Description
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
Ethnographies of alienated, often occult, responses to economic globalization
About the Author
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
"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
Book Information
ISBN 9780822330240
Author Harry G. West
Format Paperback
Page Count 328
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 517g