and France and South Africa repeat the old/new model of Britain and the United States, but in a very unusual way. France of course is not my home country and although it’s an old capitalist society, in all the time I have spent there, now 16 years, it feels fresh and strange to me. I compare myself sometimes with exiled black writers like Richard Wright or James Baldwin — as someone who is taking refuge from an unequal society at home in a place that allows him to write and supports him, but which he really isn’t part of in any integrated way. That’s how I experience France; whereas South Africa is the old British Empire. It’s a new society, South Africa is only a century old, it was founded in 1910, so it’s an incredibly new society, it’s growing and developing all the time, it obviously has many problems but one problem it doesn’t have is that people feel stuck in old patterns they can’t get out of, which one often feels in Europe. Having said that, in the African context, South Africa often seems more trapped in is past than some other countries nearby. As a result it feels familiar to me here; when I live in Paris, my wife has to do most of the tasks like hiring the plumber, dealing with the tax people … because it’s all very strange to me. I don’t understand that style of dealing with people, but here I do. It may be Africans, Indians or British, but I really know most of the infrastructure of what works. I can buy things like this [points to a glass], you might think it looks like lemonade but it’s ginger beer, old English soul food. So I find a lot about South Africa deeply reassuring.AS: And new at the same timeKH: New in the sense of hopeful, this society hasn’t even begun to explore its ultimate identity. Of course it may crash, but I would rather have the chance of looking into a different future; whereas both England and France are rather depressing and depressive societies, stuck in nostalgia for their waning glory.AS: So we can say that here in South Africa you found some of the freedom the US was giving you and some of the stability UK was giving you?KH: Yes, both South Africa and France combine elements that were separated in Britain and the States. Paris is an old society but it’s new to me, while South Africa is a new society, but it’s old to me. They both combine stability and movement in complementary ways. In Paris I have the residential and emotional stability provided by my family; in South Africa the institutions and culture of British imperialism are still stronger than in Britain itself. As an expatriate in both societies, I get to choose where and how I engage with or detach myself from them. Taken together they provide a complex platform from which I can enter the world more fully than ever before. They are linked by an 11 hour flight, but are in the same time zone, so no jet lag. It is a much richer scenario than the North Atlantic matrix of my life up to the millennium. It feels to me like I have found ways of bringing together the old and the new, stability and movement, the local and global is ways that are at once focused and kaleidoscopic. It’s a new beginning in which I can integrate whatever I want from my past.AS: So tell me about the other places that were part of your life in the?North Atlantic.? Do we find some of them in Durban too?KH: The three main peoples that constitute Durban society are: ?first Zulus, who are almost a quarter of South Africa’s population; this is their home area, so they dominate the city’s population. A quarter to a third is Indian in origin. And this is also the first South African colony that the British made by themselves. They pushed the Dutch out of the Cape after the Napoleonic wars and when they came here, they saw the possibility of reproducing Caribbean sugar plantation society; but they couldn’t get the Africans to work for them and they had to bring in the Indians for that. So Durban and Natal are a very traditional British colony. These three are not the only people here, but they predominate. I find the triptych interesting. The English and their offshoots tend to operate in a dualistic society, just black and white, whereas the French, Spanish and Portuguese have a strong mixed-race middle class between white and black — métise,?mulato?and?assimilado. Durban’s large Indian population prevents the black/white contrast from being as stark as it is elsewhere in South Africa.South Africa is much like the United States; I sometimes call it the America of Africa, because they share a brutal form of capitalism with a very strong racist history; and to some extent each society feels that it is separated from its neighbors and the rest of the world. South Africans don’t think of themselves as being part of the rest of Africa. This allows the ANC government (and Trump for that matter!) to pursue xenophobic and imperialist policies that command considerable domestic support. Their natural links are with London, New York, Bombay… South Africa and the United States share a twentieth century history of highly organized racism. It’s different from slavery. What happened after the civil war in the States, when the Blacks moved into the northern cities, also happened here when the Zulus and the others came to work in the mines; this was what provoked apartheid. The Whites felt that the Blacks, left unchecked, would take over their cities, so they tried to restrict their right to live there. Within South Africa, Durban is by far the most mixed city, the least polarized; and this is principally because of the size of the Indian population in the middle. Cape Town also has a large colored population and it is divided between British and Afrikaans-speaking Whites, but it is more starkly segregated, as are Soweto and the Northern suburbs in Johannesburg.Of course Durban is a port city too; I call it the Marseilles of Africa. A very large port is just round the corner here, I see the ships coming and going all the time, and port cities are always more mixed, more open, more dynamic. It was also traditionally an industrial city. One of the things I don’t like about Paris is that it is a political center. In the US, I love Chicago because it is not Washington or New York. I like provincial industrial, commercial cities that make their own living without taking it from their political subjects. So I don’t like London and to some extent I don’t like Paris for the same reason, its history of exploiting the French population as a political center, just as Manchester was and is by London.When I bought this apartment, it added a dimension that I didn’t choose Durban for, but which I now enjoy more than anything else. When I look out of the windows, I see the horizon and an infinite expanse of sea and sky. I know that over the other side of the horizon is India with all its allure for me, I watch the big boats come in and out … that horizon is not just a metaphor. I can sit here and I feel that I’m anchored somehow in this place because there is so much of South Africa and Durban that I share coming from where I do. And the situation opens me up, I am at home and rooted in some way, but I can entertain the most ambitious and inclusive thoughts, while allowing the ocean to stimulate me.AS: And what about what is behind your flat?KH: There is a long beach and promenade, 7 kilometers. Durban is ranked by Lonely Planet as one of the top ten family beach resorts in the world, it’s very attractive. But the port is right next to my end of the beach and of course ports produce red light districts and the rest… In fact behind me is a rather run down area, which was once more criminal, more subject to crime, drugs and prostitution than it is now. Since the container revolution the number of sailors coming into Durban has been massively reduced. As a result the strip clubs on Point Road (which ironically has been renamed Mahatma Gandhi Road) have been reduced in twenty years from nine to one. And the city of Durban wants to develop this area by gentrifying it as best they can, since it is very close to the city center; but they have only half succeeded yet. So the front is a well-maintained international resort, a surfing center with many other possibilities; while the back is close to being a slum.The first time I went to a supermarket at the back, I couldn’t believe how cramped, noisy and vital it was; and I thought, “This is like Ghana, like the Nima I knew in the 1960s”. I didn’t think much more about it, but there was something quite tangibly similar. We hired a Zulu girl to look after Constance when she was small. The first day she came, she said, “Oooh this is a dangerous place — there are so many foreigners here”. I don’t understand the African languages they speak around here. All I saw were poor Africans, but she was a Zulu, a local, and she knew they were foreigners. So I checked out who they were around here and found that the largest groups were Congolese and Nigerians! Of course Nigerians in South Africa stand for criminal immigrants, whether justifiably or not. They even made a popular movie in which Nigerians were aliens trying to take over. The contrast freaked me out: the beach front in Durban is like a cross between Blackpool and Miami, it has a lot of tall skyscrapers and hotels, but also piers with black people fishing on them, of the kind I was familiar with in the northwest of England when I was a boy.These are some of the influences that come together here. When I walk out of the back door, I am revisiting my youth as an ethnographer in the slums of West Africa, I can’t believe it really. The front evokes the Lancashire coast, Greek islands, Accra, Chicago, Los Angeles, Marseilles, Jamaica, Brazil, Goa – beaches connected by the world’s oceans. And then in addition, not far from here is the most important racecourse in South Africa; it has the main race, the Durban July. It’s a beautiful racecourse and when I was a student, even as a schoolboy, I took a great interest in horse racing and betting. So I began to think that I could somehow pull together here a patchwork of elements that allowed me to revisit some of the most important parts of my life, always with Paris as its counterpart.AS: And how can you bridge Manchester and Durban?KH: I have a big television here. I live in France and the French?don’t?show English soccer – cricket even less. But here, cable TV has almost every English football match, up to 6 or 7 a weekend. You could sit here from Saturday morning to Monday night and watch nothing but English football. Of course my team is Manchester United, so I am more connected to English football than to my origin in Manchester itself. I actually grew up in Old Trafford, which is where their ground is. It’s also where Lancashire built a national cricket stadium. I could walk to each of these in 15 minutes. So my connections with Manchester are more ideal than real — my family have all left there and I can’t really identify with what Manchester has become in the last 20 or 30 years. When I grew up there, it was bombed out and depressed. So Manchester has become a totemic association, reduced to my support of Manchester United. When I lived there I couldn’t wait to get out of Manchester, it really was a terrible place to live in after the war, so there was not much to hold me there that I want to relive. I haven’t thought about it so much since I wrote that essay “Manchester on my mind”. Manchester formed me as a strong provincial, industrial, commercial city that changed the world through is industrial revolution. When I go to Chicago, I can see that they did the same thing there on an even grander scale. What attracts me to places like Milan or Marseilles or Durban is that they are like Manchester, although each has its own character. So Manchester is something I am looking for wherever I go. Paris is the opposite of Manchester, so there has to be somewhere else where I can tap into what Manchester means to me and Durban is it. If I was living in France and had to pick a city, it would be Marseilles, I love Marseilles. It’s got the beach, it’s got the Old Port and fresh fish, it’s got industry and they think they are Phocean Greeks! I call Marseilles “Manchester on the Med” and Durban “the Marseilles of Africa”. These cities form a linked set of which Manchester is the source for me. So yes living here connects me to Manchester.AS: So Durban is opposite to Pretoria somehow?Keith: You could say that in my city network, Pretoria is the Paris of South Africa, but of course it isn’t. It’s a boring dump. I have a job there; my colleague, John Sharp, read the introduction of a book I was compiling with French and Brazilian colleagues, The Human Economy: A Citizens’ Guide, and he said “we could run with this idea here”. Pretoria University is the largest residential university in South Africa, it was traditionally an Afrikaner institution but now, like most of South Africa, it has become more open. They did sponsor our post-doctoral research program there, which in the last three years has taken up a lot more of my time. When I am in Pretoria I am always passing through and I would never dream of living there, but I have to be there to do the job. It has diverted me from spending more time here in Durban; but I see this as temporary. The program there is short-term, with a rolling contract and it could fail at any time, but here is my home.All the places I have lived form a dynamic set for which the prototype is Manchester vs. Cambridge and London. Manchester had the independence to create the industrial revolution, but later in the nineteenth century the powers in London appropriated the wealth of industry and diverted it to making a commercial empire, which simultaneously rewarded non-productive elements in British society -- colonial mercantile classes -- and undermined the vigor and dynamism of Manchester’s industry. To some extent, this is a rerun of the City against the State. So what appeals to me about Durban, Chicago, Marseilles etc. is that these are real cities with a sense of their own destiny that has not yet being overridden by national state power. Vishnu belongs to a class that is almost medieval, a genuine bourgeoisie. It takes responsibility for the city, knows its own power, does good works and builds museums, but also has a very strong sense of its ability to fend off intrusive political power of which, as you can imagine, there is quite a lot, especially in Zuma’s South Africa; Zuma of course is a Zulu. The Zulus running amok in the city council are not at all bourgeois, but simply reflect national and regional political power, obviously in some kind of contest with the local bourgeoisie, old and new.This was a British city; if you were in the port yesterday you saw the Royal Yacht Club, founded in 1858. But now the Whites are moving out of Durban up the coast to new areas where they can have gated communities with shining buildings, exclusive use of the sea and so on. So Durban is losing white capital and this represents quite a major threat to its future. Also the airport has been relocated from the city into Zululand, 35 km north near the coastal area being developed by the Whites. So here is a great city, a port city, with an incredible history that is nevertheless struggling for its future; but at the same time it still has an identifiable bourgeoisie. I use bourgeoisie not as the Marxists do, but as a class of citizens who really care about and look after their city. Some Marxists would say this is the wrong class for the job, but as far as I am concerned it is indispensable. The Manchester bourgeoisie was very strong in the nineteenth century; not only that, they launched many of that century’s deepest political transformations: the free trade movement, the cooperative movement, liberal economics… All this stuff was coming out of Manchester and it was reflected in a particular kind of engaged politics involving the local citizens across classes, but especially one class among them.That’s what I find here! It’s a better answer to the original question about what is the relationship between Manchester and this place; it’s more specific. I am looking for Manchester everywhere and when I find it, as in Chicago, I fall in love with the place. After London squeezed the life out of Manchester’s industry, the whole project moved to the States. Chicago was not only an industrial city, but it organized the agricultural commerce of the whole of the country’s hinterland. Look at the buildings from the 1880s until the 1920s, you can take architectural tours, the buildings are incredible, different styles, art deco and so on. Every great architect in America felt obliged to build an even better skyscraper. The other thing about Chicago is that it had a big fire in the 1870s and they had to get rid of all the rubbish, so they put it in the lake, and in doing so extended the lake front quite significantly. Previously the railway, roads and buildings went right against the lake; but now they created a new space. The mayor said: “We are not going to build on this space”. So in Chicago you can get a view of the city as you can’t in New York’s canyons. Frank Lloyd Wright operated in Chicago, so the architecture is adventurous and beautiful and brave. A political class encouraged that and supported it, out of a sense of Chicago as a society belonging to itself.A part of me simply wants to find cities that make their own destiny at every level — aesthetic, economic, political and social — and that is why Chicago is my favorite city in the world. I love the sheer spirit of what they have built there, all that emulation and not just that. My subject is money and these people changed what money is and does several times: they invented hedging against speculation, you know, and money futures after the dollar went off gold. Chicago, because it sought to save American farmers from the volatility of markets, has been the most innovative financial center in the world for over a century, more than the City of London or Wall Street whose influence has been exploitative, not creative.AS: Can we imagine a link between your fascination with cities that take control of their own destiny, maybe against centralized political power, and how anthropologists or any single person should try to take control of their own destiny through their actions to produce their economic situation?KH: I have been speaking of how I relate to all this as a person. How others might relate to what I say isn’t up to me. But when you mention anthropology, there is a difference between what I have said about cities and the role of anthropology in my life; it’s been implicit so far. Yes, my aim in life is to find the fullest self-expression I can and to make relations that help me combat the obstacles that are put in my way, usually through movement or by combining activities in different places. This desire for self-expression and free association depends on having a social structure that is conducive to it. So it’s not just about looking for self-determination as an individual. You need to find a place that actually supports you in this goal. This is what Tocqueville found in America in his book, Democracy in America, that private interests and free self-expression need public institutions that are compatible with that end. He found this in the early American democracy and later also in France. Do I seek something like that in anthropology? No I don’t, because anthropology could never actually represent a social organization. It’s a strategy if you like, that some people may adopt partially, as I do.Returning to Durban, I didn’t yet mention the very first thing Durban meant to me: Mohandas K. Gandhi. He spent twenty years in South Africa as a relatively young man, of which the first half was mainly in Durban. I have a hundred volumes of Gandhi’s writings in my living room here. All his effort was concerned with scaling up the self and scaling the world down. There’s an amazing passage in his autobiography about a big strike in Ahmedabad, an industrial city; he goes there and just sits down on a street corner. In four days the whole strike is about him and this is something he had being preparing for all his life. When he went to learn the law in London, he found that there wasn’t anything to eat, because he was a vegetarian. So he joined the vegetarian society, got onto the committee and started doing policy documents; by the time he finished his degree there were a dozen vegetarian restaurants in London. One person can change the eating habits of a city to suit himself and this is what he tried to teach people. He picked the Indian village as an appropriate vehicle for the anti-colonial revolution because it was organized on a scale where most Indians were not dwarfed, as they are by big cities and modern states.All of Gandhi’s work is interesting for anthropologists. If you look for his vision of anthropology, he held that every human being is unique and we all belong to humanity as a whole; but how to connect the two extremes? Between them are all the social divisions and categories of gender, nation, class, race and religion which the social sciences have made their special province. So we know a lot about why people don’t get along with each other; but we don’t know much about how they might come together in more inclusive ways. That’s what he was trying for, to take the sub-continent out of the British Empire. He needed to mobilize people, but the project would fail unless they believed in themselves and their own capacity to achieve great things. He goes to the sea to make salt in Attenborough’s movie “Gandhi” with Ben Kingsley. The British banned the Indians from making salt, and he goes all the way to the sea, starts boiling sea water to make salt, then it switches to the Viceroy of India, played by John Gielgud, and his officials say “Gandhi is boiling salt on the sea shore, what are we going to do about that?”.This is what I believe anthropology has the potential to do! But unfortunately the anthropologists bought into the social sciences, so that they now know how to fragment social reality better than to help people to bridge its extremes in this way. We are living in a world that is increasingly interdependent and really is in great danger on several fronts -- environmental, economic and political. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we enter another thirty years war. It is vital for people to connect with this dangerous situation we are all in. But how can they do so when the TV tells them every day that the latest idiotic comment by Jacob Zuma is all that really counts? Or that the movement of shares on the Johannesburg stock exchange is how you understand what’s happening in the economy? Rousseau said that education is designed to limit what individuals can become; colonial India did the same; so do France and South Africa now. What can we do?This is the inspiration for the Human Economy Program: if people are going to win some degree of democracy from the expert classes that deny them the chance of it, it’s not enough just to celebrate the actors’ point of view, because the actor often doesn’t know enough about what affects his life most. That was Durkheim’s original mission: ?sociology is going to teach people how to connect what is inside them with all that stuff outside, how they belong to other people and what they can do about it, if they want a better life. At this stage in history we can’t settle for anything less than making the world a better place to live in. But that doesn’t mean abandoning our concerns with every day and concretely local affairs; our attempts to deal with the world have to be grounded in what we do day-to-day.? It’s no good believing in some grand ideology that has nothing to do with your everyday life. That’s a sort of symbolic politics: ?you are in your office doing your thing and a message flashes into your inbox saying “sign this petition” and you say “Oh, what the hell”, send it off, boom. That’s the opposite of how Gandhi acted in the world.AS: I can see this as the final link between the many bridges you have been building all your life, a bridge between the inner self and global humanity; and I can see how you try to build this bridge in your human economy project. At the same time I see this as the next step after the informal economy. In what ways was the idea of informal economy an attempt to bring together the inner self and the world outside?KH: I was 22 years old when I went to Accra. I had never experienced or coped with anything like that before. The informal economy is simply a form of empiricism: “The people are not what experts say they are; they are not doing what they are supposed to do”. My only aim was to reveal what was invisible, to show what people were really doing and to challenge the masters of the universe: “Now that I have shown you this, does that make you think you might need a new approach to ruling the world?” I was addressing a class of politicians and development economists: “Hey, you people in your air-conditioned hotel rooms and offices, this is what is going on out there”. Yet neither the people I worked with nor I understood the great events that were happening then. After I finished my thesis on informal practices I understood the street economy as well as they did, if not better; but they and I were equally clueless about why Kwame Nkrumah had been ousted in a coup, why the economy collapsed in that year, why the military did what they did.I began to explore these questions, partly by working with The Economist, partly through development consultancies with international agencies, and I found that the cocoa price collapsed in the year of the coup because the Ghanaians supplied half the world market, but they over-produced this time and the government still bought all the cocoa at last year’s price, put it on to the world market and brought the price down to below; so the famers were paid less for producing more than they did last year and the government no longer drew the same revenues from what had been a cocoa boom. It was a real mess, but I had no idea about that when I was in Accra. So I have been working on connecting real life to the big picture for decades. My first thought was that l couldn’t just go back to the streets. I had to join the development industry at the level of governments and international agencies. When I was 29 I co-wrote the development strategy report for Papua New Guinea’s independence. All of this was a way of scaling up. What I did as a consultant in the 70s was in fact an ethnography of political life at that level, which I had previously not known about. Then that was not enough. I felt that I needed the perspective of world history and philosophy to put some of these things in place; and all of that took decades. I gave up on contemporary anthropological theory. I read Kant and Rousseau instead and absorbed a great deal from them. I didn’t know that this was what I was aiming at, to be able to say that C. L. R. James and Gandhi, in trying to dismantle colonial empire, showed others including me how to connect meaningfully to the predicament of humanity as a whole. All of that came later or maybe it will never come in any complete way.At home in a new quadrilateralSo far I have emphasized the binary of France and South Africa and these two places have succeeded Britain and the US as the poles of my existence in the last two decades. But until recently this period afforded me richer and more satisfying engagement with the world than anything that preceded it. Paris gave me a stable home where writing and family life reinforced each other; and Durban (afterwards Pretoria) offered professional and cultural opportunities, eventually a second home of my own, between Africa and India. But just as West Africa and the Caribbean combined with the other two as the chief points of a North Atlantic quadrilateral formed by the slave trade, France and South Africa were supplemented by Britain and Switzerland. Since leaving Cambridge, I have held down three academic posts in Britain: a full-time (but largely absent) research fellowship in rural development studies at Aberdeen; a half-time professorship in anthropology at Goldsmiths, London; and a half-time centennial professorship at the London School of Economics in international development. Geneva has been a staple of our family life until this year when, following the deaths of Sophie’s parents, their house began to be converted into three apartments. Until then, we spent August and Christmas there every year and made many more small visits in between.This new quadrilateral embedded my personal network rather than any intrinsic historical connection. But each place gave anchorage to unprecedented global movement. The other anchor of course was my laptop – my home work station and constant companion on my travels, providing yet further continuity (my virtual social life) in movement. I have written in other places about humanity’s goal and destiny is to be at home in a world of movement. The idea of a “human economy” rests in part on such an idea. The balance between home and away is never quite right –how could it be? – and I sometimes pine for Cambridge, where I found the ideal place for intellectual work, but little else. I often think about how the disruptions and dislocations of my middle years prepared the way for this late flowering. I gained a lot more knowledge, but could not produce it. My suffering may have made me more humble than the cocky youth who carried all before him. Certainly, when my mental illness cleared, I felt an urgent need to catch up for lost time and life with Sophie in the world has given me that chance.What kind of world is this that I want to feel at home in? This chapter concludes the personal narrative, although I am not absent from what follows. It is time, however, to identify some of the forces driving world society. Part TwoSome General ReflectionsChapter 12The Eighteenth Century’s Revolutionary PhilosophersIn more than two centuries, human life on this planet has gone through a massive transformation. We might approach the period, 1800-2100, as a three-act play, in which the population will have multiplied ten times, the leap from the countryside to the city as our main habitat will be almost complete and 4 out of 5 people will live in Africa or Asia. Many of us are still the offspring of the nineteenth century, when the world was reshaped by the industrial revolution and European empires. The main event of the twentieth century was the anti-colonial revolution when peoples subjugated to racist empire fought to establish their own relationship to world society. Whatever we do next will be an extension of that historical process; and this book offers one take on it.The nineteenth century stood on the back of what went before, 1500-1800, when Europeans made many advances in their knowledge and global reach without yet having the means to conquer the world. That early period’s culmination was the eighteenth century Enlightenment whose intellectual achievements underpinned the age of war and revolution (1775-1815) that unleashed our new world. This opening chapter explores three interlinked themes whose origins lie in that century – theories of education, anthropology and self in the world – before the historical rupture that paved the way for us. I don’t want to restore the Age of Enlightenment; but the struggle to save our world would benefit from revisiting that time to throw new light on the play’s third act unfolding now.A tale of two centuriesThe eighteenth century philosophers had come to the end of something and they had to figure a way forward. Their kings ruled only because they conquered the place long ago. The church endorsed their rule as God’s will. Unequal society was bad enough, but its arbitrariness was insupportable. The philosophers believed that God was the perfect creator of all things, but He did not intervene directly in His creation. The universe was governed by unchanging natural laws whose workings could be revealed by study. Despite everything, Providence was guiding humanity to a good end.The political question concerned what the new society would be based on. The answer was on natural law, on what people have in common, their human nature. Human beings differed from the animals in our capacity for reasoning and morality; but we are born without either and education teaches us how to combine personal freedom with social duty. A good citizen should be an autonomous person. Becoming one replicates the tension between nature and history in social development. These were still small-scale societies; and, while the right balance between individual and social development was hard to achieve, the aim was their successful integration. The scientific and political goal to replace unequal society with one based on human nature gave birth to anthropology. All the thinkers considered here in depth – John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and Immanuel Kant – confronted the nature and history of humanity as a whole. Rousseau and Kant were modern anthropology’s founders. The idea of the “self” also took root at this time, especially in Rousseau’s purple patch of the 1760s, and with it came psychology, the novel, autobiography and educational theory, sometimes all of them combined.I have immersed myself in the liberal writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their political concepts remain substantially ours, but they have been corrupted by what our societies have become, so that most people doubt their honesty. They retained the goal of unifying humanity’s two sides, our individual and social nature, recognizing that each person must be free and embedded in society. For them personal freedom flourishes in a society whose pubic institutions are conducive to it. They wanted a civil society to replace the old regime, but this society would succeed only if its individual members were educated to reproduce it. European society expanded greatly in force and scale during the nineteenth century: the industrial revolution spawned unprecedented urbanization, a demographic explosion, huge political and commercial organizations, enormous inequality and the division of the world between their empires. G.W.F. Hegel (The Philosophy of Right, 1821) announced that Kant’s philosophy was the last dying gasp of bourgeois individualism and thus unsuited to the new stage of world society. The societies we live by are still shaped by the synthesis of industrial capitalism and the nation-state that he forecast – I call it “national capitalism”. He recognized that the power of society – eventually organized by university-trained experts in vast bureaucracies – now dwarfed the agency of living persons. A new philosophical paradigm, social science, was the result. Hegel was assisted by Auguste Comte (1830-1842) and David Ricardo (1817), bringing together German political philosophy, French sociology and English economics. Impersonal society was at odds with individuals, not their extension. A space arose for filling the gap through the “sentimental education” (Flaubert 1869) offered by fiction -- plays, novels and in time movies. The accumulation of private property by huge entities (governments and businesses) cleared the path for the horrors of a twentieth century. States and the professions drove families out of the job of social reproduction and the humanities lost their human impulse. The corporatization of the universities finished off this historical process.John LockeAt the age of 51, John Locke (1632-1704) was an unpublished Oxford academic and the client of a discredited politician. He fled for his life to Holland, carrying a manuscript on political theory, and was sacked by his college. He returned to England when William of Orange established Protestant monarchy in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He immediately published Two Treatises of Government. Locke was appointed to the Board of Trade and wrote influential pamphlets on money. He soon became so famous that a friend could describe him as “the greatest man in the world.” As an architect of the middle-class revolution, Locke was certainly the leading public intellectual when the United Kingdom was formed around 1700. The European Enlightenment was largely a response to his work. The Americans wrote their revolutionary constitution on the basis of his ideas. Now he is often regarded as an apologist for capitalism and author of the “possessive individualism” on which neo-classical economics is founded (Macpherson 1962). When I read Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690), I did not find there the story I expected. To properly understand political power and trace its origins, we must consider the state that all people are in naturally. That is a state of perfect freedom of acting and disposing of their own possessions and persons as they think fit within the bounds of the law of nature. People in this state do not have to ask permission to act or depend on the will of others to arrange matters on their behalf. The natural state is also one of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal and no one has more than another. The purpose of his Commonwealth was to protect personal autonomy. “The end of law is… to preserve and enlarge freedom.” Freedom is “...a liberty to dispose and order, as he lists, his person, actions, possessions and his whole property within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.” Locke was celebrated as a technical philosopher: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) long stood as a model for English empiricism, the mirror image of Cartesian rationalism, until Immanuel Kant brought ideas and the object world into a dynamic partnership a century later. But Locke was celebrated by his countrymen, not as a political theorist or epistemologist, but for his writings on education. Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) began as private letters to a friend and was intended for “English gentlemen”. Locke didn’t believe that his prescriptions applied to the “common people”. The book was intended for reading on private matters and became a long-term best-seller. Its wide acceptance came in part from its tone of a conversation between friends: “One ought to treat grown men, as well as older children, with familiarity and friendliness, since they resent formal instructions and those who affect great formality” (Tarcov 1984:79). I hope that this book, combining my life story and some general conclusions about the world, can emulate Locke’s personal and egalitarian style.Many philosophers have linked political proposals for the good society with advice on education. At first glance, Locke’s writings on politics and education contain little overlap; and this reflects his desire to separate public and private life that had been ruinously conflated before. He saw education as the concern of families, not schools and certainly not government. Yet the Two Treatises of Government hinge on parent-child relations. The first part attacks the patriarchal theory of absolute monarchy in pedantic detail. Locke denies the claim of monarchs to be the father of their subjects. The more substantial second part lays out the principles of a Commonwealth whose citizens are free, equal and independent. Children constitute the only exception, since they lack the freedom and powers of reasoning to enter society as equals. Locke wanted to his book to show parents how to help their children to grow up independent. No society has yet accomplished this. He saw “no difference of sex in mind relating to truth, virtue and obedience” and recommended only some small differences in the education of women. Relations between public and private life were in turmoil during and after the civil war. Hypocrisy was often the only solution, as a satirical song, “The vicar of Bray”, reveals. Locke wrote an earlier, more conservative version of the Two Treatises that remained unpublished. The education book was published anonymously at first, but Locke eventually acknowledged his authorship. Despite his public fame, he retained the caution needed to survive in seventeenth century England.Jean-Jacques RousseauWhen he was fifteen, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), son of a Geneva watchmaker, ran away to France and converted to Catholicism. He became the lover of a noble woman, but his partner of four decades was a chambermaid when they met. He invented a new system of musical notation, had an opera performed at Versailles and turned down the king’s offer of a pension. In 1750 he entered an essay competition for the Dijon prize: Have the arts and sciences improved morals? One day the answer was revealed to him in a flash: the arts and sciences have led to the moral degeneration of men who are by nature good. Rousseau asked his friend, Denis Diderot, for an opinion and he said that it would surely be different. He won and became instantly famous. He then wrote a second discourse, On the origins and foundations of inequality among men, which came second (Rousseau 1754). This launched anthropology as a modern project:Rousseau summons men to hear for the first time their history as a species. Man was born free, equal, self-sufficient, unprejudiced, and whole; now, at the end of history, he is in chains (ruled by other men or by laws he did not make), defined by relations of inequality (rich or poor, noble or commoner, master or slave), dependent, full of false opinions or superstitions, and divided between his inclinations and his duties. Nature made man a brute, but happy and good. History – and man is the only animal with a history – by the development of his faculties and the progress of his mind has made man civilized, but unhappy and immoral. History is not a theodicy but a tale of misery and corruption (Bloom 1979:3).This vision launched what I call “the anthropology of unequal society”, a series that has included Lewis Henry Morgan, Friedrich Engels, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, Eric Wolf and Jack Goody. Rousseau published three masterpieces in 1761-62. The first was Julie or The New Helo?se ("Letters from two lovers, living in a small town at the foot of the Alps"), an educational novel (Bildungsroman) that kicked off the Romantic Movement and threw an entirely new light on the individual and collective aspects of human existence. Its exploration of “sensitive” themes prefigured the novel’s efflorescence in the next century. Whereas Locke emphasized the rational foundation of morality, Rousseau dwelt on the competing claims of reason and emotion, freedom and order. It was the biggest best-seller of the eighteenth century – the publishers were so overwhelmed by demand that they rented out copies by the day. In The Social Contract, Rousseau addressed the threat to political community posed by commercial society. The state of nature had long gone and the aristocratic order ripe for revolution; so how might democratic citizenship face the threat posed by the rising bourgeoisie? A bourgeois was concerned only with his own self-preservation. Legitimate authority must be based on laws made by a sovereign people. Rousseau meant direct not representative democracy. Liberal platitudes mask societies today that are anything but democratic. Rousseau dwelt on how the balance of power might shift from the people to government and concluded that small-city states like Geneva offered the best chance for democracy. This political tract did not disturb the authorities unduly. That honor was reserved for the third book, Emile or On Education which Immanuel Kant linked to the French revolution as the two most important events of his lifetime.We have glimpses of Rousseau’s lifestyle during this amazingly fertile period. He wrote for most of the day before taking a walk in the Bois de Boulogne in the late afternoon; then he rushed back home in the fading light to jot down his thoughts for when he resumed writing the next day. In the evening he was the star turn at parties put on by high-born ladies, some of whom were stimulated by Julie to make amorous advances. Soon afterwards, David Hume came to Paris as secretary to the British embassy and Adam Smith was there as a travelling tutor. But by then Rousseau was on the run from both government and church.Emile and afterEmile: Or on education is fiction, but not a novel. Some liken it to Plato’s Republic, with the philosopher-king here replaced by the governor of a boy aristocrat. The style is vivid, aphoristic and contrarian. “I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know.” Conventional education produced the opposite of personal development. What got Kant excited was Rousseau’s attempt to reconcile nature and history, reason and emotion, human selfishness and civic duty in a theory of education – to integrate the private and public, subject and object that Locke wanted to separate. The schools run by the church taught only a kind of repressed conformity, while the upper and middle classes did their best to speed up maturation, preferring their children to be pseudo-adults than just children. Any fool, says Rousseau, can train his five-year old son to entertain guests with a violin sonata after dinner, but only by sacrificing most things that a child of that age should do. We think that life is short and time is scarce; but children have plenty of time and wasting it is how they grow at their own pace. “Apparent facility at learning is the cause of children’s ruin…Their brain, smooth and polished, returns, like a mirror, the objects presented to it. But nothing remains; nothing penetrates”. The instructor "should remember that his business is not so much to teach all that is knowable, as to raise in [the child] a love and esteem of knowledge; and to put him in the right way of knowing and improving himself." There are three sources of education – nature, people and things – of which the other two should seek to serve the first. The education of “nature” is the internal development of faculties and organs; learning how to use them is the province of teachers; while experience of the object world is the education of things. Each stage of maturation offers different opportunities for living a full life and these should be indulged. A teacher’s first duty is to help a student discover his own integrity. Emile?would resolve the contradictions between being self-centered (“natural man”) and living in society.To be oneself and always one, a man must act as he speaks; he must always be decisive in making his choice, make it in a lofty style and stick to it. [I want] to know whether he is a man or a citizen, or how he goes about being both at the same time.The present obstacle to a free and equal society was not the old regime, which was on its last legs, but the embodiment of English political science, whom Rousseau named “bourgeois”, a low type who privileged reason in the education of even young children. My daughter was 18 months old when she declared “Wanna banana!” I gave her one. Soon afterwards, the banana only half eaten, she shouted “Wanna peanut butter sandwich!” I ignored her, so she repeated her command. “Why do you want a peanut butter sandwich?” “Don’t like the banana” “OK, now you get the sandwich”. This scene was witnessed by an American friend who half laughed, half snorted, “What do you think you are doing?” “I’m showing her that middle class society rewards people who can give a plausible explanation for why they do or want something.” “You’ll turn her into a monster,” he said. I didn’t, partly because I read Emile later, but mainly because she developed in her own way. Rousseau argued that the capacity for reasoning comes late and is difficult to cultivate. If we push it too early, as Locke recommended, the child grows used to manipulating half-understood forms, but can’t engage fully with the substance. “Each advances more or less according to his genius, his tastes, his needs, his talents, his zeal, and the occasions he has to devote himself to them…We do not know what our nature permits us to be…The lessons pupils get from one another in the schoolyard are a hundred times more useful to them than everything they will ever be told in class”.All hell broke loose with the publication of Emile. Rousseau was summoned by the government and the Archbishop of Paris announced that whoever killed Rousseau would receive the blessing of the church. He took refuge from the hit squads in the small Prussian dependency of Neuchatel in Switzerland. Its governor, George Keith, was a Jacobite exile, and with David Hume’s help he found a safe house in England for Rousseau. There he wrote the bulk of his autobiography, The Confessions, which were published after his death. Once again he claimed total originality for his approach. Most people use their life story to show themselves in the best possible light, not Jean-Jacques. I have entered upon a performance that is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself. I know my heart and have studied mankind; I am not made like anyone I have known, perhaps like no-one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mold with which she formed me, can only be determined after having read this work….With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory.We each have a big voice and a little voice. The first tells us we are a hero, a star, a genius; the second says, you’re a fraud and they are going to find you out. The second voice keeps us sane, but without the first we would never attempt something great. Jean-Jacques lacked a little voice here and was more than a bit mad. Most of his philosopher friends fell out with him –Diderot, Voltaire, Hume. The English sojourn ended badly with him blaming Hume for a letter to The Times signed “The King of Prussia” – “It is not widely known that a revolutionary and dangerous lunatic [Jean-Jacques] is living in this country…” The English demonized Rousseau as the sole cause of the French revolution. He was eventually allowed back to Paris if he never wrote about politics or religion. He made a poor living there from copying music scores. He was an object of celebrity tourism and sometimes emptied his piss pot on German admirers. He wrote one more beautiful book, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, just before his death in 1778. These essays have none of the strident egotism of The Confessions. They reveal deep self-knowledge, acute observation and even a sense of humor. In the seventh walk he finds himself in an Alpine wilderness:I compared myself to those great explorers who discover a desert island, and said complacently to myself: ‘Doubtless I am the first mortal to set foot in this place.’ I considered myself well-nigh a second Columbus. While I was preening myself on this notion, I heard not far off a certain clicking noise which sounded familiar…Surprised and intrigued, I got up, pushed through a thicket of undergrowth in the direction of the noise, and in a hollow twenty yards from the very place where I had thought to be the first person to tread, I saw a stocking mill.The little voice returns and with it sanity, reinforced by his common law wife, Thérèse Levasseur who stuck with him to the end. It took his native Geneva another century to erect a statue to him where the Rhone emerges from Lac Leman; and now they have four streets named after him and his work. There has probably been only one like him since, Friedrich Nietzsche; but, for me, his work doesn’t measure up to Rousseau’s.Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was also celebrated as “the greatest man in the world” and his autobiography had a much greater impact than Rousseau’s. He was the youngest of ten sons of a Boston soap and candle maker. He had almost no formal education, but taught himself to read and write exceptionally well. At 17 he ran away to Philadelphia, became a successful tradesman, printer and journalist and retired at 42 with a fortune large enough to support “Leisure during the rest of my life, for Philosophical Studies and Amusements”. He entered public service, co-wrote the Declaration of Independence, was lionized in Paris as American minister plenipotentiary for France and took part in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Unusually, Franklin attributed his business success to his love of reading and writing. He was a prolific inventor and synthesized the field of electricity out of the fragments that then existed. He wrote on everything -- “agriculture, chess, military strategy, literary style, silkworms, pickled sturgeon, ice boats, mastodon teeth, garters and the balance of trade” (Silverman 2003). To call him a polymath doesn’t capture it and he had a very attractive personality to boot, being noted for his wit. Franklin travelled a lot as the revolution’s foreign spokesman. The Autobiography was written in installments at home and abroad – the first section in England when he was 65, the second in France 13 years later, the third in Philadelphia when he was 82 and the last section was begun when he was 84, but he didn’t finish it. The book breaks off before the American illustrious political career was properly launched. His life story was written in the opposite style to Rousseau’s. He famously made nothing of his personal appearance – the Parisians said he looked like a peasant and admired him nonetheless – and this book is much the same. It is written very plainly – he makes much of his Puritan family background with little style and next to no emotion showing. His readers already knew who he was, so he had no reason to be boastful. The book is an understated account of his pubic legend.Franklin’s autobiography is a just so story about those aspects of the American Dream that he valued and thought he personified – the ideals of material success, moral regeneration and social progress. As a result, it became a symbol of America itself. Millions who identify with America have read his book to confirm their beliefs, while its detractors find in Ben Franklin’s life “a national creed of capitalist avarice, sexual repression, and bourgeois comfort” (Silverman 2003). The author presents himself as being guided by reason, moderation and virtue, but offers few glimpses of the unusually complex human being that he was informally.Around 1980 I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My daughter (the same one, now seven) was visiting from England. She had heard that Americans have poison ivy. There was a pink spot on her leg and she asked me if it was poison ivy. I reflected a bit, “It looks as if your leg will have to come off, Louise”. She did a quick logic check -- “Daddy loves me, he isn’t upset, so this is another of his silly jokes” -- said “Oh Daddy!” and stalked off. An old lady sitting on a bench near us told me, “That is the most disgusting thing I have heard in my life. You lied to your daughter, She needs to know that her father always speaks the truth”. I barely recalled what I had said or why. It was a reflex. Later I worked it out. Many Americans believe that children should be protected from the ugliness of adult life for as long as possible. In Manchester we knew that adult life could be awful, but families prepared children for it by making them choose independently between contradictory versions of events. Is an aversion to contradiction in childrearing more common in the United States than in Europe and New York? Certainly, the struggles with contradictory principles of education that preoccupied Locke, Rousseau and Kant are absent from Franklin’s autobiography.Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant (1724-1804) lived in or near K?nigsberg, East Prussia all his life. He was a university teacher, a writer, a philosopher and, in a more focused way, as remarkable an example of lifetime self-learning as Benjamin Franklin. He had a profound influence on nineteenth century thought, but today he is widely disparaged or ignored. If the Enlightenment’s pursuit of liberal democracy entailed radical reappraisal of self in the world, Kant took that project further than anyone. His legacy of original thinking includes nature and history, life and ideas, individual and society, morals and politics, past and future, local and global. He epitomizes the main themes of this book: education, anthropology, self in the world. Kant was born of “poor but pious” parents. After university he was a private tutor for a decade and hated it. On receiving his doctorate in philosophy, he was appointed university lecturer in mathematics, physics and philosophy and later as professor, teaching for four decades on a wide range of subjects. Early on he made an important breakthrough in astronomy, A General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, which was later credited to Laplace, and published some remarkable essays. His three Critiques – of Pure Reason, Practical Reason and Judgment – came out towards the end of his career, between 1781 and 1790, along with an essay on universal history, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Perpetual Peace, a sketch for would-be world citizens and the Anthropology, a best-seller for its day. Kant’s lecture-notes on Education (“pedagogy”) were edited for publication by a former student shortly before his death.Throughout this work, Kant “emphasized the education of the individual, not in his solitude, but as a man, as a citizen, and as a member of a kingdom of ethical ends [as a cosmopolitan]” (Buchner 1908). Kant built on, but also surpassed his predecessors. He was not just concerned with how individuals could reconcile their personal inclinations with social duties or with how humanity’s origins in nature might strengthen the present transition from agriculture and monarchy to capitalism and modern states. In a 1784 essay, he states that nature’s endowment of human beings with the capacity to reason will only reach its fulfillment at the species level, not the individual. The goal of social development is the equal administration of justice everywhere; and human antagonism in society (war is an inducement to peace) is the catalyst for this. The current system of states was the problem, not be solution. Kant interviewed Dutch and Portuguese sailors in the local docks to find out how they managed conflict resolution on the high seas beyond the reach of state-made laws. These questions permeated his Anthropology (1796). Kant believed that education should prepare students for a world quite unlike the one they knew at present. His book was intended to provide a template for organizing personal experiences in future. He wanted to awaken his students to mature individual thinking. University education should be inspired and organized by the new idea, promoted by the American and French revolutions, of the value and beauty of a free humanity. Kant agreed with Rousseau that the roots of education should lie as deeply as the human nature that it aims to modify; but whereas Rousseau would perfect the natural man in each of us, moral idealism held the key to human progress for Kant. We need both intelligence and social obligation to overcome instincts that are often untrustworthy. Human nature can and should be improved upon; character formation looks forward and not just back. Immanuel Kant, like Thomas Hobbes, focused on reform of the universities as a priority in education, not on child-rearing,.Kant was a modern Socrates who synthesized in himself the forward movement of the previous three centuries:It was no longer How does the world get into the mind? but How does it get out of the mind? …Education is no longer world-appropriation, but world-building. Each man, by his own mental processes, builds up his own world. The question is, How is this done? (Davidson 1908)One such method is autobiography. Next we fast forward a century and see how the nineteenth century transformed the eighteenth century’s problematic and approach.Henry AdamsHenry Adams (1838-1918) of Boston and Washington was descended from two American presidents; his maternal grandfather was a millionaire. He died at the end of the First World War and his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, was published the next year. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the Modern Library later ranked it first in a selection of the twentieth century’s best non-fiction. The historian and journalist Garry Wills awarded the same accolade for the nineteenth century to Adams’ nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1801-1817). Both are notable for their fine writing. Adams was a student at Harvard where he was “barred from philosophy and bored by facts”. He later taught medieval history there and hated the system of education as both student and teacher. He couldn’t understand his students’ enthusiasm for their lot until one of them told him that “the degree of Harvard College is worth money to me in Chicago”. In Henry Adams’ circle a Harvard degree “was rather a drawback for a young man in Boston and Washington”. In the 1860s he was private secretary to his father when he served as Lincoln’s ambassador to London and he acquired there a taste for country houses. John Stuart Mill’s writings confirmed his belief that the intellectual elite could take the lead in a democracy. He retired from Harvard at 39 (a bit earlier than Ben Franklin, but based on inherited wealth) and devoted himself to writing history, journalism and the occasional novel, anonymously in the main. Adams was a serious globetrotter and valued his close friends highly. His wife suffered from depression and committed suicide. There was whiff of scandal since Adams kept up an (apparently unconsummated) passionate friendship with the wife of a senator. The years 1872-1892, when all this happened, are omitted from his memoir without explanation. He completed the autobiography in 1907. It begins with homage to Rousseau, to his Confessions more than Emile, although both are relevant to a book whose theme is self-education. Adams claims that the nineteenth century saw no new model for education since Rousseau and Franklin. Moreover, an education in 1800 was useless for the world of 1900. The book is an introspective meditation on how its author tried to equip himself to understand and cope with a world in permanent revolution, much of it driven by technology. Henry Adams was conflicted over the role to be granted to the self, referring to himself throughout in the third person. By now, at least in his social class, demotion of the ego in speech and writing reflected the victory of the object world over human subjectivity. The liberal thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries understood that self-realization depended on making a new world by means of revolution. Individual and society were interdependent features of the one personality. But the rise of industrial capitalism made that relationship problematic. The norms of academic scholarship today retain that effacement of ego. The architect of this transformation was G. W. F. Hegel, as noted earlier. Adams does not refer to Hegel and his book dismisses conventional educational systems, while hoping that his own self-education might teach others something useful. In attempting to capture the transformations of his day, he seized for a symbol on the electric “dynamo” that was replacing the steam engine as the motor of industrial civilization. He bitterly regretted his youthful training in dead languages rather than in math and science; and the bridge between the humanities and sciences that he offers here reveals that lack. Adams attributes his actual education to varied experiences, friendship and reading; but he yearns to connect with scientific thinking. This quote captures the verbal synthesis he aspires to: “Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world” (Adams 1919).Henry Adams apparently saw no merit in the common culture that Alexis de Tocqueville (1840) identified as the cornerstone of the early American democracy. He was an unrepentant scion of the ruling class, for whom the hereditary privilege that he shared with the old French aristocrat required him to lead society effectively, but not to question his class’s role in subverting democracy. Even so, his writing had and still has broad human appeal. In the early twenty-first century, we must acknowledge that, far from making progress in solving the problem of education, we may even have regressed. Henry Adams, midway between us and Kant, kept alive the tradition of self-education as a suitable theme for autobiography that we would do well to renew in these desperate times.Unifying humanity’s dual natureThe expanding power of human production in the nineteenth century introduced a rift between individuals and society that made the political project of their integration increasingly implausible. This rift became even greater in the impersonal societies that flourished during the twentieth century. Scientific modernism – quantum (Planck) and relativity (Einstein) – sought to unify the extremes of scale, but their outlook never penetrated public consciousness. Recent approaches to complexity use non-linear equations to investigate chaos, order and phase transitions, as when fast-moving water molecules become fixed as ice. Chaos is itself determinate, if only we could see it. James P. Crutchfield, an American mathematician and physicist, asks “What lies between order and chaos?” His answer is “human innovation”. The middle ground is where life and creativity grow or, as Vladimir Nabokov put it in his autobiography, “There is…a kind of delicate meeting place of imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic” (my emphasis). It often seems that each of us is a puny self, lost in a vast universe. How do we bridge the gap? As Nabokov says, we need to scale the world down and scale up the self, so that the two can meet meaningfully. Ritual and prayer once connected something deep inside each of us to an object world personified as God. For many people, works of fiction – plays, novels, movies – perform a similar role. The world is reduced in scale to a stage, paperback or screen allowing each spectator or reader to enter it subjectively on any terms they wish. Sophocles and Shakespeare stand out as social thinkers because their medium of drama bridges personal and impersonal dimensions of our existence. Their subject matter reflects this: how can a king be a man or vice-versa? The digital revolution in communications has collapsed this opposition between the personal and impersonal aspects of experience. But most of us are still struggling to escape from the nineteenth century.Every human being is a unique person who lives in society. We are therefore all individual and social at once and the two are inseparable in our experience. Society is both inside and outside us; and a lot rides on our ability to tell the difference as well as to make a meaningful connection between them. Society is personal when it is lived by each of us; it is impersonal when it takes the form of collective ideas. Life and ideas are likewise inseparable in practice, but they need sometimes to be distinguished.It is as damaging to insist on a radical separation of individuals and society or of life and ideas as it is to collapse the difference between them. Modern capitalism rests on division between personal (consumer) and impersonal (worker) spheres of social life. The institution of private property, in Locke’s hands, drove a conceptual wedge between our individuality and an active sense of belonging to society. In time the latter was made invisible or at least unreachable for most people. But then private property assumed the form of public ownership by large business corporations and even governments. The personal and impersonal spheres were then merged in business law, leaving a confusion in political culture between the rights of individual citizens and those of abstract social entities wielding far more power than any human being ever could. The consequences for democracy are disastrous. Is it so hard to distinguish between real persons and the impersonal organizations they live by? Bill Gates is Bill Gates, not Microsoft, and, when he plays bridge with Warren Buffet, they talk about money, with consequences for the rest of us. We have no difficulty watching a play that represents modern physics as a meeting between Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen (Frayn 2000). Even the academic humanities have become so abstract that it is now quaintly old-fashioned to imagine that living people are what make society and ideas. Classical liberalism expressed it in words whose meaning we have forgotten. “General Forms have their vitality in Particulars, and every Particular is a Man” (William Blake). The convergence of phones, television and computers in a digital network of communications has speeded up human connection at the world level. Society now takes a number of forms – global, regional, national and local. We need new impersonal norms to guide our social interactions in such a world, but not at the expense of recognizing individual personalities. The stage is set for a new humanism capable of uniting these poles of our existence. “Humanity” contains the elements of our predicament and their potential synthesis. It is a collective noun, a moral quality and a historical project for our species. We are still primitives; but eventually we, the people, will make society on our own terms, if we master the machines and money that are its means of development. We will encounter immense social forces bent on blocking the drive for a genuine democracy. There is much talk these days of “good governance”. This could be dismissed as a cynical disguise of power passed onto a gullible public by a transnational aristocracy. But it also speaks to a genuine desire to bridge the gap between politics and morality left by the twentieth century’s experiment in impersonal society. The remarkable strength of religious feeling in the world’s most modern society and the role of Islam in mobilizing resistance to it are not anomalous hangovers from the past, but evidence of a widespread desire for meaningful connection in a world where the secular state’s grip on society has been weakened.Chapter 13 Movement and the globalization of apartheidMovement is:The act of movingchanging placestendency or trendmaterial flux or flowpolitical effort to a common goalsection of a musical compositionsuggested motion of a designevacuation of the bowelsmilitary maneuvermechanism of a watchpoetic rhythm or structureemotion, a feeling of excitementprocess, a series of actions with a resultThe state is a state,a fixed idea;movement is life.THE GREATEST POSSIBLE COMMERCE BETWEEN THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD THE LEAST POSSIBLE COMMERCE BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENTS OF THE WORLD (Richard Cobden, Frieze of the main auditorium, Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 1856)“What’s the difference between animals and plants?” I would ask my undergraduate students. “Animals move to where the food is, but plants wait for it to come to them.” For 10,000 years, the bulk of humanity built societies around staying put to cultivate plants. Before that, human beings and their hominid ancestors moved around on foot to find their food and they knew no boundaries on earth. Ever since the industrial revolution began to pull people out of the countryside into cities, our societies have become a curious compromise between agriculture and industry, fixture and mobility (using machines for transport).My favorite movie is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). After a scene in Cairo headquarters, Lawrence crosses the desert with a guide on camels to meet up with Prince Faisal and the Arab revolt. They stop for water at an isolated well. The guide, whose eyesight is sharper, picks up a dark spot on the horizon. As it gets nearer, he realizes what it is, dashes for his camel and is shot dead with a rifle at long range. Dressed all in black with a bandolier draped around his chest and a rifle in the crook of his elbow, Omar Sharif (in his first film part, like Peter O’Toole) is berated by Lawrence: how will the Arabs unite against the Turks while you retain these barbaric habits? Sharif replies, “He knew it was our well”. Even desert nomads need fixed points they can rely on. Like everyone else, I have found my own version of this compromise; but by modern standards I am a nomad. Movement contradicts inequalityInequality is intrinsic to the functioning of the modern economy at all levels from the global to the local. The rich and poor are separated physically, kept apart in areas that differ greatly in their standards of living. It is impossible to prevent movement between the two areas in any absolute sense, since the rich need the poor to perform certain tasks for them on the spot. But movement of this sort is severely restricted, by the use of formal administrative procedures (governments and laws) and by a variety of informal institutions based on cultural prejudice. Systems of classification, of which racism is the prototype, perform this task for us; and racism is still the single most important means of inclusion and exclusion in our world. We live in self-proclaimed democracies where all are equally free; and we are committed to these principles on a universal basis. Yet we must justify granting some people inferior rights; otherwise functional economic inequalities would be threatened. This double-think is enshrined at the heart of the modern nation-state. The neoliberal conservatives who have dominated world society for several decades had as their first aim dismantling the social democratic institutions (welfare states) that arose in the mid-twentieth century to protect national workers and their families. This was accomplished by engineering downward pressure on wages through the threats of exporting capital to cheaper countries and importing cheap labor. The result in the rich countries is racist xenophobia exacerbated by job insecurity and rising levels of poverty at home. This is the immediate context for the globalization of apartheid as a social principle. It is echoed in increased security measures aimed at regulating movement in the name of the “War on Terror” after September 11th, 2001. Immanuel Kant argued for the “cosmopolitan right” of free movement everywhere. Our world seems to be the opposite of that now. But, sooner or later, economic and political crisis will force a revision of the principles organizing world society.Movement is predicated on some things staying as they are. We need to feel at home, so we build up durable attachments to particular places. Place and movement across distance are hard to combine in practice. Obviously, if virtual movement (telecommunications) can substitute for real movement, this dilemma would be reduced. The digital revolution in communications brings the world closer to each of us and it makes society at distance possible without disturbing our commitment to particular places. This machine revolution bears comparison in human history with the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Indeed our task is to understand the relationship between the two events. The exchange of commodities (markets) and cultural communication (language) are converging in the internet. It is now possible to imagine machines as instruments of human freedom rather than the opposite, as a means of feeling more at home in the world.A new free trade campaign is needed that would seek to dismantle the institutions of national and global privilege and insist on movement as a human right. Only then will the better off see any reason to engage with the world outside their fortified enclaves. The world belongs to all of us and each has a right to move in it as we wish. A modified Keynesian program for the world economy would be one step in that direction, redistributing purchasing power to the impoverished masses. Global capital will only be checked effectively when popular forces can mobilize freely. First, however, the world is seeing a move towards national and regional trade protection. This is bound to be resisted by the forces of neoliberal globalization – the transnational corporations and countries committed to production for export – with war the likely outcome.Apartheid as a universal social principleIn the Great Depression, Maynard Keynes offered a solution to national elites concerned that their governments would be overwhelmed by the poverty and unemployment generated by the economic collapse. It was to increase the purchasing power of the masses. The rich countries today are similarly cast adrift in a sea of human misery that includes most people alive. Karl Marx used to claim that the social relations of production act as so many fetters on the development of the productive forces, by which he meant that capitalist markets could not organize machine production for the benefit of society as a whole. The main fetter on human development today is the administration of the world economy by nation-states who prevent the emergence of new forms of economic life more appropriate to global integration. This prevents the implementation of a Keynesian programme aimed at alleviating world poverty by redistribution of purchasing power.In the film Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen says that he doesn’t feel like eating out tonight because of all those starving millions in the Third World. The audience laughs, uneasily. The gesture rings false: why tonight and not every night? No-one could live consistently with that proposition — could they? We might ask how people live with economic inequality. And the short answer is that they don’t, not if they can help it. Most human beings like to think of themselves as good (Kant). This normally involves being compassionate in the face of others’ suffering. The worst thing would be to be held responsible for that suffering in some way. Better to explain it away as having some other cause: perhaps the people deserve to suffer or are just pretending to be poor. Better still not to have to think about them in the first place. In the last resort we can ignore the problem by defining them as less human. Distance (physical, social, intellectual, emotional) is the answer to the unwelcome conflict between inequality and human compassion. While each of us engages in thousands of voluntary acts distancing ourselves from the suffering of others, the task is performed more reliably, at the communal level, by institutions.An institution is an established practice in the life of a community or it is the organization that carries it out. The root sta- is shared with “establish” and with “state”, the institution that represents society as a single centralized actor. What they have in common is the idea of a place to stay, in opposition to the movement, flux and process of life. Institutions and agriculture go together. The conflict between fixing society in the ground and reinventing it on the move underlies the present crisis. Keeping society unequal depends on controlling the movement of people. If the poor are to be kept at a proper distance, they should not invade the protected zones of privilege occupied by the rich. Better by far that they should know their place and stay there.The two principal institutions for upholding inequality, therefore, are formal political organization (law enforcement by governments) and informal customary practices shared by members of a community (culture). The most important task of both is to separate and divide people in the interest of maintaining rule by the privileged few. Classifying people is as old as language and society; and it helps to define solidarity within and between groups. But, labeling people differently is also a means of preventing them from combining. Modern ruling elites have come to terms with the anonymous masses they govern by pigeon-holing them in systems of classification. The intellectuals devise and maintain such categories. Social science would be impossible without subordinating persons to these impersonal systems of thought and enumeration.Now that society has become a depersonalized interaction between strangers, an important class of categories rests on overt signs that can be recognized without prior knowledge of their bearers. These are usually visual — physical and cultural characteristics like skin color or dress; speech styles also sometimes reveal social identity. Modern states are addicted to identity cards, preferably with a photograph of the bearer. By a standard symbolic logic, these sign systems are taken to reveal personal character — trustworthiness, ability and much besides. On this arbitrary basis, personal destinies are decided, people are routinely included and excluded from society’s benefits, inequality is made legitimate and policed, the world is divided into an segmented hierarchy of “us” and “them” and monstrous crimes against humanity are carried out.After the Second World War, South Africa’s ruling National Party instituted what they called apartheid, separate development of the races. Despite the close integration of people of European, African, Indian and mixed race origin in the country’s economic system, they decided to segregate the “races”, by allocating to “Blacks” a series of homelands (fragmented according to “tribal” origin) and denying them the right to reside in the cities, where the “Whites” mainly lived, except with a pass. Within the cities, Black and White areas were kept apart and were unequally endowed with resources. Establishing and keeping all this up required the systematic use of force, although collaborators were not hard to find. Internal resistance built up gradually and the rest of the world expressed outrage, translated into an intermittent boycott. The release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 signaled a retreat from this policy which culminated quite soon in African majority rule. But apartheid can’t be abolished by the stroke of a pen.The South African experiment was ugly, but not the most extreme form of inhumanity known to the twentieth century. Stalin and Hitler were responsible for much worse; and, as the ANC was being peacefully elected, a million people lost their lives in Rwanda, while Bosnia revealed that genocide was alive and kicking in Europe. Yet the Afrikaners managed to provoke the most coordinated international opposition since 1945. Why? What they did was obnoxious, but was it so exceptional? Their main crime was to be explicit, even boastful about their method of maintaining inequality. For the same method operates everywhere, but not always so openly or violently.South Africa became an exotic symbol of a universal institution about which people were feeling generally uneasy. It offered a limited target, outside the societies of its international critics, which could be rejected as an alternative to more painful introspection. For do not people like to think of themselves as good? Opposing evil elsewhere is a way of displacing our ambivalence about how we handle inequality closer to home. In any case, after apartheid’s official demise in South Africa, with Nelson Mandela celebrated everywhere as its heroic negation, something similar to it is the universal rule for managing the inequalities of world society today.There is a great lie at the heart of modern politics. Nationalism is racism without the pretension of being as systematic or global. So-called nations, themselves the outcome of centuries of unequal struggle, link cultural difference to birth and oppose citizens’ rights to all-comers. The resulting national consciousness, built on territorial segmentation and regulation of movement across borders, justifies unfair treatment of non-citizens and makes people blind to humanity’s common interests. As long ago as the Algerian war of independence, Frantz Fanon (1963) identified “the pitfalls of national consciousness” as the main obstacle to political progress in our world.There are other ways of classifying the poor besides visible signs of “natural” difference encoded as race. Nationality, ethnicity, religion, region and class may be signaled in many other ways. But the pervasive dualism of modern economies derives from the need to keep apart people whose life-chances are profoundly unequal. Friedrich Engels (1845) noticed it when he came to Manchester. In medieval cities, the rich and poor lived together. Here the rich lived in the suburbs and worked in the city center; they rode to and from their businesses along avenues whose facade of shops concealed the terrible housing conditions behind. Post-apartheid Johannesburg takes this to extremes, with its rich White Northern suburbs policed by private security firms and poor Blacks crowded in monochrome townships. The apartheid principle is now to be found everywhere in local systems of discrimination, more or less blatant. Israel, a society formed by the most concentrated racial attack in history, is seen by many as the most blatant successor to the Afrikaners’ social experiment. Passage through any of the world’s airports today shows how the “War on Terror” has strengthened the ability of state apparatuses everywhere to control the movement of people.Unequal developmentIn the two centuries since the industrial revolution, “development” theory has addressed two distinct, but related questions: What are the engines of capitalist growth? And how can the damage that capitalism does be patched up (Cowen and Shenton 1990)? In the last half century, “development” has come to mean the political relationship between rich and poor countries following the anti-colonial revolution. In the 1950s and 60s a semi-serious attempt was made to help the poor countries develop in the first sense. But since 1980, what passes for development aid has been just sticking plaster for the victims of a world economy in recession, more often a self-serving tool of mercantilism. Anthropologists of development were wrong to identify their project too closely with the development bureaucracy. In the twenty-first century there will be radically new forces to contend with and a different approach has become essential.The historical relationship between the peoples of rich and poor countries is one of movement in both directions. We need to address systematic attempts to control such movement today and ask whose interest these policies serve. Concerns with “immigration” to western countries are tied to the development of poor areas by the economic inequality on which contemporary world economy rests. Moreover, the situation is changing in unforeseen ways.If the decades before the First World War were a similar era of “globalization” to our own, marked by mass migration of Europeans to temperate lands of new settlement and of Asian “coolies” to tropical colonies, we have seen restricted migration of the inhabitants of poor countries to the main western centers. Then western capital unified the world economy and the rise of large-scale machine industry encouraged the emergence of a high-wage economy at home separated from the cheap labor of the colonies. German and American capital made inroads into Britain’s monopoly of world trade and finance. Today the cheapest agricultural products come from Brazil, the cheapest manufactures from China, the cheapest information services from India, the cheapest migrant labor from the ruins of the Soviet empire. Following a wave of migration from what Britain calls “the new Commonwealth” countries and three decades of neoliberal economic policies, western workers are facing increased competition both at home and abroad, while capital has become truly global for the first time by diffusing to new areas, notably in Asia.South Africa was always central to globalization and remains so today (Hart and Padayachee 2013). The need to keep high- and low-wage labor streams separate became acute in Natal, where British and Indian migrants of similar levels of skill competed for the same jobs. The resulting discrimination in favor of Whites was later adopted as to regulate the poor Black majority in what became apartheid. But keeping high- and low-wage labor apart in systems of discrimination based on race has since then been elevated to a universal principle of world society, replicated at all levels of society. This was obscured by treating apartheid as something those nasty Afrikaners did, not us.The neoliberal counter-revolution against post-war developmental states of 1979/80 had one aim -- dismantling the social democratic institutions that arose to protect the families of national workers. This is the immediate context for the globalization of apartheid as a social principle. It is echoed in increased security measures aimed at regulating movement in the name of the “War on Terror”.When agricultural societies adopted machines and moneyMore than two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant (1795) argued for the “cosmopolitan right” of free movement everywhere. It is our task not only to show how people organize themselves in the face of global inequality today, but how society might be made more just. This involves a fundamental critique of current ideas and practices carried out in the name of “development”, seen through the lens of the international movement of peoples.?What does it take to feel at home in the world today? How have recent changes in transport and communications affected people’s ability to adapt the rhythms of their own inner worlds to those of the world outside? What distinctive patterns of residence and movement, work, recreation and identity are emerging in our time? If digital communications bring the world to each of us at home, parallel, but less spectacular improvements in transport allow us to join the movement of the world more cheaply and efficiently than before. How are these changes in people’s horizons, the chance to be more sedentary and nomadic at the same time, reorganizing the lives of individuals and families? For, in order to move, we must hold other aspects of our lives constant. You can’t fly without airports, take a train without stations. The need for change or something different requires stability as much as movement. This sameness-in-difference lies at the heart of the contemporary problem of personal identity; and modern communications offer new means for resolving old contradictions.We need to feel at home. It is possible to be at home on the move (hence “mobile homes”), but generally speaking we build up durable attachments to particular places. Place and movement across distance generate stress and conflict, since they are hard to combine in practice. Reconciling our need for a stable base with participation in the world at large (usually through movement) often poses acute dilemmas for individuals and for small groups who wish to stay together. If virtual movement (communications) could be substituted for real movement, this dilemma could be moderated.So the digital revolution in communications is crucial for two reasons: it brings the world closer to each of us and it makes society at distance possible without disturbing our commitment to particular places. The middle-class revolution with which the modern age began has stalled, even regressed, first allying itself with landed power and then assuming the form of rule traditional for agrarian civilizations. No serious mid-nineteenth century social thinker imagined that urban commercial agglomerations could be controlled from the top by remote centralized states. Yet a century and a half later, most of us are conditioned to think that no other form of society is imaginable. The institutions of agrarian civilization, developed over five millennia with a passive rural workforce in mind, are, in form if not in content, our institutions today: territorial states, landed property, warfare, racism, embattled cities, money as objects, long-distance trade, an emphasis on work, and of course world religions and the family. Consider what happened to all the wealth siphoned off by western industrial states since the Second World War, the largest concentrations of money in the history of humanity. It went on subsidizing food supplies and armaments, the priorities of the bully through the ages, certainly not those of the modern urban consumers who paid the taxes. No, we have never been modern, as Bruno Latour (1993) says. We are like the digging stick operators whose scratching launched the invention of agriculture. They could not imagine that it ended up as Chinese civilization and neither can we envisage what the internet has in store for life on earth. So far we have settled for repeating the inhumanity of a society built unequally on agriculture, especially the notion that households relate to society principally through their work. The communications revolution rests on the exchange of meanings at distance through electronic media. Civilization now rests increasingly on the services that human beings perform for each other and the economy is less concerned with material production as a result. This contrast with agriculture and early industrialization shares some features with the priorities of the peoples who live as hunter-gatherers, a way of life evocative of before we settled down to cultivate the land. Movement as a human rightOnce people roamed freely around the world, like the animals, and the evidence provided by their contemporary successors suggests that they did not experience their relations with nature and each other as contradictory. Their economic mechanism was sharing consumption and their daily lives were infused with the spirits they thought shared the world with them. Society had its fixed reference points, places whose importance lasted through time; but it was significantly translocal, existing across places and to some extent independently of them.After settling down to produce food, society became wedded to place, since plants expect to get their nourishment while being fixed to one spot and farmers had to stay and look after their plants. They domesticated animals in order to bring them under a similar regime of protection. One consequence of this move to agriculture 10,000 years ago is that the world no longer appeared undivided to its occupants. There was the domesticated part brought precariously under human control and the rest, “the wild”, a term including untamed thickets, fierce animals, human predators and vengeful spirits. Somehow we must transcend this inherited worldview.The world has never been more connected or more unequal than now. The reason for both is the global freedom enjoyed by capital. Just as in the nineteenth century the liberal state imposed the freedom of capital on others whom they enslaved, today’s neoliberal world economy imposes its own forms of coercion on the vast bulk of humanity. Inequality is administered by territorial states, one of whose principal functions is to restrict the movement of people, especially from the poor areas to the rich. This attempt to maintain two zones of labor, one high-paid and the other low-paid, has its origins in the imperialism of the decades before the First World War. It persists in the organization of the world economy as a system where inequality is expressed through a semiotics of race. Resistance to globalization understandably takes the form of seeking to reinforce national boundaries against the predations of capital. But this plays into the hands of racists and fascists.We need a new free trade movement, seeking to dismantle the institutions of national and transnational privilege. that insists on movement as a human right. The philosophical inspiration for this program is Immanuel Kant in late works such as The Perpetual Peace and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The world belongs to all human beings and each of us has a right to move in it as we wish. An injury to one person anywhere affects us all. The last and most difficult task of humanity is to construct a universal system of justice. A modified Keynesian program for the world economy might be one step in that direction, redistributing purchasing power to the impoverished masses. Global capital will only be checked effectively when popular forces are able to mobilize freely. The internet has increased this possibility of late; but dismantling state jurisdiction over international movement is as essential for us now as the repeal of the Corn Laws was a century and a half ago. Chapter 14Thinking new worlds: the anti-colonial intellectualsRethinking the worldWhat does it take to rethink the world? And to whom should we look as antecedents? The circuit of money today is global and in effect lawless, while politics are mainly national, without offering much purchase on that more inclusive economy. Not long ago there were several models of humanity and society in circulation, but now there is only one. That is why we need to refresh our thinking about the world. Nineteenth-century world society was conceived of as an evolutionary racial hierarchy imposed on others by “white” conquerors. By 1900 the Europeans controlled 80% of the world’s land surface, but a sequence of world wars and economic depression undermined their monopoly. The main event of the twentieth century was the anti-colonial revolution, a process whereby peoples originally coerced into joining European empires sought their own independent relationship to world society. This was important, not just for dismantling empire, but for generating a number of thinkers who could imagine a new kind of world and persuaded the masses to fight for it.The Pan-African movement was the largest and most inclusive organization for change in the first half of the twentieth century, with Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon offering a vision of the world that negated racial empire. M. K. Gandhi developed the most original global vision for the anti-colonial movement. If we wish to rethink our place in world society, he has the most to offer. He was the first truly global thinker since Immanuel Kant.I came to the anti-colonial intellectuals late. They were absent from my education and played almost no role in my early academic career. Social anthropology was transformed (but only temporarily) by the collapse of European empires, mainly because the world was changing in radical ways, opening us up to history and critique. Even an academic careerist like me believed that western societies were decadent and might be made receptive to political lessons from the newly independent countries. And of course the Vietnam War felt like the end of imperialism too. But the social anthropology syllabus at Cambridge was still imbued with the spirit of Radcliffe-Brown. My favourite books (always the classicist) were S. F. Nadel’s A Black Byzantium (Nadel 1942), a marvellously full account of the political economy of a Nigerian kingdom, and Raymond Firth’s monograph on Tikopia economy (Firth 1939). Jack Goody was moving towards comparative history and linking up with sociology and politics. Edmund Leach gave theory lectures based on Rethinking Anthropology (1961), but one day he came to the lecture room brandishing Lévi-Strauss’ Le cru et le cuit and told us that our discipline would never be the same again. His BBC lectures, A Runaway World? (Leach 1968) were as thrillingly iconoclastic then as they are now. I became a specialist on Ghana, but I only found out in the late 1980s that President Kwame Nkrumah was a protégé of the London-based Trinidadian Marxists, George Padmore and C.L.R James, and that James wrote a devastating critique of his protégé’s post-colonial politics (James 1978). But then I would not blame the Cambridge system for an ignorance of the world fostered by a decade of specialization in ancient languages.What does it take to think the world differently? And to whom should we look for antecedents? The circuit of money today is global and in effect lawless, while politics are mainly national, without offering much purchase on that more inclusive economy. Not long ago there were several models of humanity and society in circulation, but now there is only one. That is why we need to refresh our thinking about the world. Nineteenth-century world society was conceived of as an evolutionary racial hierarchy imposed on others by “white” conquerors. By 1900 the Europeans controlled 80% of the world’s land surface, but a sequence of world wars and economic depression undermined their monopoly. The main event of the twentieth century was the anti-colonial revolution, a process whereby peoples originally coerced into joining European empires sought their own independent relationship to world society. This was important, not just for dismantling empire, but for generating a number of thinkers who could imagine a new kind of world and persuaded the masses to fight for it.Pan-AfricanismIn 1944 the Pan-African Federation was founded in Manchester: participating associations of African and Coloured peoples attended including delegates from Kenya, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast. Its aims were to promote the well-being and unity of African peoples and peoples of African descent throughout the world; to demand self-determination and independence of African peoples and other subject races; to secure equality of civil rights for African peoples and an end to racial discrimination; and cooperation between African peoples and others who share our aspirations.In October 1945, the Fifth Pan-African Congress was held in Manchester. It was organized by George Padmore and his and James’s protégé, Kwame Nkrumah. The 90 delegates included Jomo Kenyatta, W. E. B. Dubois, Obafemi Awolowo and Hastings Banda. There were 33 delegates from the Caribbean. The British media ignored both events which were, in effect, the launch of a drive for post-war independence in Africa and the Caribbean, linked to the American civil rights movement. I knew nothing of it until middle age. Why Manchester? Manchester’s industrial revolution generated an active associational life there: friendly societies like the Odd Fellows and the cooperative movement. Thomas Clarkson was greeted by a large abolitionist crowd in Manchester and 10,000 people signed a petition. Manchester was a central node in Britain’s international campaign to end the slave trade. When cotton was scarce during the American civil war, Lancashire’s workers held demonstrations against slavery. Marx and Engels based their faith in the revolutionary potential of the industrial working class on what they saw in Manchester.The Pan-Africanist movement was the largest and most inclusive radical organization in the early twentieth century, with black anti-colonial intellectuals offering a vision of the world that negated racial empire. M. K. Gandhi developed a vision of a post-colonial world. He was Immanuel Kant’s successor as a truly global thinker.Africa succumbed to the last phase of the European land grab. An international movement aiming to restore control of their land to Africans provided a direct challenge to racist empire. Its main intellectual drivers, with one or two exceptions, were from the New World, rather than Africa itself. The three Pan-Africanist writers considered here – Du Bois, James and Fanon, along with Gandhi -- ranged in time from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. Each of them mobilized an inclusive democratic movement animated by visions of a new world order.W. E. B. Du Bois Du Bois was born in 1868 of mixed ancestry and grew up in Massachusetts without much experience of racial discrimination. University in Tennessee changed all that. He went on to Berlin University and then to Harvard where he was the first African American to receive a PhD. His first three books were a history of the slave trade, a sociological monograph, The Philadelphia Negro, and a literary and anthropological masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk. He was prominent in the first and fifth Pan-African Congresses and a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured Peoples. His first impulse was to build bridges to the white majority in the US; but then he changed his position and came into conflict with his own government. He and his second wife, Shirley, settled in Ghana in the 1960s when invited by Kwame Nkrumah to work on an Encyclopedia Africana. Du Bois died there in 1963. When I arrived in Accra two years later, Shirley Du Bois was the head of Ghana’s television service.Du Bois’ speech to the First Pan-African Congress in London (1900) is justly famous. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. How far will differences of race be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization?...[If] Negroes and other dark men [are given] the largest and broadest opportunity for education and self-development, then this contact and influence is bound to have a beneficial effect upon the world and hasten human progress.? But if, by reason of carelessness, prejudice, greed and injustice, the black world is to be exploited and ravished and degraded, the results must be deplorable, if not fatal.Let the world take no backward step in that slow but sure progress which has successively refused to let the spirit of class, of caste, of privilege, or of birth, debar from life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness a striving human soul. Let not the natives of Africa be sacrificed to the greed of gold, their liberties taken away, their family life debauched, their just aspirations repressed, and avenues of advancement and culture taken from them….Thus we appeal with boldness and confidence to the Great Powers of the civilized world, trusting in the wide spirit of humanity, and the deep sense of justice and of our age, for a generous recognition of the righteousness of our cause.The Souls of Black Folk was an extraordinary compilation of essays ranging from a polemic against the leading black politician through an analysis of Georgia sharecroppers to the death of his own son aged two. Du Bois aimed to touch his readers’ hearts as well as their minds; and each chapter is headed by an excerpt from a Negro spiritual, which he calls “the sorrow songs”. Black music was the one thing of beauty produced by nineteenth-century American society; it epitomized the common soul of black folk, while reaching out across to more ecumenical notions of soul. In this book, Du Bois sought to gain recognition of his own human worth; but disappointment led him to abandon that strategy for one of separation. “Soul” has three meanings: one’s non-material, immortal part; one’s core, most integral, vital part; and the sensitive component of personality as opposed to the intellectual. Du Bois hoped then that a religious and universal meaning of soul could evoke the common humanity linking Blacks and Whites in a Christian nation. Soul is both a property of individual persons and something shared by whole peoples, even by humanity as a whole.Du Bois felt thwarted by the veil, the fact that Black people were seen first as Black and only secondarily as themselves. Black people are to some extent invisible to the White gaze and this can be a strategic resource for them. Du Bois says that he is writing “through, inside, outside and above the veil”. The veil makes Blacks unseen, but not invisible. One may be unseen but not veiled, veiled but not visible. Not to be seen might be an opportunity. But the great prize is still to be seen as oneself.The cracked mirror of race prevents us from seeing and being seen as we are, so that our knowledge of ourselves and others is inevitably partial. One might find in this vision an ethnographer’s desire to encounter others as human beings. The decades following reconstruction revealed fully the contradictions of a world defined by identity politics. Du Bois concludes that all Black people, at least in the US, are victims of a “double consciousness”: they aspire to being full members of society, but they are not and never will be. He did not pursue white recognition for long. By the time he published Darkwater: Voices from within the veil, Du Bois was a fully-fledged separatist.C. L. R. JamesJames is the Caribbean’s equivalent to Du Bois, an intellectual of extraordinary range and impact who lived for almost 90 years. His Trinidad was a more benign place to be Black and middle class than post-reconstruction US. He avoided the standard route to higher education, writing fiction and sports journalism instead. James arrived in London at the age of 32. In the next six years, he published the first Caribbean novel of urban low life, ghosted a cricket autobiography, wrote the first global history of the Trotskyist movement, a political history of labor in Trinidad, a pamphlet advocating West Indian self-government, a play about Toussaint L’ouverture starring Paul Robeson, a history of the slave revolution in Haiti and a survey of Black revolt since then. He became the leading anti-Stalinist politician in Britain, organized the International Africa Service Bureau with George Padmore (who had been Stalin's global coordinator of African affairs) and wrote and spoke prolifically in a variety of media.James’s great achievement was The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), his monumental book about slave revolution in the French colony that became Haiti. This event changed the world as much as the American and French revolutions; yet it had been forgotten. The leading powers sent and lost large armies to defeat the insurgents. William Pitt switched the focus of British national interests from the New World to India as a result. But James saw here the inspiration for an anti-colonial revolution. This message came across most clearly in The History of Negro Revolt (1938) where James demonstrated that African insurgency in the western Atlantic region had now shifted to Africa itself. The slave revolution had been sparked by appalling racism linked to advanced capitalism in mechanized sugar plantations. The recipe for revolution was that conjuncture. Gold Coast dockworkers, Johannesburg gold miners and East Nigerian women palm-oil producers were all stoking an anti-colonial revolution that would erupt soon. No-one, from African politicians to European Marxists, thought this was remotely likely. But James was right and they were wrong.James’s case for African unity drew on a Trotskyist vision of history. He was a practicing revolutionary and world history was his teacher. James’s later masterpiece on cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963), criticized the media’s focus on the sporting arena. Society is also present as the crowd of spectators. He spent 15 years in the United States where he broke with party politics. His American Civilization (1993) stands with his other two classics. James considered his most significant contribution to have been Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1948), placing himself in a sequence of revolutionary Marxism.Frantz FanonFanon was a Martinican psychiatrist who came to live in France, where he denied that he was Black, claiming rather to be a doctor, French and Communist. He married the daughter of a white trade unionist in Lyon. He was not then a Pan-Africanist. Black Skins and White Masks was a withering critique of the successor political class in the Caribbean. The first volume of his collected writings, Freedom and Alienation, reveals him as the opposite of the Pan-Africanist he became during the Algerian war for independence. Frantz Fanon spent six years working as a psychiatrist in Algeria, first in a French military hospital and then as a member of the FLN insurgency. His experience of this genocidal war recruited Fanon to the Pan-African cause. He died of cancer aged 36. The Wretched of the Earth had a Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre who emphasized the book’s sensational character. It made his reputation as a revolutionary, although his early writings paint a more complex picture. The opening chapter, “on violence”, argued that white colonial society was inescapably racist and could only be displaced by force. Parisians read a text whose basic message was “Kill whitey”. But Fanon was a consummate writer and this was not the book’s only message. A long final chapter, “Colonial war and mental disorders”, reports on his work with patients from both sides of the war. The case studies include two 12-year-old Algerian boys who could not cope with having killed a European schoolmate; and a young French soldier driven mad by memories of torturing insurgents. Fanon concludes that, for the victims and the victimizers on both sides, violence is humanly impossible to live with. The author’s death was no doubt brought on by the terrible stress he faced as a doctor in that war. His notorious advocacy of violence had to be reconciled with the view that war is humanly intolerable.“The trials and tribulations of national consciousness” is a sustained polemic against the weakness of the postcolonial national bourgeoisie and the inevitable fragmentation of Pan-African unity. The book was written when very few African countries had won independence, so its prophetic power is remarkable. But Fanon does not dismiss a national framework for politics entirely. His extraordinary ability to write about Africa as a whole comes out most strongly in the chapter, “Grandeur and weakness of spontaneity”, which attempts a generic class analysis of Africa’s war for independence.Small urban elites tied to the metropolis despised the rural masses and their chiefs, but were persecuted by the colonial authorities and forced to take refuge in the countryside. The two sides formed a partnership with the urban elites offering political education and the peasants teaching them the realities of the anti-colonial struggle. This was the birth of the revolutionary movement for independence. Finally, in “On national culture”, Fanon insists that a focus on the dynamics of national culture is more important than technical concerns with culture as such.Gandhi’s world visionMohandas K. Gandhi grew up in the ancient Indian Ocean port of Porbandar in Gujarat. This was a cosmopolitan place lacking religious antagonism. He was funded by local businessmen to study law in London and soon after departed for South Africa to give legal advice on a commercial dispute between Indians. He stayed there for over two decades (1893-1915) and became a prominent civil rights activist. The first half was exclusively concerned with Indians, but afterwards as a leader of a non-white coalition. His wanted to work through the British Empire in order to subvert it and he has been criticized for that. When he returned to India, he soon became the most prominent figure in the campaign for home rule. He was 78 when assassinated by a Hindu zealot shortly after India’s independence.Gandhi’s critique of the modern state was devastating. He believed that it disabled citizens, subjecting mind and body to the control of professional experts, when the purpose of a civilization should be to enhance its members’ self-reliance. Thus we must be patients, students, taxpayers and prisoners in the service of doctors, teachers, bureaucrats and jailers. This critique announced a distinctive direction for Indian independence, with home rule seen by Gandhi as being driven by self-realization at the personal level. His term for self-rule at all social levels was swaraj, with a focus on political decentralization. The independence movement abandoned Gandhi’s program, but some precedent was set for work organizations, voluntary associations and NGOs; and the ideal of bottom-up organization by individuals and communities persisted after Gandhi’s death.Gandhi’s method for achieving self-rule was satyagraha, “insistence on truth”. His autobiography, the most revealing source for his politics and ethics, is subtitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth. The pursuit of truth is linked to non-violence (ahimsa). It seems obvious to many that he was a religious figure for whom politics was of only secondary importance. Given the historical trajectory of the Indian postcolonial state, one can easily claim that Gandhi’s secular politics failed because of its religious basis. Thus Perry Anderson’s essay “Gandhi center stage” is a critique of Gandhi’s religious politics by someone whose own agenda is exclusively secular. The Pan-Africanists showed that religious or metaphorical thinking and secular politics could be combined in interesting ways, with James at one extreme and early Du Bois at the other. Clearly, the idea of soul was central for Gandhi and he found it easy to move from individual instances (including his own “great soul”) to collective expressions of soul on a global scale. Did Gandhi’s religious politics contain an anthropological message? He did have a vision of humanity: every human being is a unique personality and as such participates with the rest of humanity in an encompassing whole. Between these extremes lie a great number of divisions and associations. Having absorbed much that the West had to offer, Gandhi settled on the village and agricultural society as the most appropriate vehicle for human development in the Indian case. If the world of society and nature is devoid of meaning, being governed by remote impersonal forces known only to experts, that leaves each of us feeling small, isolated and vulnerable. Yet modern cultures tell us that we are personalities with significance. How do we bridge the gap? Gandhi chose the village as the site of India’s renaissance because most Indians lived there, but also because its scale was appropriate to self-respecting members of an agrarian civilization. Moreover, the purpose of his philosophy was to build up the personal resources of individuals.The catalyst for anti-colonial revolution was world war. Gandhi’s appeal to the West is that he synthesized Victorian romanticism and Buddhist economics. The first is well-known – Thoreau, Tolstoy and Ruskin; the second less so (Dasgupta 1996). His Porbandar sponsors included Buddhist and Jain financiers. How do we span the chasm between self and world? Normally divisions of race, class, nationality, religion, gender, time and place mediate the poles. Like Rousseau and others, Gandhi asked what size and type of social units were most conducive to enabling citizens within a common framework of belonging. Men like Nehru, Jinnah and Ambedkar made short work of his political focus on the village.Two examples from Gandhi’s Autobiography illustrate the pragmatic and holistic aspects of his method for scaling up the self and scaling down the world. When he went to London to study the law, he couldn’t find food that he wanted to eat. He joined the Vegetarian Society, got onto the committee and, by the time he left there were a dozen vegetarian restaurants in London. In South frica he was obviously influenced by the revolutionary African left. After returning to India, a large strike broke out in the mid-1920s in the industrial city of Ahmedabad. Gandhi made his way there and sat down on a street corner and within a few days the whole strike hinged on him. He was not content just to practice this method himself. For the nationalist movement to succeed, millions of Indians had to believe that they could emulate him in their own way.Traditionally religion performed this task and, as long as those governing society acknowledged its public role, there was a tangible bridge between men of power and the masses. A fraudulent one, perhaps, but civilizations were built on it. For over a century now this link has been broken in the most powerful societies. Rather, science presumptively rules and social science has replaced the humanities as a guide. It is time to restore the humanities to pole position: truth of potentially universal significance is sought through the exercise of personal judgment on particular cases backed by scholarship and rigorous thought. Kant’s revolution in metaphysics consisted in this; but Michel de Montaigne has a claim to be its founder too. Great literature always encouraged an approach seeking to generate larger truths from closely observed details. History, case law, dialogical philosophy and ethnography rest on similar principles.The classical means to this end is prayer. Religion is an attempt to maintain a binding link between something deeply personal and subjective inside each of us and the impersonal world that we depend on. I can talk to God, privately or in public. Speech is the unity of thought and action. Many people still bridge the gap this way. For two centuries or more the main medium for this was fiction: novels, plays and movies.Anthropological visions of world societyIn a world of movement, some people seek existential stability by combining the poles of human existence -- the self as an identity and the world as a unity. We are each unique personalities and the world is potentially composed of humanity as a whole. Our societies have hitherto emphasized the varieties of classification and association that mediate these extremes. In future teachers and students may prefer to focus on “subjects in history” or “self in the world”. Anthropology as a discipline has not yet grasped the potential of this new world. When we contemplate its future, we need to think again about its scope, reach and impact, about the audiences we wish to address and how. Our task is to make a world society fit for all humanity. This means using the imagination for purposes of fiction, for the construction of possible worlds out of actual experience. Thinking about the macrocosm is made easier through contemplation of microcosms. Of course, the peoples who were subjected to western imperialism in the nineteenth century have not been outside modern history in the last one. They have been making it. The intellectuals of the anti-colonial movement could inspire a new cosmopolitan tradition in anthropology. All of them aspired to extend the achievements of western civilization to all humanity, especially to the victims of western racism.The last century elevated impersonal society above the person, separating subject from object, humanism from science. This is why most anthropologists today know little of the eighteenth century’s contribution to their own intellectual history. The communications revolution has spawned a new idea of the person, based on digital abstractions and concrete forms of individuality. This trend, at once personal and remote, should be familiar to us. We encounter it in our customized interactions with online suppliers of books. Anthropology should be existentially motivated, as the anti-colonial intellectuals were. The liberal tradition that they renewed entails a self-conscious revival of its metaphysics. There is nothing wrong with this tradition, except that its best slogans have been hijacked by industrial societies bent on imperialism and class warfare. After two centuries of lies and distortion, it is not surprising that most people now view the language of liberalism with suspicion. We need to reinvent the human truth of liberal revolution using language that carries fresh conviction.Truth is always local, but we must also extend ourselves to grasp the world we live in. World society is constituted by power relations, but the bridge to understanding our common humanity is moral. Morality is the ability to act on personal judgments about people’s behavior, including our own. Works of fiction allow us to span actual and possible worlds. We should focus on resistance to alienation, in whatever form it takes, religious or otherwise. How can we feel at home out there, in the restless turbulence of our world? We feel at home in intimate, face-to-face relations; but we must engage in remote, often impersonal exchanges at distance. The drive to overcome alienation is more powerful than alienation itself. We have universal communications at last; let’s make world society in the image of our own humanity. Chapter 15The democratic potential of the internet Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, is well-known for his inspiring online lectures and documentary shorts. He once received over a hundred applications for his graduate course in “digital ethnography” from around the world. The only problem: no such course existed; but millions had seen his creations on YouTube and they wanted more of it. The world is changing all around us, not just because we study it, but because our students live in it and they are rapidly leaving their teachers behind. The new communications technologies are blurring the boundaries of our disciplines, transforming the content of education, spawning new genres and sites of research, demanding fresh intellectual strategies. And contemporary academic institutions act as a brake on our ability to engage with all this. Anthropology as a discipline has not yet grasped the potential of this new world. When we contemplate its future – and indeed whether it is to have one -- we need to think again about its scope, reach and impact, about the audiences we wish to address and how. This chapter moves from my own encounters with the digital revolution to broad speculations about its human significance. We are living through the first stages of a world revolution as profound as the invention of agriculture. It is a machine revolution, of course: the convergence of telephones, television and computers in a digital system whose most visible symbol is the internet. It is a social revolution, the formation of a world society with means of communication adequate at last to expressing universal ideas. It is a financial revolution, the detachment of the virtual money circuit from production, linked to the West’s loss of control over the world economy. It is an existential revolution, transforming what it means to be human and how each of us relates to the rest of humanity. It is therefore also a revolution in anthropology that will make everything we have done so far seem like its prehistory. Oswald Spengler observed that the world historical moment you are born into does not need you; it will carry on with or without you. But still he offered a challenge to his readers, “Do you have the courage to embrace it?” So too with this revolution: you can engage with it or you can hide from it. And every person’s trajectory is particular to them, even if some common outlines can be glimpsed as the revolution unfolds. The world revolution and meI never warmed to the typewriter. All that whiting out of mistakes was too messy for me. I depended on fierce Scottish matrons to type up my hand-written manuscripts. We both knew where the power was. So, when I was introduced to word processing in the early 1980s, I seized my chance for liberation. I could become an artisan, designing my own layouts as well as the content. Email was made for me, an oral/written hybrid, between a letter and a phone call. I still love the fluency of the medium, more than online chat in real time. Then I discovered desk-top publishing and produced beautiful pamphlets, adding the roles of editor and publisher to my new craft identity. Next I started a mailing list, the amateur anthropology association (small-triple-a) which flourished for a couple of years. Today children grow up with text messaging and Nintendo DS while the rest of us struggle to keep up with the latest search engines. Desk-top publishing was alright, but the problem was distribution. How to improve on the system of putting something on a bookshop shelf and hoping that someone would find and pay for it? I flirted with reviving the eighteenth century subscriber system with an online data-base of interested readers; but I was already too committed to standard publishing. The mailing list was dominated by a small group of friends at Cambridge who tended to write as academic anthropologists do; so that outsiders were repelled by what they took to be a jargon-ridden clique. But Prickly Pear Pamphlets and the small-triple-a each expressed what I wanted from the medium. The point was to embrace the new technologies and explore the opportunities they offered by doing.At this time, the World Wide Web was making the internet more visual, personal and interactive. For two years I headed a committee to explore the uses of information technology for teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences. People said that Cambridge University had no place in this brave new world; we were too old-fashioned and the former Polytechnics had much more experience with online techniques. But over the centuries we had accumulated lots of beautiful stuff that could become a rich internet resource. In any case, I argued, the digital revolution is not linear. Everyone enters it with their own bundle of specific advantages and drawbacks at a particular moment. The technology evolves, so that early users may be too adapted to older techniques, while latecomers can make more creative use of software that requires less specialist knowledge than before. The machine revolution is a river and you can never step into the same river twice. I asked myself what I could possibly give to the young geeks who helped me keep a toehold in this revolution. I decided that it was “history”: I have been around since the Second World War and have a vision of history that they don’t. As a teacher I don’t want to clone myself, but to persuade my students to let me hitch a ride on their lives, since they are going places I could never reach by myself. I also became more self-conscious about my role as a network entrepreneur. What could I offer participants if my enterprises had no money or prestige? They had to be given something to do that they couldn’t find elsewhere. Maybe they fancied trying out graphic design: I got an amateur product, but it was free; and they acquired the experience. If they no longer got much out of the enterprise or had more pressing things to do, they would leave. So I worked on the value added by the collective; it had to be cool, hot or both! I found these methods through my internet-related activities, but soon adapted them to normal academic practice (teaching, running a center etc.); and the two spheres cross-fertilized each other in many ways. After I moved to Paris, I wanted to write a book that would sum up thirty years of teaching and point forward too. My first attempt was a textbook. I found it depressing: it contained nothing of what I had learned as a journalist, consultant, publisher, administrator and gambler. I couldn’t locate myself in my own book! So I withdrew the manuscript. Then I asked what future generations will be interested in us for. The answer was, obviously enough, the digital revolution. We have no idea where this thing is going. But what we do will have significant consequences for those who come later. I searched for an angle and hit on an old lecture about money that had a minor success (Hart 1986). So I wrote The Memory Bank, a book about the implications of the digital revolution for money and exchange.My new website was at first a vehicle for promoting my book, but it evolved into a blog. It isn’t really a blog, since the posts are my essays and attempts to make it more interactive never took off. It is a shop window for my writings. It feels great to bung whatever I have just written out there instantly. And it has some video footage, mainly of my lectures. Without helpers I would be nowhere in this revolution. But in the last two decades I have come a long way and so has the internet. I now do a lot more myself than I once could and the software becomes more user-friendly all the time.Then came the social networking revolution and Web 2.0: Google, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, Flickr, Twitter, Stumbleupon and all the rest. This is the revolution that I want to join. I love Twitter for the chance to project myself as an editor, sending the best economic journalism from Europe to American traders, gold bugs and currency freaks. I meet an interesting class of anthropologists there. And I hone my subediting skills on the space limit. Social bookmarking really turns me on (Weinberger ref). Classification of knowledge was hitherto done by experts and every piece of information had its unique place in a folder somewhere. Now tagging makes it possible for anyone to leave a mark on something they like or consider useful and you can find their guidance with increasingly sophisticated software. The people are generating the categories; and Google’s algorithms are already obsolete because its millions of hits are impersonal, less attuned to the user’s own profile. Twitter divides people into followers and followed. For those of us brought up on Fascism and Stalinism, all the talk of leaders and followers in Web 2.0 is something of a turn off. But when the Latins invented societas to describe their aspirations for collective order, the word they used had as its root sekw-, meaning to follow. If anyone was attacked, the others agreed to support them in battle. The hierarchy was temporary. It’s the same with Twitter. The new social networks are personal and unequal; they often have a commercial feel that puts off many intellectuals. But there is something exciting going on that it would pay us to understand and use. Twitter would be an ideal platform for complementary currencies; but I will be too busy writing about it to be the organizer.The Open Anthropology CooperativeA chain of events in 2009 led to the launch of the Open Anthropology Cooperative (Barone and Hart 2015). A handful of friends who were dissatisfied with the closed and hierarchical methods of the main professional association began discussing on Twitter the possibilities for a new kind of anthropology network. The talk moved to my website for discussion at greater length. Someone suggested trying the Ning platform and I jumped in. An administrative team supervised its explosive growth in the first few months, when over 2,000 members joined from an amazing diversity of backgrounds. They include faculty, postgraduate students, undergraduates and outsiders to the profession. Over half of an average 500 visitors a day came from the US, Britain, Canada and France (in a ratio of 4:2:1:1), but the next batch makes interesting reading: Portugal, Germany, Brazil, Georgia, Italy, Greece, Australia, Switzerland, India, Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey, Norway, Mexico, Spain, New Zealand. We soon acquired over a hundred discussion groups (some of them in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Russian and Norwegian), blogs, a forum, a wiki repository, the OAC Press, a seminar series and personal pages in all their multimedia variety. Anyone could start anything on the OAC and many of them did! Our members vigorously defended their independence from bureaucratic interference, but we managed to get some minimal rules generally accepted.People ask me how I find time for my professional work given all this stuff. My writing benefits enormously from being online 10 hours a day. I can check anything in a fraction of the time that it took before. I stay at my work station longer when I can answer an email message there, keep an eye on a football match, surf my key places for the latest developments. Sometimes the speed and diversity of my online connections generates a wave motion that carries my writing into unexpected regions of discovery. If this is the virtual social life, bring on the revolution! Our students, readers and the people we study will expect to be engaged through these new means of communication. For some this will be an uphill struggle. We must move from monologue to dialogue, from guild disciplines to the kind of lifetime self-learning that the internet affords. The universities now lag behind the students in terms of media literacy. The “edupunk” movement, armed with user-friendly digital technologies, rejects the forced imposition of out-dated software systems that universities spent millions on. They also face a threat to their monopolies when teachers extend their classrooms to non-university students. Is an anthropology of the internet possible (Hart 2004)? If so, what would it look like? People, machines and money matter in this world, in that order. Most intellectuals know very little about any of them, being preoccupied with their own production of ideas. Anthropologists have made some progress towards understanding people, but they are often in denial when it comes to the other two; and their methods for studying people have been trapped for too long in the twentieth-century paradigm of fieldwork-based ethnography. For sure, we need to find out what real people do and think by joining them where they live. But we also need a perspective on humanity as a whole if we want to understand our moment in history. Even more than before, participant observation online relies on auto-ethnography, on fieldwork as personal experience. We each enter it through a unique trajectory. The world constituted by this “network of networks” does not exist out there, independently of our subjective experience of it. Nor is the internet “the world”, but rather an online world to which we all bring the particulars of our situation in society offline. In reaching for the human meaning of the internet, we need to combine introspection and personal judgment with comparative ethnography and world history. I begin here with a world-historical perspective on the internet— its origins and political economy — before turning to the dialectics of virtual reality that map our journey through cyberspace. The origins of the internetCommunication is a word cognate with common and community. It appears to have its root in the ability of a group or network of people to exchange things and ideas through interaction. This usually consists of circulation of goods and services by means of money or the exchange of signs by means of language. The two circuits are converging in the digital revolution of our day: money is becoming information and information money. In both cases, the signs exchanged are now increasingly virtual; they take the form of bits detached from persons and places passing through the ether at the speed of light. This process of digitization lies at the core of our epoch; but the precedents for it go back to the origin of writing and further than rmation is an intentional signal from the perspective of the sender, perhaps anything that reduces the uncertainty of a receiver. The transmission of information through machines has traditionally come in the form of waves, imperceptible gradations of light and sound. For communications engineers analogue and digital computation rest on measuring and counting respectively: on the one hand, continuous changes in physical variables like age, height, warmth or speed; on the other, discontinuous leaps between discrete entities, such as days of the week, dollars and cents, letters of the alphabet, named individuals. Analogue processes, such as time and distance, may be represented digitally; but it was something of a breakthrough for early modern science to measure continuous physical change with precision. Before that the clarity of phenomena was generally enhanced and comparison facilitated by constructing bounded entities that could be counted, by digitization.Digital numeration is at its clearest when the only possible signals are binary: on/off, yes/no, either/or, 0/1. And this reversion to an older system of simple enumeration lies behind the latest revolution in communications. Digitization greatly increases the speed and reliability of information processing and transmission; it also lies behind the rapid convergence of what were once discrete systems: television, telephones and computers. The last have been digital from the beginning, while the other two recently completed the shift from sound waves to digital transmission. As a result, any kind of information can be carried by all types of equipment, which become essentially substitutable. Communications technology in future will consist in various combinations of screen, computer and transmitter/receiver. The manufacturing monopolists fight over whether the resulting hybrids resemble more a television set, a PC or a telephone. But the process common to all is digitization and the present moment of convergence lends our era its specificity. We should not, however, stress information at the expense of people. For the relations we make with each other matter more than the content of the messages that pass between us or the means of their transmission. To place the internet within a broader context of social life, we should step back to examine its historical antecedents.Human communication starts out as speech; exchanges are usually between people who can see as well as hear each other. A lot of non-verbal information accompanies the words – gestures, tone, emanations of feeling – and this helps us to interpret what is said and how to respond. This is surely why we say that social interaction is real. The words are abstract enough; but the exchange is face-to-face, grounding what passes between us in the exigency of place. Writing made it possible to detach meaning from the persons and places where it was generated and to communicate at some distance in time and space, not only in the here and now. Even then, the signs were often highly particular, too many for all but a select few to understand and variable from one scribe to the next. The alphabet took the process of simplifying the signs a step further, one sound for one letter, making it possible for writing to be adopted more widely and reliably. It was a cheapening of the cost of transmitting information.The Phoenician city states, maritime traders of the Lebanese coast, were the main pioneers of alphabetic writing at the beginning of the first millennium BC; and it came into Europe through the Greeks. I like to speculate how books were received then. On Homer: “All youngsters want to do today is read at home. You can’t get them to go out or anything. They have no idea what it was like hearing the old boy in a torch-lit barn on a Saturday night, with his voice echoing in the rafters. It brought tears to your eyes. Well, it was the smoke too.” Many more people have had access to the bard over the last 3,000 years than could ever have been in the same room as him during his lifetime. Virtual communication takes place more in the mind than in actual fact. The only way people could escape from the restrictions of the here and now was through exercising their imagination, usually under the stimulus of story-telling. Alphabetic writing, ultimately the book, vastly increased the scope of the collective imagination. It also made possible more practical exchanges at distance.Around the same time as the alphabet (c.700 BC), coinage was invented in Lydia, now a part of Turkey. Alphabetic writing and this new form of money were profoundly subversive of old ways. Until then, wealth and power were concrete and visible, being attached to the people who had them. They took the form of cattle, vineyards, buildings, armed men and beautiful women. Now riches could be concealed as gold and silver coins, allowing for a double detachment from persons – impersonal exchange at distance and unaccountable economic power (because hidden and private). Writing found a ready application in palace bureaucracy. The king could send messages while remaining himself invisible. It is one thing to be beaten up by royal thugs; but imagine the terror of receiving a written message saying “Commit suicide before tomorrow”. We feel something of this dread when we receive a demand from the unseen hand of a remote authority.I grew up without television in the home and with very limited opportunities for travel; so I relied on books to get away from it all. It feels as if my intensive training in the manipulation of words and numbers (Latin, Greek and math) now belongs to another age. I have managed to gain a toehold in the digital revolution with the help of bright young people who have grown up with it. For them, the phase of national television is already a bygone era. Communicating through keyboards will soon be replaced by audio-visual methods, thereby removing one more link between the book and the screen. Books and computers are complementary technologies, even if some academics think they are rivals. Print media are expanding as fast as their new electronic counterparts. Face-to-face exchanges, instead of being displaced by telecommunications, are essential when one spends the working day in front of a computer screen. Simple pursuits like reading and conversation, which used to be taken for granted, can be approached in a more analytical and creative frame of mind, now that there are many ways of acquiring and transmitting ideas. I do most of my writing in a Paris apartment, the long-distance writer’s traditional retreat into privacy; nothing new there. But I also keep up conversations with friends all over the world. And no writer could do that before the 1990s. I now have in my laptop a virtual space to accommodate a life of movement; even this is being displaced by a smartphone. I was forced to recognize the value of my own memory when my aptop was stolen without being backed up properly. Each of us experiences the digital revolution in our own way; but there are changes taking place that affect us all.The speed of the internet’s diffusionComputers have been with us for over 70 years, television for a bit longer and telephones for twice that long. In the1990s these technologies converged in a worldwide network of communications, the internet. It is a conceptual unity like “the world market”. Indeed market transactions increasingly take place on the internet. The big innovation when the World Wide Web arrived was the move from words and numbers to visual images. The infrastructure for transmissions constitutes an evolving network of satellites and cable grids.The internet was for several decades restricted in to a strategic complex of military, scientific and business interests, based in the United States and Europe. The scientists lent the medium its style and content in the early decades: highly technical, closed and clubby. When the internet went public in 1993, there were only three million users in the world. In the next five years the number of users increased to 100 million. This figure reached 3.5 billion in 2017 or half the people alive in the world. No previous technology has diffused so fast through the world’s population. The internet is an American invention. Americans not long ago constituted over half the world’s users; but today, at some 300 million, they are less than a tenth. Most of the practical instruments for intervening in the network are located there, however. Satellites now make broadband communications available to users worldwide. This side of the digital revolution favors large corporations, even as it distributes the medium to an ever-widening network of decentralized users. At present, the fastest-growing use of the internet is for electronic commerce, something unknown before the 1990s. But companies and private individuals are forming intranets, exclusive circuits of information exchange offering higher security than the public medium.If ever there was a challenge to empiricism, the habit of extrapolating from previous experience, it is guessing what the social impact will be. When iron smelting was first discovered in the Eastern Mediterranean 3,000 years ago, small quantities were used to make prestigious ornaments worn by the ruling classes. Then it found a military use as weapons that gave some groups a temporary advantage over their neighbors. It took several hundred years for iron to find its most significant application, as tools used in the production of food and manufactures by the common people. At the beginning of iron production, its destiny appeared to be as a symbolic and practical means of maintaining the dominance of a military caste. The same inference could have been drawn about the internet during the Cold War.So what is the digital revolution? It consists of rapid changes in the size, cost and especially speed of machines capable of processing information. This is now measured as millions of instructions per second or MIPS. The world’s first computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), was built soon after the Second World War; it cost millions of dollars, was 50 meters wide and 3 meters tall, and processed 5,000 instructions per second (IPS). Twenty-five years later, an Intel micro-processor chip, 12 mm square, cost $200 and processed 60,000 IPS (0.06 MIPS). Pentium 4 chips had a processing capacity of 10,000 MIPS in 2003 and the fastest chips had reached over 50,000 MIPS in 2008. The fastest computing speed in 2017 was 304,500 MPS. In 1980 copper phone wires transmitted information at the rate of a page of print a second; now hair-thin optical fibers can transmit the equivalent of well over a million encyclopedia volumes per second. The modems most commonly in use until recently took an hour to download a five-minute video; broadband technology can now perform the same operation in a few seconds.But reliance on more abstract forms of communication allows real persons to be involved with each other at a distance in very concrete ways. The phrase “virtual reality” expresses this double movement: on the one hand machines whose complexity their users can’t possibly understand, on the other live experiences “as good as” real. It is the same with money. Capitalism has become virtual in two main senses: the shift from material production (agriculture and manufacturing) to information services; and the detachment of the circulation of money from production and trade. This is an aspect of the latest stage of the machine revolution. If we would make a better world, rather than just contemplate it, one prerequisite is to learn to think creatively in terms that both reflect reality and reach out for imagined possibilities. This in turn depends on capturing what is essential about the world we live in, its movement and direction, not just its stable forms. The idea of virtual reality expresses the form of movement that interests me — extension from the actual to the possible. “Virtual” means existing in the mind, but not in fact. When combined with “reality”, it means a product of the imagination that is almost but not quite real. In technical terms, “virtual reality” is a computer simulation that enables the effects of operations to be shown in real time. The word “real” connotes something genuine, authentic and serious. In philosophy it means existing objectively in the world; in economics it is actual purchasing power; in law it is fixed, landed property; in optics it is an image formed by the convergence of light rays in space; and in mathematics, real numbers are, of course, not imaginary. “Reality” is present, in terms of both time and space (“seeing is believing”); and its opposite is imagined connection at distance, something as old as story-telling and books, but now given a new impetus by the internet. Already the experience of near synchrony at distance, the compression of time and space, is altering our conceptions of social relationships, place and movement.The internet is often represented as a self-sufficient universe with its own distinctive characteristics, as when Manuel Castells (ref) writes of the rise of “network society”. The idea that each of us lives alone (“solitude”) in a world largely of our own making seems to be more real when we go online. But both terms are imagined as well as being reciprocal; they are equally abstract and untenable as an object of inquiry. We approach them from a relative location in society where we actually live. We can’t study the social forms of the internet apart from what people bring to it from the rest of their lives. This social life of people off-line is an invisible presence when they are online. It would be wrong, however, to deny any autonomy at all to “virtual reality”. Would we dream of reducing literature to the circumstances of readers? If we want to engage with the digital revolution, it will require a radical revision of attitudes to subject-object relations. Both the rhetoric and the reality of markets encourage individuals to choose the means of their own Enlightenment. This is one powerful reason why the liberal and social poles of democracy need to be reconciled.Chapter 16Money is how we learn to be humanThe human economy projectMy main intellectual stimulation from living in Paris has come from hanging out with economic sociologists, historians and institutional economists, especially with Jean-Louis Laville, a prolific economic sociologist with strong political links on the left in Europe and Latin America. Following the first World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in 2001, a transnational network set out to publish a handbook summarising knowledge of key concepts and debates relevant to building a alternative world economy (a movement now known as “alter-globalization”). A series of compilations were published in Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian under the title, Dictionary of the Other Economy. A bumper French edition came out in 2006 with articles on global public goods, fair trade, complementary currencies, solidarity economy and many more; I reviewed it very positively. This led to a proposal that I join the editors of that volume in preparing the first English version in the series. We felt that there three reasons for changing the title: “dictionary” was too scholastic if we were aiming to reach activists; “other” and “alternative” implied a break with the actual economy and we wanted to emphasize that the material for a democratic economy already existed around us; finally, Latin political discourse sought to fix “Anglo-Saxon” market “individualism” with a more “social” approach, whereas I insisted that both sides had a place in any “human economy”. I had coined this term in 2002 when proposing a book that was never written. The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide came out in 2010. Our goal of increasing the number of contributions by English-speakers was realised; but, of the 15 countries represented there, only one was in Africa and Asia. The following year, John Sharp and I set up a “Human Economy Program” of post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Pretoria, South Africa and soon afterwards a Human Economy Series of edited and sole-authored books. An African node of the alter-globalization network added a South-South dialogue to the North (Europe) - South (Latin America) axis that launched the project.Written in the aftermath of the financial crisis, we felt more optimistic about checking, if not yet defeating neoliberalism. Ours was a handbook for building economic democracy worldwide. The idea was not just to define these individual conceptual discourses, but by juxtaposing them, since they overlap so much, to begin to identify a language made up from a set of terms that might allow us to talk about human economic emancipation. Neoliberalism was a counter-revolution against the global revolution that took place after the Second World War when the industrial societies committed themselves to expanding public services and the purchasing power of ordinary citizens, while the European empires were displaced by a series of linked anti-colonial revolutions. This was the only time in history when economic policy was devoted to working people’s welfare in the interest of reducing inequality.The human economy project places emphasis on what people do for themselves, while conceiving of the larger whole as all humanity. It is both about what people do and our species’ responsibility for life on earth. The idea of a human economy is not a dream or utopia. It exists practically and theoretically all around us, but often it has been obscured, marginalized or repressed by models of economy that dominate in the universities and the media. The difference between our position and that of the revolutionary left, who lack a concrete program for where they want to go, is that we believe we can identify a new direction for society based on what people are doing already, but with a new combination, direction and emphasis.So why do we call the economy “human”? In order to be human an economy must be four things: it must first be conceived of as being made and remade by people in their everyday lives, so that any economics derived from studying it must be of practical daily use. Second, a human economy addresses a great variety of particular situations in all their institutional complexity, so ours is essentially an institutional approach. Third, it is based on a more holistic conception of people’s needs and interests than is found in free market economics. Finally, as I have already said, it must address humanity as a whole and the world society we are making. The human economy is already everywhere, so it doesn’t have to be made from scratch. All the forms of human economy that have existed and, to some extent, will exist can already be found side by side in various combinations. We are quite used to the Marxist stages theory of history in which feudalism is replaced by capitalism which is replaced by socialism and perhaps by communism. Our approach is Hegel’s, when he examines natural forms of society linked to the family and the land alongside urban civil society (the market or capitalism) and the state. But he conceives of these three spheres not as succeeding each other, but as co-existing and being finally coordinated through the state. We too feel it is important to open up our vision of what human beings are already doing, have done and might do. Ideas like capitalism and socialism, especially when applied to whole countries or even to the world, refer only to a part of an economy, even if it may be strategically dominant. We may feel that we belong to capitalist societies, but we must not overlook all the rest. When you pay attention to actual economic diversity, you will find that economies are much more alike than ideal typical contrasts might suggest. We must be suspicious of a revolutionary tradition that conceives of progress as scrapping a caricature of what is for an imaginary negation.The object of economy was always to reproduce human life and whatever sustains it, that is the human being. Under capitalism, as we know, human life has become a secondary means of making money. Marxists believe that their idea of progress is underpinned by a scientific understanding of history as we live it. I too want to explore the social forces in our world (globalization, the internet etc) that push the possibilities for economy towards a new emphasis on producing human beings rather than producing things through human beings. The idea of a human economy brings together many social recipes in a unifying vision expressed in a common language for progress. It combines what each of us does in our daily lives with what we might become as a species. In other words, we need an economics that can operate at both levels as well as in between. My work on money conceives of it as the means of mediating between these extremes. Georg Simmel saw this potential of money to make universal society at the same time as being grounded in everyday life.New institutional forms anchored in social practice could insert democratic norms into economic life; and democracy means learning how to reconcile freedom and equality. During the last century, market society generated extreme forms of inequality in the name of individual freedom, while non-market society installed the most coercive bureaucracies known to human history in the name of equality. We must not repeat that pattern. The market is a legitimate bastion of human economy in our view. Many classical social thinkers believed that markets are a good thing – they get us out of our traditional insularity; they extend society to become more inclusive; they provide a measure of freedom for individuals and minorities. But markets without limits, as in the last four decades, threaten democracy itself. Markets must be limited by social institutions.The need to combine theoretical and practical work is the core of this human economy project. They must always be closely articulated. The World Social Forum in 2009 at Belém in Brazil brought together activists and researchers around the idea of combining democracy and science in some practical way. I hope that the human economy project’s intellectual collaboration, publishing and political activities will inform how theory and practice might be combined in many different areas. There is an important role for the state in coordinating large-scale activities, guaranteeing the social rights of citizens and as a redistributive mechanism. Grass-roots initiatives cannot do it all by themselves. State guarantees of that sort, however, must be made compatible with voluntary self-organization based on different forms of solidarity and these are the areas that we investigate most closely. Freedom and equality don’t just come from market contracts and citizenship, but also from the mutuality and egalitarianism of people living together. What else do anthropologists do if not try to see how people make things work themselves?In conclusion, this project draws on a dialogue between successful social experiments in many parts of the world and on theoretical reflections in several languages. So we were excited to find out what happens when all those speakers of Latin languages hit the English-speaking world. But don’t hold your breath. Breaking down the linguistic compartments of world society is not easy. Perhaps that is one justification for English as the world language. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?Money in the modern eraThere is nothing wrong with people exchanging goods and services as equals. Markets are indispensable to the extension of society. The problem is that they use money: some people have lots of it and most don’t have enough. Money marks social relations in capitalist societies. We think it makes a huge difference if a transaction involves payment or not. But we don’t ask why this should be so, even less where the power of money comes from. With the exception of a few whistle-blowers like John Kenneth Galbraith, the economists prefer to keep us mystified; the media and schools do little to enlighten us either. So our ignorance is sustained by vague beliefs and assailed by a mass of trivial facts which we are supposed to use for building defenses against an impersonal system that can only leave us feeling alienated. A wide variety of monetary instruments are issued today by a dispersed global network of corporations of many kinds, not just governments and banks; and the norm of economic growth is fed by our own desire to get ahead, not just by bank interest. Above all, banks are commercial enterprises subject to ratings agencies, central banks, regulations, audits and the need to maintain public trust as well as to satisfy their shareholders. At the same time, the causes of the global economic crisis lie beyond the reach of a populist vision. Thus, the huge trade and budget deficits of the US economy are financed by owning the world currency. The dollar is kept afloat not by trade balances but by its foreign creditors’ desire to retain the value of their Treasury paper. The wild fluctuations in exchange rates that followed depegging the US dollar from gold in 1971 led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and almost immediately to the invention of money futures in Chicago. In the mid-1970s most foreign exchange was used to finance international purchases of goods and services. Now the vast bulk of international transactions involve swapping money for money in another form: the daily turnover of FX is some $5 trillion. The global money circuit, fuelled by bets on the future price of notional assets (“derivatives”), now dwarfs the volume of international trade and national budgets. The biggest economic depression since the 1930s occurred in 2007-8 when the US housing market, inflated by heavily leveraged credit (“sub-prime” mortgage bonds) crashed. Anticipation of liquidation crises was deflected by assurances that we were entering a new stage of rationalized markets where risk was managed efficiently. Far from being chastened by their failures in 2008, the finance industry was recompensed by governments for its losses and the costs were passed onto ordinary taxpayers as “austerity”. It would take a massive program of public education before most people could replace dependence on an impersonal economic system with a more active personal relationship to money. Not demonizing money would be a start. Makers and takers of moneyOswald Spengler claimed that the power of number and money to separate and depersonalize was fundamental to our understanding of the history of civilization. For the ancient Greeks, number was magnitude, the essence of all things perceptible to the senses. So mathematics for them was concerned with measurement in the here and now. All this changed with René Descartes whose new number-idea was function -- a world of relations between points in abstract space. Now a passionate Faustian tendency towards the infinite took hold, married to abstract mathematical forms that freed themselves from concrete reality the better to control it. In economic life, a parallel shift took place from thinking in terms of goods to thinking in terms of money. When a businessman signs a piece of paper to mobilize remote forces, this gesture stands in an abstract relationship to the power of labor and machinery, only taking the form of money numbers in a retrospective accountancy process. Thinking in money generates money. It turns the world into subjects and objects-- a few executives and those who follow their orders. You might join the money force, but most are shaped by it.There is a crucial difference between how the “masters of the universe” approach money and the habits of people who have very little of it. The latter still count it carefully as a measure, while the former understand that its potential is less tangible. We might distinguish, therefore, between those who participate actively in what Spengler called “the money force” and their victims who don’t. Let us label them the “makers” and “takers” of money. This heuristic distinction is modified in two ways to be considered in this chapter. First, money-makers do not operate in a world of their own making -- they both make the market and have to take it. Second, betting on a large- and small-scale blurs the contrast. For people who are not rich, making bets replaces the role of passive bystander or victim with active participation in the money force.The money-makers, at least since Frank Knight in the early 1920s, have been able to distinguish between future threats that are calculable (“risk”) and those that are not (“uncertainty”). Whereas to you and me a barn burning down is an unpredictable disaster, insurance companies can assess the probability of such an event and share the risk of one between those willing to pay a premium. This elementary principle was forgotten in the recent credit boom, when the insurance giant AIG undertook liabilities that its assets could not cover in a crash. We were told that capitalism had entered a new stage where rational calculation of financial outcomes was rapidly making a unified world market. “Quants”, often with physics degrees, created formulas to take advantage of minor discrepancies in markets (arbitrage). The rating agencies believed that the risk of future losses could be factored into share prices in advance. Corporate executives, however, know that all futures are uncertain. They float a number of projects and hope that one scores big. But a pressing need for investment capital made them cook their books in the credit boom to conform with the agencies’ expectations. The latter, by refusing to drop their ratings in the face of big losses, could and did delay the impact of market trends. The investment banks came to think of themselves as invincible and Western capitalism took an unsustainable form. Well-established truths, like what goes up always comes down in real estate markets, were forgotten in the rush for fat salaries and bonuses. Belief in the efficiency of the “free market”, propagated by an army of economists, journalists and politicians, took hold, especially in the money-maker class. Gillian Tett tells how she was denounced as unpatriotic by leading figures in the City of London and her employers at the Financial Times for publishing doubts about the soundness of the market for credit derivatives.Money revealed by its crisesOne of the privileges of living in Paris for two decades has been to witness a renaissance in economic sociology there. Nowhere has this been more developed than in the field of money. Ever since the Maastricht treaty launched the project of European monetary union in 1992, an interdisciplinary group of scholars – institutional economists, historians, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists – has held regular seminars on money. Numerous outstanding publications have emerged from these, notably Michel Aglietta and André Orléan’s La monnaie souveraine and Bruno Théret’s magisterial two volumes, La monnaie dévoilée par ses crises, which gave this section its title.Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a homespun philosopher and successful financial trader; his book The Black Swan argues that unexpected events of large consequence play the dominant part in the history of markets. High-impact, hard-to-predict events are more significant than routine fluctuations. The probability of such rare events is not computable using scientific methods; but we can hedge against them. Psychological biases make most people blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of rare events in history.Elie Ayache, a French trader in New York, in challenging Taleb, writes that there is no point in seeking to calculate trends in market prices or even to hedge against rare events. The swan is neither black nor white, but a blank sheet on which the proactive trader writes his derivative. Ayache wants to reinstate contingency over probability, a position with which I have some sympathy. Having lost my grandfather, mother and sister to statistically remote probabilities in NHS hospitals, I need no reminding about the power of contingency. I was once offered a prostate operation and declined on the grounds that I could end up dead. On being told that the chance was small, I replied yes, but I would be dead.In a short article, “I am a creator” (the reference is to the Coen brothers’ movie, Barton Fink), Ayache brings a dialectical approach to the Black-Scholes-Merton model that most traders use when pricing options. What matters, he says, is to make the market while being in it, to be a “dynamic trader”. Such a person “can both be an original author and yet be-in-the-market…Market-makers are thinkers and creators … Because they make markets, they need to produce prices as outputs of pricing models. However, because the market is the outside that they should always be reaching for, they also need prices to be the inputs of their models…A market-maker makes a price only in so far as the market makes it.” William Poundstone’s Fortune's Formula covers the last half of the twentieth century, taking in Claude Shannon who invented information theory at Bell Labs and gambled in stocks, the Chicago mob’s racing scams, Paul Samuelson of text book fame, Rudy Guiliani’s crusade against insider trading, Milliken’s junk bonds scheme and, of course, Black-Scholes-Merton whose firm, Long-Term Capital Management, crashed in the 1997-8 crisis. Three stories have long been current in money-making circles: the economists’ belief that you can’t beat the markets; another that you can with inside knowledge (which is illegal); and a third that scientific methods guarantee steady profits from betting on asset prices. Poundstone shows that the rich rely heavily on personal knowledge and contacts, even if the relevant academic disciplines represent society as being governed by impersonal forces. Middle-class parents shield their children from direct experience of money; but poor parents can’t afford to insulate their children from it. Paul Samuelson used to introduce his best-selling textbook Economics with the observation that 10 million New Yorkers go to sleep every night confident that the economy will still be there next morning; but how do they know? Galbraith tells a story about a member of Kennedy’s administration being paid off with a directorship of a bank. After his first meeting, he was seen walking down Wall Street in a daze and muttering “I never knew. I never knew.” What had he not known before? Galbraith surmises that he learned the first principle of modern banking: take money from one party and lend it to another, then persuade both that they still have it. Paul Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an allegory of the Populist uprising of the impoverished American South and West against East Coast capital. Perhaps money truly is a phantom conjured up by unscrupulous wizards. If so, most of us would rather not know. We prefer to believe that we are standing on solid ground, that the money we live by is real and will not go away. Failing that, we pay experts to look after the problem and are reassured by their technical jargon. In either case, understanding is unnecessary. Inflation is upsetting because, when the value of money refuses to stand still, what else is there to rely on? Fear of the unknown begets a crippling search for certainty in monetary affairs.Most people cling to their own ill-formed views of the money system. They refuse to consider viable alternatives to working for wages and pensions, such as scientific betting or do-it-yourself trading circuits. Successful capitalists draw on large reserves and make small bets often; but most punters try to win a lot with a little occasionally and lose -- hence the dogma that the bookie or casino always wins. Such beliefs make our daily economic constraints more tolerable.Betting, religion and the human economyTo understand the social force of religion, we have to enter the minds of believers. Searching for the source of money’s power is like asking how God gets us to believe in Him. Of course we made him up, just as we make money up. Since all we can ever know is the past, why would anyone accept a guarantee of an unknowable future? But we do, because we have to -- and faith is the glue sticking past and future together in the present. Georg Simmel made a good case for why money can make this spurious claim. Since all the ephemeral transactions we wish to calculate are made in terms of money, it seems to be more stable than the rest, even though we know it isn’t really. The river bank seems to be solid, but it consists of slower-moving deposits thrown up by the fast-moving water. If we are drowning, we settle for its presumptive stability. There are psychologically complex reasons why most people are reluctant to embrace new approaches to money. Conventional money flatters our sense of self-determination: with some money we can exert power over the world at will, moving from infinite potential to finite determination, back and forth. Yet there is some comfort in the notion that money is not in our control at all. The fact that it embodies an exogenous force of necessity, in a manner analogous to number, sustains clarity of judgment and action, when otherwise the world would be frighteningly wide open. Similarly, if people took control of their own finances, they would not only be freer, but would have greater responsibilities also. There is a parallel with slavery. People feel that national monopoly currency must be inevitable, since no-one would freely choose it. Alternatives make nonsense of a lifetime’s enslavement to an unrewarding system. So we cling to what we know as the only possibility. We often talk about wanting to be free, but we choose the illusion of freedom without its real responsibility. This is why we prefer money not to be of our own making. We spend it, but we never have enough of it because “they” keep it scarce. This is the underlying reason why eminently sensible schemes for do-it-yourself money get such a poor reception. A superb design for exchange circuits employing community currencies is not enough. People have to be sold the idea; and this involves engaging with their deepest beliefs.Rationality works best backwards, as rationalization. The future is unknowable and modern societies train their members to expect to nail down future time. Precise calculation of future financial outcomes is a chimera, the main cause of the last big crash. We can apply reason to explaining recurrent past events and this is scientific method. Extrapolation from the past to the future fails, except under unchanging conditions that do not apply to the market economy. Knowledge and experience may help us to manage uncertain futures. Betting is one way to acquire such experience.Looking back at my childish experiments in scientific betting, it seems barely credible that I survived, even less that I prospered a little. What saved me from the martingale was my empiricism. I knew a lot about the horses. I would probably have made more money without my system, but we all need something to lean on. I never bet on fields that I don’t know very well. More important, those early forays into betting gave me a different attitude to money. I did not accept that I was inevitably a victim of the market economy and that attitude shaped my excursions into economic anthropology. I learn by doing. Betting can surely teach us about money; and this leads me to reflect on money as a form of religious life.Religion belongs to a set of terms that also includes art and science. Science, which originally was opposed to religious mysticism, is now more often contrasted with the arts. If science is, crudely put, the drive to know the world objectively and art is a means of subjective self-expression, religion addresses both sides of the subject-object relationship by connecting what is inside each of us to something outside. Religion binds us to an external force while empowering us to act; it stabilizes our meaningful interactions with the world, providing an anchor for our volatility.What we know well is everyday life, the mundane features of our routines, and we know them as individuals trapped in a sort of private busy-ness. But this life is subject to larger forces whose origin we do not know. We desperately wish to influence these unknown causes of our fate which are both individual and collective in their impact. At the very least we would like to feel they were less uncertain and to establish a connection with them. Religion is the organized attempt to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown in our lives, between a profane world of ordinary experience and a sacred, extraordinary world located outside that experience. What is ultimately unknown to us is our collective being in society. Through ritual we worship our unrealized powers of shared existence, society, and call it God. The chaos of everyday life attains some stability in that it is informed by beliefs representing the social facts of a shared collective existence. Ritual instills these collective representations in each of us. Roy Rappaport held that the project of becoming collectively human is barely begun. He did not believe that religion must rest on a sharp division between the sacred and the profane; nor do I. Religion is how we get in touch with the wholeness of things (“holiness”). Whatever unity human society has must be premised on our common occupation of the planet. I now recognize money’s redemptive qualities and link them to the idea of a “human economy”. We must join people where they live and discover what they do, think and want. From there we need to build bridges to humanity’s common predicament. Human society must be extended through the economy to include the world as a whole. Betting, seen from this perspective, is a ritualized form of engagement with society through money. It is also a way of dropping out of society. The difference between a gambler and Ayache’s dynamic trader is one of degree, not kind. Betting inserts someone into money and markets as an agent who takes and makes them at the same time. There is some satisfaction in that, regardless of profit and loss. Most card games, whether played for money or not, offer a similar experience which, with repetition, may have applications well beyond the card table. We make history, but not under circumstances of our own choosing. I am a creator. So are we all creators. Money in the search for a human economyAt Christmas 2010, I published a short piece in The Big Issue, a newspaper produced by the homeless in Britain and sold outside supermarkets. I was invited to contribute to “King for a Day”. (If you were king and could make one law, what would it be?):If I were king, I would make money a compulsory subject in schools. There is nothing wrong with the mission of economics, just with the economists. We would all like our questions about economic life answered in a reliable and reasonable way. But we can’t find any reflection of our own lives in the impersonal models and quantities published by the economists and financial media. We urgently need to devise ways of thinking and talking about the economy that make human sense.The market is democratically open to everyone: all you need is the money and most of us don’t have enough. It is an impersonal sphere kept separate from home -- a protected zone where intimate relations hold sway. Some adults go out to work, to ‘make’ the money on which the household subsists. The home economy spends this money and performs tasks without payment. This is the moral and practical foundation of capitalist society. Middle-class children belong to life outside the market. Their exposure to money is carefully controlled. We buy things for them and call them gifts. If they get their hands on some money, it is not usually related to work. As teenagers, their engagement with money widens through taking on part-time jobs, but earnings do not contribute to the common budget. Growing up consists in postponing our relationship to money; and children’s financial dependence is extended indefinitely. The education our children get in school perpetuates their separation from the world of money. This must end along with the divided economy that supports it.To be human is to be someone who has pressing personal circumstances and concerns, but who also depends on and must make sense of impersonal social conditions. Money’s social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between the extremes of human existence. It is not enough to emphasize the controls that people already impose on money in their personal practice. That is the everyday world as most of us know it. We also need ways of reaching the parts of the economy that we don’t know.If money separates economic spheres and fragments human experience, it can also join together what it has divided. It helps that money is central to both home and work. Markets are not just about universal abstraction, but also this mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete. If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it; but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment lends concrete finality to your choice. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination.Money is intimately linked to democracy as a political principle because its impersonality dissolves differences between people. So we vote with our money whenever we buy something. But this system of voting is vastly unequal. Money may be conceived of as a durable ground to stand on, anchoring identity in a collective memory that it symbolizes; or as a more creative process where we each generate the personal credit linking us to society. When most people understand money as what each of us makes of it, perhaps we will dethrone the archaic God of capitalism that it has become. Money’s essence lies in movement between the extremes that constitute its character. To be human involves participating in the widest circles of humanity, in world society. Money opens up local societies to interdependence with foreigners, but the pressure to reassert local control persists. A human economy must seek to build bridges between different levels of association. This is a process of extension from the local towards the global; hence markets and money are intrinsic to a human economy. Money’s social dimension does not lie in the separation of local and global spheres, but in movement between them. Money – some forms more than others -- reflects our human potential to make universal society while anchoring us in the everyday. All markets are world markets, but not all money is world money.We tend to think of money as one thing, the stuff we are used to because there is a local monopoly. But this situation is historically anomalous, being a central symbol of national capitalism only since the mid-nineteenth century. Money has taken very many forms and it has been usual until recently for several to circulate in a territory at one time. Since the US dollar went off gold in 1971, a world of multiple currencies has returned. This is an opportunity for all of us to join monetary experiments at all levels from the local to the global. Perhaps these will teach us how to make plural societies.Money is a great equalizer, but it also fuels inequality. Money as memory links individuals and their communities; past, present and future; fact and fiction; local and global. We cannot perch on one pole only; rather we must learn to think dialectically through both sides and combine them socially. Exchange of meanings through language and exchange of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communications, the internet. The digital revolution could promote the human conversation about a better world. Money is how we might learn to be truly human.A human economy would mediate two pairs – state and market, home and world – that framed the last century’s dominant social form, “national capitalism”. Our economic crisis today is the collapse of that system. Rather than oppose the poles of either pair to each other, we must try to synthesize them through focusing pragmatically on what people do and want. Three things count in our societies — people, machines and money. But money buys the machines that control the people. Our political task – it was Marx’s too – is to reverse that order; not to help people escape from machines and money, but to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money. Revolutions are based on digital contrasts, but human societies are built on analogue processes. This is not just an academic debating point. A lot hinges on how humanity responds to the contradictions of the turbulence ahead.Chapter 17 Anthropology: back to the future3 sections, 8.2K wordsIn man, as the only rational creature on earth, those natural faculties which aim at the use of reason shall be fully developed in the species, not in the individual (Immanuel Kant).The distinctive feature of our age is that mankind as a whole is on the way to becoming fully conscious of itself (C.L.R. James).Humanity is that part of the world through which the world as a whole can think about itself (Roy Rappaport).Thinking for the world as a species does not require us all to become one big undifferentiated brain. It depends on improving the objective means of finding, storing, retrieving, collating and sharing knowledge. Kant probably had libraries and newspapers in mind, James global political movements and radio, Rappaport advances in ecological science and television. All three saw their moment in history as a great leap forward in human connection and consciousness. We are the generation for whom the internet went public three decades ago. The convergence of computers, telephones and television in the digital revolution now takes the form of smartphones in our pockets and handbags, at once personal and mobile. Humanity now has universal means of communication adequate to expressing universal ideas – and a lot of particular information too. We think we are alone in the universe because we have only just begun to explore our capacities as a species. We have as little chance of communicating with intelligent extra-terrestrials as the ants do with us – and their collective organization is more reliable!By “anthropology” I refer not to the academic institution but to a human teleology in James’s sense. We must improve our self-knowledge as individuals and as a species, especially the relationship between the two. This relationship is mediated by a bewildering variety of associations and identities which have been the prime focus of anthropology conceived of as a social science. What interests me, and I believe the vast bulk of humanity, is how each of us relates to the whole and only secondarily how social divisions mediate that relationship. This anthropology has its origin in the Enlightenment’s attempt to build democracy on a foundation of systematic knowledge of human nature, of what all human beings have in common, against the arbitrary inequalities under which most people labored. Its apogee was Immanuel Kant’s late work during the 1780s and 90s, when he published the first book on “anthropology”. The states that had partitioned the world between themselves were bent on war; yet he asked how humanity might construct a “perpetual peace” beyond their boundaries, based on principles that we all share. This “cosmopolitan” society of world citizens was a bridge to the exercise of human reason at the species level. Kant held that humanity’s hardest task was the administration of justice worldwide. In the meantime, anthropology must explore the cognitive, aesthetic and ethical universals on which such an idea of human unity might be founded. The categorical imperative to be good (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) provided a moral link between individuals and this emergent inclusive order.The origins of British social anthropologyThe conventional wisdom is that modern British social anthropology was born without significant antecedents in 1922, when the publication of monographs by Bronislaw Malinowski on the Trobriand Islanders (Malinowski 1922) and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown on the Andaman Islanders (Radcliffe-Brown 1922) launched a “functionalist revolution”. I recall being inserted as a 1960s Cambridge student into what I took to be “a cross between a cult and a lineage” (Hart 2003). The lineage of British social anthropologists has been based ever since on a bogus double descent myth, tracing its foundation to these two ancestors, who might as well have sprung from ground, for all that their epigones know or care. William Halse Rivers Rivers joined the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits (CAETS) of 1898 as an experimental psychologist and he has been celebrated recently as a military psychiatrist in the First World War through Pat Barker’s “Regeneration” trilogy of novels (Barker ). But he did more than anyone to set British social anthropology on its modern course. Inevitably, the question of the CAETS’ historical significance becomes conflated with the need to assess Rivers’ relationship to the functionalist revolution that Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and their followers claimed to have initiated, more or less out of nothing.Rivers deserves to be seen as the iconic founder of modern social anthropology in Britain along with his counterparts in America and France, Franz Boas and Marcel Mauss, neither of whom was subject to a posthumous coup to replace him. I have no wish to denigrate Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown as they did Rivers. I exhausted that line of polemic in the pamphlet I wrote with Anna Grimshaw (Grimshaw and Hart 1993). It is obvious enough to me, as it is to everyone, that Malinowski was a writer and fieldworker of genius, the dominant figure in British social anthropology between the wars; and that Radcliffe-Brown, especially after Malinowski left England shortly before the Second World War, was responsible, with the help of his close colleagues Edward Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes, for the structural-functionalist paradigm that gave British social anthropology such a coherent, if rather narrow profile in mid-century.The only reason for taking up the cudgels on Rivers’ behalf is that his contribution has been all but eliminated from the collective memory of the discipline. To some extent this is because, by a cruel irony, he died unexpectedly in the same year, 1922, that the functionalist revolution is thought to have taken off with the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, but also of The Andaman Islanders. In order to grasp what the functionalist revolution in modern anthropology was about, it is necessary to focus on the word function which refers principally to what people do. Exotic peoples had been studied before as evidence for what western societies may have been like before we began writing our own history. They were primitive in that sense. Their customs were taken out of context and arranged in taxonomic sequences illustrating various grand narratives of human progress culminating in the achievements of the white race. The favourite themes were religion, marriage and technology.Malinowski published his functionalist manifesto in a series of short articles that came out between 1922 and 1926: the introduction to Argonauts, two papers in Nature and an encyclopaedia article. It boiled down to this. Culture is something people everywhere generate as a vehicle through which they carry out their everyday lives. It has to work for them on a daily basis and this includes the requirement that the different parts add up to something reasonably coherent. It does not matter where the bits of culture come from; what matters is the integrity of the pattern expressed in the here and now. Malinowski persisted in calling his Pacific islanders “primitive”; but his message was that their way of life had a coherence that could offer some positive lessons to the West. British social anthropology’s two sides and the nation-stateRadcliffe-Brown (no-one called him Arthur) must have held the record for geographical coverage of the world’s universities in his lifetime. From being Rivers’ student in Cambridge, he spent more than two decades outside England, mainly in Australia, South Africa and the United States. Then, no sooner was he established in an Oxford chair and undisputed leader of British social anthropology in the 1940s, than retirement forced him to set off on his travels again -- to Brazil, Egypt, Manchester, South Africa and finally to an isolated death in London. Radcliffe-Brown aligned British social anthropology firmly with Durkheimian sociology as the synchronic comparative study of primitive societies (not cultures). His functionalism stressed the concrete activities of living people observed in the field, but the purpose of these activities was their contribution to social order, conceived of as an integrated rule system or social structure. This gave rise to the hyphenated expression, structural-functionalism. He made kinship its core and, in elaborating what Malinowski sarcastically called “kinship algebra”, he gave the neophyte profession a special expertise with which to mystify students and outsiders.Radcliffe-Brown focused his effort on conceptual refinement and systematic taxonomy. If this comparative approach was reminiscent of Tylor’s evolutionism, he called his own method “a natural science of society” in which “primitive” peoples were not steps in a ladder of progress, but through their greater simplicity they clarified the abstract principles underlying social order everywhere. He was aided in this task by his junior colleagues, Evans-Pritchard and Fortes who, by virtue of controlling the Oxbridge chairs during the academic boom of the 1950s to 70s, ensured that the British school remained identifiably structural-functionalist long after conditions in the wider world (notably the post-war anti-colonial revolution) had undermined its basic assumptions.If ideology derives life from ideas, the British school sought to derive ideas from life, inventing a distinctive style of writing where concrete descriptions of live activities were used to support generalizations whose debt to the western literary canon was never made explicit. In Malinowski’s hands this could be a romantic literary exercise, linking individual actors and concrete events to a self-conscious narrative. Radcliffe-Brown aimed for professional consolidation, the promulgation of a scientific ethos, objectification of structure and abstract conceptualization. The functionalist ethnographers knew that they had to mediate between their isolation as fieldworkers in exotic places and their pressing need to reproduce themselves as a guild in an academic setting. They were pulled outwards towards joining the peoples of the world and back inside academic bureaucracy at home. Even so, this half-hearted rejection of the ivory tower while desperately seeking a regular place in it was unique when compared with their peers who remained locked up in their libraries, laboratories and seminar rooms. The CAETS began that breech with academic introversion by launching twentieth century anthropology’s most distinctive feature, making up stories about humanity based on living with real people. Modern ethnographers are a synthesis of fieldworker and theorist, two roles that the Victorians kept separate. The aspiration to combine life and ideas in one intellectual personality goes against the whole trend of modern academia to separate the two. The monographs of British social anthropologists will not be remembered for their ideas. Their vivid analytical descriptions of life on the periphery of western civilization more than make up for obscurantism concerning theory and method.British social anthropology reproduced the dominant worldview that had all of humanity pigeonholed as separate tribes, each the owner (or would-be owner) of a nation-state. The idea of a nation represents an escape from modern history, from the realities of urban industrial life, into the timeless rural past of the Volk, the people conceived of as a homogeneous peasantry, living near to nature, unspoiled by social division, the very archetype of a community united by kinship. Before nationalism, western intellectuals compared their societies with the city states of the ancient world. Now they fabricated myths of their own illiterate ethnic origins in primeval forests (Thom 1995).The Malinowskians had more than an echo of that, which is unsurprising given the Polish adventurer’s personal connection to Central European nationalism.The other half, Hegel’s (1821) vision of the state as both antidote to and vehicle for capitalism, conceives of society as a discrete, bounded territorial unit, governed from the centre according to impersonal rules administered by scientific experts, employer of a university-trained professional class -- itself the very embodiment of social order. This aspect of modern society underpinned Radcliffe-Brown’s influence as the arch structural-functionalist. British social anthropology flourished in an interwar period dominated by corporate states; and this, rather than romantic nationalism or apology for empire, allowed it to adapt to the expansion of universities in the twentieth century.Today’s practitioners of anthropology are not free of this contradiction for all their adoption of post-colonial ideologies. The unravelling of functionalist ethnography, however, which is also the unravelling of the nation-state as human society’s universal form takes our story beyond its limits. My focus is rather on the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries and on W. H. R. Rivers’ place in it.Rivers’ role in British social anthropology’s formationWhat were the distinctive features of British social anthropology in its mid-twentieth century heyday? Here is a provisional shortlist of features for an ideal type.1. Ethnography: the habit of writing about one people circumscribed in time and space.2. Fieldwork: observation and analysis of activities where they take place live.3. Ideas from life: abstract generalisations taken from concrete descriptions.4. Kinship: especially the use of genealogies for formal modelling (“kinship algebra”). 5. Social structure: society (not culture or psychology) as a coherent system of rules.6. Comparative method: sometimes based on regional surveys.7. Professional jargon: close specification of concepts, as opposed to popular usage.8. Functional integrity: the whole expressed as institutional patterns in the here and now.9. Culture contact: social change addressed as practical anthropology.10. Science of society: social anthropology as the sociology of primitive societies.What did Rivers contribute to the development of this intellectual project?1. Ethnography. His The Todas (1906) was then considered to be a pioneering example of the new ethnography. Rivers was unusually transparent in listing his sources and this has been used to discredit his seriousness as an ethnographer (e.g. by Stocking 1995). Functionalists tend to be more discreet or actually misleading. Malinowski’s monographs, however, are written at a wholly superior level, making Rivers look like a plodding amateur.2. Fieldwork. This was the great message of the CAETS and Rivers later argued for long-term immersion on the part of a single fieldworker. He wrote up this approach at length in the official Royal Anthropological Institute handbook, Notes and Queries, for 1912. Even so, the shortcuts he took for granted reveal him as a transitional figure in the development of fieldwork practice.3. Ideas from life. In his CAETS work and after, Rivers developed the genealogical method, sometimes called “the concrete method”. This consisted of mapping kinship relations within a community on a network diagram compiled from the perspective of multiple informants. The publication of this cubist solution to mediating the abstract and the concrete in modern society coincided with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 (Berger 1993, Grimshaw 2001). Rivers was always more open and precise on methodological issues than his functionalist successors.4. Kinship. Meyer Fortes reconstituted the British school’s focus on kinship as a direct line from L.H. Morgan through Rivers and Radcliffe-Brown to himself (Fortes 1969, Langham 1981). This lineage is disputed, partly because Radcliffe-Brown downplayed his debt to his teacher. He took Rivers’ dynamic genealogical method and turned it into the static kinship algebra for which British social anthropology became (in)famous.5. Social structure. Rivers habitually separated the study of social structure from psychology and published his lectures on the subject. He was not however much influenced in this enterprise by Durkheim’s sociology, unlike both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown.6. Comparative method. Rivers was interested in regional variations, but as a connected historical process, unlike both the evolutionists and the functionalists, who preferred to construct abstract taxonomies.7. Professional jargon. This was Radcliffe-Brown’s speciality, somewhat to Malinowski’s disgust. Rivers put his energies into method and theoretical analysis.8. Functional integrity. Rivers saw this -- how otherwise could he have developed a notion of social structure? But he chose to emphasize the wider historical context.9. Culture contact. This was, of course, of primary concern to Rivers and Alfred Haddon (the two leaders of the CAETS) and to the British school between the wars. They too gave the problem a functional twist when making synchronic histories (an oxymoron, one of several). This unrecognized legacy of Haddon and Rivers was submerged later in the functionalists’ denigration of “conjectural history”.10. Science of society. Radcliffe-Brown mastered the rhetoric of science, but Rivers pioneered its practice. British social anthropology occupied a no-man’s-land between science and literature, but Rivers believed he was building an impersonal scientific community, more than one in fact. Then the First World War took him in a more engaged direction.I do not wish to settle rival intellectual property claims for the invention of social anthropology, but to place individuals in a local conversation about humanity. Rivers’ contribution in the British context is far more than “the history of an error”. He made both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown possible and they in turn gave a decisive impetus to a discipline that was well-adapted to mid-century Britain and the world at large.But there is more to Rivers than a proto-functionalist ethnographer who failed to make the grade. He never abandoned his commitment to psychology and in this dialectic of emergent academic specialisms we find unfinished intellectual agendas that could inform our own efforts to reinvent the discipline as a window on the world today. British social anthropology as a self-contained, coherent enterprise is long gone, leaving only a ghost occasionally animated by the latest ideas from the United States and France.Rivers between anthropology and psychologyWilliam Rivers started out as a physiologist and had already established the first two experimental psychology laboratories in England before joining the CAETS to which he contributed studies of perception and the genealogical method. As a result of his neurological experiments with Henry Head, he developed a two-stage model of nerve regeneration, the protopathic and the epicritic (Note 4). He elaborated the sociological study of kinship and social structure; took his ethnological enquiries in the direction of German historicism and into the wilder regions of global speculation; became a psychoanalyst who followed Freud with reservations; and served as an army psychiatrist in the war, finding in the treatment of shell-shock victims a new version of social psychology. He ended his life as a socialist politician and friend of progressive literary men. In the last few years before his death, he had what amounts to a personality transplant whose origins are depicted by Pat Barker in Regeneration. Once a conservative member of the academic establishment, a recluse with a stammer, he became the very model of an outgoing public intellectual.There is much more to be told of this fascinating story (See Slobodin 1978). Rivers’ first preoccupation was to build up several academic specialisms of which he was a practitioner. These were principally psychology and anthropology (in which he included ethnology and sociology). Indeed, as a modernist, he compartmentalized knowledge, serving as president of the national bodies supervising professional practice in anthropology and psychology in Britain. He brought to his disparate inquiries a common methodological outlook that never sacrificed the active investigating subject to the positivism then taking root in the universities. He sought to separate the study of society from that of individuals, for sure, much as chemistry was hived off from physics. He only discovered late in life and in a general social crisis that he combined these branches within himself.In the last five years of his life, Rivers produced some forty pieces of work, of varying quality and length, while maintaining a punishing regime of professional and public engagement. I surmise that he wrote these pieces off the top of his head, relying on whatever was stored there from decades of specialized practice. His method became more autobiographical and self-reflexive, although he and Head believed that only scientists were adequate informants for neurological research on themselves. The boundaries between disciplines became blurred in his drive to comprehend, synthesize and influence individuals’ experience of society. In his posthumous book, Conflict and dream (1923), Rivers recalls one of his own dreams whose theme he calls “Hidden Sources”. His first explanation was that the dream was about his own frustration, because of overwork as an army psychiatrist, over not being able to reply to American critics of his kinship theories. Practically and in a deeper sense too, a conflict existed between psychology and ethnology. But, pushing the analysis further, Rivers concludes that the dream reveals the harmony between psychoanalysis and ethnology, for they are based on the same method -- the excavation of hidden sources that help us to understand the complex history of human personality and culture.Armed with this integrated vision of self and society, Rivers came out of the war ready to change the world, not just to understand it. In this he differed markedly from Radcliffe-Brown (who spent much of the war teaching in a Sydney suburb) and Malinowski (who, as we know, sat it out on a Pacific island). It was they, however, who forged an academic discipline attuned to the needs of the corporate state in mid-twentieth century Britain, not Rivers. What he might have done with interwar Rockefeller funding is anyone’s guess. Certainly the 1920s were conducive to explorations of relations between the new ethnography and psychoanalysis. Malinowski was actively engaged with Freudian ideas at this time, until the exchange went badly from his point of view. There was support for it from Charles Seligman too. But the trend, both in anthropology and psychology, was towards divorce, not marriage. The name of the game, even more than before, was division of the professional pie.It is more likely, had he lived, that Rivers would have become an academic outsider (like his friend, Charles Myers – another CAETS psychologist -- who left the academy to found the Institute of Industrial Psychology without government support) rather than continue as the central figure of two disciplines or found a new academic synthesis. Although Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were more attuned to conservative times, each of them failed to solve the problem of social reproduction too. Malinowski fell out with all his leading male students before fleeing the country for the United States; while Radcliffe-Brown died alone after a life of restless nomadism. Rivers’ death did allow them to reinvent themselves as the only begetters of British social anthropology. This foundation myth is bad history. I must also mention in passing that Rivers’ influence on modern psychology has sunk without trace. This is a pity for practitioners of both disciplines. He published three books of psychology after the war, two of them posthumously: Instinct and the Unconscious (1920), Conflict and Dream (1923) and Psychology and Politics and Other Essays (1923). Taken together, they accord surprisingly well with twenty-first century sensibilities. Rivers was a Freudian who had no truck with memories of childhood sexuality (he survived a traumatic encounter of this type when five years old). Interpretation of dreams for him always started with their immediate stimulus in daily life, not with their deeper symbolism. In an age of globalization, his emphasis on movement and attempt to situate the unequal encounters of different societies in real history has genuine resonance for us. A Rivers revival may or may not be on the cards. Perhaps it would take the dislocation of a major war for that. Kant’s cosmopolitan projectImmanuel Kant published his first book at the age of 57, The Critique of Pure Reason. He thought that society is an expression of individual subjectivity, not a collective force out there. Copernicus solved the problem of the movement of the heavenly bodies by having the spectator revolve while they were at rest, instead of them revolve around the spectator. Kant extended this achievement for physics into metaphysics. In his Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason he writes: Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects.... but what if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge?In order to understand the world, we must begin not with the empirical existence of things, but with the reasoning embedded in our experience and in all the judgments we have made. The world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. Our task is to unite the two poles as subjective individuals who share the object world with the rest of humanity. Knowledge of society must be personal and moral before it is defined by laws imposed on us from above. His tombstone reads:Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.Kant published Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view in 1798. The book was based on lectures he had given at the university since 1772. His aim was to attract the general public to an independent discipline. Remarkably, histories of anthropology rarely mention this work. But we should take his Anthropology seriously. Shortly before, Kant wrote Perpetual Peace: a philosophical sketch (1795). The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw its own share of “globalization” — the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, the rise of British industry and the international movement to abolish slavery. Kant responded to this sense of the world coming closer together by proposing how humanity might form society as world citizens beyond the boundaries of states. He held that “cosmopolitan right”, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, on the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. We should be free to go wherever we like in the world, since it belongs to all of us equally. This confident sense of an emergent world order can now be seen as the high point of the liberal revolution, before it was overwhelmed by its twin offspring, industrial capitalism and the nation-state.Earlier Kant wrote an essay, “Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose” (1784):In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural faculties which aim at the use of reason shall be fully developed in the species, not in the individual.The means that nature employs to accomplish the development of all faculties is the antagonism of men in society, since this antagonism becomes, in the end, the cause of a lawful order of this society.The ultimate problem for mankind, the solution of which nature forces us to seek, is the achievement of a civil society which is capable of administering law universally.This problem is both the most difficult and the last to be solved by mankind.A philosophical attempt to write a universal world history according to a plan of nature which aims at perfect civic association of mankind must be considered to be possible and even as capable of furthering nature’s purpose. Our world is much more socially integrated than two centuries ago and its economy is palpably unjust. Histories of the universe we inhabit do seem indispensable to the construction of institutions capable of administering justice worldwide. The task of building a global civil society for the twenty-first century is urgent and anthropological visions should play their part in that.Immanuel Kant was the spectator who never moved while the heavens turned. He died in the year of Haiti’s independence. This was the context for the Anthropology’s publication. He summarized “philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense of the word” elsewhere as four questions:What can I know?What should I do? What may I hope for?What is a human being?The first question is answered in metaphysics, the second in morals, the third in religion and the fourth in anthropology. But the first three questions “relate to anthropology”, he wrote, and might be subsumed under it. Kant conceived of anthropology as an empirical discipline, but also as a means of moral and cultural improvement. It was thus an investigation into human nature and into how to modify it, providing students with practical guidance and knowledge of the world. His lectures were to be “popular” and of value in later life. Above all, the Anthropology would contribute to uniting world citizens by identifying the source of their “cosmopolitan bonds”. The book moves between vivid anecdotes and Kant’s sublime vision as a bridge from the everyday we know to horizon thinking. Anthropology’s two divisions were physiological and pragmatic; he preferred to concentrate on the latter – “what the human being as a free actor can and should make of himself”. This combined observation with the construction of moral rules. The book’s first part on empirical psychology is divided into sections on cognition, aesthetics and ethics. The second addresses the character of human beings seen from inside and outside. Anthropology is the practical arm of moral philosophy. The metaphysics of morals which are categorical and transcendent; but anthropology’s province is interaction between human agents. It is “pragmatic” in several senses: “everything that pertains to the practical”, popular (not academic) and moral, being concerned with people’s motives for action. Kant knew that anthropological science had a way to go methodologically. It is hard to distinguish between self-conscious action and habit when observing people. So he recommends “world history, biographies and even plays and novels”. They are inventions, but are often based on close observation of real behavior. The main value of his book lay in its systematic organization, so that readers could insert their experience into it and develop new themes based on their own lives. Historians and philosophers are divided between those who find the book marginal to Kant’s thought and others for whom it is muddled and banal. Daniel Miller is a rare anthropologist who mentions Kant, but reluctantly:It is perhaps unfortunate that Kant wrote a book actually called Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. This book, the most popular of his works in his day, may be considered as somewhat trite and amongst his least effective philosophical endeavors. The claim that Kant had a major influence upon the discipline comes from elsewhere in his corpus (e.g. the Critique of Pure Reason). It is Kant’s and more generally the Enlightenment’s understanding of morality as based on reason that became central to anthropological work.The first print run of 2,000 copies of the Anthropology sold out in two years. Anthropology and the new human universalWorld society today resembles nothing so much as the eighteenth century Old Regime that Kant had every reason to believe was being abolished by revolution. Now a rich, aging white minority inured to unimaginable luxury presides over masses whose passivity is measured by their lack of spending power. The institutional legacy of 5,000 years of agrarian civilization still weighs heavily with us. The traditional recipe for managing inequality, to inject as much distance as possible between rich and poor, is contradicted by a world being drawn closer together by the digital revolution. Yet, rather than embrace as inevitable their demographic replacement by the young, female, darker, poor masses, the “men in suits” frantically erect barriers against entry whose principle is global apartheid. The opponents of globalization, who confront the new mobility of capital with myopic appeals to national interest, unwittingly preserve these privileges. If Marx showed us how the social relations of production act as so many fetters on the development of the productive forces, these now take the form of territorial states constraining the movement of people, goods, money and information. Transnational capitalism, complemented by grassroots democratic movements of all kinds, leads the way in challenging old national and regional structures, much as national capitalism underpinned liberal revolutions before. Academic anthropology is not well-equipped to inform participation in such historical processes, mainly because its cultural relativism reproduces the national structures of the last century. How might each of us find self-knowledge as individuals and as a species? Kant held that human development required building a just world society. Anthropology, however, was for him part of his vision of individual subjectivity and best thought of as a branch of humanist education. Twentieth century civilization erected barriers between each of us as a subjective personality and society as an impersonal object. What room did the last century’s anonymous institutions -- states, capitalist markets, science -- leave for personal agency, beyond the right to spend whatever small money we could lay our hands on? Anthropology should offer ways of reducing the world in scale imaginatively and of expanding our subjectivity. If we want to feel more at home in the world, that means embracing movement rather than fixture in place. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of over 7 billion people crying out for new principles of association on earth. This means making a world where all people can live together, not the imposition of principles that suit some powerful interests. The next universal will be unlike the Christian and bourgeois versions which imposed western domination by replacing the cultural particulars that organize people’s lives everywhere. The new universal will not just tolerate cultural particulars, but will be founded on knowing that true human community can only be realized through their infinite variety.There are two prerequisites for being human: we must each learn to be self-reliant to a high degree (“the toothbrush syndrome”—who will brush your teeth if not yourself?) and to belong to others, merging our identities in a bewildering variety of social relationships. Much of modern ideology emphasizes how problematic it is to be both self-interested and mutual, to be economic as well as social. When culture is set up to expect a conflict between the two, it is hard to be both. Yet the two sides are inseparable and they may be reconciled by encouraging private and public interests to coincide. One premise of the new human universal will be the unity of self and society. If learning to be two-sided is the means of becoming human, then the lesson is hard to learn. It is now harder for self-designated guilds to control access to professional knowledge. People have other ways of finding out for themselves. Many agencies compete to give them what they want, through journalism, tourism or the self-learning possibilities afforded by the internet. Resistance to experts is moral, since people insist on restoring a personal dimension to human knowledge. Anthropologists’ identification with academic bureaucracy leaves us vulnerable to these developments.“Anthropology” is indispensable to the formation of world society. The discipline could play a part; but the prospects are not good, given its current localism and anti-universalism. A Kantian anthropology would ask what we need to know about humanity in order to build a just world. This usage could be embraced, without being exclusively devoted to the project. by students of many disciplines in the humanities and some social sciences, even by anthropologists. The idea of “development” played a similar role in the last half-century. Immanuel Kant wanted to understand a world society that was emergent. He conceived of anthropology primarily as a form of education; and this contrasts starkly with the focus on research outputs in today’s universities. We could emulate his “pragmatic” approach, a personal program of lifetime learning with the aim of developing practical knowledge of the world. Kant recommended, apart from systematic observation, that we study “world history, biographies and even plays and novels”. He sought a method for integrating individual subjectivity with the moral construction of world society. World history is indispensable to any anthropology worthy of the name today. The method of (auto-)biography is particularly well-suited to the study of self and society. Global communications today contain within their movement a far-reaching transformation of world society. “Anthropology” could be one intellectual tradition well-suited to make sense of it. The academic seclusion of the discipline, its passive acquiescence to bureaucracy, is the chief obstacle preventing us from grasping this historical opportunity. We cling to the revolutionary moment when we joined the people as ethnographers, but have forgotten what it was for or what else is needed, if we would build a universal society. The internet offers a wonderful chance to open up the flow of knowledge and information. Rather than obsess over how we can control access to what we write, which means cutting off the mass of humanity from our efforts, we need to figure out new interactive forms of engagement that span the globe and make the results of our work available to everyone. I have long made online self-publishing and interaction the core of my anthropological practice. It matters less that an academic guild should retain its monopoly of access to specialized knowledge than that “anthropology” should be taken up by a broad intellectual coalition for whom the realization of a new human universal – a world society fit for humanity as a whole -- is a matter of urgent personal concern.Anthropology as a human scienceThe reason I have for taking part in this debate is not to rehash inconclusive arguments over methodology, but rather to revive interest in the objectives of anthropology. It is appropriate to be concerned with the means of acquiring knowledge if we are confident that the established ends of our collective efforts are sound. But, when our social purpose is uncertain and our discipline reflects a general intellectual malaise, preoccupation with means rather than ends becomes self-defeating.I take British social anthropology today to be marginal, fragmented, confused; to be obsessed with its own internal affairs more than with any larger conception of the purposes of knowledge. The demoralized descendants of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski are now increasingly given to insular reflection on the sources of their own anxiety -- an anxiety induced by the loss of empire and with it the closure of that window on the world that once gave British anthropology its breadth and global vision.We are not alone in this. The great project of modern social science with which our century began is manifestly in disarray. The West is now facing for the first time, in the shape of Asia’s resurgence, a challenge to its intellectual and practical ascendency. If we wish to situate our dilemmas within these epochal events, it will not do to dwell on the methodological legacies of those who wrested a niche for social anthropology in the British academy half a century ago. Rather, we must take a broader view of our place in world history, the better to devise a strategy for making a constructive contribution to understanding modern society’s next phase.There are two great ideas driving modern history and they are inextricably linked— democracy and science. The first of these says that societies fit for human beings to live in must guarantee the freedom and equality of all citizens so that the people may be self- governing. The second says that such societies can only flourish if knowledge in them is based on the discovery of what is objectively real.Science has two great objects—nature (everything out there that we did not consciously make up) and society itself (which is both a part of nature and the result of human intentions, however misguided). A democratic society has to break down intrinsic barriers to its own development—poverty, ignorance, injustice. To do so it needs science. Whatever we plan to do is more likely to succeed if we employ reason to find out how essential things work.Moreover, the principles on which society is founded must be common to all of us; they must touch what is ‘natural’ in us, as opposed to what is merely conventional or arbitrary. This is the core of the modern quest for human, civil or natural rights. Equally, science thrives on democratic social organization. It is above all a communal enterprise, relying on the painstaking, cumulative efforts of generations towards shared ends. When science is merely an elite exercise, cut off from the general impulses of ordinary people, it is in danger of atrophying. The idea that links the two sides is education. Free and equal citizens must be knowledgeable. And science must be sustained by a general culture that values truth, learning and practical invention.There is only one modern revolution and it is far from finished. It began in earnest in seventeenth-century England, which Thorstein Veblen once described as “an isolation hospital for science, technology and civil rights”. The discoveries of Locke and Newton were made general in the eighteenth century by the European Enlightenment and were realized as a living social experiment in the United States of America. Since then, the French and Russian revolutions have dominated the thinking of progressive intellectuals. And, as the Western industrial nations became wealthier and, it must be said, more equal, the pursuit of knowledge has often become more esoteric and personal.Of late it has been claimed that we are already in a post-modern, postindustrial or post- scientific phase. I doubt if this is true even of the richest countries; but it is manifestly untrue of world society as a whole, where poverty, ignorance and the starkest inequalities are normal for the vast majority. The task of building a world fit for human beings to live in has barely begun.Two attitudes predominate among our intellectual and political elites: one turns its nose up at ‘bourgeois’ democracy and science, declaring them a sham, without enquiring too deeply into institutional realities; while the other rejoices in the apparent achievements of ‘free’ Western states whose citizens remain at this time extremely unfree and unequal, being governed by remote rulers for whom science is largely an aspect of the military budget, rather than a means of general emancipation.It may be objected that my idea of science is old-hat -- that the world has moved on in the last three hundred years. And so it has. Keywords like nature, society and science move with history. This is a dialectical process and its principle is negation. What science is supposed not to be, its place in a set of terms referring to what it is not, offers a better guide to historical shifts in its meaning than positive definitions taken in isolation.There can be little doubt that what science originally was not was mystical beliefs— religion, superstition, stories—uninspected traditions referring human existence to a supernatural cause; in a word, it was not ‘myth’. After five thousand years of agrarian civilization, the main task of modern societies is to found knowledge on a truly secular footing. Even a century ago the political drive sustaining science was largely anticlerical; and, in a world where fundamentalist Christianity and Islam flourish (not to mention the Catholic Church), this crusade is still necessary.Yet, in this century, for most Western intellectuals that battle may appear to have been won. What science principally is not has shifted ground to embrace the oppositions which sustain an expanded academic division of labor. The negation of science is now most commonly the creative arts—literature, poetry, the critical imagination—reflecting the division between natural science and the humanities (the separation of matter and spirit) which has spawned, as a hybrid experiment, social science.Today’s debate could be taken as a referendum on the social sciences and on anthropology’s place as one of them. Most of this audience probably came to it with the word ‘science’ already fixed in mind as a positive or negative notion defined by one of several linked oppositions, all of them retained in present-day usage. For the founders of British social anthropology, our science of ethnography had as its principal negation ‘history’ or Victorian evolutionism. Now ethnography may be appropriated by the advocates of anthropology as writing and reflection, the very antithesis of science. Meanwhile scientific anthropologists are likely to insist that their subject matter is largely historical.It is for this reason that I have sought to rescue the original and, I would hope, unifying conception of science as one of the two great objects of modern development. I feel sure that, if we concern ourselves with the method of knowing rather than with the object of knowledge, we will repeat the mistake which has led twentieth-century social science into a blind alley; and our debate will be hopelessly confused. Science undoubtedly rests on the premise that it is possible to know what is objectively real. But to be committed to that idea is not to be forced to sign up for an ossified seventeenth-century epistemology, as, for example, economics has (thereby revealing itself to be more secular religion than science).The intellectual achievements of the last three hundred years, in both science and the humanities, have necessarily altered our conception of subject-object relations and of ways of knowing. A modern science must incorporate notions of history, reflexivity, relativity, linguistic and logical traps, Western ethnocentrism, the need for self- knowledge and much else. The best twentieth-century scientists have already done so. The ideal type ‘science’—the positivist stereotype of the man in the white coat—cannot capture what scientists, the best and the worst of them, actually do.The mistake is to emulate scientific method, while forgetting what science is supposed to be for—to be so wrapped up in the problem of one’s own ability to know or communicate anything that the priorities determining what needs to be known are lost. If modern anthropologists can often be seen to fall into this error, they are no guiltier than most modern intellectuals. We have lost our way; and this may be because we can no longer see the connection between the social purposes of knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.Our problem is that the natural scientists can no longer relate what they do to the complex character of human existence, including their own; while the humanists have given up trying to understand how the world works. The social scientists have proved incapable of spanning the gap, for a number of reasons, but mainly because they tried to behave like scientists without seeking to alter what natural scientists think or being able to learn fast enough from what they have discovered. As a result they (including ourselves, as British social anthropologists) have nothing to say about the reciprocal interdependence of nature and society.My contention is that our civilization desperately needs to reconstitute the original Enlightenment goal of progress through the systematic application of reason, in a world where nature and human society are understood to be interdependent. The prevailing division of intellectual effort within the universities stands in the way of such a development. But the progress of humanity on a world scale will demand a new concept of scientific knowledge and of its constituent branches. The mechanization of brains is one aspect of our phase of the modern revolution which is already requiring such a reorganization.Even as I contend that anthropology must be part of the great modern project to institute democratic societies on a firm basis of objective knowledge, I would still argue that the experiment known as social science has been a failure and that we would be well advised to distance ourselves from it as fast as we can. Otherwise we will soon go down with sociology, economics and other benighted ‘pseudo-sciences’ into that dustbin of history reserved for disciplines which failed to move with their times.The task of our generation is to bring knowledge of nature and society once more into an active, mutually reinforcing relationship. This means mediating and ultimately transcending the opposition between science and the humanities. Anthropologists are uniquely placed to begin such a task. We retain vestiges of an evolutionary anthropology which combines the study of humanity’s nature, societies and cultures. Even within social anthropology we combine both the scientific tradition of social theory and humanistic scholarship, as well as our own distinctive hybrid style of ethnographic writing, of abstract generalization pursued through concrete description. Above all our subject matter is the vital, inclusive middle ground—humankind as a whole.Anthropology’s virtue as an eclectic anti-discipline is that it is (or should be) open to all the currents that will make the next intellectual synthesis. It would be absurd to tie ourselves to the analytical relics of the last synthesis, to the social sciences that were formed in the early twentieth century. I do not know what this next synthesis will call itself, but I suspect that it may be ‘science’, perhaps ‘human sciences’. The rhetorical power of the word is too strong for us to abandon it lightly. If Derrida and the deconstructionists are human scientists—and I take their synoptic review of the history of Western thought to be a scientific enterprise—then current academic divisions cannot be taken seriously as a guide to whatever science may become in the next century. It is only through the dialectical synthesis of what science is and what it is not that progress in the pursuit of knowledge can continue. What matters is that we should seek to play an active role in the ongoing redefinition of what knowledge is centrally thought to be in our society. If we do not, we deserve to go under in the global upheaval that is building to a climax under our noses.The task of a science is to generate replicable knowledge; to help others to do difficult things more easily and reliably; to get something right again and again; and, when it is no longer right enough, to think again. Anthropology as an academic discipline must be a part of science. We are in the public domain and we must fight for our place there. The rhetoric of serious public discourse concerns science. We have plenty to say about what that ought to be. We are not artists, even less priests. We have nothing to gain by declaring ourselves to be against science. End Notes ................
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