"Value and Worthlessness is crucial for understanding the right wing populist backlash. Kalb shows that rather than disaffected voters having always already been fascists, sexists, and racists, our disastrous political present is the outcome of the failure of progressive political movements to protect people from the intertwined onslaughts of Big State and Big Finance." - Ewald Engelen, University of Amsterdam
"With the wit, verve, and intellectual rigor that we have come to expect from him, Don Kalb carves a path for an unapologetic, engaged, and interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present. In a set of superbly crafted research essays, he reanimates essential concepts such as realism, class, unevenness, dispossession, and devaluation, and applies them with great creativity to current-day political conflagrations including the rise of the reactionary right. Value and Worthlessness shows what we are really up against in our struggle for a more egalitarian world." - Jeff Maskovsky, City University of New York, Graduate Center
"This book is a masterful fugue. While unweaving anthropology’s ubiquitous focus on idealist “webs of meaning,” Don Kalb scrutinizes realist “webs of life” with an ostinato of class, labor, capital, and the contradictions of capitalism. In a world captured by the politics and scholarship of endless variations of culture and identity, a contrapunto of regimes of value and worthlessness could not have been more timely." - Ayse Caglar, University of Vienna
"Kalb’s work has profoundly shaped a whole new generation of East- ern European radical intellectuals who confronted the collapse of state socialism, predatory capitalism, the national-populist responses of the dispossessed, and ultimately the bloody wars. Kalb’s Marxist anthropology shows us how to use concepts of capitalism, class, and value for understanding the escalating poly-crisis, and to think about truly revolutionary alternatives in the “East,” “West,” and “South.” - Volodymyr Ishchenko, Free University Berlin
"In this trenchant manifesto for Marxist anthropology, Don Kalb shows just what the very best historical ethnography can do. Combining deep ethnography with personal reflection and theoretical ambition, this collection of chapters offers brilliant insights into theories of value, worthlessness, global capitalism, right wing populism, economic and political anthropology, and more." - Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge
"In this stunning map of capitalism today, Don Kalb bursts open a Marxist critique of anthropology for its fetishism of culture and an anthropological critique of Marxism for losing local specificity and contingency within the broad tendencies of capitalism. Kalb, thereby, brilliantly sets the scene for the pressures giving rise to populist authoritarianism." - Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley
"Value and Worthlessness synthesizes the original, courageous, and exhilarating work of Don Kalb as he crosses boundaries, insists on contingencies and process, and sharply clarifies concepts of value, financialization, class, and labor. A vital Marxist anthropology for the present." - Ida Susser, City University of New York, Graduate Center
Advocating for an interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present, this book uses historical and global anthropology to engage with history, theory, unevenness, and comparison, while using “global ethnography” and “hidden histories” as the keys to social discovery. Kalb’s anthropology of value and worthlessness lays bare the logics that currently produce right wing, populist, and nationalist outcomes. The book also battles with the “anthropology of global systems”, financialization, and the seductive myths of global middle-class formation, while assessing the theoretical legacies of Eric Wolf, David Graeber, David Harvey, Jonathan Friedman, Marcel Mauss and “moral anthropology”, among others.
Don Kalb is Professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway, and Academic Director of the GRIP program on global inequality (UiB/International Science Council, Paris). He is the Founding Editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology.
LC: GN345.15 .K35 2025
BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC026040 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Social Theory; POL042060 POLITICAL SCIENCE/Political Ideologies/Capitalism
available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from Trond Mohn Foundation (Bergen), University of Bergen, Government of Norway.
