- Convenors:
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Oana Mateescu
(Babes-Bolyai University)
Jeremy Rayner (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
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- Discussants:
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Don Kalb
(University of Bergen)
Xenia Cherkaev (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Sharryn Kasmir (Hofstra University)
Geir Henning Presterudstuen (University of Bergen)
Natalia Buier (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract
This roundtable on Don Kalb’s Value and Worthlessness (2025) explores fascism as a recurrent capitalist value-regime and asks how anthropology can confront devaluation while reclaiming “value” as a critical, historical tool for understanding worth, waste, and resistance in polarized times.
Long Abstract
In an age of ‘hyper-political’ polarization, this book-roundtable stages Don Kalb’s Value and Worthlessness: The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism (2025): How does an anthropology of value speak in a postsocialist world amid creeping fascism? The book’s central wager that value and worthlessness are historically co-produced through the contradictions of capitalism— Marxian “webs of life” rather than idealist “webs of meaning” - invites us to ask: how do uneven and combined regimes of accumulation, extraction, and moral economy continuously generate and regenerate hierarchies of worth and waste? How might the concept of value—and the practice of anthropology itself—be recast when the “other side” of value becomes mass devaluation: of territory, labor, dignity, entire populations?
Fascism is read here not as a ‘cultural vocabulary’ or regionalist pathology, but as a recurrent value-regime condensing the politics of devaluation. How can anthropology confront such formations (without retreating into relativism or despair)? What kind of anthropology do we produce in an effervescent and polarized world? Can we salvage value as a critical, portable, and historical concept? As a multiscalar dialectical tool to understand process and outcomes? Does the book successfully demonstrate the added value of combining ethnography with history and theory?
This roundtable invites scholars to engage with: (1) the politicisation of worthlessness; (2) global/local fascism as a recurrent capitalist value-regime; (3) the call for a Marxian historical anthropology as an insurgent practice fighting within and against the lived ruins of value.
[Commission on Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology]