Second paragraph of third chapter:
[Chris] Whitty had reason to be worried. Some months earlier a highly infectious disease called Ebola had started to sweep through Britain’s former colony of Sierra Leone and neighboring Liberia and Guinea. Groups such as the World Health Organization and Medecins Sans Frontieres had rushed to halt the contagion. So had the UK, French, and American governments, Barack Obama’s American administration had even sent four thousand troops to Liberia. The world’s best medical experts at places such as Harvard were hunting for a vaccine, and computer scientists were using Big Data tools to track it.
Gillian Tett and I were contemporaries as undergraduates at Clare College, Cambridge, in the 1980s; she studied archaeology and anthropology, and I studied natural sciences (specialising in astrophysics in the end). We did not know each other well, though we lived on the same staircase in our first year. I’ve seen her precisely twice since then, when she gave a presentation on the causes of the 2008 crisis in Brussels in 2009 and when we caught up at a college reunion in 2022 and found we had both been working on Ukraine. She is now the Provost of King’s College, next door.
Before becoming a Financial Times journalist, Tett was an anthropology student whose doctorate examined Islam and Communism in rural Tajikistan. I came to anthropology a bit later in my life – for bureaucratic reasons, my PhD, which was in the history of science, was administered in the Social Anthropology department at the Queen’s University of Belfast. I developed a deep respect for that discipline, and I’ve written about this here in the context of the House of Lords and, er, England. In my day job as a public affairs consultant in Brussels, it seems to me that I get a much better understanding of what is going on and what is likely to happen by applying anthropological analysis of human behaviour and organisational culture than by the traditional methods of political science, let alone philosophy.
Tett doesn’t make quite such grand claims for her discipline in her book Anthro-Vision. She argues merely that it would be good to take an anthropological perspective into account in making important decisions, as well as the legal, economic, political etc points of view that already are well represented around the table. Among the topics she examines are the response to the 2013-14 Ebola outbreak in West Africa; the failure of bankers to spot the risks in their own behaviour that caused the 2008 financial crisis; the appeal of Donald Trump; the difference between remote and office working; and the intriguing rise of environmental, social, and corporate governance as a serious concern in the top boardrooms of the private sector.
I think that she undersells the case for anthropology. As I said above, I think it is actually superior as an analytical framework, perhaps precisely because it is insufficiently used. On the other hand, she also frames herself as a feminist outsider who has a healthy scepticism about the claims of capitalists; but can a Financial Times journalist truly be a mere observer of the world of high finance? With that slight pinch of salt, I strongly recommend the book as a refreshingly different look at what is really going on in the world, and how important (and often bad) decisions get made. You can get it here.
