Articles by: Bruce Kapferer

Author Biography:

Bruce Kapferer is Professor Emeritus, University of Bergen, and Professorial Fellow at University College London. He is a fellow of the Cairns Institute, and Director of the EU Advanced Project on Egalitarianism. He is a roving anthropologist and ethnographer with an extensive research background in Africa, India, Sri Lanka and Australia.

The Trump Mediation

What Sinclair Lewis had warned in It Can’t Happen Here—a Hitler-esque rise to power at the centre of the democratic world—anticipated by all sides from the early days of Trump’s apotheosis, seemed actually to be materialising.

Informit: A Nail in the Coffin

Participatory capitalism replaces participatory -democracy In the Western hemisphere, the process of the transmutation of the nation state into a corporate state has numerous effects, the most crucial being the decline of liberal democracy. The populace as a whole comes to have less say in the circumstances of its existence and state institutions are reduced in their function for citizen interest.

Informit: The cuckoo in the nest

Societies worldwide are in crisis. At this historical juncture in the turbulent course of the West, processes indicative of radical social and political change are in play, possibly of epochal significance. The current crisis (or historical moment of critical transformational intensity) is indicated by a swath of technological innovations, the accumulation of personal wealth on a scale never before seen, new forms of class domination accompanied by deepening impoverishment and socioeconomic inequality, extraordinary population displacement…

Ideas on Populism, by Bruce Kapferer

That Trump should inhabit this space [of social media] and make regular use of it indicates a new era of populism as a force of more or less constant pressure on political realities.

Informit: Ideas on populism: The wildness of democracy and emergence of the corporate state

When Hillary Clinton attempted to counter Trump and his supporters' populist attacks by explicitly branding them a 'basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamaphobic - you name it' she was hoist on her own petard. The chant 'Lock Her Up' ('Drain the Swamp') drew its enormous potency from her alleged corruption and from her being a figurehead of the ruling Washington elites who have leached the American state's democratic egalitarian idealism. Calling Trump and his…

Trump: Totalitarian Individualism, by Bruce Kapferer

Bruce Kapferer

23 Jan 2017

Wall Street has effectively been repositioned in Vegas.