Todd Sanders

Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order

Transparency has, in recent years, become a watchword for good governance. Policymakers and analysts alike evaluate political and economic institutions—courts, corporations, nation-states—according to the transparency of their operating procedures. With the dawn of the New World Order and the “mutual veil dropping” of the post–Cold War era, many have asserted that power in our contemporary world is more transparent than ever. Yet from the perspective of the relatively less privileged, the operation of power often appears opaque and unpredictable. Through vivid ethnographic analyses, Transparency and Conspiracy examines a vast range of expressions of the popular suspicion of power—including forms of shamanism, sorcery, conspiracy theory, and urban legends—illuminating them as ways of making sense of the world in the midst of tumultuous and uneven processes of modernization. In this collection leading anthropologists reveal the variations and commonalities in conspiratorial thinking or occult cosmologies around the globe—in Korea, Tanzania, Mozambique, New York City, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nigeria, and Orange County, California. The contributors chronicle how people express profound suspicions of the United Nations, the state, political parties, police, courts, international financial institutions, banks, traders and shopkeepers, media, churches, intellectuals, and the wealthy. Rather than focusing on the veracity of these convictions, Transparency and Conspiracy investigates who believes what and why. It makes a compelling argument against the dismissal of conspiracy theories and occult cosmologies as antimodern, irrational oversimplifications, showing how these beliefs render the world more complex by calling attention to its contradictions and proposing alternative ways of understanding it. Contributors. Misty Bastian, Karen McCarthy Brown, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Susan Harding, Daniel Hellinger, Caroline Humphrey, Laurel Kendall, Todd Sanders, Albert Schrauwers, Kathleen Stewart, Harry G. West

Buses in Bongoland Seductive analytics and the occult

It is now common for anthropologists to argue that the occult is adequately explained as an oblique, metaphysical critique of the now, the new, the neoliberal. Indeed, such understandings have come to form a deep-seated anthropological analytic. Yet while this analytic has proved productive, the explanations it invites often hinge more on theoretical expectation than empirical demonstration. This may disable the very politics and ethics anthropologists seek to engage, insofar as it renders redundant the real-world inequalities and forms of exploitation they seek to understand. This article considers this analytic in relation to Tanzanian buses and the devils alleged to inhabit them. To re-engage anthropologys critical politics and ethics, the article suggests that anthropologists pay sustained attention to historical processes, particularly, continuities. This requires we reconfigure some longstanding theoretical frameworks, lexicons, explanations and pre-theoretical commitments. The article concludes by providing some conceptual signposts to re-orientate projects on the occult.

Accountability and the academy: producing knowledge about the human dimensions of climate change

Calls for accountability and ‘impactful’ research are fundamentally reshaping the academy, giving rise to a large, critical scholarship on neoliberal regimes of accountability and their pernicious effects. But these calls also animate other institutional forms and practices that have received less critical attention. These include new forms of science that promise accountability through interdisciplinarity, collaborating with stakeholders, and addressing real-world problems. This article considers one example of such accountable science: human dimensions of climate change field research. This research endeavour has produced surprising results, including the uncritical adoption of controversial Euro-American ideas about traditional Others. In exploring how this has come about, the article considers how theoretical and disciplinary diversity are managed within this arena, and the organizing logics that enable climate sciences and scientists to work together. We ultimately argue that accountable science – like other neoliberal modes of accountability – can produce outcomes for which no one can be held to account.

The trouble with deficits

In their recent paper, “Misperceptions of climate-change risk as barriers to climate-change adaptation: a case study from the Rewa Delta, Fiji,” Lata and Nunn (2012) argue that “lack of awareness” and “cultural impediments ... such as short-term planning perspectives, spiritual beliefs, traditional governance structures” are barriers to climate change adaptation in Fiji’s Rewa Delta (p. 169). Understanding how vulnerable, often marginalized people can or will adapt to the future effects of climate change is a core concern of human dimensions of climate change scholars and the policy community more broadly. We thus feel obliged to point out that this paper has substantial methodological and conceptual shortcomings. These shortcomings seriously undermine the authors’ conclusion that public deficits, in their many manifestations in this paper, are barriers to climate change adaptation in the Rewa Delta. We begin with the methodological shortcomings by asking: Of whom can the authors legitimately speak? The study focuses on one urban (Nausori Town, population approx. 25,000) and one rural location (Vutia, population approx. 900, distributed across three villages) in the Rewa Delta, Fiji. 32 inhabitants from each location were selected for interview in a non-random manner (both samples were purposive, and apparently haphazard), rendering the authors’ generalisations to each population invalid. Equally troubling, one criterion for inclusion in the study—eligible participants had to have lived in the area continuously for at least 30 years—excluded 92 % of the rural population from the study. Those excluded were “foreigner” family groups, those who in the past 20–30 years had Climatic Change (2013) 118:501–504 DOI 10.1007/s10584-013-0750-3

FERTILITY'S FIRES AND EMPTY WOMBS IN RECENT AFRICANIST WRITING

NANCY ROSE HUNT teaches African history and anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Duke University Press, 1999) received the Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association in 2000. She is presently completing an anthropological history of violence, infertility and laughter in colonial Congo; and an edited bookIDVD video documentary project on gender, health and knowledge in contemporary Accra.

The pendulum swings

Comment on Bubandt, Nils. 2014. The empty seashell: Witchcraft and doubt on an Indonesian island. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.