As promised, here’s a post-print version of my Cultures of Belief article, which was published in Anthropological Theory. cultures-of-belief-post-print The text is identical to the journal version, but the formatting is different — this is the version I’m allowed to distribute according to the publishing agreement. If you have access to the journal, for...
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I’ve just had a new paper out in Anthropological Theory — this is behind a paywall, I’ll make a post-print version available through this website soon for those who don’t have access to the journal through an academic library. The paper is titled ‘Cultures of ignorance’. In a nutshell, the argument is that academic...
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This is a cross-post from ethics.CRASSH. Felicitas Becker on Islamic reformism and Sufi traditionalism in Tanzania I’ve just read two fascinating papers by Felicitas Becker on moral conflict in East Africa. Both papers describe the relationship between Islamist reformers and Sufi-influenced traditionalists in rural Tanzania. Broadly speaking, the Islamists are young, have international connections (though these...
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I’ve launched a new website as part of my current project at CRASSH. It’s called ethics.CRASSH and at the moment it’s covering the Speaking Ethically Across Borders Project, which has been running as a reading group this year. Several of the participants have already posted commentaries on the texts we’ve been reading. If things...
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Here’s another video on cosmopolitanism, this one by Kwame Appiah, who has written on the topic: Kwame Anthony Appiah in Examined Life – YouTube.
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Here’s an interesting interview with Stuart Hall, in which he speaks about cosmopolitanism and rootedness — relevant to the previous post: http://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1119965 Pnina Werbner interviewing — I’ve transcribed the most relevant bit below. 23.30 PW: Can you be a cosmopolitan if you don’t have to commitments to a place or people or maybe even...
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Tuesday saw the first of a series of reading groups that I’m organizing at CRASSH on the subject of ethical conversations across borders. There will be four sessions this term, each dealing with a different theme, taking in readings from anthropology, sociology, philosophy and history. The first session, on rooted cosmopolitanisms, was based on...
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I am reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), and I’ve just come across a passage that is related to my recent argument about the problems of the use of the concept of neoliberalism in anthropology. Part of my argument was that academic advocates of neoliberalism and academic critics of...
Read more →Thanks to Theo Kyriakides (@Theo_Kyriakides), who was present at the GDAT debate on neoliberalism for alerting me to a post by Kathleen Fitzpatrick of Pomona College. She writes, I have come to despise the term “neoliberal,” to the extent that I’d really like to see it stricken from academic vocabularies everywhere. It’s less that...
Read more →There is a great new resource on the sociology of ignorance at: http://www.sociologyofignorance.com/. The site is run by Joanne Gaudet and supported by Matthias Gross. It already has a very useful bibliography.
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I am currently a research fellow at CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, at Cambridge University. One of the things I’m working on is an interdisciplinary project on ‘Speaking Ethically Across Borders’. Right now I’m planning a reading group on the topic for next term. The outline is...
Read more →Part of my argument in the recent neoliberalism debate was that, evidence of discontent about any aspect, be it ever so narrow, of what have been identified as neoliberal transformations is taken, without further justification, as a rejection of all of the phenomena that have been so identified My point was that just because lots of...
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