world's greatest Ph.D.

media over-exposure

not related to much of anything, but you can see janelle and my apartment in this Village Voice article.

As for the "interview" there's a certain irony when the author writes: "It is more interesting to see how people want to perceive an event rather than the actual information."

internet linkage fun: WGD makes boing-boing

chris made some mention of how the post from last week could be sent to boing boing. So, I did that on on saturday.

maybe the most fun and interesting part of it was finding out about the linkages between sites and the flows of traffic. i found out about my technorati profile for the boing boing link. oddly enough, one of the links to zmetro had already come to me in my inbox on the FOIA listserv which, in turn, had arrived to that listserver through another listserv i used to be a part of, dave farber's interesting people (which i got rid of because my dialup in warsaw was so slow).

in any case, technorati is a fascinating website, i even spotted the second home of one of our blog's authors on their top 100

from aesthetics to institutions

right now, i'm working through my chapter on corruption (still) and i'm trying to make a certain kind of transition in the history of corruption studies in poland. a main interlocutor who is an established corruption scholar has claimed that during the 70's and 80's while little scholarship on corruption in poland took place (mostly because the state didn't approve), he argued that the sense of aesthetic disgust with what he called the "corrupt" system helped fuel the democratic resistance movement.

to get at that sense of disgust he spoke of, i'm using a novel called A Minor Apocalypse by Tadeusz Konwicki. it's a strange story of the day in the life of an oppositionist poet asked by the movement to self-immolate himself in front of an important Party Congress event that evening. through the course of the day, the main character must decide whether or not to kill himself for the cause. i won't give away any suprise endings, it's a good book.

up to this point, i have tried to keep my writing in the realm of the very concrete: specific policy initiatives and practices rather than generalized statements about, say, a culture of corruption. still, i like this sense of dealing with the cultural and emotional context of things. but does anyone know about different ways to understand the transformation of this kind of aesthetic, phenomenological (?) reaction into contemporary institutionalized forms and policies? it's partly a process of appropriation, of legitimation, of un-emotionalizing, of rationalization (but not intellectualization, Konwicki is already quite intellectual), of ???

at the same time - this is interesting - the first expert who recommended Konwicki said that today's more pragmatic version of corruption is susceptible to logical breakdown. but another expert argued that this emotional side of things has nothing to do with corruption: maybe in its inception, but today it's all about development. how did they get from there to here? what changes first?

a coincidental juxtaposition?

my sentiments, elsewhere

DoD recognizes irony

The DoD, after almost 2 years, has decided that the public (me and a handful of fellow requestors) has a right to know about a video titled "The Public's Right to Know." It's a FOIA training video for US Army officials. Apparently, the video contains clips from espionage-style movies. Someone said "Casablanca" is in there, but that can't be confirmed because the clips have been redacted.

As I see it, there are two adverse reactions to withholding public information (outside of the reaction that there are laws that determine decisions for bureaucrats). The first is suspicion of some kind of cover-up, possibly leading to conspiracy theory.

This request falls under the second reaction, that some kind of perverse logic has taken hold of the bureaucracy and it does the "thinking" for them, as opposed to "common sense."

documentation of the whole story is on my FOIA website.

However, Robert Freeman, Executive Director of NYS Committee on Open Government referred me to the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy fall 1983 edition of FOIA Update which states: "On its face, the Copyright Act simply cannot be considered a 'nondisclosure' statute, especially in light of its provision permitting full public inspection of registered copyrighted documents at the Copyright Office [see 17 U.S.C. 3705 (b)]."

it looks like an appeal may be in order, if i or any other fellow requestors so choose.

WSJ-Alaska conspiracy

okay, so maybe you're tired of academic-minded posts. Here's something strange that happened while doing some research at the local branch of the brooklyn public library.

a man sat across from me reading the wall street journal and mumbling numbers to himself as he scanned the headlines. then i noticed a pile of napkins full of numbers written on them. he was writing on the newspaper too. he got up and returned a minute later with an atlas, turned to the map of alaska and he started working through it, apparently with the same numbers. he got up again, with the atlas, and returned a minute later with a photocopy of alaska. on this copy, he started plotting points based on some mad calculus of numbers derived from WSJ headlines. !

could there be a connection? sometimes i feel like all research is some kind of derivative of this mad style.

ethnography of policy papers

in the past week or so, i have slowly moved through a policy paper by NIK, the Supreme Chamber of Control. it's the equivalent of the American General Accounting Office, except it is completely isolated from the rest of the Polish government with the exception of Parliament. NIK is well respected in Poland as trustworthy, honest, and, sort of, apolitical.

i'm using a 2000 report from NIK called "Threats of Corruption in light of NIK controls (audits)," as an ethnographic fieldsite to illustrate some points on the nature & constitution of corruption. what is probably most interesting is that it was NIK's first report on corruption and first mention of corruption. the report synthesizes earlier audits from 1995 to 2000, in addition to corruption literature and the experiences of NIK auditors, to reflect on and reintrepret those earlier irregularities, constituting ares and mechanims susceptible to corruption. finally, it proposes remedies to the problem (one of them being more access to information).

there are several ways in which i will make this an ethnography of policy (maybe you can think of other, better ways). first, the standard anthropology thing is thick description, give us the meaning of the text through cultural context. second, the performative angle: what does policy do? NIK holds a position of great authority and in 2000, they put their weight behind this concept of corruption for the first time. the main thrust of their recommendation: Poland requires a more systematic legal approach to tackling the problem - the law fails to recognize "corruption" in any actual terms.

Does NIK "create corruption"? Not meaning it was the first to recognize the problem - they took their cues from earlier academic work and make reference to a 1999 World Bank report - but they allow themselves to create a new classificatory category under which they subsume specific cases, well after documenting them. They define the term and create 3 different versions of it (economic corruption, political corruption, bureaucratic corruption). They list areas most susceptible to it, for diagnostic purposes. They suggest remedies.

but this work remains mostly in the realm of policy and theory. where changes have been implemented, they are hardly solidified and systematic. the information access law, for example, makes no explicit connections to a wider legal framework.

does anyone else have suggestions concerning ways to talk about policy, maybe in terms of authors, audience, or text?

Feedback from the Author: David Westbrook

I don't know what I feel more foolish about, having David Westbrook post to this site and me not noticing it right away, or failing to be a good webmaster and having to have Westbrook post right after the "penis enlargement" spam comment. In case you missed it, I'm making it a post unto itself. It was originally a comment in Aimee's post, "More on Westbrook" Thanks David!

***

This appears to be a website for Rice anthro doctoral students? If so, what a neat idea.

I'm flattered that my book City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent has attracted some attention. A few thoughts/comments, in no particular order, that may be helpful.

City is an effort to follow, to the bitter end as it were, the political logic of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, I've employed what might be called -- and even I have to smile -- post Marxist, post/neostructural analysis. In doing so, an enormous amount of the enlightenment apparatus, including the opposition between government and market, the idea of efficiency, easy ideas of equality, and the privileged position of the academic observer (including, of course, anthropologists, though my main target is economists) simply falls away. As a result, the book is difficult to get a handle on, and difficult to reduce. Hence the use of the essay, allusion, and other elliptical approaches to the argument. But from time to time I've attempted to provide the reader with guideposts, which I hope help.

My best to Jim Faubion. I didn't like "Empire," for reasons detailed in one of City's notes. Basically, however, Empire is straightforward old fashioned lefty pomo critique from folks who haven't lived in, nor have much understanding of, any actual markets. Little traction, though some of their discussions of books are interesting.

If you want to read a serious book about money and modernity, I'd recommend James Buchan's "Frozen Desire." As a bonus, Buchan is a novelist, and writes very beautifully.

Re corruption, and a much more straightforward read than City, some of you might want to look at my Corporation Law After Enron: The Possibility of a Capitalist Reimagination, in the Georgetown Law Journal. You might also check out Galbraith's recent "The Economics of Innocent Fraud."

Re the EU and the transformation of what it means to be political, the locus classicus is Jean Monet's memoirs. The recent Douglas Holmes book, Integral Europe, is simply marvelous. If you want law, you might also look at the "competition" jurisprudence. I learned my Euro stuff in a number of ways, but notably through working at the Commission.

Good luck with your dissertations in progress!

Cheers,

David

book reviews

What can Bogotá....II

Now that you have (I hope!) some sort of idea of what I'm doing here....Here are some key points that I would like to put foward in what (so far) might be my diss....
Sorry for those of you who have already read this (aja!! Michael!) but I cannot find a better way to "locate everybody" in what I have been working on and what I would like to work on in the coming months....

My dissertation seeks to put forward the following main statements:

1. Bogotá’s recent transformation has at its base the design and implementation of security and peaceful coexistence initiatives resulting from the adoption of modalities of urban governance that at once address these two elements –security and coexistence– as subject matters of city governance and also treat them through novel ¬–for local standards– modalities of exercising power and performing authority.
2. Such a transformation, however, needs to be addressed in a context marked by the permanent tension between the effects of intertwined forms of violence that in the past decade have progressively had Colombian cities as their main scenarios, and local attempts to ameliorate violence while generating a sense of normality by fostering order and improving urban life. Neither trapped by any of these two forces, not totally detached from them, the Bogotá of the late 20th and early 21st century stands as an incipient and always at stake miracle.
3. Security and coexistence initiatives recently implemented in Bogotá stand as “globalization spots” as long as they a) are in part products of IADB’s dynamics and the dynamics of other multilateral organizations, and b) are in part products of the dynamics that characterize municipal Bogotá.
4. Security and peaceful coexistence are spaces for the creation of different kinds of capital including political capital, economic capital and intellectual capital.
5. Security and peaceful coexistence have become central themes in contemporary Bogotá. The Colombian capital might be seen as a thematic city where both security and peaceful coexistence stand as core defining elements.

What can Bogotá....

O.k first of all sorry it took me this loooooooong to post something...but aja!! you cannot imagine how things can get when you are trying to survive, to get a student visa, to finish this and that project, to earn some $$$, to deal with your fieldnotes, to figure it out how to organize your student life there while here, to work even if you fill like dacing every weekend (ja!!)....Anyways here I'm...

Aja!! thanks for the organization advice (I guess I'm also kind of stuck in this part because I cannot take everything with me so I need to organize as much as I can here!! ja!! but I'll follow your don't be too "intensa" with organizing....)

Hey!! as a point of departure I guess the best way to go is to post some sort of explanation of "what in this world I'm doing in Bogotá"....For those of you who don't know and for those of you who have a feeling but don't really know....here I go....

Let's say this is a summarized application style version of my research. I edited (of cours) all the details...but it might still be too long (sorry!!!):

What can Bogotá, the capital of a country where homicide is the leading cause of death, tell us about urban governance and violence management? In the past few decades, violence has increased throughout Latin American cities at higher rates than in other urban centers across the world. This is particularly the case in Colombia, where political violence, drug-related violence and social violence have progressively had urban settings as their main scenarios. Enmeshed in such regional and national trends, in the early 1990’s Bogotá was known as one of the western world’s most violent cities. Nevertheless, a few years later and unlike other Colombian cities Bogotá witnessed significant achievements in the amelioration of violence. These achievements are most clearly evidenced by a substantial reduction of its homicide rate from 89 violent murders per 100,000 inhabitants to 28. While Colombia remains as one of the most violent countries in the Western Hemisphere, its capital has a rate lower than both the Latin American average rate and the rates of comparable cities such as Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and San Salvador.

Municipal authorities, local scholars and international experts often relate these achievements to recently implemented official initiatives for providing security in Bogotá. My research pursues an ethnography of key concepts and values concerning violence, security and governance. It examines how these concepts and values are produced, circulated and redefined by municipal authorities, scholars and members of international organizations, as they are involved in the design and implementation of initiatives aimed at ameliorating violence in Bogotá.

My dissertation illuminates the interrelations of municipal Bogotá, Colombian scholars, and international organizations in the rethinking, designing and deploying of governmental interventions for ameliorating violence. I address these interrelations within a specific historical context: the design and implementation of policies for combating violence in Bogotá (1995-2003), and the processes of adopting these policies as both local modalities of governance and models of governmental intervention. I analyze the agencies and agents behind the processes of the development and adoption of these policies, particularly in terms of the production, circulation and redefinition of core concepts and values. How are these agents constructing discourses and promoting practices of security in environments of violence? How are the agencies themselves molded by local experiences; by social, political, institutional and intellectual positions; and by shifting global and local trends regarding violence, security and governance?

what's it about?

so i wrote up a draft and i got one response back asking: "Is your dissertation going to be about the corruption stuff? or is [corruption] one case of a different kind of phenomenon or level of analysis [?]"

and it is the latter, sort of. so i started re-writing the intro of my draft chapter until i came to the part where i say, "but this dissertation is not about corruption, it is about..."

and then i drew a blank. maybe it's the heat or just trying to write too much, but i had to sit and think for awhile about, well, what is this dissertation about? not trying to get existential about this, but here's what i've thought of next. tell me what you think

1 - it's about information access/freedom of information in poland: its origins, practices, and promises

also/or

2 - it's about a constellation of tropes/discourses/cultural logics of (anti-) corruption, transparency (/access), and investigation as 3 co-evolving phenomenon (at the very end of the 1990's) born of a specific political culture/environment caught in a tension between the old and the new, the way things are and the way that these people (the subjects of my study, who are a somewhat influential elite group) want them to be

the first is a much more concrete set of connections between historical events & activities resulting in a single law's passage which then, in turn, is used by a few other people. the second has more to do with the logic behind all of these things.

does anyone have a catchphrase that might sum up what it's about in brief either for themselves or for me? perhaps this will come in time.

More on Westbrook

I'm intrigued by Michael's earlier post on how corruption was transformed from being a political issue to an economic-social one. Especially because, when he and I had the chance earlier in the summer to chat about the subject in person, I simply took for granted that corruption was an economic concern. One more of those things identified as a problem that keeps competition and the market and economic development from operating the way they're supposed to under the correct conditions (ah, those beautiful vacuum conditions). What I realized from the post is now naturally and obviously corruption appeared to be an economic issue to me, now that it's been made into one. What a thorough job has been done on that one!
Which takes me back to the Westbrook book, City of Gold. I'm finding it useful, and we almost started talking about it in this blog (while, Michael did) and i dropped the ball because I hadn't finished reading it at that point. This is the first time I've run across the type of argument that Westbrook offers, that to talk about globalization as simply the decline of the nation-state and its circumventation by global markets, is to miss seeing how a new relationship of governing in respect to markets has arisen. Jim Faubion has advised that I take a look at Empire by Hardt and Negri as well, if I'm finding the Westbrook helpful. Am I the only person around who hasn't read that book? Probably.
At any rate, this proposition that citizens of the City of Gold are economic citizens rather than political ones feels right as I look at where I've found myself with my own project. Michael, I still need to read the chapter that you sent me to see if you've been using the book explicitly so far. For me, it takes me to the hypothesis that this citizen is necessarily a consumer, and that that word means something very specific and exact, and that the kinds of changes that have happened in Greece (and in Poland?) with their entrance into the EU work to create exactly that consumer citizen. And so now I have to say what that consumer must be, and how it's been done. I don't know... that's the hypothesis for the week at any rate. As usual, I'll work through it until I discover that things are always messier than any neat little hypothesis I can come up with. It does give me a way to think about how both the consumer protection agencies and the banks, in their battles against each other and opposing each other, are also both playing roles that compliment each other.
Now I must go read the Fischer article (thanks for the recommendation on that one) and Michael's paper, and post again. I have nothing to add yet on the conversation about the experimental systems/social network approach, or actor-network theory, other than to say that I wish I'd been reading more about that (or thinking harder about it) before I went into the field. (Then again, when I went into the field, I was thinking about my research project in an entirely different way than I am now.) But I'm persuaded enough by Michael's description to realize that I must go take another look. Sigh, I'll add that to the top the long, long, long list of stuff I've discovered would have been good to read 3-4 years ago. When I was reading ethnographies of Greek villages instead. Although, okay, that stuff's been coming in handy too.
More on Westbrook anybody? And, does Movable Type have spell check? Argh.