Gustavo Lins Ribeiro holds his Ph. D. in Anthropology (City University of New York, 1988). He is currently a full Professor of Anthropology in the University of Brasilia; Level 1A Research Fellow of Brazil’s National Council of Scientific and Technological Develoment (CNPq). He was a visiting professor in several universities and research centers in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and the U.S. He has done research and written on topics such as development, environmentalism, international migration, cyberculture, globalization and transnationalism. His doctoral dissertation on the construction of the Yacyreta Dam won the National Association of Graduate Programs in the Social Sciences 1989 Prize for the Best Doctoral Dissertation and was published in Argentina, Brazil and the United States. He has written and edited 14 volumes in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and more than 100 chapters and articles in different journals and books in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the U.S., in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Japanese, French and German. He was a member of the Advisory Council of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (New York); Advisory Editor of Current Anthropology (Chicago); president of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology; a founder and the first chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations. He is a co-chair of the Committee on World Anthropologies of the AAA and serves on more than 20 editorial boards of journals in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, including the American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropology Today, Journal des Anthropologues and Alteridades. His last books are the edited volume (with Arturo Escobar) “World Anthropologies. Disciplinary Transformations in Systems of Power” (Oxford/New York: Berg Publishers, 2006) and “The Capital of Hope”, in Portuguese, about the construction of Brasilia from the workers’ point-of-view (Brasilia: Edunb, 2008).

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Elisa Reis is a professor of Political Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She holds her PhD in Political Science (MIT, US 1980); MA (1972) and BA (1967), Brazil; Post-graduate diploma in development sociology, ILADES, Chile (1968). Professor Reis is a fellow of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) as well as a visiting professor at University of California at San Diego, Columbia University, MIT and Ludwig Maximilians Universitat. Munich.

Author of more than 100 articles in Brazilian and international periodicals, some of her latest work includes “New Ways of Relating Authority and Solidarity: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations”, in The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology, Kalekin and Denis (eds.), Sage, 2009. Among her books, Elite Perceptions of Poverty and Inequality (ed. with M.Moore) Zed, 2005 has been very influential in poverty studies.

Some of Professor Reis’ selected administrative experiences include Secretary of the Brazilian Sociological Society (SBS), President of the National Association for the Social Sciences (ANPOCS), Vice-president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (current), Chair of the Interdisciplinary Research Network for Studies on Social Inequality (NIED) (current), and Vice-president for Latin America of the Comparative Research on Poverty (CROP).

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Europeans just cannot seem to get Islam, or more properly, Islamism, out of their heads. This seems to be particularly true of Europeans who have not spent much time in the Islamic world, and whose idea of immersion journalism is to spend an afternoon wandering round an immigrant neighbourhood in the European capital city of their choice with a view to chatting up a few swarthy-looking men over a cup of mint tea.

And even some more serious writers have ended up falling into the same trap over the last few weeks. Take Timothy Garton Ash, for instance, whose reporting of the decline of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe in the 1980s was exemplary in its combination of in-depth research and first-hand experience. In a series of articles in The Guardian, Garton Ash has been greeting the wave of insurrections sweeping across the Arab world with a wall of worry. In his latest piece, published last week, a visit to the Calle de Tribulete in Madrid plunged him into new depths of anxiety.

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The economy teetered on the brink but did not fall into the abyss. The bailouts, the stimulus, and adequate international political comity —each imperfect, even ugly—nevertheless prevented what was otherwise very likely: another Great Depression.

But the collective sigh of relief and overconfident pronouncements emanating from Wall Street and Washington obscure the fact that we have done little to avert an even worse crisis in the future. We may have stanched the bleeding, but the underlying disease—a culture, ideology, and political economy of uninhibited finance—remains. Indeed, by tiptoeing around the real issues we may ultimately make things worse.

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One of the most interesting organizations to come out of the crisis is the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which is dedicated to “fresh insight and thinking to promote changes in economic theory and practice.” I attended its first conference in April 2010. The mood was optimistic. Rational expectations theories, the efficient markets hypothesis, capital account openness, Ricardian equivalence, were all on the chopping block. The book of the conference was Skidelsky’s The Return of the Master. We were all Keynesians now, again…for about eight months.

Then came the ECB June 2010 Monthly Report that raised the specter of ‘Ricardian consumers’ and ‘expectation effects,’ while the G20 meeting that same month (coincidence?) focused attention upon ‘Growth Friendly Fiscal Consolidation’ and the overwhelming need to reduce debt. Led by the UK (whose net debt-to-GDP ratio was at that time was below the Maastricht threshold) the voices of orthodoxy quickly regrouped and triumphed. Austerity and belt-tightening gained traction as the advocates of a reinvigorated Keynesianism shifted their sights from dismembering the neoclassical corpus to simply maintaining the legitimacy of spending under any circumstances.

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The current crisis is twofold: it affects Wall Street and Main Street — that is, both finance and the real economy. It has also been accompanied by a sharp decline in trade. The reasons for this decline — manifested not only in absolute trade volumes but also in the decline of trade to national income (GNP) — involve factors other than protectionism, which has been held at bay in several ways. This fact makes Niall Ferguson’s pessimism seem alarmist.

Given that the ratio of trade to GNP rose strikingly in the decades of growing incomes prior to the crisis, one might expect that it would decrease during a recession in which incomes and consumers demand are on the decline. There are two reasons that explain this reverse phenomenon. First, product components increasingly are outsourced to other parts of the world and then assembled in one place. Thus, even if the value of the final product changes little, the trade in components needed to manufacture that product will rise.

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A few years ago, when I was still teaching at the University of Chicago, I had my first Chinese graduate students, a couple of earnest Beijingers who had come to the Committee on Social Thought hoping to bump into the ghost of Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish political philosopher who established his career at the university. Given the mute deference they were accustomed to giving their professors, it was hard to make out just what these young men were looking for, in Chicago or Strauss. They attended courses and worked diligently, but otherwise kept to themselves. They were in but not of Hyde Park.

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Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos is Associate Professor of Sociology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She gained her Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research, New York, in 1994. Her research interests relate to collective memory, sociological and cultural theory. She is currently developing research on collective memory and trauma in prisons. Her publications include several books and articles on social theory, museum exhibits, popular culture, carnival festivities, slavery, race relations and, more recently, violence.

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Jorge Castañeda was Foreign Minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003. He attempted to run for President of Mexico as an independent candidate in 2006. Castañeda is a renowned public intellectual, political scientist, and prolific writer, with an interest in Mexican and Latin American politics, comparative politics and US-Mexican and U.S.-Latin American relations.

Born in Mexico City in 1953, Dr. Castañeda received a B. A. from Princeton University and a B. A. from Université de Paris-I (Pantheon-Sorbonne), an M. A. from the Ecole Pratique de Hautes Etudes, and his Ph. D. in Economic History from the University of Paris-I.

He taught at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) from 1978 through 2004, at Princeton University, and the University of California, Berkeley and (since 1997) at NYU. Dr. Castañeda was a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1985-87) and was a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant Recipient (1989-1991).

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