Value and Worthlessness

The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism

Don Kalb (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

400 Seiten

2025
Berghahn Books (Verlag)
978-1-80539-822-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Advocating for an interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present, this book uses historical and global anthropology to engage with history, theory, unevenness, and comparison, while using “global ethnography” and “hidden histories” as the keys to social discovery. Kalb’s anthropology of value and worthlessness lays bare the logics that currently produce right wing, populist, and nationalist outcomes. The book also battles with the “anthropology of global systems”, financialization, and the seductive myths of global middle-class formation, while assessing the theoretical legacies of Eric Wolf, David Graeber, David Harvey, Jonathan Friedman, Marcel Mauss and “moral anthropology”, among others.

Autor

Don Kalb is Professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Academic Director of the GRIP program on global inequality (UiB/International Science Council, Paris). He is the Founding Editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology.

Inhalt

List of Illustrations



Part I: Foundations



Introduction: Webs of Life versus Webs of Meaning: Or how I Became a Marxist Anthropologist



Chapter 1. No Outside? Then What? For a Dialectical “Value Regime”



Part II: Living Labor, Value, and Worthlessness



Chapter 2. “Worthless Poles” and other Postsocialist Devaluations: Conversations with a Polish Populist

Chapter 3. “It is my history and it is worthless”: Gender and the Making of Philipsism, The Netherlands

Chapter 4. Regimes of Value and Worthlessness: Two Stories and a Marxian Reflection



Part III: The Non-Surprise of the Populist Right



Chapter 5. Theory from the East: Class without Class and the Making of the Illiberal Right in Eastern Europe

Chapter 6. Double Devaluations: The Making of the Populist Right in the Global North



Part IV: Global Middle Classness: Living and Dreaming



Chapter 7. “Scraps from the Bourgeois Kitchen”: In the Romanian Bubble of Outsourced Creativity

Chapter 8. The “Global Middle Class”: A Seductive but Empty Signifier



Part V: Finance and Hegemonic Decline



Chapter 9. Financialization and the Capitalist Moment: Marx versus Weber in the Anthropology of Global System

Chapter 10. Two Theories of Money: A Historical Anthropology of the State-Finance Nexus for Present Purposes



Part VI. Polemics for a Reason



Chapter 11. Trotsky over Mauss: Anthropological Theory and the Centennial of the Russian Revolution

Chapter 12. The Labor Theory of Value and the Value Theory of Labor



Epilogue: Why I Will not Make it as a Moral Anthropologist



Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.1.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Dislocations
• Verlagsort: Oxford
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 152 x 229 mm
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre
• ISBN-10: 1-80539-822-9 / 1805398229
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80539-822-6 / 9781805398226
• Zustand: Neuware