Jane Guyer - The gift that keeps on giving

Discussion of Mauss' Gift by:
Jacob Copeman, Kostas Retsikas, Jonathan Parry, Maurice Bloch, Keith Hart

Money and its redemption

Speaker(s): Dr Laura Bear, Professor David Graeber, Professor Bill Maurer
Chair: Reverend Dr Giles Fraser
Recorded on 7 May 2015 at Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House
Can “bad money” be made good? Leading economic anthropologists will debate the morality of money, philosophies of philanthropy, and the lure of redemption.

Laura Bear is Associate Professor of Anthropology at LSE.

David Graeber (@davidgraeber) is Professor of Anthropology at LSE.

Bill Maurer is Professor of Anthropology and Law at UC Irvine.

Giles Fraser (@giles_fraser) is a Priest, former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral and Guardian columnist.

Listen here

Malcolm X on Violence

Victims of Violence are Accused of Violence... by ellvispresley

1963 'Open Mind' - Race Relations in Crisis

Given the contemporary U.S. climate, I thought this might be appropriate...

Malcolm X, Alan Morrison, Wyatt Tee Walker and James Farmer participate in an open round debate on the PBS show "Open Mind". Original air date: June 12, 1963.



Malcolm X at UC Berkeley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTOn8JtN4c0

Religion and Law: John Witte

The Social Life of Money - Nigel Dodd; response: Keith Hart

Supplement: Thomas Piketty and David Graeber have a discussion here

Alain Badiou - Towards a Contemporary Conception of the Absolute

Lesebühne extra: Towards a Contemporary Conception of the Absolute - Vortrag von Alain Badiou from Volksbühne Berlin on Vimeo.

John Searle on Consciousness as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology

Malcolm X debate with James Baldwin in 1963

Gayatri Spivak - Humanities and Development

My comments on the lecture here

The Right to Die

On Assisted Suicide in Scotland

Chomsky on Moral Relativism

Watch the Foucault-Chomsky debate here (with link to transcript)

Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment 



"the Zimbardo study sheds the harshest light of perhaps any research ever done on the nature of power and its pervasive corruptive powers.

From the standpoint of the guards, the pathology of power led them to exert an “unprecedented degree of control” that was “self-aggrandising” and “self-perpetuating.”  Prisoners in the real world want to wrest back some of this control by any means necessary, and so when released, they “will take action to establish and assert a sense of power.”

While in prison, though, the loss of personal identity and control led  the prisoners to adopt the pathological prisoner syndrome a reaction that took several forms of coping strategies.  They went through stages from disbelief to rebellion; when these didn’t work, they tried to work the system (the “grievance committee”). When those efforts to gain control failed, it was every man for himself as each tried to find ways to preserve their own self-interests and identity. For some, this meant further rebellion and for others it meant becoming excessively obedient, even to the point of siding with the guards against intransigent prisoners.

Zimbardo and his co-authors hoped that the emotional and human price of the study  would provide a model for improvements in the penal system as a whole.  You might not agree with his conclusion, but it’s a thought-provoking one, so I’ll offer it here: “… since prisoners and guards are locked into a dynamic, symbiotic relationship which is destructive to their human nature, guards are also society’s prisoners.” "

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201307/the-rarely-told-true-story-zimbardo-s-prison-experiment


Zimbardo also wrote a book called 'The Lucifer Effect', which focused on why good people do bad things. The book is based on his famous Stanford Prison Experiment and his experience as an expert witness in the Abu Ghraib trial against an "all-american" prison guard.