Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people’s actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls “the society of capital” and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: INTELLECTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Chapter 1. Capital: structural, phenomenological, financial
PART II: SCALES OF HISTORY AND POLITICS
Chapter 2. The scales of ethnography: periodizing spatial coherence in early twentieth-century, Spain
Chapter 3. Popular struggle, dissident intellectuals and perspectives in realist history: a case from late twentieth-century Peru
Chapter 4. History’s absent presence in the everyday politics of contemporary rural Spain
Chapter 5. On the threshold between everyday practice and historical praxis
PART III: POLITICS’ EDGE
Chapter 6. Conditions of possibility: dominant blocs and changing contours of the hegemonic field
Conclusion: Between reflexivity and engagement: tensions in the praxis of intellectuals
References Cited
Index
About the author
Gavin Smith is the author of Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Politics of Land in Peru (1989); Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology (1999); and, with Susana Narotzky, Immediate Struggles: People, Power and Place in Rural Spain (2006). He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.
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