was published a couple of weeks ago. It is here, but I have pasted the full text below.

Thinking through kids
Olumide Abimbola

Act One
A couple of days ago I joined one of my friends to pick up his daughter at the kindergarten. This was the first time I was seeing her in close to two years; the last time I saw and carried her she was just about 4 months old. Of course, she didn’t remember me, so I had to find a way to charm myself into her favour. The first steps involved me smiling sheepishly, talking gently and offering my arms to her. She refused all the advances, despite the very hearty encouragement from her father.

We left the kindergarten and headed for a café, where my friend pulled out a lunch box filled with grapes. It was obviously something she loves very much. Still trying to get her attention, I took one of the grapes and offered it to her. She, as I suspected, refused. But then, something else happened that got me thinking about reciprocity and economic exchange. As I was trying to ingratiate myself in her favour without much success, her father gave her a grape to give to me. She collected the grape and passed it on. Then he gave me a grape to offer her; this time, she accepted it. From then on things went pretty smoothly.

What I took away from this has nothing to do with trust and child psychology, at least not directly. I realized that I just witnessed, from a child, one of the most cardinal things in human economic relations: reciprocity. At that moment, with that little girl, I realized that I was witnessing the early traces of that social characteristic of the human. I could not help but wonder – and this is the part where I need the help of child psychologists – when kids start putting a value to things, what values mean to them and how they relate to values.

Act Two
Another friend’s daughter made her parents promise to get her a Spider-man cake for her third birthday. But all these were to change just shortly before the birthday. Sometime between the day she elicited the promise from her parents and shortly before her birthday she changed her mind. She had just joined a kindergarten, where she learnt about the differences between what a boy should want and what a girl should want.

She learnt that she liked pink – something she did not know until she joined the kindergarten. She also found out that she wanted to be a princess. Her mother started getting requests concerning pink dresses for princesses. Boys were supposed to be knights. In fact, one of her male friends was waving a sword, slicing the air, when I met him. Of course, her relationship with Spider-man changed; she wanted a princess cake instead. She had learnt that Spider-man is for boys and princess for girls.

This got me thinking about how children are socialised by each other. Someone mentioned to me that children are very serious conformists, and that kids always strive to be like their mates, never wanting to unduly stand out. How many kids have quickly forgotten languages they acquired while living abroad because they are afraid that their mates would make fun of their difference? How many kids have joined in making fun of other kids who look like they might not ‘belong’? Of course, prejudices that kids display are picked from adults; and it is presumable that the children who are the first to bring the idea of gender roles and differences into the kindergarten somehow got it from adults.

It is interesting to watch kids learn from their parents and from each other. But perhaps the most important thing is what one learns from watching them learn: the importance of socialisation, and of being social.

Dani Rodrik thinks it is a good idea; or at least a place to start.

The Economist thinks not.

1. Is economics as a subject of study still attractive?

2. Is there a role for industrial policy in the developing world?

3. A collection of links to articles on What’s Wrong with Macroeconomics?

4. Financial crisis in Africa? Dr. Okonjo Iweala of the World Bank presents an analysis

5. Joseph Stiglitz on GDP fetishism

And, Bride-to-Be Throws Tantrum After Dress Disappears.

From the BBC.

HT AAA Blog

Leave a baby behind!

Probably the most honest sex tourism advert till date.

According to the BBC, the advert was pulled off YouTube following complaints that it promotes promiscuity.

If you are interested in reaching a wide audience:

NigeriansTalk.org serves as a one-stop site for those interested in Nigeria through the lens of its large community of bloggers. We feature regular feeds, articles, and reviews of posts written by bloggers of Nigerian extraction, bloggers living in Nigeria, and bloggers who blog about Nigeria. NigeriansTalk.org seeks to cover the wide spectrum of perspectives on various social, political, and personal issues – issues that affect Nigerians at home and abroad. We hope that through our collective voices, we will document and bring about the future we seek for our country.

Though we openly accept submissions from anyone who writes generally about Nigerian affairs, we, at NigeriansTalk.org, are actively seeking regular contributors for the following categories:

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I am one of the coordinators. For more information, click here.

I have been reading on the internet about the portrayal of Nigerians in the new South African movie District 9. I haven’t seen it so I have generally refrained from writing anything about it. This review seems to be the only one I have read that has treated the portrayal of Nigerians in the movie with a fair measure of clear-headedness. Some might even argue that Teju Cole, the writer of the review, is being charitable to Neill Blomkamp, the director of the movie.

H/T Sean

The Aliens are coming
Teju Cole

Near the end of his 1904 poem, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ C.P. Cavafy writes: “night’s fallen and the barbarians have not arrived.” And: “Now what will become of us without barbarians./ Those people were some kind of solution.”

The title, and the sentiment, migrated to the other end of the century in Coetzee’s novel, which also centred on an unnamed threat at the empire’s borders, a threat that did less harm than the empire was able to do to itself.

The spectacular (and spectacularly successful) new film ‘District 9’ settles itself into precisely the same precincts of immigration, invasion, co-dependency and fear.

‘District 9’ is a film made in South Africa by the young South African director Neill Blomkamp. It is very much up to the moment, shoehorning into the science-fiction genre immediate and not at all fictional realities: immigration, war, terrorism, slums, the 24-hour news cycle, video surveillance, and xenophobia.

It is a testament to Blomkamp’s sharp, smart storytelling that we have such a convincing sensation of these subjects, even though the immigrants in question are not human at all, and not even of this planet.

Full-grown, the aliens are of larger than human size, with a crustacean-looking appearance that causes some to call them “prawns.” They are discovered in 1982, more than a million of them, in the hold of a giant spaceship that has come to rest in the sky over Johannesburg.

The opening scenes of the movie are truly wondrous, with the camera jumping between various talking-heads discussing the aliens, and footage of the prawns themselves, living in a desolate shanty town on the outskirts of the city.

“Prawns”: the name, introduced as a slur, soon becomes the standard way of referring to them. They are the barbarians: the unknown other, vaguely human in their behaviour and their communities, but different enough that persecution is sure to follow.

The main action of ‘District 9’ takes place twenty years after the prawns are rescued from the hold of the stalled ship. In that time, they have drawn the ire of “normal” South Africans (both white and black). They are feared and mistrusted, and are suspected of plotting against the government.

The decision is made to transfer them out of the demarcated area, the District 9 of the title, and into a concentration camp farther away from inhabited areas.

In charge of the move is a private company, the ominously named and heavily armed Multinational United (the name brings to mind the ‘Multi-National Force’ which invaded Iraq in 2003). The MNU operation is led by Wikus van de Merwe (played excellently by Sharlto Copley), the son-in-law of one of the corporation’s leaders.

The idea is to get all the prawns to sign the necessary paperwork, and then to evict them with minimum force. But things go badly. There are plenty of plot twists in the rest of the film, notably one in which Wikus undergoes a transformation of sorts and his loyalty to MNU gets called into question.

The strength of ‘District 9’ is that it tries to do too much. It goes for broke. The film can be plausibly read as an attempt to do a blockbuster film like ‘Independence Day’ (there is no shortage of explosions, chases and special effects) and underpin it with ideas taken from Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis,’ ‘City of God,’ ‘Schindler’s List’ and Nollywood.

The description of an explosion as a terrorist attack (when it is obviously not), the insistence on legal procedure when evicting the aliens, the spouting of banalities by government functionaries like Wikus: these are all things we recognise from our day to day world, and they are presented in a cinema verité style here that is so convincing that the viewer, every now and again, must be reminded that this is a science fiction film, and one produced, for that matter, by Peter Jackson (of ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘King Kong’ fame).

It is all done very well, and it illuminates the genre of the action movie like nothing else I’ve ever seen. It takes a very serious question-how do we treat the strangers among us?-and makes an honest attempt at an answer.

‘District 9,’ though, also has serious flaws. Perhaps most notable among them is the depiction of Nigerians in the film. Even making allowances for the fact that this is a fable, with strong elements of satire and allegory, the one-dimensionality of the Nigerian characters is striking.

The Nigerians live in District 9 with the prawns, and sell cat food to them (the prawns are cat food addicts) in exchange for weapons. In addition, the Nigerians run a prostitution ring (renting out their women for sex with the aliens) and occasionally murder prawns to use for juju.

In other words, the most violent and offensive clichés of Nollywood have been grafted onto the film, without the humanising, narrative context of Nollywood.

The decontextualization is brought home by the fact that the Nigerian gang-leader is actually named Obasanjo (no, I couldn’t believe my ears either), and these so-called Nigerians all speak Zulu.

This raises the questions of why Blomkamp, who is so scrupulously realist in other parts of the film, has chosen to depict his Nigerian characters as caricatures. One possibility is that he is trying to extend the film’s larger argument: that we are callous to strangers among us.

It is a fact that Nigerian immigrants in South Africa are often persecuted, stereotyped as drug dealers and prostitutes, and denied housing and jobs. Perhaps Blomkamp is simply holding up a mirror to society, reminding his viewers that the film is not about humanoid prawns who, after all, do not really exist, but rather about people, who do.

‘District 9,’ which has been read by most critics as an allegory of apartheid (parallels have been drawn to forced removals from the real-life District Six in Cape Town during the 70s), might be more profitably viewed through the lens of ongoing anti-foreigner sentiment in South Africa.

There’s a particular harshness in the violence that the disenfranchised mete out to the even more disenfranchised. Perhaps this is why the Nigerians in the film are depicted as sub-human: because, to many, they are.

Perhaps he wants audiences to ask: why do you have such a lurid imaginary notion of Nigerians? Why this need to designate others as barbarians? Or perhaps it is simply a massive blindspot on Blomkamp’s part, a failure that mars what is otherwise a remarkable work of art.

1. Mediation and memory in the theory of money

2. Understanding Nigerian banking sector

3. Anthropology of suicide

4. Speculators and the oil price

5. Homing pigeon faster than internet in South Africa

The rapid development of global communications today contains within its movement a far-reaching transformation of world society. ‘Anthropology’ in some form is one of the intellectual traditions best suited to make sense of it. The academic seclusion of the discipline, its passive acquiescence to bureaucracy, is the chief obstacle preventing us from grasping this historical opportunity. We cling to our revolutionary commitment to joining the people, but have forgotten what it was for or what else is needed, if we are to succeed in helping to build a universal society. The internet is a wonderful chance to open up the flow of knowledge and information. Rather than obsessing over how we can control access to what we write, which means cutting off the mass of humanity almost completely from our efforts, we need to figure out new interactive forms of engagement that span the globe and to make the results of our work available to everyone. Ever since the internet went public and the World Wide Web was invented, I have made online self-publishing and interaction the core of my anthropological practice. And recently I have stumbled into what may turn out to be the most powerful vehicle for this project yet: the Open Anthropology Cooperative.

It matters less that an academic guild should retain its monopoly of access to knowledge than that ‘anthropology’ should be taken up by a broad intellectual coalition for whom the realization of a new human universal – a world society fit for humanity as a whole — is a matter of urgent personal concern. Read in full.

Earlier today I drew attention to the announcement of the ASA Globalog series on the financial crisis. The first post in the series is already up. Alexander F. Robertson of Edinburgh University writes about Corporate Greed:

The medieval burghers sought to dodge accusations of greed by political bluster or conspicuous acts of charity, but nothing provided better moral cover than their most successful and durable invention, the corporation.  This transcendent meta-body is no freak of nature, no historical accident.  It was invented by European merchants in the 15th century, along with enough moral latitude to allow great commercial ventures to flourish, and many rogues to prosper.  Chambers’ excellent Dictionary tells us that the corporation is ‘a succession or collection of people authorized by law to act as one individual and regarded as having a separate existence from the people who are its members’.  It allows real people to join forces for private gain, to mask their personal identities, dodge their liabilities, and defy mortality.  Moral ambivalence is intrinsic to the corporation.  It is the framework in which individuals are piously held to account, and yet can get away with almost anything.  Back in the 18th century, an English Lord Chancellor asked:  ‘Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?’ Continue reading.