Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World OrderHarry G. West, Todd Sanders Duke University Press, 2003 M04 17 - 316 pages 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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 38
... Elections HARRY G. WEST 92 Through a Glass Darkly : Charity , Conspiracy , and Power in New Order Indonesia 5 6 ALBERT SCHRAUWERS 125 Invisible Hands and Visible Goods : Revealed and Concealed Economies in Millennial Tanzania TODD ...
... objective but also iden- tified its pursuit by states emerging from civil conflict as a precondition for continuing assistance . The staging of multiparty national elections in Power Revealed and Concealed in the New World Order.
... elections in coun- tries such as Cambodia , Guatemala , and Mozambique has been described as a necessary measure in the campaign to establish political transparency ( see also Dundas 1994 ; Scholte 1998 ) , as has the establishment of ...
... elected transnational bureaucracy and an international elite that might dic- tate its governing objectives . Callers to talk radio shows across America ar- gued that the United States should not pay its membership dues to the United ...
... elections . West suggests that the voting process was presented to Mozambicans as a vast material metaphor wherein ... election workers found Muedan elders reluctant to reg- ister . West suggests that this was not because these elders ...
Contents
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 |