Loomnie

At the Association of Social Anthropologists Blog: Most notably, banking conferences – like marriages – provide a chance for a social group to assemble iin one place, in a way that reaffirms their common identity and enabled them to forge new alliances, often in opposition to others. It also provides a forum for the group to restate their core assumptions and ideas in a manner that allows the group to reproduce and disseminate a cognitive map, over time. Some of this is done overtly, and self-consciously, with power-point presentations on a podium, or deliberate, carefully chosen branding and marketing campaigns. However, the most powerful forms of intellectual ‘reproduction’ occur through more informal means: the gossip around the bar about bonuses (that reinforces the dominant assumption that bigger pay is tantamount to success); the use of complex mathematical language to discuss credit (which makes it acceptable to talk about money for hours on end, without ever mentioning a human being); the sartorial conformity, as bankers all wear chinos and expensive watches/ear-rings (which underlines the idea that wealth is unifying source of identity, but only when it is not overtly displayed); the widespread use of speaker ‘biographies’ (which also stress the common educational, quasi-kinship bonds that link the group), or the use of ‘on-the-record’, or ‘off-the-record’ conventions for journalists, (which reinforce the assumption that bankers have a right to control information flow to the outside world.)

However, the other feature which makes investment banking conferences oddly similar to marriage rituals is that they are also one of the few occasions when ‘outsiders’ have a chance to slip into the banking world, and properly observe the interactions of the group, and the way that they discuss and display themselves. This is not always possible: just as some weddings might be limited to a tiny group of invited guests, some conferences will tightly control the members, and ban outsiders, such as the media. Yet, the bar to entry can often be overcome, since investment banking conferences are so big, and bankers are meeting away from their own, private space in the office or trading floor. So I, for one, plan to keep attending as many of these events as possible – only this year, in a symbolic nod too the new mood of austerity, the conferences are no longer being staged in holiday resorts such as Barcelona, Cannes, Boca Raton or Las Vegas (which used to be hot destinations of choice), but instead in the more humdrum, ’serious’ locations of Washington, or Edgware Road, London.

The full post is here.

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.

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.