Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

If I had to explain briefly what I have been thinking about lately, it is this: how we might subsume a Melanesian emphasis on dynamism, disjuncture, and change under a Benjaminian-Baudelairian notion of ‘modernity’ rather than the older tropes of cargo cult or (more simply) ‘savagery’. I think it took me a little bit to figure out that this was what I was doing because my starting point was Levi-Strauss’s distinction between hot and cold societies, which cuts in odd ways across the Weber-Marx notion of modernity as institutional rationalization and the Benjamin-Baudelaire notion of innovation and self-forging. It is all a bit confusing because mining companies imagine themselves as ‘developed’ in a way that cuts across all three of these scholarly topoi.