Product Endorsement

by Ozma on March 8th, 2006

I’ve been reading Keith Hart’s Money in an Unequal World with the participants in my Alternative Economies class, and finding it hugely exhilirating. For quite some time I had been wondering when my next big intellectual crush was going to come along; I haven’t felt this swoony since I discovered the work of Joan Martinez-Alier and James O’Connor while writing my dissertation thesis.

Call me an old-fashioned girl, but even though I acknowledge that Bruno Latour has definitively skewered “the modern critique” I find it’s still what I like. “Network theory” doesn’t do it for me; I still want history (1) systematically accounted for and (2) demystified with a flourish. I can’t help it: in spite of agreeing with all the remonstrances about how I oughn’t to fall for it it remains my idea of a good time, every time.

From Academia, Bibliomania, Briefly Noted, Political Economy

2 Comments →
  1. John McCreery permalink

    I, too, find history ”(1) systematically accounted for and (2) demystified with a flourish” enormously satisfying and, I would add, a model for effective ethnography. I am reminded about that because I am currently reading David McCulloch’s Truman. As I read his description of the Independence, Missouri in which Harry Truman was a boy, I find myself experiencing a shock of recognition. My father is of Scotch-Irish descent and his father and mother moved from Missouri to Georgia, where my father was born. I read, for example,

    Certain precepts and bywords were articles of faith in such a place, in such times, and nearly everybody growing up there was imbued with them, in principle at least:
    Honesty was the best policy. It saved time and worry, because if you always told the truth you never had to keep track of what you said.
    Make yourself useful.
    Anything worthwhile required effort.
    If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. “Never, never give up,” Harry’s father would say.
    Children were a reflection of their parents. “Now Harry, you be good,” his mother would tell him time after time as he went out the door.

    That describes my father and my own upbringing to a T.

  2. suhail permalink

    i need to be a knowledge full man so i need those books

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