The Gift by Marcel Mauss is one of the most profound essays in sociology and anthropology. Mauss was interested in what happened between people, as that is where the social can be found. The structured obligation of the gift is a recurring act. Seen ‘in totality’ as Mass put it, …
In what sense is crime a coherent action category? There is the positivist sense that there is a state defined category of human action that justifies coercive control and we can leave it at that. That approach leads us up some blind alleys as key terms such as human trafficking …
Ontology and epistemology are two dimensions of research that are easily despatched in a sentence yet which give every research a lifetime of heartache. Ontology is the theory of the nature of reality, and epistemology of the acquisition and evaluation of knowledge about it. Both are facets of understanding. It …
Our first autonomous robot arrived in the house last week. It is a wee fellow, hugging the ground as if cowering in the presence of its true master, the iPhone. A round plastic body, a sensor cluster, wheels and a vacuum are set off with a cheery burble. It is black, …
Street encounters and digital encounters are hybrids. Trying to understand them separately will trip the ethnographer up (Lane, 2018). Lane elaborates the digital element to street encounters and the reverse using a multi-sited ethnography which traces encounters through street and digital domains. Doing so means he avoids assuming the meaning …
… the heat is on the bottom level It has been a norm that in the UK we expect public figures to be held to a higher standard than us schmoes. Ordinary folk can make daft statements, fool around, run over the family dog and still be invited to the …
… in the abstract and also not literally in the concrete It’s a delusion of a certain type of policy wonk that if you just tweak a society’s political institutions enough you will get the right outcome. A common reference point is the refoundation of West Germany after the second …
Much of what I’m writing about here I owe to the insights and research of my colleagues Alex Wafer, Kirstin Lardy, Delani Mathevula and Motswaedi. In fact a lot of it comes from a recent talk by Alex. We know the digital divide very well. Much of economic and social …
The kind of reading you do matters a lot to the kind of scholarship you are doing. The classic image of the scholar is someone poring carefully over a text, parsing each phrase and glossing every paragraph. A scholar isolated from the world around, unburdened by cares. I expect few …
Forgiveness is good for the soul. Debt forgiveness is the juice that keeps the economy fresh. If all debts were honoured then capitalism would close up shop. Debt forgiveness can be egalitarian. Social movements promoted the forgiveness of odious debts incurred by developing world governments. Debt cancellation has been a …
