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Book review: The deep footprints of colonial Bombay

Published on August 4, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, history, poverty, Us and Them

Three Women of Mumbai. Photo: Steve Evans, flickr

Antropologi.info book reviewer Tereza Kuldova has read another book for us.

“One wonders how little has changed”, she writes in her review of The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920 by historian Prashant Kidambi. The book is in her opinion “a great read also for any urban anthropologist, not only for historians who are the main target group”.

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The deep footprints of colonial Bombay

Review: Kidambi, Prashant. 2007. The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920. Ashgate

Tereza Kuldova, Ph.D. student in social anthropology, University of Oslo

At times, when you read about old Bombay, about the ‘lost’ times when ‘Bombay’ was not ‘Mumbai’, you are faced with idealized narratives of a golden era, now long gone and mourned. A picture of Bombay is painted in which people of diverse religions, classes, castes and live harmoniously together; it is a picture of a conflict-free era, where rules and obligations are followed and mutual respect prevails.

It is then only refreshing to read an account of colonial Bombay (1890-1920) that confronts us with a much more realistic picture. A picture of Bombay struck by two global pandemics, as well as by episodes of collective violence. A picture of Bombay, where the ruling elites try to handle the ‘unintended city’ – a result of industrialization and intense immigration – and its issues of sanitation, slums, famine, plague, riots, order and criminality.

Divided by caste, class and religion

Reading Kidambi’s account, it becomes obvious that, as he himself says, the imagined ‘ideal’ Bombay is “essentially an exercise in ‘historical fantasy’ that elides over the extent to which the city has always been divided by caste, class and religion” (236). If one has some knowledge of contemporary Mumbai, reading this book makes one realize how little has changed and how deep footprints have the colonial rule left in today’s Mumbai.

Prashant Kidambi’s inquiry into the urban history of Bombay manages to grasp the dynamics of urban change at the same time as it catches the reader’s attention – and that even though the wealth of historical detail can be overwhelming.

He focuses on three decades in which, in his own words, “the city was restructured in accordance with the dictates of modern urban planning and intrusive modes of governance were deployed in response to the challenges posed by rapid industrialization and massive labor migration” and in which “the city became the site of a vigorous associational culture and ‘modernizing’ social activism that infused its civil society with new dynamism” (p. 9).

Prashant Kidambi argues, that the city was a ‘contested terrain’, shaped as much by acts of resistance as by the operations of power (p. 12). Contrary to the “widely entrenched perception that the norms and practices of civil society were solely internalized by the Anglophone intelligentsia and were more or less alien to the cultural worldview and dispositions of the lower orders” (p. 14), the lower strata of society actually took part in the associational civility, the civil society of the emerging Bombay (pp. 157-202).

An interesting part of the book, particularly for an anthropologist such as me, is the discussion of the urban middle class formation in colonial India in relation to the concepts of ‘social reform’ and ‘social service’ and the way in which middle class became formed by these practices.

The distinction between ‘social reform’ and ‘social service’ is I believe useful in this respect. Kidambi argues that “while ‘social reform’ during the late nineteenth century had largely denoted the internal attempts at ‘self-improvement’ within particular castes and communities, the emergent discourse and practice of ‘social service’ articulated by members of the high-status Anglophone intelligentsia was directed at the destitute, the downtrodden and the disadvantaged” (p. 15).

A leading cosmopolitan commercial center

Kidambi’s account of the colonial Bombay is centered around several topics. Firstly he introduces the reader to the rising city of Bombay, a city that had by 1860 “become, after New York and Liverpool, the largest cotton market in the world” (p. 18) and that “by the last decade of the nineteenth century (…) could justifiably lay claim to being a leading commercial and financial center” (p. 23), where a “highly cosmopolitan culture amongst the business elites” (p. 24) developed. At that time “Bombay was also home to a nascent, but dynamic, English-educated Indian middle class comprising lawyers, doctors, engineers, businessmen, journalists, teachers and clerks employed in mercantile and government offices. This middle class was a product of colonial policies that dated back to the second quarter of the nineteenth century” (p. 26).

The growth of Bombay as a business and industrial center also “attracted a large, predominantly male, proletarian population”, which “found employment in the cotton-textile industry” (p. 29). However, the “city’s modernization had resulted in ‘two Bombays’, the one inhabited by a cosmopolitan elite that nestled in the fashionable enclaves of the city, the other full of chawls, crowded, insanitary, ill-ventilated slums and filthy lanes, stables and godowns” (p. 36). (One wonders here, how little has changed, when in today’s Mumbai 95% of its population lives on 5% of its space and the richest 5% occupies 95% of the land).

Diseases and segregation: Urban poor as threat

Overcrowding, slums, sanitary issues, disease, increased criminality, all these were the issues that increasingly kept the colonial administration preoccupied. And in 1896 this was only to get more intense as the plague epidemic attacked Bombay.

The plague and its handling by the administration becomes another interesting topic. Kidambi argues that “for nearly a decade after the initial outbreak in the city, long-standing assumptions that viewed epidemic diseases as a product of locality-specific conditions of filth and squalor exercised significant influence over the colonial state’s war against plague” (p. 50).

These localist perceptions meant that the policies were aimed at sanitary regeneration of the city, cleaning of the infected areas, their evacuation or eventual demolition. Furthermore a notion that Kidambi labels as “contingent contagionism” has developed, which could be summarized as follows: “If plague was a disease either generated by, or nurtured in, filth and squalor, many officials argued, it followed that Bombay’s poor who resided in ill-ventilated, overcrowded tenements would be more susceptible to its ravages. This, in turn, buttressed the belief that it was the poor, rather than the ‘respectable’ classes, who were the ‘natural’ bearers of contagion” (p. 64). “Consequently, the colonial state’s antiplague offensive was in large measure directed at segregating the urban poor, who were perceived as posing threat to the physical well-being of Bombay’s elites” (p. 70).

Shadow City – Dharavi, Mumbai. Photo: Akshay Mahajan, flickr

The next chapter deals with the Bombay Improvement Trust (1898), which was meant as a solution to the sanitary problems of the city; it dealt with the issues of town-planning, slum clearance, tried to expand the city’s residential area and provide sanitary housing for the poor.

Kidambi concludes that “(b)y the end of the First World War, it was widely acknowledged that the Bombay Improvement Trust failed to redress the civic problems that had led to its creation. On the contrary, most contemporary observers agreed that the Trust’s activities had worsened Bombay’s housing and sanitary problems” (p. 112). However, “notwithstanding the Trust’s failure to carry out the tasks for which it had been established, its policies has profound, albeit unintended, consequences for the development of Bombay’s spatial organization and social geography” (p. 113).

The emerging importance of the ‘street’

Kidambi goes on to discuss colonial policing strategies and control and regulation of the urban spaces and the perceived threats to urban ‘order’, particularly after the experience of two major riots in the 1890s. He presents an interesting discussion of the emerging importance of the ‘street’ and the life of and on the street and in neighborhoods.

“The street was the principal locus of working-class social life and recreational activities ranging from akharas (gymnasia) and tamashas (street theatre) to the liquor shops where many workers congregated after work” (p. 121).

He concludes that in the 1890s “the traditional colonial strategy of ‘indirect’ control began to give way to a more intrusive approach vis-à-vis the urban neighborhoods and the emergent plebeian public sphere. The 1902 Police Act vastly enhanced the discretionary powers of the police over a range of ‘public’ activities and urban spaces that had hitherto been unregulated. Their newly consolidated powers, in turn, increased the scale and dimension of conflict between the colonial police and the populace. Consequently, the relationship between the colonial administration and plebeian society in Bombay grew markedly fractious in the years leading up to the end of the Great War” (p. 155).

Mumbai at night. Photo: Premshree Pillai, flickr

Towards the end of the book, Kidambi takes on topics such as the emergence of the civil society in Bombay and the involvement of particularly the English-educated elite and middle class in various educational, scientific, religious and social reform oriented associations.

He concludes that “the rich diversity of associational activity within Indian civil society rendered its public sphere a ‘segmented’ domain in which the fashioning of the ‘autonomous, reason-bearing individual’ was offset by a countervailing process ‘through which community identities were reworked and reaffirmed’. It also invested urban public culture in colonial India with an intrinsic plurality and polyphony that has continued to inflect its post-colonial career” (p. 201).

The last chapter of the book is devoted to the question of social reform and social service and the social activism of Bombay’s intelligentsia directed at the uplifting of the depressed classes. These efforts of the educated middle and upper classes were both integral to the process of nation building and also had the effect of strengthening “the claims to public leadership of the educated middle class during the first two decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the First World War, educated men were able to tout their credentials as the ‘real’ leaders of the citizenry far more confidently than during the late nineteenth century” (p. 231).

Relevance for today?

There are several things that I have been missing in the book (but that may be likewise a general problem with the genre of historical accounts).

The book deals with a period of three decades (1890-1920). Except for a brief note in the conclusion there is no reflection on the effects of these three decades on the later developments. One is simply left to conclude on one’s own. It feels as if relating to present days or even decades following the three decades under thorough investigation, would not be rigorous enough. I would prefer at least some reflections, that would give the reader a sense of continuity and change and put things into a broader context of events that followed and issues that Mumbai is faced with now. This would turn a historical narrative, largely of interest only to specialists, into a reading of relevance for a much broader audience.

Another thing that at times bothered me was what I experienced as a continual struggle of the author to give the account an appearance of factuality, of presenting matters ‘as they were’ and the very little space left to polemics with one’s own material and the works of others. This appearance of an authoritative account is greatly supported by the referencing system that uses footnotes at the bottom of each page (and not references directly in the text) and by the use of single quotes for both quotations from other’s works and archival materials and author’s own expressions in ‘quotes’. This is not very lucky as the reader very often looses track of who says what.

Nevertheless, reading this book was enjoyable and would be definitely a great read also for any urban anthropologist, not only for historians who are the main target group.

>> information about the book by the publisher (Ashgate)

>> read the first chapter of the book (pdf)

>> read another review: Bombay on the brink of modernity (Hans Schenk)

>> Article by Prashant Kidambi: ‘The Ultimate Masters of the City’: Police, Public Order and the Poor in Colonial Bombay (Crime, Histories and Societies 2004)

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Three Women of Mumbai. Photo: Steve Evans, flickr

Antropologi.info book reviewer Tereza Kuldova has read another book for us.

“One wonders how little has changed”, she writes in her review of The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture…

The world’s only anthropology professor of indie music?

Published on July 15, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, Europe, music

Arctic Monkeys @ Explanda del Estadio Azteca. Photo: monophonic.grrrl / Mariel A. M., flickr

“Ask the indie professor” is the name of a new series in the Guardian. The indie professor in question is Wendy Fonarow. At a music festival she was recently introduced as “the world’s only professor of indie music”.

“I’m not sure if I’m the only indie professor, but I’ve spent the last 18 years recording, examining and writing about the culture of indie and the international music industry”, Wendy Fonorow writes in her opening post. Her book “Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music” tackles questions such as “Why are drummers the most ridiculed band members?”, she adds.

The readers of this new series are invited to ask questions. “So if you are curious about why cassettes are the new vinyl, or whatever else takes your fancy, here is your chance to ask”, she writes. “And please someone ask me about why Americans think they invented indie.”

After one day, there are already more than 250 comments.

The Guardian presented her book two years ago.

Here is what she according to the Guardian writes about indie culture and religion:

“Religious narratives show up in all expressive forms, from politics to music. I see a lot of the religious narrative of Puritanism in the indie music scene; the idea that, to have the pure divine experience, it has to be direct and unmediated. So the smaller and more intimate a show is, the ‘truer’ fans believe their experience was, compared to someone who saw them later on in a bigger venue. That’s why so many people claim to have seen the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club. You can also find the aesthetic of Puritanism in the way indie people present themselves, such as childlike clothing, this idea of returning to the golden age of childhood or the musical past.”

Or here about music as ethnicity:

One of my ex-students once said ‘music is my ethnicity’. People want to find other people who are like-minded so instead of finding their ethnic identity through birth they find it through aesthetic preferences and that becomes their identity. For each one of those music movements, there are modes of display. Desmond Morris talked about how different earrings can signify where you are in the age grade of certain tribes in central Africa. To outsiders these displays are subtle or hard to notice at all.”

Interesting! But it seems the anthropologist is extremely fond of theory and might tend to over-analyse her informants. Here is how the Guardian begins the presentation:

Remember that time you were crowd surfing at an Arctic Monkeys gig and thought you were just having a drunken laugh? Rubbish! You were, in fact, being “collaborative in a unique social space, expressing super-intimacy with strangers and rejecting the self-aggrandising that comes with stage-diving”. Oh yes you were. And that time you were standing at the bar and thought you were just, well, thirsty? Not at all: you were probably just “proving your credentials as an industry professional” or “communicating to others a disinterest in the act”.

These are the theories of professor Wendy Fonarow, anthropologist at UCLA in California and the author of Empire Of Dirt: The Aesthetics And Rituals Of British Indie Music.

Her book has received a lot of positive reviews, while Pichfork reviewer William Bower is less convined by the book and its language. Check also Wendy Fonarow’s website at http://www.indiegoddess.com/

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Arctic Monkeys @ Explanda del Estadio Azteca. Photo: monophonic.grrrl / Mariel A. M., flickr

“Ask the indie professor” is the name of a new series in the Guardian. The indie professor in question is Wendy Fonarow. At a music festival…

“Encouraging to see a Muslim anthropologist studying American society”

Published on June 14, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, Northern America, religion cosmology, Us and Them

Days and weeks before the launch of the new book by anthropologist Akbar Ahmed called Journey into America: the Challenge of Islam, it was already reviewed in major Pakistani newspapers. “Usually it is Western anthropologists who study Muslim societies. It is encouraging to see a Muslim scholar returning the compliment by studying American society”, Maleeha Lodhi writes in The News.

Accompanied by several researchers, Akbar Ahmed travelled for a year to over 75 cities across the U.S., meeting a diverse array of people and visiting more than a hundred mosques.

After (too?) much research on muslim issues and media focus, it seems that eveything has been said. But his book does not seem to be one of those numerous studies on “the integration of immigrant women”. His book is also an ethnography of today’s America.

In an article in the Guardian, the anthropologist writes that he “realised that it was impossible to study Islam in America without studying America itself and its identity.”

This “reinterpretation of the competing influences that have shaped American identity” is, writes, Maleeha Lodhi, “fascinating”:

Americans, Ahmed says, need to make a choice between the concept of the country fashioned by its Founding Fathers – universal, pluralist and tolerant – , or the post-9/11 vision “which is aggressive, self-centred and suspicious of, if not hostile to, “the other”:

He traces the first and dominant primordial identity to the original white settlers of the 17th century. Fashioned by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) settlers, this vision of a society based on justice and a rule-bound charter was however exclusionary, meant only for Christians, not Native Americans or those who were forcibly brought from Africa.

From that period also emerges a secondary identity from the pluralist tradition. This foreshadows the vision of the country’s Founding Fathers based on equality between and respect for all citizens, democracy, religious freedom, and rejection of slavery.

Dr Ahmed identifies a third identity with origins in the 17th century. This is the predatory identity which unleashed an aggressive impulse that saw Native Americans as heathens who had to be eliminated. It also justified slavery. This established the notion of zero tolerance: that any threat to society had to be permanently decimated by the full use of force. Compassion was seen as weakness and compromise as defeat.

This identity, Dr Ahmed argues persuasively, asserted itself in the post-9/11 period when America under Bush embarked on two wars and a path that saw it compromising its own laws and ideals and justifying torture and Guantanamo in the name of protecting the nation. The invasion of Iraq, the Patriot Act and secret detention centres were all actions consistent with the old predatory identity.

The book also includes a “thought-provoking comparison” between two founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, writes Rafia Zakaria in The Dawn. “Sadly it seems both Americans and Pakistanis are only too willing to eviscerate the commitments these two founding fathers made towards tolerance and religious pluralism.”

The anthropologist is according to Maleeha Lodhi “just as forthright in identifying the weaknesses and problems in the Muslim diaspora”. He distinguishes between three traditions: mystic (Sufism, emphasises universal humanism), modernist (balance modernity with religion) and literalist (Salafis, adhere strictly to tradition) and concludes that “modernist Muslims have provided neither leadership nor a critical mass to change the community, while mistakenly dismissing literalists as being of no consequence.”

In order to “recreate the community’s self-image and extricate it from persistent identification with 9/11 and terrorism”, Muslim American leaders need to look to the African American community. he recommends.

According to the reviewers (somehow I have the impression they’re a bit too positive…), this is a well-written book, and Daily Times reviewer Mahjabeen Islam even things it will be the “talk of the town“.

For more information see the book blog at http://journeyintoamerica.wordpress.com/ and the first chapter (pdf) as well as Ahmed’s posts at Huffington Post

Anthropologist Maximilian Forte continues his analysis of the “predatory” elements of American culture in his recent posts on Zero Anthropology, among others Team USA at the 2010 FIFA World Cup: Motivation Unthinkable without the Military and Militainment: U.S. Military Propaganda in the News Media, Hollywood, and Video Games

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Polynesian Tattoos and Public Anthropology

Published on April 24, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, art, books, culture traditions, Pacific Oceania

Public anthropology does exist. There are lots of anthropologists who write for the wider public and not only for other anthronerds. Here’s another example: The Polynesian Tattoo Today by Tricia Allen, doctoral candidate in anthropology at the university of Hawai’i.

In an interview with Honolulu’s Star Bulletin, she explains:

“The first book did well; it is now in its third printing. Its primary readership was those with a specific interest in Hawai’i and history. The new book will reach a larger audience, as it is far more general — covering all of Polynesia — and is primarily photographs. Anyone can enjoy looking at beautiful photos of artful bodies!”

The book was not launched in a traditional academic way with a seminar. The publishers hosted a “Tattoo Contest”. Tricia Allen and several Polynesian tattoo artists were “on hand to autograph books — or your arm”.

Allen is by the way not only anthropologist but tattoo artist herself and has tattooed over 8000 members of the Polynesian community. She completed her Master’s thesis at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 1992 on the early practice of tattooing in the Marquesas Islands. For her doctoral thesis, she is researching the revival of the arts in the Pacific. “In the last few years a pan-Polynesian style has gotten incredibly popular”, she says.

>> read the whole story in the Star Bulletin

Her new book is already mentioned in several blogs and forums like Twistedprints, Honolulu Magazine, and Tattoosday.

“Many tattoos featured in the book are a mixture of styles… Hawaiian, Maori, Samoan. Polynesian tattoos are increasing in popularity and many traditional designs have been revived”, writes M.L. Sanico i his review in the Hawaii Book Blog:

What I especially liked about the book is seeing the diversity of people who have these tattoos, and who are tattoo artists themselves. Each photo has a short caption with the person or tattooists name, where they’re from and a little bit about the tattoo or what it means to them.

In an earlier interview, Tricia Allen tells us more about the revival of Polynesian tattoos:

There is a revival of all of the ancient arts: tattooing, tapa making, weaving, carving, dance, chanting and firewalking. There is a whole resurgence of Polynesian culture, and tattooing is just a part of that. In my mind it is one of the most significant parts of the revival because it’s such a permanent statement: “I’m Polynesian.” And to some degree in many cases it is a political statement, or a statement of allegiance to the traditional culture.

Also check her own website with more tattoo infos and pictures.

The recent example of public anthropology was my blog post Anthropologist uncovers how global elites undermine democracy and one of the most read posts ever.

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Public anthropology does exist. There are lots of anthropologists who write for the wider public and not only for other anthronerds. Here's another example: The Polynesian Tattoo Today by Tricia Allen, doctoral candidate in anthropology at the university of Hawai'i.…

Anthropologist uncovers how global elites undermine democracy

Published on April 1, 2010 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, globalisation, Northern America

Janine Wedel has done something that far too few anthropolologists do: She studied powerful people. Those who rule the world.

In her book “Shadow Elite“, she shows how a new system of power and influence has taken hold globally, one that undermines democracy, government, and the free market.

Why went America to war against Iraq? More and more “government work” is performed by “shadow elites”: consulting firms, companies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks etc, rather small circles of powerful people (she calls them “flexians”) who use their interlocking relationships to control public policy without public input. “Flexians” work often for private interests, academia and government at the same time.

The flexians form “Flex nets”. They cannot be reduced to lobbyists or interest groups. They are according to a review in the Financial Times defined by four features:

1) personalizing bureaucracy, or using personal connections and loyalties to realize goals;
2) privatizing information while branding conviction, or branding the information available only to insiders in this game;
3) juggling roles and representations, or changing spots frequently, wearing the pelt of military leader one day, analyst the next, and concerned citizen the next;
4) relaxing rules at the interstices of official and private institutions, or adjusting accountability and rules that apply to one or more of their pelts from the safety of a seemingly non-aligned position.

One of those flexians is the retired US general Barry McCaffrey, who has been simultaneously a commentator for the media, a consultant to the defence industry and professor. According to a 2008 exposé in the New York Times, he was one of several former military men who helped to shape public opinion on the Iraq war, while simultaneously having undisclosed ties to the Pentagon.

Wedel’s book has received quite a lot of media attention since it was released earlier this year. It was book of the month at Huffington Post (where she has started writing a weekly column) and was also reviewed in mainstream media. She was interviewed both by BBC, Russia Today, MSNBC and Al Jazeera.

Riz Khan - Shadow Elite - 15 dec 09 - Pt 1

Riz Khan - Shadow Elite - 15 dec 09 - Pt 2

It would be interesting to know how she studied the “shadow elites”. Has she been on fieldwork? I haven’t read all her texts. But in her newest article in Huffington Post, she explains how she came to understand the game: through her experience studying the mechanisms of power and influence in post-Cold War eastern Europe for about 30 years:

(E)xamining eastern Europe up close–through its transformations away from communism over the last quarter century–has been excellent preparation for making sense of how a small group of power brokers helped engineer the invasion of Iraq, and more broadly, how a new system of power and influence has taken hold globally, one that, as I write in my book Shadow Elite, undermines democracy, government, and the free market.

In communist Poland, the necessity of getting around the state-controlled system created a society whose lifeblood–just beneath the surface–was vital information, circulated only among friends and trusted colleagues, information that was not publicly available. Under-the-radar dealings that often played on the margins of legality – this was the norm, not the exception.
(…)
I began to recognize a familiar (to me) architecture of power and influence. I started to follow the networks and overlapping connections in government, foundations, think tanks, and business of a tiny set of neoconservatives – just a dozen or so players I call the “Neocon core”.
(…)
The playbook of the Neocon core seemed to come straight from that of the top players of transitional eastern Europe. In both cases, players who already knew each other set up a host of organizations–organizations that seemed more like an extended family franchise than think tank, populated by the same set of individuals. (…) And despite a new administration in Washington, not to mention the damage done to their credibility since the Iraq invasion, the Neocon core lives on, because networks like it are self-propelling, multipurpose, and enduring.

And she adds that as a social anthropologist, her “focus is not on whether the U.S. should have invaded Iraq, but rather how that decision was made, who made it, and what mechanisms of power and influence were used to make it”.

Exactly!

And in Anthropology News february 2010 (pdf) she explains why we need an “ethnographic focus” on power:

I have concluded that an ethnographic focus is indispensable to sorting out power and influence amid transforming federal governance in the United States, not only under change-of-system conditions such as those found in transitional eastern Europe.

The ethnographic sensibility that enabled scholars of communist and post-communist societies to deal with the complexity, ambiguity and messiness of political and policy processes is ideally suited to examine the interactions between public policy and private interests and the mixing of state, nongovernmental, and business forms that are increasingly preva- lent in the United States and around the world.

By focusing on players and their networks as drivers of governing and policy decisions, these ethnographers have laid the groundwork for badly needed critiques of social science categories such as “state” versus “private,” “top-down versus bottom-up,” and “centralized” versus “decentralized.” They have provided a basis for reexamining conventional models that guide so much thinking about politics, policy and power, and yet obfuscate, rather than illuminate, the real system of power and influence.

Her work is a good example of public anthropology. Her website is really impressive. There you find a great amount of her publications, both newspaper articles and papers (even back to pre-internet and pre-computer times), a collection of book reviews, TV and radio interviews, interviews related to Shadow elites etc

It is popular to lament about the lack of public anthropology, but anthropologists have been highly visible in matters regarding global financial and power issues, see earlier posts Anthropologist Explores Wall Street Culture, Financial crisis: Anthropologists lead mass demonstration against G20 summit and Used anthropology to predict the financial crisis.

Studies on elites are still not as common as studies on marginalized people, though. This is not only true for anthropology. I have to think of a series of great programs at BBC Thinking aloud about white collar crime – a rather neglected topic among sociologists and criminologists as well.

Janine Wedel has done something that far too few anthropolologists do: She studied powerful people. Those who rule the world.

In her book "Shadow Elite", she shows how a new system of power and influence has taken hold globally, one…