Why do we have different currencies and why do they differ in value?

Because you can then sell and buy money, which will make it a product instead of a mere measuring system or labour and value. And because every product in the market has a price, if you sit at the source of money manufacturing, the banks,  you can manipulate the price of money and, ipso factum, you will control all prices for everything. Consequently, the more things around are monetised/commodified, the deeper and wider it this control by way of money. 

BTW, up to 85% of world trade are futures: promises to guarantee against the risks of possible fluctuations between currency exchange rates of money that  have ever only existed as flickering digits in a computer. 

QED

Global South vs. Western Canon

This is an epistemologically flawed political project. First they denounce Orientalism: there's no Other, we're all same humans. But then they say but The Global South is different and cannot be understood by outsiders.  So essentially, it's self-Orientalisation now re-branded in the Global South packaging. If you push for universalism, stay consistent at least about the basics and think through how you are going to resolve your logical fallacies.

Besides, any theory without empirical evidence is unfalsifiable arm-chair pontification. It cannot be proved neither right, nor wrong:and hence has nothing to do with science. Theory need to be grounded on studying a particular object by applying a particular method to it. Both the object and the method should be laid open and clear for critical scrutiny. When the object is something as vague as "culture" (in fact, ANYTHING) and the only method is Homi Bhabha-style projectile verbal vomiting, the critical scrutiny is but one likely guess against another, and the resulting theory is not worth the paper its written on.

Food and wholesomeness

Imagine all that negative energy around those celeb kitchens, and then you have to eat food "blessed" with a few dozens 'fucks' and a few dozen 'shits'.

"Why do celeb chefs love to swear as they cook when the "negative energy" that goes with it can be imparted in it making the food less wholesome than if cooked with love?"

Because food in restaurant marketing is commodified and thus acquires a monetary value, which is the raison d'etre of the whole shebang. You can't commodify "energetic wholesomeness" and hence it has no market value and, ipso factum, does not "exist" for the participants of the above-mentioned shebang.

English grammar and social theory

Being able to speak correctly your mother tongue and knowing its grammar are totally different kettles of fish. The former is acquired by virtue of growing up in a certain linguistic environment, the latter is a an abstract skill that takes a substantial educational effort. The difference is the same as between experiencing gravity since your birth (animals do that too!) and being able to explain it in words (takes some education in Physics, far from everyone does that).

Many of my students, British kids from solid middle-class backgrounds, never get to learn English grammar at school, which, in my opinion, deprives them of the chance to develop a level of abstract thinking required for university students, to realise that apart from the obvious, superficial level of existence, there's a structural level, which may not be visible, yet is extremely important to be aware of. Such kids invariably struggle with learning social theory, because it takes grasping exactly that level of abstraction.

When I talk to their parents who, thanks to having enjoyed a more "old-fashioned" kind of education, do happen to know the difference between an adjective and a noun, I realise, on the micro-level, what the educational trend for replacing training in critical and abstract thinking for learning a trade to "finish school, get a job and pay taxes" is doing to this society. People who can't access reality critically, who can't see beyond the obvious or what they are told, become a docile flock that can be duped into literally anything: mindless consumerism, media-instigated xenophobia, unnecessary wars, giving up on hard-earned civil liberties and labour rights, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Just look around and see for yourself.

Sheeple, get a clue!

Sick and tired of people whose only idea of the world is the latest propaganda soundbite they caught from a news presenter reading whatever shows on the autocue cooked up by some spin doctors overpaid by their corporate employers to guide the public opinion to legitimise whatever self-serving political turn the present ruling party makes to continue "dividing and ruling" their clueless electorate who keep turning to news presenters for opinions

Deindividuation and deindividualisation in racialised context

Deindividuation, in plain English, is when individuals turn into a mob. Deindividualisation is when you paint a social group as a homogeneous slab whose members allegedly have no individual characteristics, like "Muslims", or "African-Americans", or "gays", or even "women". 

Neither is a pretty thing. The herd instinct is behind Nazi rallies, lynching, and Black Friday stampedes. Ostracising social groups is Divide and Rule 101, an age-old technique of cynical mass control.

The two can cross-pollinate selectively. That's when it turns really ugly. Thus, London riots of 2011 became racialised as "ethnic minorities going out of hand", and the perpetrators get meted out 1800 years of prison sentences.  On the other hand, drunk college jocks rampages or the Bullingdon club's violent antics are written off as "boys going wild". The class, race and increasingly religion-centred prejudice make out essentially the same events as if radically different in nature.

In essence, that's what anthropologists do too, just from the other (left-wing) side of the same paradigm. The psychological aspect of mob behaviour often escapes social scientists, who look for all answers in social contexts, as if individuals do not exist. Unfortunately for anthropologists, the tireless paeans of cultural difference, some things are just really "universal human nature". Dismissing that fact precludes any meaningful understanding of social events: humans are reduced to the reductive Homo Anthropologicus, a perennial cultural group actor, put into action by collectively shared beliefs and rituals differing based on class, gender, or ethnicity.

Public debt and questions about it

Just when we thought the global public debt stood at a paltry 55 trillion... US federal unfunded liabilities have amounted to 127 trillion.

Yet the questions still stand: TO WHOM is all this owed? HOW was all that money created in the first place? WHAT is the future of all this debt?

Markets are not a natural, impersonal force like rains or earthquakes

From a recent article by the Economist on what happens to countries when they default on their debt: "As punishment for default, capital markets will either impose punitive borrowing rates or refuse to lend at all."

It is made sound as if it were a natural force, a kind of passive tense without an actor, a force majeure of impersonal justice. We must, however, remember that what is made out to be an "invisible hand of the market" is in fact a bunch of people who by arbitrary controlling the value of the main exchange currency, the US dollar, hold nearly the entire world hostage: the 55 trillion that the world owes, as if to an impersonal natural force, is not even paper. It is digits in a computer, whose value is created out of nothing by the fact of borrowing. 

When Russia has recently lost half of its currency value, nothing happened to its real, physical assets, instead an imagined value went down RELATIVE to another imagined value controlled not by some impersonal and disinterested forces, but by a number of private profiteers, seeking nothing but personal gain at the expense of the welfare of whole nations. However, because the imagined value of digital money is used to measure the value of physical assets, control of the former allows a full control of the latter. It is as if someone had the right to decide, at their will, how many grammes are in the kilogramme: today 800, tomorrow 1200, and then buy and sell gold according to those values.