Description
Book SynopsisThrough 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.
Trade Review"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
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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
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Power Revealed and Concealed in the New World Order / Todd Sanders and Harry G. West 1
1. Gods, Markets, and the IMF in the Korean Spirit World / Laurel Kendall 38
2. "Diabolic Realities": Narratives of Conspiracy, Transparency, and "Ritual Murder" in the Nigerian Popular Print and Electronic Media / Misty L. Bastian 65
3. "Who Rules Us Now?" Identity Tokens, Sorcery, and Other Metaphors in the 1994 Mozambican Elections / Harry G. West 92
4. Through a Glass Darkly: Charity, Conspiracy, and Power in New Order Indonesia / Albert Schrauwers 125
5. Invisible Hands and Visible Goods: Revealed and Concealed Economies in Millennial Tanzania / Todd Sanders 148
6. Stalin and the Blue Elephant: Paranoia and Complicity in Post-Communist Metahistories / Caroline Humphrey 175
7. Paranoia, Conspiracy, and Hegemony in American Politics / Daniel Hellinger 204
8. Making
Wanga: Reality Constructions and the Magical Manipulation of Power / Karen McCarthy Brown 233
9. Anxieties of Influence: Conspiracy Theory and Therapeutic Culture in Millennial America / Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart 258
Transparent Fictions; or, The Conspiracies of a Liberal Imagination: An Afterword / Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff 287
Contributors 301
Index 305
