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Anthropologist: Investors need to understand the tribal nature of banking culture

Published on January 26, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology

Can anthropology help us to understand the current Wall Street crisis? Of course. Anthropologist Gillian Tett is an assistant editor of the Financial Times. “It is undoubtedly an unusual background for a financial journalist”, she writes:

Indeed, whenever I reveal my strange past today, bankers usually either react with horror (what does she know about finance?) or incredulity (why would anyone spend years studying Tajik goat-herders?). But a decade later, my years in Tajikistan are suddenly starting to look a whole lot more useful.

For one thing that anthropology imparts is a healthy respect for the importance of micro-level incentives and political structures. And right now these issues are becoming critically important for Wall Street and the City, as the credit crunch deepens by the day.

One of the important issues is the culture of power:

(G)roups such as Citi or Merrill appear to have developed a more hierarchical pattern, in which the different business lines have existed like warring tribes, answerable only to the chief. Moreover, the most profitable tribe has invariably wielded the most power – and thus was untouchable and inscrutable to everyone else. Hence the fact that, in this tribal culture, nobody reined in the excesses of the structured finance teams at Citi and Merrill.
(…)
(W)hat is crystal clear is that if you want to understand which banks will emerge as winners from the current mess, it is no longer enough to look at their computer systems and balance sheets. Now, more than ever, investors need to understand a bank’s culture too – and the degree to which it is tribal. As I said, a training in Tajik anthropology is suddenly looking very useful.

>> read the whole article in The Financial Times

>> Steve Portigal comments on this piece

Gillian Tett has also written Office Culture – good overview about corporate anthropology

>> more pieces by Gillian Tett

Can anthropology help us to understand the current Wall Street crisis? Of course. Anthropologist Gillian Tett is an assistant editor of the Financial Times. "It is undoubtedly an unusual background for a financial journalist", she writes:

Indeed, whenever I reveal…

How anthropological research can reduce the paper usage in offices

Published on November 15, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, technology

(Links updated 14.2.2025) Another example of anthropologists in product development: As a consequence of anthropological research, Xerox is developing a new kind of paper where the printed information simply disappears within about 16 hours, allowing the paper to be reused.

Why this? Xerox-anthropologist Brinda Dalal, an anthropologist at Xerox, found out that 21 percent of copier documents ed up in the recycling bin on the same day they are produced. In most offices, paper is used as a medium of display rather than storage. Paper is only only printed out or copied when needed for meetings, editing and annotating, or reading away from a computer. The result is, of course, an enormous quantity of waste paper and environmental problems.

>> read the whole story on ZDNet

Actually, the New York Times wrote about this self-erasable paper one year ago. They called anthropologist Brinda Dalal for “garbologist”. She told, she was surprised by the results: “Nobody looks at the ephemeral information going through people’s waste baskets.”

>> Some papers by Brinda Dalal

Timo Veikkola – The Anthropologist as Future Specialist at Nokia

“The science of ethnography is an ideal tool to designing mobile phones”

Anthropologists find out why we (don’t) buy organic food

Ethnography, cross cultural understanding and product design

(Links updated 14.2.2025) Another example of anthropologists in product development: As a consequence of anthropological research, Xerox is developing a new kind of paper where the printed information simply disappears within about 16 hours, allowing the paper to be reused.…

American Anthropological Association opposes collaboration with the military – Bloggers react

Published on November 12, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, ethics

A few days ago, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) decided to oppose the embedding of anthropologists in military teams (HTS) in Iraq and Afghanistan. The use of anthropological knowledge in the U.S. military and the militarisation of anthropology has been the most discussed topic among anthropologists this year.

We read:

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association concludes (i) that the HTS program creates conditions which are likely to place anthropologists in positions in which their work will be in violation of the AAA Code of Ethics and (ii) that its use of anthropologists poses a danger to both other anthropologists and persons other anthropologists study.

Thus the Executive Board expresses its disapproval of the HTS program.

In the context of a war that is widely recognized as a denial of human rights and based on faulty intelligence and undemocratic principles, the Executive Board sees the HTS project as a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds. We have grave concerns about the involvement of anthropological knowledge and skill in the HTS project. The Executive Board views the HTS project as an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.

To facilitate discussion on this subject, the AAA has created this blog as a forum for members to post comments regarding the Executive Board statement and related issues. Currently, their first and only blog post about the Board statement has 64 comments!

It was fascinating to see how quickly the anthropological blogosphere reacted. Short time after the publication of the statement, the first blog posts appeared:

L.L. Wynn at Culture Matters summarizes the statement and the first reactions.

Alex Golub, Savage Minds sounds enthusiastic:

The statement clearly (in my humble opinion) shows the influence of SM (Savage Minds) and the anthropological noosphere more generally on the AAA exec board and every reader, commenter and Mind should be proud to see that this is really a case of our community forming a ‘civil sphere’ that can inform AAA decision making.

I am blown away by the quality of the comments on the AAA blog, as well as the fact that they are published by professors writing in their own name. This is the first time I have seen the anthropology professoriate as a professoriate. I hope that the AAA blog become a major site in the anthropological noosphere.

Kambiz Kamrani, anthropology.net is not so happy about the decision and summarizes some criticisms.

One of the most detailed commentary can be found on the blog Open Anthropology by Maximilian Forte. After having read through over 60 comments on the AAA blog he wrote the post Empty Scholasticism at its Best on the AAA Blog. See also his comment Politics and Ethics: Anthropologists and Human Terrain Systems.

Futhermore, Forte noticed that the AAA still has job adverts for the HTS by the U.S. military on its website (see an example). “This should be a source of embarrassment for the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, although thus far there is little indication of any”, Forte writes.

UPDATE (17.11.07):“The AAA disapproving of HTS is unfortunate, U.S. militrary anthropologist Marcus Griffin writes. “Anthropology will have failed to take advantage of an important opportunity to make a difference in the world”. >> continue reading on his blog (link updated)

Urban anthropologist: "Recognize that people want to come to the big cities"

Published on November 12, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, development empowerment, Latin- and Central America, poverty

(LINKS UPDATED 21.9.2020) More and more people live in mega cities. Rather than fixating on investing in the countryside, donor agencies need to recognize that people want to come to the big cities. And rather than demolishing squatter developments one should integrate these self-made communities into the surrounding neighborhoods, anthropologist Janice Perlman said in a lecture according to Multi Housing News.

The cities whose populations are expected to increase the most Mumbai, Lagos and Mexico City etc) are according to the anthropologist also the least equipped to handle the massive influx of people. The world’s slums will likely become even more massive in scale, and this, in turn, will hinder the ability of many cities to be truly sustainable. However, according to Perlman, there are steps that can be taken now to avoid an ecological disaster.

The anthropologist is the founder and executive director of the Mega-Cities Project, a transnational nonprofit network that strives to aid urban dwellers around the world. It concentrates its efforts to make cities more socially just, ecologically sustainable, politically participatory and economically productive.

>> read the whole article in the Multi Housing News

According to the Megacities website, Perlman is about to finish a book on the dynamics of urban poverty in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The book’s working title, Marginality from Myth to Reality: Favelas of Rio de Janeiro, 1969-2005 is based on field research she has done over that period of time. This study documents what has happened to the original study participants of her 1969 research which became the classic book, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Politics and Poverty in Rio de Janeiro (UC Press, 1976).

She explains:

As a young graduate student in 1968-69, during the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship I lived in three favelas in Rio de Janeiro and interviewed 250 residents in each.
(…)
I discovered that the prevailing stereotypes of favela residents (which I termed the myths of marginality) were “empirically false, analytically misleading and invidious in their policy implications” — as they were used to justify the eradication of favelas. My book created a paradigm shift from “blaming the victim” to recognizing migrants as highly motivated urban pioneers and from socio-cultural modernization theory to structural dependency theory.
(…)
How has life changed over the last three decades? (…) The answers are paradoxical. While the material condition of life has improved, the human condition has deteriorated. The fear of favela eradication has been replaced by the fear of being killed in the cross-fire between drug gangs and the police. Despite the return to democracy after the 20-year dictatorship, people feel more excluded and say they have less bargaining power than before; and despite community upgrading, the poor feel more marginalized than ever.

She has put online several papers on her research in Rio’s favelas, environmental justice and related issues.

>> visit the Megacities Project website

Cultural Backstreet Tours: Explore your town with anthropologists!

Anthropology of Trash: An anthropologist as garbage collector

Interview: Anthropologist studied poor fast food workers in Harlem

New journal: “Radical Anthropology” with David Graeber

Published on November 6, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, journal articles / papers, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, politics

David Graeber is one of the authors in a new journal called Radical Anthropology. The journal is available for free. You can download it as pdf-file. The journal follows Graebers vision of anthropology as an “intellectual forum for all sorts of planetary conversations” that makes “common cause with social activism for the sake of human freedom”.

The first issue consists of two essays

David Graeber: Revolution in reverse
The idea of radical change today seems unrealistic.Why?

Camilla Power: Religion as spectacle
Richard Dawkins may think it’s just a delusion, but religion had amore interesting evolutionary role than that.

The journal is edited by The Radical Anthropology Group that was founded back in 1984. Many members are active in indigenous rights movements and combine academic research with activist involvement in environmentalist, anticapitalist and other campaigns.

>> download the first issue of “Radical Anthropology

>> previous publications by The Radical Anthropology Group (lots of papers!)