Greed, desire and other historical stories

Social theory seldom puts emotions and bodily urges centre stage. Western philosophy has intellectualised human passions, explaining and justifying our expansive desires as ‘rational self-interest’. But a serious examination of what is considered ‘greedy’, or ‘needy’, in different contexts, brings us back not only to the body as metaphor, but also to the need to reintegrate biology and history.

Greed: gut feelings, growth, and history is a wide-ranging enquiry into how greed works in our lives and in the world at large. Life like dolls investigates the multi-million dollar business of collector dolls to develop insights into family, gender and generation in contemporary life.