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Harry G West - Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order - 9780822330240 - V9780822330240
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Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order

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Description for Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order Paperback. Through vivid ethnographic analyses, this book examines the 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. Editor(s): Sanders, Todd. Num Pages: 328 pages. BIC Classification: JFC; JHMP. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 231 x 156 x 23. Weight in Grams: 526.
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.

Contributors.
Misty Bastian, Karen McCarthy Brown, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Susan Harding, Daniel Hellinger, Caroline Humphrey, Laurel Kendall, Todd Sanders, Albert Schrauwers, Kathleen Stewart, Harry G. West

Product Details

Publisher
Duke University Press
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2003
Condition
New
Weight
525g
Number of Pages
328
Place of Publication
North Carolina, United States
ISBN
9780822330240
SKU
V9780822330240
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-50

About Harry G West
Harry G. West is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the New School University. He is editor of Conflict and Its Resolution in Contemporary Africa. Todd Sanders is University Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is coeditor of Magical Interpretations, Material Reality: Modernity, Witchcraft, and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa and Those Who Play with Fire: Gender, Fertility, and Transformation in East and Southern Africa.

Reviews for Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order
"There are few topics of more profound and immediate significance than transparency and conspiracy, the twin specters of contemporary globality. Harry G. West’s and Todd Sanders's collection displays the virtues of analyzing the particularities of experience in different places while, at the same time, treating this topic as one with general implications and transnational origins. This is what anthropology does best, and this group of essays does it very well indeed."—Rosalind C. Morris, Columbia University ”Transparency and Conspiracy connects with a central question presently before the field of anthropology and globalization studies: how to interpret the varied cultural forms which alienation from modernity is taking today.”—Don Robotham, City University of New York Graduate Center

Goodreads reviews for Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order


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