Written by Keith Hart
World society has been formed as a single interactive network in our time. Universal means of communication are now available to give expression to universal ideas. This essay explores the role of markets and money in the human economy. They are intrinsic to the extension of society from the local to a global level. By calling the economy human we put people first, making their thoughts, actions and lives our main concern. ‘Humanity’ is a moral quality of kindness and, since theoretical abstraction is impersonal, economic anthropology should pay attention to the personal realm of experience. But humanity is also a collective noun, meaning all the people who have existed or ever will. A human economy is inclusive in that sense too, requiring us to engage with society in its impersonal dimensions. Money mediates the personal and impersonal extremes of social existence. These reflections lead us to Kant’s Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. ‘Anthropology’ is indispensable to the making of world society. It would then mean whatever we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a more equal world. This usage could be embraced by students of history, sociology, political economy, philosophy and literature, as well as by some anthropologists.
A new human universal
Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after
Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At much the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas opposed the racial inequality of Spain’s American empire in the name of human unity. We are living
through another ‘Magellan moment’. In the second half of the twentieth century, humanity
formed a world society – a single interactive social network – for the first time. This was
symbolized by several moments, such as when the 60s space race allowed us to see the earth from the outside or when the internet went public in the 90s, announcing the convergence of telephones, television and computers in a digital revolution of communications. Our world too is massively unequal and the voices for human unity are often drowned. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. The task of building a global civil society for the twenty-first century, perhaps even a federal world government, is an urgent one.
A lot hinges on where in the long process of human evolution we imagine the world is
today. The Victorians believed that they stood at the pinnacle of civilization. I think of us
as being like the first digging-stick operators, primitives stumbling into the invention of
agriculture. In the late 90s, I asked what it is about us that future generations will be
interested in. I settled on the rapid advances then being made in forming a single
interactive network linking all humanity. This has two striking features: first, the network
is a highly unequal market of buyers and sellers fuelled by a money circuit that has become progressively detached from production and politics; and second, it is driven by a digital revolution in communications whose symbol is the internet, the network of networks. My research over the last decade has been concerned with how the forms of money and exchange are changing in the context of this communications revolution.
My case for a recent speed-up of global integration rests on three developments of the last
two decades: 1. the collapse of the Soviet Union, opening the world to transnational
capitalism and neo-liberal economic policies 2. the entry of China’s and India’s two billion
people, a third of humanity, into the world market as powers in the globalization of capital
accumulation, loosening the West’s grip on the global economy and 3. the abbreviation of
time and distance brought about by the digital revolution in communications and a
restlessly mobile population. The corollary of this revolution is a counter-revolution, the
reassertion of state power since 9-11 and the imperialist war for oil in the Middle East.
Humanity has regressed significantly from the hopes for equality released by the Second
World War and the anti-colonial revolution that followed it. On the other hand, growing
awareness of the risks for the future of life on this planet entailed in current levels and forms of economic activity might encourage more people to take world society seriously.
Humanity is now caught between national and world society; and that is why new ways of
thinking are so vital.
By a ‘new human universal’ I mean making a world where all people can live together, not
the imposition of general principles that suit some powerful interests. The next universal
will be unlike its predecessors, the Christian and bourgeois versions imposed on cultural
particulars everywhere by the West. The main precedent for discovering our common
humanity is great literature which achieves universality through going deeply into
particular personalities, relations and places.
Ethnography is based on a similar principle. The new universal will not just tolerate
cultural particulars but will be founded on knowing that true human community can only
be realized through them. There are two prerequisites for being human: to be self-reliant to
a high degree 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 often inseparable in practice and some societies, by encouraging private and public interests to coincide, have managed to integrate them more effectively than ours.
(…to be continued)
Perspectives in Anthropology 