The question arises: Why did the Great Recession happen?  My answer is poleconomic i.e., that it was due to…

An anthropologist studying political economy in ethnographic situations or by reading history can get a perspective on the locus of problems in contemporary society.  The problem is that anthropologists are almost never consulted in these matters – economists are.  As a rule, they lack the ethnographic and historical insights a seasoned anthropologist gets from doing fieldwork and reading history.  History is important and it can teach us many things. This applies to what I see happening in…

Introduction

What could undermine the stranglehold of global capitalists?  As millions slip into poverty while the super-rich make fantastic profits, what could loosen their grip?

Gramsci (1971, 1991) gave us the concept of hegemony, which he saw as the result of the activities of politicians establishing rules of predominant influence over a public.  Over and against these efforts by leaders, however, power…

Anthropologists interested in political anthropology and/or economic anthropology need to think in terms of poleconomics.  In some of my publications I have used the term poleconomics to indicate that political power and economic clout go hand-in-hand.  That is, those with great wealth either attain high office or have greater than average influence over politicos and political processes.  On the one hand, being in office can open up opportunities to achieve great wealth if one makes the…

 The common folks of my small unincorporated village in Northern California are grumbling about capitalism’s negative impacts on their lives.  They usually don’t phrase it like that, but rather they blame the government or the rich or a given political party or the whole bunch of them that the folks of my community call “they.”  “They are screwing us.”  But we don’t have any riots in my village – ones like we see in the streets of the Middle East, London, Greece, Chile or now Israel. …

I am writing a book on the history of political domination and one of my main points is that when a storable-stealable-surplus came about in the early Neolithic kin groups formed that had more structural solidarity than Paleolithic bands of hunter-gatherers i.e., members were more rule-bound and formal cross-generation leaders emerged e.g., the office of lineage elder that was passed on through the generations.  I claim that all human populations have a small percentage of individuals who…

I claim that in every human group a small percentage of individuals are aggrandizers or those who have the drive to dominate others.  But domination was not possible until a material base allowed the production of a storable-stealable-surplus.  Only then did society begin to evolve complex structures that allowed a few to dominate the many.  Such domination was the result of social construction, not biology.  Presumably the biological drive was always there in primates, hominids and the…