Loomnie

From a WSJ review of Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy:

Mr. Neuwirth introduces us to a woman named Jandira who for a decade has peddled coffee and homemade cakes to the unlicensed vendors at São Paulo’s early-morning wholesale market for pirated movies. Her street-corner business, she proudly tells him, has enabled her to buy two cars and a house and to pay her children’s fees at private school. Another of Mr. Neuwirth’s sources, Chinese handbag designer Ethan Zhang, prefers to stay illegal. For him it’s a matter of costs and benefits: “If I want to get a license, then I will need a bank account and an office in an office building.” These are not people who lack the skills to survive through legal employment; they just see no good reason to join the legal economy.

System D is full of surprises. From Linda Chen, who trades counterfeit auto parts, we learn that China has a hierarchy of fake merchandise: The manufacturers of high-quality fakes offer guarantees and take back defective products, but with low-quality fakes it’s caveat emptor. Ogun Dairo buys woodchips from a sawmill and uses them to smoke fish, for sale by street vendors; her unlicensed grill is in an illegal squatter settlement in Lagos, but she buys fish that have been imported from Europe. At the euphemistically named Guangzhou Dashatou Second Hand Trade Center, where Arthur Okafor obtains the pirated mobile phones that he later smuggles into Nigeria, the cash turnover is so high that almost every (unlicensed) kiosk has a battery-powered currency counter.

The review reminds me of a chapter in my dissertation, in which I follow a container of secondhand clothing from the Cotonou port to the used clothes market in the Beninese city, and from the market to the Seme border and then into Nigeria. I show the different regulatory regimes under which batches of the imported used clothing fall – when taxes get paid on them and when not, and how the final retailer in Lagos sometimes actually pay some form of tax on the goods he has in his small stall on Lagos Island – even when secondhand clothing is not legally supposed to be imported or sold in the country (there is a ban on the importation of secondhand clothing into Nigeria). It also reminds me of the importance of ethnography for understanding microeconomic interactions that eventually feed into macroeconomic figures of a country. (Try understanding why Benin would always have a balance of trade deficit without knowing that almost all consumer goods it imports ends up being smuggled into Nigeria.) Of course, the whole idea of the informal economy itself arose from Keith Hart’s ethnographic study of urban slums in Ghana in the 1960s.

Read the review here. H/T to Bunmi Oloruntoba on Twitter.

A couple of weekends ago we hosted a friend who had just returned from Nigeria. She mentioned that penises were currently being ‘disappeared’ in the country. We smiled, we laughed, and I told the story of how I first learnt about disappearing penises. Like a good, self-respecting, PhD-holding anthropologist, I concluded by insisting that I really couldn’t say much else until someone did an ethnographic study of the topic.

I hadn’t thought about it since then until this evening when Teju Cole, during one of the times he breaks character as a writer of Small Fates, tweeted a link to the closest thing to an ethnographic study of disappearing penis – a Frank Bures article titled A mind dismembered: In search of the magical penis thieves. It is a well nuanced piece whose quality does not derive only from the fact that it wounds my Nigerian pride by showing that  we are neither the originators of, nor the exclusive owners of the rights to, disappearing membrum virile.

Much like how a very quick look in the literature, as I was thinking of starting a research project on the study of internet fraud, showed that we cannot claim to have founded – or even be the greatest practioners of – the confidence trick, even though it is now known almost exclusively by its Nigerian name, 419. Bummer.

From the Bures article:

Nigeria was not the first site of mysterious genital disappearance. As with so many other things, its invention can be claimed by the Chinese. The first known reports of “genital retraction” date to around 300 B.C., when the mortal dangers of suo-yang, or “shrinking penis,” were briefly sketched in the Nei Ching, the Yellow Emperor’s Classic Text of Internal Medicine. Also in China, the first full description of the condition was recorded in 1835, in Pao Siaw-Ow’s collection of medical remedies, which describes suo-yang as a “ying type of fever” (meaning it arises from too much cold) and recommends that the patient get a little “heaty” yang for balance.

Fears of magical penis loss were not limited to the Orient. The Malleus Maleficarum, medieval Europeans’ primary guidebook to witches and their ways, warned that witches could cause one’s membrum virile to vanish, and indeed several chapters were dedicated to this topic. Likewise the Compendium Maleficarum warned that witches had many ways to affect one’s potency, the seventh of which included “a retraction, hiding or actual removal of the male genitals.” (This could be either a temporary or a permanent condition.) Even in the 1960s, there were reports of Italian migrant workers in Switzerland panicking over a loss of virility caused by witchcraft.

Read it all here.

Joris Luyendijk, Dutch anthropologist and journalist, is currently blogging an anthropological study of bankers he’s doing in the City of London for Guardian. From the introduction to the blog:

It is quite a change for me, exploring bankers. I used to do anthropological fieldwork among students in the slums of Cairo, then worked as a Middle East correspondent going back and forth between Hamas leaders and Jewish settlers. The latter were people who knew they might die at any moment for their convictions, and had made their peace with that. Meanwhile those students lived off less than a dollar a day.

Compare this to the bankers and I have moved from freestyle boxing to billiards. Then again, readers’ responses may not be that different.

When I wrote about Israel and the Palestinians some readers would judge an article exclusively by whether it was likely to make one camp look good or the other. In particular, pieces that humanised their objects of hate elicited very aggressive letters to the editor – or worse. I expect the same thing with bankers.

The Middle East is a pretty intense place but unless you have family living or serving there, for most readers it is also a pretty far away place. Finance is not. If somebody told you your savings aren’t safe, she’d have your full and immediate attention, wouldn’t she? But if she then said the words “bank reform” many would have to suppress a yawn.

This is paradoxical. Finance directly affects everyone’s interests, but many have a hard time maintaining their interest in it. But as the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the following three years have shown, the financial world is too important to leave to the bankers – in fact in some countries democracy is beginning to look like the system by which electorates decide which politician gets to implement what the markets dictate. The people in this very powerful sector are worth learning more about. And the good news is, when you listen to them in their own words, that can actually be pretty entertaining. And humanising.

The first batch of posts is a series of profiles of different actors who work in the City. You can read the whole thing here.

The closest thing to this on Wall Street is Karen Ho’s book Liquidated, which I wrote about here.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

I am currently reading the book – just finished the first two chapters. Will write some more about it when I’m done.

A feature article on Al Jazeera. Here is what I wrote a while ago on the subject.

Imagine how gratifying it is for me to wake up this morning and find this post by Edward Caar through a Twitter link:

What brings me to today’s post is the new piece on hunger in Foreign Policy by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.  On one hand, this is great news – good to see development rising to the fore in an outlet like Foreign Policy.  I also largely agree with their conclusions – that the poverty trap/governance debate in development is oversimplified, that food security outcomes are not explicable through a single theory, etc.  On the other hand, from the perspective of a qualitative researcher looking at development, there is nothing new in this article.  Indeed, the implicit premise of the article is galling: When they argue that to address poverty, “In practical terms, that meant we’d have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives,” the implication is that nobody has been doing this.  But what of the tens of thousands of anthropologists, geographers and sociologists (as well as representatives of other cool, hybridized fields like new cultural historians and ethnoarchaeologists).  Hell, what of the Peace Corps?

Whether intentional or not, this article wipes the qualitative research slate clean, allowing the authors to present their work in a methodological and intellectual vacuum.  This is the first of my problems with this article – not so much with its findings, but with its appearance of method.  While I am sure that there is more to their research than presented in the article, the way their piece is structured, the case studies look like evidence/data for a new framing of food security.  They are not – they are illustrations of the larger conceptual points that Banerjee and Duflo are making.  I am sure that Banerjee and Duflo know this, but the reader does not – instead, most readers will think this represents some sort of qualitative research, or a mixed method approach that takes “hard numbers” and mixes it in with the loose suppositions that Banerjee and Duflo offer by way of explanation for the “surprising” outcomes they present.  But loose supposition is not qualitative research – at best, it is journalism. Bad journalism. My work, and the work of many, many colleagues, is based on rigorous methods of observation and analysis that produce validatable data on social phenomena.  The work that led to Delivering Development and many of my refereed publications took nearly two years of on-the-ground observation and interviewing, including follow-ups, focus groups and even the use of archaeology and remotely-sensed data on land use to cross-check and validate both my data and my analyses.

You really should read the whole thing.

As one who has a Masters degree in Development Studies but who chose to do a PhD in anthropology because I found that development research is all too often dealing with quantitave, “generalisable” data, and who has concluded said PhD, I find it really interesting that the RCT movement in economics seem to be taking credit, in the media and in policy circles, for what ethnographers – anthropologists, rural sociologists, historians, human geographers – have been saying all along. This is that things are a lot more complicated than people want to think, that it is extremely difficult to find a generalisable explanation, and that at the end of the day, what leads one to better understanding of issues is attention to personal stories, and an attempt to tease out how those stories are linked to larger structures, like local politics, regional politics, the economic structures, colonisation, culture etc. etc. One cannot arrive at this sort of understanding without spending time trying to understand the interaction between all these elements. Now that economists have discovered qualitative research it seems as if it were never there, as if there aren’t people who have been pointing to the importance of understanding nuances and personal stories.

I have deliberately refrained from commenting on RCT in economics because I wanted to read some of the texts, but since Edward Carr took thoughts out of my head I thought I would quote him and call attention to the fact that these kinds of studies have been going on for a long while. If economists are not aware of that (I think some of them are) it is their fault for not looking at other social sciences.

My copy of Karlan’s book is in the post to me, and I look forward to reading it. I doubt that I will learn anything new from it, but I feel it is important, as an economic anthropologist, to know what economists are doing. I wish economists would extend the same courtesy to other disciplines whose works often overlap with theirs.

And on RCT itself, check out the link that my brother, a medical doctor and researcher, sent me. It is a Lancet article titled “A philosopher’s view of the long road from RCTs to effectiveness”. Remember, RCT has been in medical and pharmacological research for a while.

PS, I promised a while ago to blog a list of must read economic anthropology books. I should get to it pretty soon.

Kerim Friedman has an excellent post on literacy, communication and social media at the Savage Minds blog. It is hard to carve out an excerpt that does justice to the whole post but let’s try this one:

First, the technology itself is not as important as the social conditions in which it is used. In many cases social media is more a means of communicating what is happening on the ground with the outside world, as diasporic populations keep in touch with their friends and family at home via Facebook and Twitter, than it is a means of organizing activity on the ground. If these social networks exist, families will communicate with them however they can, whether by usenet, fax machine, telegraph, or letter. The second point is that the mere existence of these technologies does not imply that people will necessarily make use of them in a particular way. Certainly there is a huge difference in how Twitter is used at the annual anthropology conferences and at an event like SXSW. And the third point is that it isn’t necessarily a bad thing for people to be fascinated by how this technology is being used in Egypt. Certainly it has allows us to voyeuristically participate in world events from afar.

Read the full post here.

Both on NigeriansTalk.

First, in a post titled Jos and Maiduguri Attacks: If not ethno-religious, then what? Yomi Ogunsanya writes:

The crises can also be understood in the context of Nigeria’s perverse inequality, high rate of unemployment, and worsening poverty rate, all of which are, of course, largely the upshot of institutional dysfunction, absence of socially answerable state structures, and the lack of legitimacy between the government and the governed. All these, I daresay, are material conditions that can be exploited for selfish purposes just as they can act as a catalyst—where there is widespread discontentment—for revolt or insurrection. But—and this is the point I wish to stress—religion and ethnicity are not coextensive with such material conditions as poverty, unemployment and social inequality. Religion, in particular, is conterminous with belief and opinion and is often underpinned by an emotional or spiritual sense of certainty which, in many cases, would not brook any criticism or opposition. It is a very dangerous terrain of sociality that, more than anything else, is preoccupied with our fears, our anxieties really. It is this fear, this anxiety, that, in my opinion, makes some people to be overly religious (or extremists) and therefore very dangerous to live with. Members of the Boko Haram sect, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist movements (including the group claiming responsibility for the Christmas Eve bombings) represent a most menacing face of religion. Now, to say that these extremists who are burning, maiming, killing and bombing are doing so because they are poor or because they are jobless is to miss the point. Abdul Muttallab, the young man who attempted to detonate a bomb mid-flight in Detroit on Christmas Eve in 2009, was not from a poor home.

In a rejoinder titled In Jos and Maiduguri Religion is Politics, Benson Eluma writes:

It is important to factor in the recruitment of foot soldiers for the purpose of doing this violence. It has always largely been among the poor and the underclasses. Mutallab, whom you cite, is the exception that proves the rule about the recruitment of actual fighters in the north. And Mutallab did not risk his life in a Nigerian fight, even though that point is not relevant to this argument. The pattern in the recruitment of people to carry out acts of violence reveals an economic angle that must not be ignored. From the days of the Maitatsine, this pattern has been a constant source of concern, for it points up the sorry fact that so long as there is a vast army of people who have nothing to lose in a life of abject poverty and deprivation, the task of recruitment is made easier for the political entrepreneurs of ethno-religious violence in the north. But a new pattern of recruitment is unfolding before us. I refer to the sophistication of the weapons used by these new ‘Islamists’, especially in Jos. I refer to numerous eye-witness accounts that the attackers come attired in military fatigues. The new recruitment is done among people who have good knowledge of the use of assault rifles and bombs. They show mastery of military precision and ample field experience in scorched-earth policy. There is somebody investing in these new fighters. These are no mere Fulani herdsmen armed with bows and arrows, amulets and incantations. There is plenty of evidence that the power game has entered a new phase.

The two articles are fairly long but they are both worth your time. They both raise some really important issues about the relationship between culture, religion, politics and violence.

In her latest column, Gillian Tett draws attention to the research of Anne Jefferson, an anthropologist who is studying how mortgage foreclosures are unfolding in the United States. This caught my attention:

In the past century, American culture has developed a well-entrenched, commonly shared national narrative to explain and justify success – the myth of the “American dream”. But, observes Jefferson, while “the American dream narrative explains upward mobility … we have fewer cultural narratives to help us understand and cope with downward mobility”. Thus, widespread foreclosures pose a “narrative challenge”; there is no single, commonly agreed national way to explain these events. Different groups are fighting to control the story.

The column is here.

That is the title of a new book by Gareth Dale. If you are interested in economic history and the history of ideas you should check out the book. Or at least this review.

The book is acclaimed as the first comprehensive book on the ideas and legacy of Karl Polanyi. If you have ever heard of The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi wrote the book.

HT to Tyler Cowen.