Laya > Recent Status Updates

If I were the person who wrote the world bank report which ferguson eloquently shredded to pieces for 40 pages in this book.... I would kms

More descriptive than I expected but I understand why this was so influential. Right time right place to launch a new sub-discipline itself

Consulted crashcourse YouTube channel 3 times, these footnotes are doing nothing

Jim Scott literally opens this book on subtle resistance with an Ethiopian proverb in nice italic font "When the great lord passes, the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts"

Not so bad for a short summary so far

Wish I understood more of the literary references, missing out on some interesting stuff

"It is often said that our society is too materialist and that advertising reflects this but it seems that in this respect our society is quite evidently NOT materialist enough, and that this is paradoxically, the result of failure in social meanings values and ideals. It is impossible to look at modern advertising without realising that the material object being sold is never enough"

- Advertising: the magic system

Good thing this counts towards exam prep

The Bloomsbury Fraction - when I saw the title I thought it would be a vindictive take-down essay of privilege and exclusion but this is an excellent analytical essay of upper class progressive intelligentsia 'conscience' and it's limits

"Darwin himself did not take a consistent position on any of these applications. In a letter he observed ironically that he had just received in quotes 'a squib' printed in a newspaper showing 'I have proved might is right and therefore that Napoleon is right and every cheating tradesman is right' - obviously a reaction to one of the first and crudest kinds of social darwinism."

Interesting stuff

"In a sense we can provide a very adequate analysis of social darwinism in terms of errors of emphasis it makes on extending the theory of natural selection to social and political theory I think it simplifies the matter a little too much in that biology itself has from the beginning a strong social component. We have to think of this dialectical moment between two areas of study."

- In Social Darwinism

Abstraction of a multiplicity into a singular and personified concept of nature was a leap in consciousness and underlies the double definition of nature as both physical object and also as immutable characteristics that are fundamental and explanatory. Gives rise to paradox on whether nature is a complex system of mutual cooperation or competitive brutality. Both ideas are present in pol theory -Ideas of nature

each term of the proposition has to be revalued..revalue 'determination' towards the setting of limits and the exertion of pressure, and away from prefigured and controlled content.. revalue 'superstructure' towards a range of cultural practices and away from reflected reproduction.. 'the base' away from a fixed economic abstraction and towards dynamic processes in real and economic relationships with contradictions

"The superficial attraction of this position [ref. McLuhan]..rests on characteristically rhetorical isolation of 'mass communications' from complex historical development of means of communication as intrinsic, related and determined parts of the whole historical social and material process."
- From essay 'Means of Communication as Means of Production'

"once its specificities are acknowledged, it may seem far less obvious that [capitalism] must have been born in the city, and much more convincing to situate its origins in the countryside."

Me when I travel through coconut plantations and paddy stretches of deltaic andhra pradesh

Ch 4 … Applying Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and regulated improvisation to sketch out the way dietary decision of food provision are made in households and how they are contextually embedded in a wide array of factors - excellent excellent anthropological essay about decision-making

Gotta love edited volumes on niche topics because how else would you find a paper that digs into economic history roots of contemporary debates.. Good references in Mick Moore’s paper - interested to dive on critical literature on ‘anti-rural anti-peasant strain of Marxian thought’.