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<i>"</i>Value and Worthlessness<i> is crucial for understanding the right wing populist backlash. Kalb shows that rather than disaffected voters having always already been fascists, sexists, and racists, our disastrous political present is the outcome of the failure of progressive political movements to protect people from the intertwined onslaughts of Big State and Big Finance."</i> - <b>Ewald Engelen</b>, University of Amsterdam</p>
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<i>"With the wit, verve, and intellectual rigor that we have come to expect from him, Don Kalb carves a path for an unapologetic, engaged, and interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present. In a set of superbly crafted research essays, he reanimates essential concepts such as realism, class, unevenness, dispossession, and devaluation, and applies them with great creativity to current-day political conflagrations including the rise of the reactionary right. </i>Value and Worthlessness<i> shows what we are really up against in our struggle for a more egalitarian world."</i> - <b>Jeff Maskovsky</b>, City University of New York, Graduate Center</p>
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<i>"This book is a masterful fugue. While unweaving anthropology’s ubiquitous focus on idealist “webs of meaning,” Don Kalb scrutinizes realist “webs of life” with an ostinato of class, labor, capital, and the contradictions of capitalism. In a world captured by the politics and scholarship of endless variations of culture and identity, a contrapunto of regimes of value and worthlessness could not have been more timely."</i> - <b>Ayse Caglar</b>, University of Vienna</p>
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<i>"Kalb’s work has profoundly shaped a whole new generation of East- ern European radical intellectuals who confronted the collapse of state socialism, predatory capitalism, the national-populist responses of the dispossessed, and ultimately the bloody wars. Kalb’s Marxist anthropology shows us how to use concepts of capitalism, class, and value for understanding the escalating poly-crisis, and to think about truly revolutionary alternatives in the “East,” “West,” and “South.”</i> - <b>Volodymyr Ishchenko</b>, Free University Berlin</p>
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<i>"In this trenchant manifesto for Marxist anthropology, Don Kalb shows just what the very best historical ethnography can do. Combining deep ethnography with personal reflection and theoretical ambition, this collection of chapters offers brilliant insights into theories of value, worthlessness, global capitalism, right wing populism, economic and political anthropology, and more."</i> - <b>Sian Lazar</b>, University of Cambridge</p>
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<i>"In this stunning map of capitalism today, Don Kalb bursts open a Marxist critique of anthropology for its fetishism of culture and an anthropological critique of Marxism for losing local specificity and contingency within the broad tendencies of capitalism. Kalb, thereby, brilliantly sets the scene for the pressures giving rise to populist authoritarianism."</i> - <b>Michael Burawoy</b>, University of California, Berkeley</p>
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<i>"Value and Worthlessness synthesizes the original, courageous, and exhilarating work of Don Kalb as he crosses boundaries, insists on contingencies and process, and sharply clarifies concepts of value, financialization, class, and labor. A vital Marxist anthropology for the present."</i> - <b>Ida Susser</b>, City University of New York, Graduate Center</p>

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.

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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

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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781805398226
Publisert
2025-01-01
Utgiver
Vendor
Berghahn Books
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, UP, 06, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
400

Forfatter

Om bidragsyterne

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.