Kalb grew up in the municipality of Eindhoven. Born into a family of cigar and textile producers, the significant development Eindhoven experienced in the 1960s, catalyzed by the growth of the Phillips Corporation headquartered in the city, influenced Kalb to take up anthropology as a method of investigating what he describes as "the complexity, unevenness, and inequality" latent in the city's expansion.[2]
Kalb's work has addressed numerous topics including globalization, nationalism, labor history, and class.[8] While he is known as a Marxist anthropologist, Kalb's scholarship has often utilized historical evidence in addition to or in lieu of fieldwork, leading to him having been described by historian Michael Hanagan as "an anthropologist, equally at home with historical methods and debates".[9] His empirical work has been mainly on economic transformations, class, and popular and political culture in Europe, in particular the Netherlands and Central and Eastern Europe.
Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850–1950
In Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850–1950, Kalb examines 20th century social and economic developments in the Brabant region of the Netherlands through a case study of the region's predominately Catholic working-class families. Following E.P. Thompson, Kalb develops what he describes as a relational approach to class that attempts to explain worker quiescence through an analysis of the Brabant region's cultural and social circumstances as well as productive relations.[9]Charles Tilly argues that the brand of relational analysis proposed in Expanding Class "incorporates some coercion and pays considerable attention to culture, but resolutely rejects both functional and competitive accounts of inequality. Kalb centers his explanation on continuously negotiated social relations. His investigation thereby provides a promising model for further anthropological work".[10]
Kalb is the founding editor of anthropology journal Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology,[8] as well as the current FocaalBlog editor.[11] Focaal focuses primarily on intersecting anthropological and historical debates examining local case studies within a global context. According to the journal's website, Focaal advocates for "an approach that rests in the simultaneity of ethnography, processual analysis, local insights, and global vision".[12]
Carrier, James G.; Kalb, Don, eds. (2015). Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice, and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1107087415.
Kalb, Don; Halmai, Gábor, eds. (2011). Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. EASA Series. Vol. 15. Oxford: Berghahn Books. ISBN978-0857452030.
Kalb, Don; Tak, Herman, eds. (2006). Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. Oxford: Berghan Books. ISBN978-1845450298.
Kalb, Don; van der Land, Marco; Staring, Richard; Van Steenbergen, Bart; Wilterdink, Nico, eds. (2000). The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN978-0847698851.
Selected articles
Kalb, Don (2013). "Financialization and the capitalist moment: Marx versus Weber in the anthropology of global systems". American Ethnologist. 40 (2): 258–266. doi:10.1111/amet.12018.
Kalb, Don (2012). "Thinking about neoliberalism as if the crisis was actually happening". Social Anthropology. 20 (3): 318–330. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2012.00215.x.
Visser, Oane; Kalb, Don (2010). "Financialised Capitalism Soviet Style? Varieties of State Capture and Crisis". European Journal of Sociology. 51 (2): 171–194. doi:10.1017/S000397561000010X. hdl:2066/90377. S2CID145206501.
Kalb, Don (2009). "Conversations with a Polish populist : Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in postsocialism (and beyond)". American Ethnologist. 36 (2): 207–223. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01131.x.
Kalb, Don (2015). "Introduction: class and the new anthropological holism". In Carrier, James G.; Kalb, Don (eds.). Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice, and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–27. ISBN978-1107087415.
Kalb, Don (2014). "Class". In Nonini, Donald M. (ed.). A Companion to Urban Anthropology. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. pp. 157–176. doi:10.1002/9781118378625.ch9. ISBN978-1444330106.
^"Financialisation". Research Department 'Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia'. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Retrieved November 11, 2017.
^ abHanagan, Michael (1999). "Reviewed Work: Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, the Netherlands, 1850-1950 by Don Kalb". Journal of Social History. 33 (1): 217–219. doi:10.1353/jsh.1999.0022. JSTOR3789484. S2CID142772931.