Anthropological Theory

Humanity is caught between the institutions of agrarian civilization and a machine revolution whose implications we barely understand. In consequence, the world is becoming rapidly more unequal as we grow closer together. As a result of digitalization, the dominant economic form of the 20th-century, state capitalism, is giving way to a new phase, virtual capitalism. The struggle for value on the internet is analysed with reference to the categories of classical political economy. The key to economic democracy is to focus on the money instruments themselves, which are changing in response to the repersonalization of economic life in a world of cheap information. The article reviews the evidence for such change and considers the future of money. If we are to displace the old regime of agrarian civilization, the middle-class revolution with which the modern age began needs to be revitalized.

This article concerns the generation of a particular kind of inequality through social practices of inclusion and exclusion. It argues that we need to examine political as well as economic motivations to explain inequality, and it shows, using the case of Russian history, how political anxieties about the integrity of social groups and their governability has served to create inequality by disadvantaging those excluded. The theoretical approach taken is a dynamic and social one, taking up Dunn's observations on the continued salience of Hobbes in today's world and Kharkhordin's Foucauldian analysis of 20th-century Russian collectivism. Inequality, in this light, is seen as something that can be produced by political emotions and discursive practices, rather than as a fixed situation to be explained in terms of income disparities, unequal rights, or structures of exploitation. The intention is not to displace these other accounts but to supplement them by drawing attention to the ways in which a political impulse for the preservation of society constantly reviews the criteria of conformist unity and thus continually resets the boundaries for defining insiders against the outside. Variegated categories of the dispossessed are thereby created historically, and they form multiple sediments at the ‘bottom’ or the ‘peripheries’ of the wider polity. Among ordinary people, fear of being excluded, and ambivalent sentiments to those who have been expelled, give rise to volatile judgements about the legitimacy of inequality – especially when (as in the contemporary turmoil in Russia) certain of the previously dispossessed suddenly take their chance to grasp wealth.

Transformations of credit in 16th-century England illustrate how interpersonal transactions cause changes in inequality. Despite the efforts of such outstanding scholars as Eric Wolf, Don Kalb, and Timothy Earle, inequality has lost the prominent position it once occupied among anthropological concerns. As a result, anthropologists are missing the opportunity to intervene in important debates about inequality in history and the social sciences. A primitive general theory of inequality centering on the dynamics of interpersonal relations identifies one way in which anthropological investigation can contribute to those debates.

How is inequality related to time? This article explores some temporal coordinates of newly emerging unequal land distributions inTransylvania (Romania), in the wake of socialism's collapse. Building on a notion of temporally based strategies, it examines both temporal conceptions and temporally based practices to describe how time entered into the initial conception of the land restitution process, how achieving ownership was itself a time-intensive activity, and how the government's economic policy has inadequately supported the time-horizons appropriate for new owners. In each respect, time tends to work to the advantage of the former holders of political and social capital as they seek to convert those forms of privilege into control over land.