Kalb grew up in the municipality of Eindhoven. Born into a family of cigar and textile producers, the significant development Eidhoven 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. Kalb completed his MA in cultural anthropology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen in 1988 before finishing his PhD in social sciences at the Universiteit Utrecht in 1995.
Kalb's work has addressed numerous topics including globalization, nationalism, labor history, and class. 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". 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. 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".
Focaal
Kalb is the founding editor of anthropology journal Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, as well as the current FocaalBlog editor. 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".
