A “bleg” or whatever: now that the Iraq war is ending and we have the decidedly unambiguous left-wing Occupy X— protests, what is the sense of today’s society people have? Is it still a network society a la Castells? Does Luhmann provide the necessary cues for studying global society? Or is the strangely personal character of the “global village” handled best by Hardt and Negri? My observation is that there is something of a “new anthropology” when people try to understand the situation of a place like Greece – there is less “we all put our pants on one leg at a time” rigmarole than in the post-communist era; we want to establish national epistemes that enable us to forego ‘sympathetic but concerned’ judgment of the kind the demands of the enrages compel, even from a left-wing standpoint.

Comments strongly desired – I’d like to get clearer about this sort of thing.

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