Loomnie

I just read Jonathan Elendu’s brief summary of what happened to him. It is so sad that this can go on in Nigeria. It is really, really, very sad. I insist, like I did in the previous post I wrote on the topic, that the federal government of Nigeria needs to tell us what transpired. We need to know why Mr Elendu was arrested, held without trial, kept in solitary confinement, and why everything he came into the country with is still being held. In short, we demand that all information about this incident be made public. The list of countries that clamp down on internet journalism is a rather unattractive one. I would not want to have Nigeria on that list.

And, I join my voice to the voices of freedom-loving persons to say Free Jonathan Elendu Now!

In the concluding paragraph of the story:

So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

The story is here….

… a socialist an insult? Why is the idea of redistribution such an anathema that an utterance of ‘spreading the wealth around’ is described as a gaffe, one to quickly run away from? Why does a country with so much income-disparity and rising inequality squirm at the idea of fairness? Why does Mr John McCain accuse Mr Barack Obama of wanting to be ‘fair’ by redistributing wealth? And why does Mr Obama have to defend himself against this ‘accusation’? A blogger says that Mr Obama is the latest victim of MacCathysim. These are really confusing times…..!

I have now decided to learn to play the sax. I am a great jazz music lover, and I have put off learning to play an instrument since. Now, I decided that I could start it. Not like I never really tried to learn an instrument. I tried my hands on the flute a while ago but it didnt work out too well between us, partly because I didn’t have the right teacher, and partly because I wasn’t really motivated. Yes, the idea of playing a flute was appealing, but I guess the instrument itself didn’t do it for me. Now, I know it is a cliche for a jazz lover to learn to play the sax but who cares? One of my colleagues helped me take the first steps by lending me her old tenor sax – great thanks to her, really. A good Yamaha beauty costs a lot, just Google it – and I will buy mine in a couple of months into the lesson. The next step is to get an instructor. Well, I have started by doing what any self-respecting internet-savvy guy does: Google around. Discovered a couple of sites. Most of them try to sell me DVDs and guides etc etc, but I have decided to put that off for now. What I’m gonna do is to study the ones that are available for free online and then decide whether to go with the local €20 per lesson teacher in my town here or get a DVD/study guide, or do both. We’ll see, really.

Yeap, the fact that I am blogging about this shows how much excited I am about this. I will not let it go the way of the flute.

I am sort of a late-comer to the news about the arrest of Mr. Jonathan Elendu of Elendu Reports. This is a sad development indeed, especially as it comes when we are still trying to reconcile our image of a benevolent Yardy with the incedents that surrounded the closure of Channels TV. This latest development shows that there might be an emerging pattern. We should not let this slide. We should not only demand that Mr Elendu be released, we should also demand an explanation of what transpired from the federal government. Otherwise, this leads to the dangerous conclusion that Nigeria is losing the one thing that has often been reported in the international press about Nigeria – the relative freedom of the press.

For more on this issue please see:
Nigerian Curiosity
Waffarian
Sokari
Ayobami Ojebode

From a post written by Kerim Friedman at Savage Minds, I learnt that Paul Krugman, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, had reposted an autobiographical piece he wrote in 1992 on his blog. I went over there and got the piece. After reading it many things came to mind, a lot of which has been dealt with at the Savage Minds post (also see the comments). One thing that jumped out was Krugman’s interest in the ‘suggestive special cases’. Hear him::

The process works like this: start with an informal verbal story, often one drawn from casual empiricism or from non-mainstream economic literature. Then try to build the simplest possible model that will illustrate that story. In the course of the model-building the story tends to change along with your intuition, but at the end of the process you have a simple model that is a very special case, but that makes a lot of intuitive sense and effectively gives you a language to discuss things that previously were off limits.

I could not resist comparing this to what anthropologists do, not when he wrote that he liked working from ‘suggestive special cases’. It seems, however, as if the interest in case studies is where any similarities end. I thought about the problem with model building. I know that the issues we deal with as anthropologists are certainly different from the issues economists deal with, but I still can’t shake off the urge to call attention to my feeling that anthropologists don’t quite like models. It seems like we most often seek to complicate things, to add more ‘variables’ to the mix, because we understand too well how difficult it is to ascribe causality. In other words, Krugman’s goal of searching for the simple model is almost the direct opposite of what anthropologists do.
I remember discussing, recently, with a colleague who thinks that anthropologists let themselves be held back by too much detail, so much so that they are unable to contribute so much to policy formulation. I guess this post comes partly as a result of that discussion.
Comments please!

Some months ago Jeremy recommended The Wire to me, describing it as anthropological. I just finished watching the last episode of the last season, and being an anthropologist myself, I have to agree that this looks pretty much ethnographic. HBO is known for their good shows. Hell, the last piece of TV that I really enjoyed was from them: Six Feet Under. And I just learnt that they released a TV movie not too long ago on the recount of the 2000 presidential elections in Florida. The movie is called Recount and the good Doctor Mark Kermode describes it as really good. By the way, he is the best movie critic.

I guess all I’m saying is that if you want to see one good piece of good TV please let it be The Wire. This has cushioned my landing in Germany; work begins in earnest on Monday. And thanks for this, Jeremy.

Contrary to “popular knowledge”, a new book suggests that China took a turn for the worse in the 90s. You might want to read MIT’s Yasheng Huang‘s book Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. Or, if you are really busy – like me – you might start with/settle for the review of the book by The Economist. I strongly resist digging into the review here. You are best served reading the review yourself.

After 10 months in West Africa (Nigeria, Bénin, Togo), I am back in Germany. I did not have much time for blogging during the 10 months cos I was moving around a lot, cos I did not have very reliable internet connection, and cos my work did not allow me to spend so much time on the internet. Looking back at the blogging I did in the 10 months I sometimes ask myself how I even had the time to do it. So, I hope things will improve on the blogging end, and that my work in Deutschland will proceed well. Great thanks to Oz, Solomonsydelle, Waffarian, Nneoma, and every other person who checked on me, but whose names I cannot remember at the moment. I appreciate your care and concern.

And to the general blogging community, you will hear from me soon.