Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World OrderHarry G. West, Todd Sanders Duke University Press, 17. apr. 2003 - 316 sider 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. |
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... Nigerian Popular Print and Electronic Media MISTY L. BASTIAN 65 " Who Rules Us Now ? " Identity Tokens , Sorcery , and Other Metaphors in the 1994 Mozambican Elections HARRY G. WEST 92 Through a Glass Darkly : Charity , Conspiracy , and ...
... Nigeria , of judicial and police complicity in dirty dealings may be articulated in the form of accusa- tions of " ritual murder " directed at elite social classes ( Bastian , chapter 2 ) . At the same time , conspiracy ideas in America ...
... Nigerian modernity ( Bastian 2001 ) ; Chinese modernity ( Lee 1999 ) ; and so on . To imagine the world in this way is to problematize a host of previously assumed dichotomies , including those between tradition and modernity , be ...
... Nigeria - of popular readings of the global IMF dis- course of economic transparency . In the case that she describes ... Nigerian people . " Through her class - centered analysis , Bastian treats Owerri residents , not as homogeneous ...
... Nigerian state risked exposing , not only criminal elements , but also state complicity in criminal phenomena , as is the case anywhere the state finds itself tightly bound up with the social forces- whether organized crime or ...
Indhold
Gods Markets and the IMF in the Korean Spirit World | 38 |
Diabolic Realities Narratives of Conspiracy Transparency and Ritual Murder in the Nigerian Popular Print and Electronic Media | 65 |
Who Rules Us Now? Identity Tokens Sorcery and Other Metaphors in the 1994 Mozambican Elections | 92 |
Through a Glass Darkly Charity Conspiracy and Power in New Order Indonesia | 125 |
Invisible Hands and Visible Goods Revealed and Concealed Economies in Millennial Tanzania | 148 |
Stalin and the Blue Elephant Paranoia and Complicity in PostCommunist Metahistories | 175 |
Paranoia Conspiracy and Hegemony in American Politics | 204 |