1. Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout. The author uses published works on Louis Armstrong, and tape recordings privately made by Armstrong himself during the course of his life, to tell the story of one of the greatest musicians of the last century. If jazz is your thing, and you like Louis Armstrong, you should take a look at the book.

2. Visions of a Better World: Football in the Cameroonian Social Imagination  by Bea Vidacs. The author, my friend and colleague, discusses football in the social consciousness of Cameroonians, football as escape from the grunt of everyday life, and football as an avenue for aspirations:

Those who participate in football can be seen and see themselves in a heroic light. They perceive themselves as wanting to create something: something concrete, something real, a better future, a good team, that everyone will remember and that will be the talk of the town. Coaches claim that they do not train football players, but “men”, in an “old-fashioned”, pathos-filled sense. As an ideal, at least on the level of desires and will, in Cameroon football represents an antithesis of the zombification, inertia, and impasse of the postcolonial condition, described so vividly by Mbembe and others.

If you are interested in football in Africa, you should give the book a read. Plus, although it is an academic, scholarly text, it is very accessible.

3. More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics Is Helping to Solve Global Poverty by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel. The book has been hailed by a number of people, and I would assume that readers of this blog have already come across some reviews. As an introduction to randomised control trials in development economics, the book does a good job. However, an anthropologist reading the book would want to learn more about the people, he would also be interested in hearing their points of view and how they themselves would represent issues that concern them. I’d for instance want to learn why the taxi driver really didn’t take a loan, not why the authors think he didn’t, just as I’d want to learn more from micro-lending clients about how they view micro-lending and other areas of their lives. I would also have liked to read more about the social and political conditions that produce the situation that aid tries to tackle. Admittedly, this is not the focus of the book, but one does feel the need to see it said that poverty is not the natural state of being, a state from which people advance towards development.

Having said that, let me add that if we live in a world in which numbers hold the magic – as we do – there would be need to show evidence of aid effectiveness in numbers, and if numerical evidence is generated, there would be some desire to know how they are generated. This book tells us about that. In any case, it is nice to see that the discussion on aid effectiveness has left the macro-economic, mutually exclusive, binary domain of aid is either good or bad. The hope is that at some point, development economics will embrace real ethnography and we’d actually be able to learn about subjects of anti-poverty measures.

4. Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. Graeber has been described as one of the best economic anthropologists of his generation. I agree. The book first of all tackles the whole barter myth – you know, the idea that there was first barter, then money, then credit – and shows that if anything, it is the other way around: economic relations, as much as there were relations that could be described as economic, relied on credit; after that came money in the sense of a special ‘commodity’  for which goods and services were exchanged. It is only in societies where there used to be money that one finds the kind of barter system that one reads of in economics textbooks.

One main point in the book is how moral obligations become quantifiable as debt, over time, and across different parts of the world. If you have any interest at all in money, you should give the book a read, especially if you’ve read Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money. And oh, did you know that the first and probably the only ever free market economy was operated in the Middle Ages by Islamic merchants and clerics? Couldn’t resist throwing that in since I am currently working on a research proposal on Islamic finance. You can start with this interview with the author.

5. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. A number of people made money from the financial crash of ’08. The book follows some of them, and in the process discusses how the bubble got blown out of proportion, and how those who should have paid attention to it didn’t, partly because many of them didn’t understand the securities they were dealing with, and partly because many of them were making so much money out of the bubble that they couldn’t be bothered. It is one of the best and most accessible books on the crisis.

6. Open City by Teju Cole. I’ve already written about it here.

There are three reasons why the book is so compelling, and the quality of translation will be vital if this success is to continue in other languages. In the precision with which Mr Cole chooses words or phrases he is not unlike Gustave Flaubert, who sometimes took a week to write a single paragraph. Thus New York’s horses are “blindered”, its flocks of birds “take auspices” as birds did in Roman times, the traffic on Sixth Avenue “with its rush-hour gladiators testing each other’s limits” are a stark contrast to the quietude of the American Folk Art Museum where Julius first encounters Brewster’s portraits.

Secondly, like the Ethiopian-born writer, Dinaw Mengestu, another African who has become American (and also a rising star), Mr Cole has no time for clichés and generalisations. Julius rails against a film director who thinks that French-speaking Mali and Anglophone Kenya are interchangeable. This is not pedantry, but a quiet insistence that Africans can no longer be lumped together as one. When Julius flies to Europe, it is not to his mother’s homeland, Germany, but to Belgium, a nation with a long and complex history involving Africa. By the time readers follow Julius to Lagos, they no longer see Nigerians as nationally feckless, but as sympathetic, complicated individuals.

Last, and most important, given how contemporary novelists are criticised for repeating the achievements of those gone by rather than adequately portraying the modern world, is that Mr Cole is an original. James Wood, a British critic who teaches at Harvard, is one of a number of reviewers who have singled out Mr Cole’s work. “Open City”, he says, is as close to a diary as a novel can get, an unusual accomplishment for which “a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake.” It could so easily have failed. Instead, it is a clear-eyed and mysterious achievement, a modern meditation that is both complex and utterly simple.

The whole review is here.

I agree with the three points. The language of the book is very well thought through. One gets the feeling that only the writer could have written the prose, and that every expression is carefully considered before it is chosen. The other contemporary Nigerian writer whose prose is that personalised is Helon Habila – see his Oil on Water.

My other thought ties in with the last point in the review. With this book, Teju Cole has consolidated what he showed that he could do in his earlier work, the novela Every Day is for the Thief (sadly, the Nigeria-published book is not available on Amazon or anywhere online for that matter). In the book, he showed what could be done with a diary-like style of writing. The style shows itself in the much more mature Open City.

Get the book if you can. And I’ve just ordered Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air.

Political criticisms of multiculturalism confuse three objects. One is the changing cultural and religious landscape of Europe. Postwar France and Britain encouraged immigration of willing workers from former colonies; Germany drew on its longstanding ties with Turkey for the same purpose; somewhat later, new African and Asian immigrants, many of them Muslims, traveled throughout Western Europe to seek jobs or political refuge. As a result, one sees mosques where there once were only churches and hears Arabic and Turkish where once there were only dialects of German, Dutch, or Italian. The first object then is the social fact of cultural and religious diversity, of multicultural and multi-religious everyday life: the emergence in Western Europe of the kind of social diversity that has long been a matter of pride in the United States.

The second object—suggested by Cameron’s phrase “state multiculturalism”—concerns the policies each of these countries have used to handle new residents. By the 1970s, Western European governments realized that the new workers and their families were there to stay, so the host countries tried out a number of strategies to integrate the immigrants into the host society. Policymakers all realized that they would need to find what later came to be called “reasonable accommodations” with the needs of the new communities: for mosques and schools, job training, instruction in the host-country language. These were pragmatic efforts; they did not aim at assimilation, nor did they aim to preserve spatial or cultural separation. Some of these policies eventually were termed “multicultural” because they involved recognizing ethnic community structures or allowing the use of Arabic or Turkish in schools. But these measures were all designed to encourage integration: to bring new groups in while acknowledging the obvious facts of linguistic, social, cultural, and religious difference.

The third object that multiculturalism’s critics confuse is a set of normative theories of multiculturalism, each of which attempts to mark out a way to take account of cultural and religious diversity from a particular philosophical point of view. Although ideas of multiculturalism do shape public debates in Britain (as they do in North America), they do so much less in continental Europe, and even in Britain it would be difficult to find direct policy effects of these normative theories.

Here. Thanks to Saratu for the link.

What is striking to me as an anthropologist, however, is that much of the fundamental intellectual work in Collier’s analyses is, in fact, ethnographic. Because it is not done very self-consciously and takes place within a larger econometric rhetoric in which such forms of knowledge are dismissed as “subjective” or worse still biased by the political (read “leftist”) agendas of the academics who create them, it is often ethnography of a low quality.

And:

Collier brings his creativity and virtuosity to his selection of categories of analysis, eschewing the actors’ own categories and stated intentions, “tainted” as they may well be with ideology, self-deception, or the desire to portray oneself in a positive light. These are, however, human beings. There are no true control groups, least of all in the context of war or the daily scramble for survival that characterizes the lives of the very poor. In this context of myriad relevant variables, extreme fluidity, and limited information, much of the intellectual heavy lifting in economic analyses of culturally different settings such as Africa is anecdotal, sometimes internally contradictory, and often highly questionable. It may reflect the author’s own imagination of poor people’s lives more than the realities of those lives. If these analyses are fundamentally flawed in this way, what is their staying power? Development economics as a discipline has been systematically unsuccessful in producing desired policy results, at least in the countries where the bottom billion reside. Moreover, those countries such as China and India that Collier hails as truly and rapidly developing have been characterized to a large extent by their rejection of the ministrations of such institutions as the World Bank.

You really should take the time to read the whole stuff Here. Via Chris Blattman.

For the book I thank Baz; for the Video HT to the Naked Capitalism blog.

In the face of … inconveniences, in 1978, the leaders of the church experienced, in an “upper room” in Salt Lake City, a highly convenient Pentecost, and with it a revelation ending the ban against black priests. Mormons were still counseled by their church President, Spencer W. Kimball, not to “cross racial lines in dating and marriage”—but this was presented as a practical matter, not a spiritual commandment. Meanwhile certain excisions were made, to render The Book of Mormon less embarrassing, and the text of II Nephi 30:6 was rewritten in 1981, to prophesy that righteous Indians would receive a blessing from the hand of God and that “their scales of darkness shall begin to fall from their eyes; and many generations shall not pass away among them, save they shall be a pure and delightsome people.” In the original version it had been foretold that the Indians would become a “white and a delightsome people.” (The Jews will also become delightsome, thank goodness, when they agree to believe in Jesus Christ.)

This willingness, admirable in its modest way, to jettison or modify revelation in order to conform to public opinion, has been characteristic of Mormonism since the long dispute over polygamy: in the end, it would seem, they get the point. They listen to criticism over the decades. They make some furtive adjustments. They clean up their act. And, at this rate, one might predict—one might be inclined to prophesy—that within a decade or two they will have reformed their teaching on homosexuality, which comes in for much good-humored ragging in the Broadway show, including one of the wittiest of the songs. It is as if the search for acceptability matters more, in the long term, than doctrine. In this sense, the candidatures of Mitt Romney, sacrificing his most significant legislative achievement on the altar of Republican censoriousness, and Jon Huntsman, sacrificing no less than his old master Obama, look like expert strategies of Mormon assimilationism.

In the context of the musical, the openness to ragging, the patience under blasphemous attack, become less mysterious. It is as if they understand the ridicule that they are currently undergoing at the Eugene O’Neill Theater to constitute a sort of hazing. To get through the ordeal they must keep their good humor, and it is worth doing so because, at the end of the hazing, their reward will be a greater acceptance in society. Some hand is going to clap them on the shoulder and say: Well done, you managed to survive. And the audience is going to feel better about Mormons than they did before, and better about themselves for all that better feeling.

The little I know of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, aka. the Church of Mormon I learnt from attending a service at one of their temples in Lagos, and from reading the Book of Mormon. I don’t remember much of the content of the book, but I remember that I was struck by how very Christian the content and message of the book is. Nothing revolutionary in the book itself, and nothing that one would see as against the doctrines of Christianity as found in the Bible. Of course, that is after you’ve got over the idea that the newest messenger of the lord is, well, an all American guy. It is somewhat heartening to learn that they are willing to review and modify their beliefs. One wishes that Christianity in general (Mormons are Christians), particularly in Africa, were also willing to do so.

Mr Ghemawat points out that many indicators of global integration are surprisingly low. Only 2% of students are at universities outside their home countries; and only 3% of people live outside their country of birth. Only 7% of rice is traded across borders. Only 7% of directors of S&P 500 companies are foreigners—and, according to a study a few years ago, less than 1% of all American companies have any foreign operations. Exports are equivalent to only 20% of global GDP. Some of the most vital arteries of globalisation are badly clogged: air travel is restricted by bilateral treaties and ocean shipping is dominated by cartels.

Far from “ripping through people’s lives”, as Arundhati Roy, an Indian writer, claims, globalisation is shaped by familiar things, such as distance and cultural ties. Mr Ghemawat argues that two otherwise identical countries will engage in 42% more trade if they share a common language than if they do not, 47% more if both belong to a trading block, 114% more if they have a common currency and 188% more if they have a common colonial past.

What about the “new economy” of free-flowing capital and borderless information? Here Mr Ghemawat’s figures are even more striking. Foreign direct investment (FDI) accounts for only 9% of all fixed investment. Less than 20% of venture capital is deployed outside the fund’s home country. Only 20% of shares traded on stockmarkets are owned by foreign investors. Less than 20% of internet traffic crosses national borders.

You really should read the whole thing here.

Werner Herzog

To propose to his first wife, Herzog traveled on foot about a thousand miles, across the Alps. (Herzog, who had made several other such journeys, is insistent that this not be referred to as walking. “Traveling on foot,” he says. “Walking is something different.”) He went because he had something important to ask. When I press him to explain further, he says: “There are certain things out there that a manly man has to do in his life, at least once.”

Years ago Herzog declared that if he ever opened a film school, people should have to travel by foot from Madrid to Kiev before even being permitted to apply. In the past couple of years, he has finally created such a school—he calls it the Rogue Film School—which exists as occasional weekend seminars popping up around the globe. Though the actual application process is not as strident as he’d once anticipated—not quite—his policy hasn’t wavered in spirit. “Three months traveling on foot, let’s say, which would be something like 3,000 kilometers,” he declares, “would have more value than three years in film school.”

Point four of the school’s online rules forcibly clarifies this: “The Rogue Film School will not teach anything technical related to filmmaking.” Other points illuminate aspects of Herzog’s aesthetic, attitude, and method. There are taboos (one of which will be already familiar): “Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.” There are compulsory and voluntary reading lists. (On the former, Virgil and Hemingway. On the latter, the Warren Commission Report into the JFK assassination: “A most fantastic crime story—a most conclusive, most intelligent thing that human mind can ever put together,” Herzog tells me. “It’s a fantastic piece of human ingenuity.” He declares that anyone who has actually read it has no doubt that Oswald did it, and did it alone. “Everybody raves and rants against it, and nobody has read it, including those like Oliver Stone who has made a film on the assassination. He has not read it. I know it because I asked him. Oh no, he is not reading this kind of crap. I said, ‘You’re wrong, and shame on you.’ “) There is also a list of applicable skills for would-be filmmakers. As well as traveling on foot, these include the art of lock-picking, the creation of your own shooting permit, and the neutralization of bureaucracy.

Another skill Herzog has advocated for filmmakers (and, I suspect, pretty much anyone else whom he considers truly worthy of respect) is the ability to milk a cow: “If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him.” Herzog has also previously claimed that when he walks into a room, he can tell who in there has previously had hand to udder. Or, at the very least, would.

“I can tell from miles away, yes,” he confirms. “Woody Allen is not ever going to milk a cow.”

Via More Intelligent Life. You really should read the whole thing here.

Many years ago, the Belgian anthropologist Johannes Fabian identified a tendency he called “the denial of coevalness.” “The history of our discipline,” he wrote, reveals the use of time for “distancing those who are observed from the Time of the observer.” But this isn’t just a professional deformation of anthropologists: presented with an African—and especially a rural African—setting, many in the West instinctively turn to thoughts of the ancient human past. Firstbrook is no exception here. He begins a timeline that appears toward the end of his book with this item:

2.4 million BC…. A manlike ape or hominid called Australopithecus africanus lives in East Africa

Is it fussy to observe that the Obamas have no special claim on A. africanus just because they happen to live on the continent where the species disappeared two million years ago? Although the book blessedly avoids extensive discussion of prehistory, it does insist on recounting—on the basis of academic historical and anthropological accounts—the migrations of the Nilotic ancestors of the modern Luo people. Firstbrook flies north from Kenya to Juba, in southern Sudan, in order to visit the vast swamp north of the Imatong Mountains called the Sudd. “Historians and anthropologists,” he tells us solemnly, “believe the southern part of the Sudd to be the ‘cradleland’ of Barack Obama’s ancestors.” As it turns out, though, they left in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Imagine a book about Bill Clinton’s family that began with the migration of the Franks—apparently Clinton has Frankish ancestry—in the fourth century: “Historians believe the middle and lower Rhine valley to be the ‘cradleland’ of William Jefferson Clinton’s ancestors.”

Fortunately by the third chapter, we are in real family history, following the life of Opiyo, the President’s great-great-grandfather, who was born in the early 1830s in Kendu Bay, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Because Firstbrook was able to recover few specific details about him, he uses this chapter to introduce Luo traditions of birth, marriage, the building of family compounds, funerals, and so on. Opiyo is a name for a firstborn twin, and given that the Luo consider twins “a bad omen,” his life would have begun with the careful carrying out of rituals to keep away harm. Despite this, he “grew to be a strong and respected leader among the Luo of south Nyanza.”

Firstbrook calls this man Opiyo Obama in the chapter’s heading…which would probably have come as news to Opiyo. According to the Luo naming system, he should have been known by the combination of his own personal name and that of his father, which was Obong’o. In fact, the President inherited the name Obama because it was the personal name of Opiyo’s son. When the President’s grandfather took the name Onyango Obama, he was simply following Luo tradition. “Onyango” was his personal name, “Obama” was his father’s. It wasn’t the name of a family.

The breach of naming traditions came in the generation that followed, when Onyango’s son Barack took the name Obama. In the colonial period, the father’s second name came to be treated like an English surname. The idea of an Obama family, defined by a shared family name passing from father to son, is a colonial innovation. Of course, the President’s patrilineal kin thought of themselves as a family. That’s why they had all this genealogical information. But they wouldn’t have thought they were linked by a name.

Lest you think everything is as scathing, read the whole thing here.

In Hans Fallada’s version, the couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, lost their son in the war. Like the couple that inspired the book, they too decided to start dropping postcards around the city. After they were caught, the following conversation went on between Inspector Escherich and Otto Quangel, after the inspector told him that of the two hundred and seventy-six postcards and nine letters he wrote and dropped around Berlin, only eighteen were not brought to the Gestapo by those who found them:

‘So I’ve accomplished nothing?’

‘So you’ve accomplished nothing – certainly nothing that you would have wanted to accomplish! But you should be glad of that, Quangel, because it will certainly help to bring about a reduction in your punishment! Maybe you’ll get off with fifteen or twenty years!’

Quangel shuddered. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No!’

‘What did you expect anyway, Quangel? You, an ordinary worker, taking on the Führer, who is backed by the Party, the Wehrmacht, the SS, the SA? The Führer, who has already conquered half the world and will overcome the last of our enemies in another year or two? It’s ludicrous! You must have known you had no chance! It’s a gnat against an elephant. I don’t understand it, a sensible man like you!’

‘No, and you will never understand it, either. You see, it doesn’t matter if one man fights or ten thousand; if the man sees he has no option but to fight, then he will fight, whether he has others on his side or not. I had to fight, and given the chance, I would do it again. Only I would do it very differently.’

Apart from reading of the fear in which everyday Germans lived during the Nazi period, the feeling I had while I was reading the book nearly matches in intensity the one I had when I visited the site of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp (blogged here). Any attempt to understand why an ordinary person would commit atrocious acts of evil needs to be matched by an attempt to understand why some would not cave in the face of fear. And not just refuse to cave, but actually commit futile acts of resistance, such as dropping postcards inciting civil disobedience.

Reading through the book, one could see the futility of the acts of the couple, but one nevertheless joins Hans Fallada in applause. Even if their resistance was not of the same scale as that of von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators (remember the movie Valkyrie?), one applauds their refusal to be sucked in by the promises that joining the party held, or by the fear that ruled everyday life in Germany during the Nazi era.

In the Afterword in the version of the book that I read, Geoff Wilkes of the University of Queensland writes, ‘whereas Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) dissects and anlyses the “banality of evil”, Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin comprehends and honours the banality of good.’