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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... tells the tale of a group of occult books publishing house editors who feed bits of rejected manuscripts into a micro computer that randomly reworks them into an all - encompassing conspiracy reaching across time and around the globe ...
... telling us how and to what ends , or whom these processes marginalize and what sort of world they inhabit ( Kearney 1995 : 553 ) . Detailed ethnographic accounts are , we believe , required to enhance our appreciation of the myriad ways ...
... tells us that his emerging interest in the topic was often greeted with raised eyebrows ( Brown 1997 ) . We can only speculate on the reasons for this . Anthropologists are , after all , social and political beings in their own rights ...
... - Pritchard found sense in Azande beliefs , but he tells us quite explic- itly that he did not believe in witches and oracles even if , as a good par- ticipant observer , he did consult oracles while in the 14 TODD SANDERS AND HARRY G.
... tells us , only once one ( erroneously ) assumes the existence of witches and the efficacy of oracles , once one ... tell us that ideoscapes of transparency fail to express Power Revealed and Concealed 15.
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 |