Don Kalb's Book «Insidious Capital» Gets Top Prize
«The recognition goes to us all,» professor Kalb says.
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The book Insidious Capital: Frontlines of Value at the End of a Global Cycle, edited by social anthropology professor at UiB, Don Kalb, recently received the book of the year prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Work at the American Anthropological Association meetings.
«This is a compliment for developing a field of study, empirically and conceptually, over a long period of time with exciting results and at the top of the discipline. And not a compliment for me alone, but for the network of scholars we have been able to build globally over a long stretch of time, a small dozen of whom have participated in the Frontlines of Value project; a compliment also to the Department of Social Anthropology,» Don Kalb says.
Funded by TMF
The book is one of the collective outcomes of the Frontlines of Value research project at the Department of Social Anthropology at UiB. The project was funded by Trond Mohn Foundation’s Topforsk grant, and was wrapped up in 2023. Read more about the project here.
In a global perspective of fast-transforming social spaces that move from East to West, this book explores the struggles around the exploitation and valuation of labor, environmental politics, expansion of the ground rent, new hierarchies, the contradictions of higher education, the offshoring of 'immaterial' labor, the illiberal right, and the mobilizations against it.
Novel and Incisive
According to the prize committee, Insidious Capital was selected from among a remarkable set of nominated volumes.
The committee writes that «Insidious Capital is a timely intervention in key questions and debates concerning shifting regimes of value and labour, capitalist accumulation, and political economy. As edited volumes should, it synthesized numerous pressing concerns among anthropologists, as well as allied disciplines, and provided a novel and incisive theoretical framework. Each of the chapters of the volume extended these conceptual and theoretical insights through illuminating empirical analysis.»
Head of Department of Social Anthropology, professor Synnøve Bendixsen is delighted to congratulate Kalb on this prestigious recognition.
«By synthesizing pressing concerns in anthropology and beyond, and providing a novel theoretical framework, Insidious Capital stands out as a significant academic achievement. This recognition not only honors the hard work and dedication of my colleague and scholars in the Frontlines of Value project but also underscores the insightful research being conducted within our department. The prize committee's commendation highlights the book's timely and incisive intervention in critical debates surrounding value, labor, and capitalist accumulation – which is urgently needed in our current time,» she says.
Numerous Publications
Insidious Capital is a very special book, according to Kalb.
«The sort of book that you can only do when you can bring the right people together at the right moment and with sufficient time and resources. I had the precise outlines - but of course not the contents - of this book already in mind when we started in 2017, though we took it to a theoretical and methodological place, an anthropological version of value theory, that I couldn't have fully anticipated even though the value concept was in its title. The project produced more than 100 publications, several monographs, as well as the Routledge Handbook for the Anthropology of Labor (2022), altogether defining a good chunk of a field that is increasingly becoming known as the anthropology of capitalism,» he says.
Kalb emphasizes that he is very grateful to the Trond Mohn Foundation for their flexible and judicious approach to their grants and their grantees.