Tag Archives: James Ferguson

Battle Hymn of the Research Experts (circa 1959)

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The poem was published anonymously in the Northern Rhodesian Journal (in present day Zambia) in 1959.

Some talk of race relations, and some of politics,
Of labour and migrations, of hist’ry, lice and ticks,
Investments, trends of amity
And patterns of behaviour
Let none treat us with levity
For we are out to save ‘yer.

When seated in our library-chairs
We’re filled with righteous thought’ho,
We shoulder continental cares

Tell settlers what they ought to,
We’ll jargonize and analyse
Frustrations and fixations,
Neuroses, Angst, and stereotypes
In structured integration.

Strange cultures rise from notes and graphs
Through Freud’s and Jung’s perception
Despite your Ego’s dirty laughs
We’ll change you to perfection,
We’ve read Bukharin, Kant, and Marx
And even Toynbee’s stories
And our dialect’cal sparks
Will make exploded the Tories.

Rhodesians hear our sage advice
On cross-acculturation,
On inter-racial kinship ties
And folk-away elongation,
On new conceptual frame works high
We’ll bake your cakes of custom,
And with a socialising sigh
We’ll then proceed to bust ‘em.

Our research tools are sharp and gleam
With verified statistics,
Our intellectual combat team
Has practiced its heuristics
From value judgements we are free,
We only work scientific
For all-round global liberty
and Ph.D.s pontific.

Source: Jim Ferguson’s must read Expectations of Modernity, p. 30

Quick Hits

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1. Lunch with the FT: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

2. Blattman on Russian politics, and other stuff.

3. Tyler Cowen asks a rather odd question….  “Are anthropologists better than you think?” My simple answer is yes. I wish it were possible for everyone in the world working in development to take Jim Ferguson’s Economic Anthropology graduate seminar (or simply read this book), or David Laitin’s Political Culture class which includes works from brilliant anthropologists, both old and new. Plus my better half and a few close friends are anthropologists; and I can tell you from first hand experience that once you get through the jargon the field emerges as the mother social science [although in characteristic fashion none of the anthropologists I know would ever admit this].

4. Governance is hard. And now it is ISIS’ turn to find out.

5. 50 Shades of Poor: Who exactly qualifies as “middle class” in Congo?

Development Experts and Their Biases

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It is perhaps uncontroversial to suggest that World Bank staff have a different worldview from others. World Bank staff are highly educated and relatively wealthier than a large proportion of the world. However, it is interesting to note that while the goal of development is to end poverty, development professionals are not always good at predicting how poverty shapes mindsets. For example, although 42 percent of Bank staff predicted that most poor people in Nairobi, Kenya, would agree with the statement that “vaccines are risky because they can cause sterilization,” only 11 percent of the poor people sampled in Nairobi actually agreed with that statement. Overall, immunization coverage rates in Kenya are over 80 percent. There were also no significant differences in the responses of Bank staff in country offices and those in headquarters or in responses of staff working directly on poverty relative to staff working on other issues. This finding suggests the presence of a shared mental model, not tempered by direct exposure to poverty [emphasis added].

That is an excerpt from the World Development Report 2015, the section on the biases of development professionals.

One hopes that the problem highlighted by the last line is not crowded out of President Kim’s agenda at the Bank by the ongoing cost-cutting. And in case you were wondering, I don’t think flying coach and no breakfast will cut it since airports and the Mamba Points of this world are beyond the reach of most poor people. Speaking from experience, the development “expert” bubble is real, and enduring. We definitely need to do more to burst the bubble.

If field country offices are mere extensions of DC, then many development projects will continue to be variants of the proverbial solar cookers decried by Jim Ferguson in the Anti-Politics Machine. And everyone will continue to run around in circles.

Some Readings in Economic Anthropology

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Perhaps in a subconscious attempt to distract myself from writing my dissertation prospectus I am currently taking an Economic Anthropology class [and loving it] with Jim Ferguson, author of Expectations of Modernity, among other famous works in Economic Anthropology.

The class has a fascinating reading list that includes works like Debt (by the anarchist David Graeber) and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, among other works in economic anthropology and general anthropological ethnography.

Over the past week we read Karen Ho’s Liquidated, a captivating ethnography of Wall Street, outlining how the recruitment, orientation and work experience of Wall Streeters give them both a false sense of being one in the market and a misguided belief that the real economy is just as liquid as Wall Street.

Reading the book gives one a better understanding of why Wall Street has no qualms with downsizing. Turns out they downsize a lot on the street, to the extent that it is only natural to them that the real economy ought to operate that way as well. It was one of  the most interesting ethnographies I have ever read (out of the five I have read thus far; most of them from some remote part of the world).

Watch this space for more takes on the class reading list as the quarter progresses….