Listen :
Availability:
Available to listen.
Last broadcast on Mon, 8 Nov 2010, 21:30 on BBC Radio 4 (see all broadcasts).
Synopsis
Andrew Marr talks to the Swedish poet, Lars Gustafsson about whether writers have a responsibility to challenge the establishment. Gillian Tett, the award-winning Financial Times journalist, who predicted the financial crash, does her own challenging of the status quo. The writer Patrick Wilcken describes the great intellectual Claude Levi-Strauss, as 'the poet in the laboratory' in a new biography. And Ed Vulliamy reports, in almost anthropological detail, on the lives of those caught up in the war of drugs, gangs and guns on the US-Mexican border.
Producer: Katy Hickman.
GILLIAN TETT
Gold has been a desirable commodity since the earliest civilisations and had become the recognised standard medium of exchange for international trade as early as 1500 BC. But this year the price of gold has soared to an all-time high. A surge in gold investment has pushed the price up by 54% in just two years. Gillian Tett, of the Financial Times, argues that the current gold mania is a sign of how faith in governments and banks has crumbled since the present global economic crisis began. When we don’t trust governments to honour their debts and protect the value of our money, we go back to basics – gold.
ED VULLIAMY
It’s been called ‘una herida abierta’, an open wound – the border between the USA and Mexico is more than two thousand miles long. A million people cross it every day legally, and many more brave the barbed wire and desert patrols to cross into the USA. Drug smuggling north and gun smuggling south continue unabated, despite government offensives both sides of the border. But it’s the nature and savagery of the violence in the border towns that has changed in recent years – more than two and a half thousand people were murdered in one town, Ciudad Juárez, in 2009. The journalist Ed Vulliamy reports on the new kind of narco wars that are devastating the area he calls, Amexica.
Amexica: War Along the Borderline is published by Bodley Head.
PATRICK WILCKEN
Claude Lévi-Strauss is known not only as ‘the father of modern anthropology’, but as the founder of structuralism. His structural analysis of kinship and myth in indigenous societies was revolutionary, and led to his iconic status as one of the post-war era's most influential thinkers. In the first biography of Lévi-Strauss in English, Patrick Wilcken traces the evolution of his ideas, showing how and why he captured the intellectual high ground from Camus, De Beauvoir and Sartre in the 1960s.
Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory is published by Bloomsbury.
LARS GUSTAFSSON
The work of the prolific Swedish poet, Lars Gustafsson is often ironic and contemplative, and not overtly political. And yet he argues at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival that it is a writer’s responsibility to challenge the establishment and hold authority to account. Lars Gustafsson talks to Andrew Marr about how being a poet is an act of subversion in itself.
Broadcasts
-
Mon 8 Nov 201009:00
-
Mon 8 Nov 201021:30
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~41~RS~){kind=small}