Utopian World Championship

MR CYRIL BELSHAW: IN HIS OWN WORDS

In my high school years my economist father took me with him as an amanuensis when he studied the contemporary New Zealand Maori.. Then the war came and eventually I found myself in the colonial (yes colonial) service in the Solomon Islands. Those three years were a major coming of age event, which I will never regret. At that time I managed a Master's degree in economics.

But, as in the case of my theory of innovation, those influences came together as I enrolled to obtain my Ph.D. in the London School of Economics. I wanted to fuse economics and anthropology, I wanted to use that fusion to help explain and advance development and as time went on to use anthropology to explain phenomena and change in the world of complex societies. I retained too an interest in international, global, affairs,

From my ultimate base in the University of British Columbia I was recruited to work for ECOSOC and UNESCO and devoted a great deal of energy to national (Canadian) and international scholarly organisations. This involved me in the International Social Science Council and similar bodies. I became editor of the international journal Current Anthropology and at the same time President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. This enabled me, with Wenner-Gren Foundation support, to be in contact with, and travel to see, colleagues on most continents for a period of ten years.

Over these years and more my interest in the links between anthropology and public policy strengthened, In the seventies I refined a theory of innovation which was already present in my Ph.D. thesis and became addicted to it. Gradually the penny dropped. As I observed social change in the late twentieth century, and watched the public struggle with a their desire to get things right, and their frustrations at not doing so, I realized that there was little focus. Publishers even said to me "The reading public is not interested in the future, only in immediate solutions."

How wrong they were. I didn't believe it. The public needed a voice of optimism and a sense of direction. So I worked toward my idea of a 21st century Utopia, one which will come too late for me to see. My theory gave me the reason for optimism. The holistic world view of anthropology gave me the sense of systemic world organisation. My fortunate experiences - and some bad ones - focused attention on what I believed to be the issues. So, thanks to SOC Stockholm, here is a beginning result.

It now remains to complete the job, which, again thanks to you, I am stimulated to do.

Cyril Belshaw
Vancouver, February 2005

 

 

 

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