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Friday, February 19, 2016

HOT OFF THE PRESSES

Lecture Seven, the last on the Kalahari and Wilmsen, is now available on YouTube.  Enjoy!
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7 comments:

s. wallerstein said...

I don't think that there are any cultures outside what you referred to as "the world system" in a previous lecture.

Over 30 years ago I crossed South America from Peru to Brasil, traveling down the Amazon by local transportation. Coca Cola had gotten there long before me. I didn't go inland from the river, but I'm sure that Coca Cola (and beer) have traveled inland by now.

February 19, 2016 at 2:29 PM
Robert Paul Wolff said...

What an extraordinary adventure! I am sure you are right, but my emphasis was on the period before the European colonization of Africa.

Thirty years ago, I drove with a group of students from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg way into the hinterlands of one of the so-called Homelands. We came to a dusty rural town, and when we turned the corner onto the main street, there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken! I was seriously bummed out.

February 19, 2016 at 3:06 PM
s. wallerstein said...

It's how the worst aspects of U.S. culture have spread everywhere, stuff that is not only commodified, but also bad for everyone's health. The French, on the other hand, make an effort to export the best aspects of their culture, the Impressionists, Proust, Voltaire, Simone de Beauvoir, etc.: in Santiago there's a French cultural center, which not only provided a cultural space to people who were opposed to the Pinochet dictatorship, but also has exhibitions on the aforementioned French artists and writers, etc. The U.S. cultural center seems to be more interested in selling English courses and the idea of studying in the U.S..

February 19, 2016 at 3:25 PM
s. wallerstein said...

My above comment should read "it's remarkable how the worst aspects...."
Sorry..

February 19, 2016 at 3:26 PM
Matt said...

It's how the worst aspects of U.S. culture have spread everywhere, stuff that is not only commodified, but also bad for everyone's health.

There is an extremely hard to get essay by Gabriel Garcia Marquez about visiting the Soviet Union called ‘The USSR: 22,400,000 square kilometres without a single Coca-Cola advertisement’. I struggled to read it in my fairly poor Russian (I've never been able to find it in English. Perhaps it's more available in Spanish, or maybe I've just been looking poorly) but it's quite interesting. I'm hardly what you'd call a fan of the Soviet Union (If you've read Alec Nove, you know why it couldn't work, and the seeds of the awful place that Russia has become were clearly present in it, to say nothing of the early and lasting brutality) but it's hard to look at something like, say, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuK6EM3JEfU and not see something lost. (The music is from one of my very favorite movies, Siberiade, which I cannot recommend highly enough.)

February 19, 2016 at 3:50 PM
s. wallerstein said...

Matt,

Thanks. I'll try to find it online in Spanish. A very quick Google search in Spanish turned up the title, but not the complete essay. I'll try harder when I have more time.

February 19, 2016 at 4:03 PM
Tom Cathcart said...

A few unrelated thoughts:

1) It's difficult to grasp how Lee, et al. could have not read any British commentary on their experience in the Kalahari, which could have been written as recently as the 1890's. Or that none of Lee's interviewees passed on stories from their grandparents and great- grandparents of working for the British.

2) As we approach next Saturday's SC Democratic primary, with the importance of the African-American vote, I'm curious, Bob, how your former colleagues in the Afro-American Studies Dept. are leaning these days.

3) I guess anyone who has been to "remote" villages anywhere in the world has a story like yours and Mr. Wallerstein's. Mine was in the "remote" Nicaraguan village of El Noranjo in 1988. After a very long truck ride on barely passable mud roads through the wilderness, our delegation arrived in the village to find that the Contras had cut off the electricity. We found our way in the dark to a little cafe outside the village and were surprised to find it full of local people. They were delighted to see us and welcome us and learn who we were, and in the candlelight they began to serenade us. In the semi-darkness, I asked the American sitting next to me, "Is that what I think it is on the wall over there?" It was. It was a velvet Elvis.

4) It's a hoot to be sitting in your office as part of that trio of famous philosophers: Nagel, Parfit, and CATHCART(???)

February 19, 2016 at 9:04 PM

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