I just started reading Sidhartha Mukherjee’s biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies. I am still in the first part but I can already see that it is a very well-written and nicely-paced book. This is how a New York Times review describes it:

“The Emperor of All Maladies” is a history of eureka moments and decades of despair. Mukherjee describes vividly the horrors of the radical mastectomy, which got more and more radical, until it arrived at “an extraordinarily morbid, disfiguring procedure in which surgeons removed the breast, the pectoral muscles, the axillary nodes, the chest wall and occasionally the ribs, parts of the sternum, the clavicle and the lymph nodes inside the chest.” Cancer surgeons thought, mistakenly, that each radicalization of the procedure was progress. “Pumped up with self-confidence, bristling with conceit and hypnotized by the potency of medicine, oncologists pushed their patients — and their discipline — to the brink of disaster,” Mukherjee writes. In this army, “lumpectomy” was originally a term of abuse.

For me, reading a biography of the disease is very personal: just over a year ago, my mother died of a particularly virulent form of cancer.

The idea is that standard economics is often too simplistic:

But in most economic analysis, the decision makers’ point of view is quite narrow. It starts with what people like and don’t like. People may have a taste for oranges or bananas, or a preference for enjoying life today instead of saving for the future. They then decide what to buy or how much to save, given prevailing prices, interest rates, and their own income. Economists have included in such analysis that people interact with others, but they have largely treated such social interactions in a mechanical fashion, as if they were commodities.

Their proposal:

As economists and policymakers, we could be content to continue looking only at prices and income and related statistics to explain people’s decisions. In some circumstances, that might be enough to understand what is happening. But in many other situations, we would miss major sources of motivation – and thus would adopt useless, if not counter-productive, measures aimed at producing the outcomes we seek. Identity Economics provides the broader, better vision that we need.

Institutional analysis has been successfully used to study changes in property rights and the negotiation of the collective-action problem inherent in managing common-pool resources under a variety of property regimes. It is particularly well-suited to the analysis of socio-ecological systems, and is compatible with theories coming out of ecological and economic anthropology. Yet despite the pioneering work of James Acheson and Jean Ensminger, institutional analysis remains unfamiliar to most anthropologists, primarily because of its theoretical foundations in rational choice and game theory, which many anthropologists see as irreconcilable with anthropology’s humanistic, reflexive, and relativistic biases. Institutional analysts circumvent the problems inherent in strict definitions of rationality through the concept of bounded rationality. This is a necessary first step, but still assumes the existence of an abstract Rationality as the underlying motivation behind human behavior, and as the normative baseline from which to measure “deviations” in human behavior. This paper is a step toward elaborating a more nuanced understanding of situated bounded rationality, based on situated cognition, humans’ evolved reliance on heuristics, and the predominance of preferences over actions (means) as opposed to preferences over outcomes (ends). This approach combines the strengths of two dominant types of actor-based models – the microeconomic and the psychological (behavioral) – and integrates them with the analysis of social structure. In this way, the approach proposed here reconciles institutional analysis with processual, cognitive, practice-based, and perhaps most surprisingly, phenomenological approaches in anthropology.

That is the abstract of a working paper titled Situated Bounded Rationality: linking institutional analysis to cognitive, processual, and phenomenological approaches in anthropology [pdf] by friend and colleague Brian Donahoe.

The abstract of a paper titled ‘Investigative Journalism and Scandal Reporting in the Nigerian Press’ by Muhammad Jameel Yusha’u:

Using interviews conducted with Nigerian journalists, this article explores Nigerian journalists’ understandings of investigative journalism, and whether they use it to investigate the allegations of corruption scandals against various public officeholders. The results show that Nigerian journalists have a fair understanding of investigative journalism. However, they do not fully agree that it is being practiced. The results also show that clientelism is a feature of journalism practice, and one of the factors that impedes the practice of investigative journalism. The research has identified the challenges militating against the practice of investigating journalism in order to uncover the cases of corruption scandals. Such impediments include poor remuneration, bad working conditions, corruption within the media, and the relationship between publishers and politicians.

The paper is here. If you don’t have online access to journals you can go here for a summary.

Swiss voters will go to the polls on Sunday to decide on a proposal to appoint state-funded lawyers across the country to represent animals in court.

Supporters of the initiative say such lawyers would help deter cases of animal cruelty and neglect, by making sure that those who did abuse or neglect animals would be properly punished.

BBC

Liberal orthodoxy is avuncular and patronising and it bestows upon the “helpless” African a benevolent but malignant label – subhuman. It is malignant because most days these days we spend our waking hours trying to convince the other that well, we are human, just like them. Why do they see us differently from how we see ourselves? Is racism alone the answer to that question?

In a perverse sense, the earthquake that rocked Haiti’s wobbly foundations exposed the pathetic rubble that passes for black life not only in Haiti but almost everywhere our people live. Chew on this: 10,000 NGOs pretending to do work have gulped billions of dollars in “aid” to Haiti in recent years and yet the country is so poor, it is called a Fourth World country. Nigeria is the next embarrassment waiting to happen. Every day Nigeria is rocked by quakes of thievery, savage violence and pure unadulterated incompetence. So, what is wrong with us?

As people of colour, it sometimes seems that we spend our days loudly proclaiming our humanity. We are on the defensive all the time.

NEXT newspaper’s Ikhide Ikheloa wrote that after reading J. M. G. Le Clézio’s Onitsha. The full article is here.

On the subject of being defensive and proclaiming ones humanity. I wrote about how I became a Nigerian a couple of months ago.

1. Turns out Nigerian foreign minister knows the ‘visions’ of a president he hasn’t talked to in close to two months! (See this BBC Hardtalk excerpt). Hmm… maybe we really don’t need a president then.

2. Intelligent Life on online fashion shopping.

3. Haiti and the Catastrophic Role of the International Financial System by Saskia Sassen. HT @jranck

4. Haiti: Thoughts on Women

5. Chris Blattman calls for an anthropology dissertation on microfinance-as-norm

1. Haiti Earthquake: Worldwide solidarity, a common humanity?

2. Paul Krugman writes, ‘Europe’s economic success should be obvious even without statistics’. Matt Welch responds. Megan MacArdle responds. Don’t forget to check out the comments.

3. Top 5 reasons why “Failed state” is a failed concept – Aid Watch

4. Is the Nigerian President a goner? – The Economist

5. Weight change is limiting – Square One

6. Van Gogh: in his own words – Guardian

7. Poverty porn and fundraising – Owen Barder

Food will grow more expensive as the earth warms

First things: For those who don’t know – and I would expect that that is a large chunk of the readership – until recently, I used to have another blog called Native Anthropologist.It is a blog where I discussed my research as an anthropologist. I have decided to close that down and move the content over here (actually, the right term would be to duplicate, since the content is still there and I just copied it to Loomnie.com).  From now on I will have only one blog, which is Loomnie.com, and I will be discussing the issues I discussed on Native Anthropologist here as well. Those who don’t know much about anthropology or what anthropologist do will find some discussions around here. Of course, Loomnie.com is still about my experiences, thoughts, ideas and opinions; I have only added some more to it.

Now, to the link love:
Check out the blackboard blogger of Monrovia at White African’s.
My friend Oz guest-blogs at Nigerian Curiosity on the Economics of Nollywood.
Guess who would make the best journalists? Anthropologists, of course.
The political economy of urbanization in contemporary Africa, from the anthropologist who coined the term ‘informal economy’.