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
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... officials , representatives of international development agen- cies , and influential businesspeople gathered in Berlin to found Transpar- ency International , an organization committed to reducing bribery and other forms of corruption ...
... official pronouncements , at least somewhat opaque . Consider this : Safire links the rise in global - speak currency of the term transparency to the " mutual veil dropping " coming with the end of the Cold War . Once the Berlin Wall ...
... Official Spirits " to aid their clients . Koreans have always looked to the spirits with ambivalence , Kendall ex- plains , because they sometimes bring good fortune and sometimes bring disaster . The unpredictability of Official ...
... official investigation in Owerri might , as Bastian de- scribes it , be better understood as an attempt to cloak a violent underworld in a veil of transparency than as an attempt to expose it . Predictably , soon after the Owerri riots ...
... official symbols . The New Order state derived legitimacy under the specter of its implied antithesis , which Schrau- wers points out was not an Old Order but , rather , disorder . Even so , ram- pant corruption and abuse of state power ...
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 |