Value and Worthlessness

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.

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.

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.

“It is a very strong and compelling set of essays that trace Kalb’s intellectual trajectory and makes the case for Marxian anthropology.” • Sharryn Kasmir, Hofstar University