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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... 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 Power in ...
... popular mistrust of the state ( Banning 1978 ; Robertson 1971 ) . Today , however , conspiracy thinking is as vibrant as ever in the American popular imagination ( Fenster 1999 ; Melley 2000 ; Knight 2001 , 2002 ) . In his 1988 novel ...
... popular show necessarily believe in the Roswell conspiracy , but most have sufficient familiarity with , and tolerance for , such ideas to find entertain- ing and intriguing the show's many episodes exploring how state and supra- state ...
... popular media and literature , and it often takes the form of anecdotal storytelling devoid of rigorous ethnographic evi- dence . It is far too commonplace , in this literature , to speak in ill - supported generalities - to conjure ...
... popular culture to be silly and without merit " ( 1999 : 109 , n . 1 ) . Anthropologists might be expected to show more sympathy than social scientists working in other disciplines , but , even in a time when the discipline has embraced ...
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 |