Transparency has, in recent years, become a watchword for good governance. Policymakers and analysts alike evaluate political and economic institutions--courts, corporations, nation-states--according to the transparency of their operating procedures. With the dawn of the New World Order and the "mutual veil dropping" of the post-Cold War era, many have asserted that power in our contemporary world is more transparent than ever. Yet from the perspective of the relatively less privileged, the operation of power often appears opaque and unpredictable. Through vivid ethnographic analyses, "Transparency and Conspiracy" examines a vast range of expressions of the popular suspicion of power--including forms of shamanism, sorcery, conspiracy theory, and urban legends--illuminating them as ways of making sense of the world in the midst of tumultuous and uneven processes of modernization.

In this collection leading anthropologists reveal the variations and commonalities in conspiratorial thinking or occult cosmologies around the globe--in Korea, Tanzania, Mozambique, New York City, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nigeria, and Orange County, California. The contributors chronicle how people express profound suspicions of the United Nations, the state, political parties, police, courts, international financial institutions, banks, traders and shopkeepers, media, churches, intellectuals, and the wealthy. Rather than focusing on the veracity of these convictions, "Transparency and Conspiracy" investigates who believes what and why. It makes a compelling argument against the dismissal of conspiracy theories and occult cosmologies as antimodern, irrational oversimplifications, showing how these beliefs render the world more complex by calling attention to its contradictions and proposing alternative ways of understanding it.
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Contributors." Misty Bastian, Karen McCarthy Brown, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Susan Harding, Daniel Hellinger, Caroline Humphrey, Laurel Kendall, Todd Sanders, Albert Schrauwers, Kathleen Stewart, Harry G. West

Against the historical backdrop of successive socialist and post-socialist claims to have completely remade society, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and often paradoxical continuities between diverse post-socialist presents and their corresponding socialist and pre-socialist pasts. The chapters focus on ways in which: pre-socialist economic, political, and cultural forms in fact endured an era of socialism and have found new life in the post-socialist present, notwithstanding revolutionary socialist claims; continuities with a pre-socialist past have been produced within the historical imaginary of post-socialism; and socialist economic, political, and cultural forms have in fact endured in a purportedly postsocialist era, despite the claims of neo-liberal reformers.

Harry G. West is Reader in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His research in northern Mozambique has examined how colonialism, revolutionary socialism, and post-socialist political and economic liberalization have reconfigured institutions of local authority.

Parvathi Raman is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Her research in South Africa explores the historical impact of Indians in the South African Communist Party, and their contribution to the struggle against apartheid.

On the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers are said to feed on their victims, sometimes "making" lions or transforming into lions to literally devour their flesh. When the ruling FRELIMO party subscribed to socialism, it condemned sorcery beliefs and countersorcery practices as false consciousness, but since undertaking neoliberal reform, the party--still in power after three electoral cycles--has "tolerated tradition," leaving villagers to interpret and engage with events in the idiom of sorcery. Now when the lions prowl plateau villages, suspected sorcerers are often lynched.
In this historical ethnography of sorcery, Harry G. West draws on a decade of fieldwork and combines the perspectives of anthropology and political science to reveal how Muedans expect responsible authorities to monitor the invisible realm of sorcery and to overturn or, as Muedans call it, "kuplikula" sorcerers' destructive attacks by practicing a constructive form of countersorcery themselves. "Kupilikula "argues that, where neoliberal policies have fostered social division rather than security and prosperity, Muedans have, in fact, used sorcery discourse to assess and sometimes overturn reforms, advancing alternative visions of a world transformed.

Against the historical backdrop of successive socialist and post-socialist claims to have completely remade society, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and often paradoxical continuities between diverse post-socialist presents and their corresponding socialist and pre-socialist pasts. The chapters focus on ways in which: pre-socialist economic, political, and cultural forms in fact endured an era of socialism and have found new life in the post-socialist present, notwithstanding revolutionary socialist claims; continuities with a pre-socialist past have been produced within the historical imaginary of post-socialism; and socialist economic, political, and cultural forms have in fact endured in a purportedly post-socialist era, despite the claims of neo-liberal reformers. Harry West is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His has conducted research in the northern district of Mueda in Mozambique, where nationalist guerrillas based themselves during the anti-colonial war (1964 1974). As part of his project, he has studied how various social groups experienced, and coped with, violence during and after the war for independence. He has also taken interest in how colonialism and revolutionary socialism reconfigured the institutions of local authority, and, more recently, how post-socialist reforms have fostered a revival of tradition in rural Mozambique. Parvathi Raman is a lecturer in Social Anthropology in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She has conducted research in South Africa on the role of Indians in the South African Communist Party and has written about the changing character of the socialist imagination in the twentieth century. She also works on the politics of diaspora, and multiculturalism and the neo-liberal state."

According to the people of the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers remake the world by asserting the authority of their own imaginative visions of it. While conducting research among these Muedans, anthropologist Harry G. West made a revealing discovery--for many of them, West's efforts to elaborate an ethnographic vision of their world was itself a form of sorcery. In "Ethnographic Sorcery," West explores the fascinating issues provoked by this equation.
A key theme of West's research into sorcery is that one sorcerer's claims can be challenged or reversed by other sorcerers. After West's attempt to construct a metaphorical interpretation of Muedan assertions that the lions prowling their villages are fabricated by sorcerers is disputed by his Muedan research collaborators, West realized that ethnography and sorcery indeed have much in common. Rather than abandoning ethnography, West draws inspiration from this connection, arguing that anthropologists, along with the people they study, can scarcely avoid interpreting the world they inhabit, and that we are all, inescapably, ethnographic sorcerers.

In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist Jose Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenco Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends. Through gesture, footwork, and patois, they used what Craveirinha termed "malice"-or cunning-to negotiate their places in the colonial state. "These manifestations demand a vast study," Craveirinha wrote, "which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography." In Football and Colonialism, Nuno Domingos accomplishes that study. Ambitious and meticulously researched, the work draws upon an array of primary sources, including newspapers, national archives, poetry and songs, and interviews with former footballers. Domingos shows how local performances and popular culture practices became sites of an embodied history of Mozambique. The work will break new ground for scholars of African history and politics, urban studies, popular culture, and gendered forms of domination and resistance.

In articles for the newspaper O Brado Africano in the mid-1950s, poet and journalist Jose Craveirinha described the ways in which the Mozambican football players in the suburbs of Lourenco Marques (now Maputo) adapted the European sport to their own expressive ends. Through gesture, footwork, and patois, they used what Craveirinha termed "malice"-or cunning-to negotiate their places in the colonial state. "These manifestations demand a vast study," Craveirinha wrote, "which would lead to a greater knowledge of the black man, of his problems, of his clashes with European civilization, in short, to a thorough treatise of useful and instructive ethnography." In Football and Colonialism, Nuno Domingos accomplishes that study. Ambitious and meticulously researched, the work draws upon an array of primary sources, including newspapers, national archives, poetry and songs, and interviews with former footballers. Domingos shows how local performances and popular culture practices became sites of an embodied history of Mozambique. The work will break new ground for scholars of African history and politics, urban studies, popular culture, and gendered forms of domination and resistance.

At a time when the relationship between 'the country' and 'the city' is in flux worldwide, the value and meanings of food associated with both places continue to be debated. Building upon the foundation of Raymond Williams' classic work, The Country and the City, this volume examines how conceptions of the country and the city invoked in relation to food not only reflect their changing relationship but have also been used to alter the very dynamics through which countryside and cities, and the food grown and eaten within them, are produced and sustained. Leading scholars in the study of food offer ethnographic studies of peasant homesteads, family farms, community gardens, state food industries, transnational supermarkets, planning offices, tourist boards, and government ministries in locales across the globe. This fascinating collection provides vital new insight into the contested dynamics of food and will be key reading for upper-level students and scholars of food studies, anthropology, history and geography.

In southeast Africa, the power to heal is often associated with crossing borders, whether literal or metaphorical. This wide-ranging volume reveals that healers, whose power depends on the ability to broker therapeutic resources, also contribute to the construction of the borders they transgress. While addressing diverse healing practices such as herbalism, razor-blade vaccination, spirit possession, prophetic healing, missionary health clinics, and traumatic storytelling, the nine lively and provocative essays in Borders and Healers explore the creativity and resilience of the region s healers and those they heal in a world shaped by economic stagnation, declining state commitments to health care, and the AIDS pandemic. This important book contributes to understandings of the ways in which healing practices in southeast Africa mediate divides between the wealthy and the impoverished, the traditional and the modern, the local and the global."

Africa's Second Wave of Freedom represents the work of scholars who share a concern with the development of civil society in Africa. The first third of the book deals theoretically with the issues of democracy and stability in Africa. In particular, the contributors analyze the inadequacy of the United States' response to African problems (such as environmental decay, spiraling debt, and health epidemics) that do not respect national boundaries; the fragility of democracy in Africa and the danger of reversion to dictatorships; and the barriers to constitutional democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. The remainder of the book consists of case studies of various aspects of civil society from Mozambique, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

This book is part of a continuing series that explores international political change. The volume focuses on African nation-states, their internal conflicts, and their role in the international arena, and also delves into history, political leadership, rebellion, military conflict, policymaking, and diplomacy in Africa. Topics such as ethnic differences, political corruption, and revolution are discussed against the backdrop of contemporary political life. Recent experiences in Somalia and Rwanda and the United States and the United Nations' intervention in African conflicts are also given particular attention. Rather than attempting to offer definitive solutions to the problems and questions facing Africa today, the work takes a more proactive and informative approach. Co-published with the Miller Center.

Transparency has, in recent years, become a watchword for good governance. Policymakers and analysts alike evaluate political and economic institutions--courts, corporations, nation-states--according to the transparency of their operating procedures. With the dawn of the New World Order and the "mutual veil dropping" of the post-Cold War era, many have asserted that power in our contemporary world is more transparent than ever. Yet from the perspective of the relatively less privileged, the operation of power often appears opaque and unpredictable. Through vivid ethnographic analyses, "Transparency and Conspiracy" examines a vast range of expressions of the popular suspicion of power--including forms of shamanism, sorcery, conspiracy theory, and urban legends--illuminating them as ways of making sense of the world in the midst of tumultuous and uneven processes of modernization.

In this collection leading anthropologists reveal the variations and commonalities in conspiratorial thinking or occult cosmologies around the globe--in Korea, Tanzania, Mozambique, New York City, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nigeria, and Orange County, California. The contributors chronicle how people express profound suspicions of the United Nations, the state, political parties, police, courts, international financial institutions, banks, traders and shopkeepers, media, churches, intellectuals, and the wealthy. Rather than focusing on the veracity of these convictions, "Transparency and Conspiracy" investigates who believes what and why. It makes a compelling argument against the dismissal of conspiracy theories and occult cosmologies as antimodern, irrational oversimplifications, showing how these beliefs render the world more complex by calling attention to its contradictions and proposing alternative ways of understanding it.
"
Contributors." Misty Bastian, Karen McCarthy Brown, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Susan Harding, Daniel Hellinger, Caroline Humphrey, Laurel Kendall, Todd Sanders, Albert Schrauwers, Kathleen Stewart, Harry G. West

On the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers are said to feed on their victims, sometimes "making" lions or transforming into lions to literally devour their flesh. When the ruling FRELIMO party subscribed to socialism, it condemned sorcery beliefs and countersorcery practices as false consciousness, but since undertaking neoliberal reform, the party--still in power after three electoral cycles--has "tolerated tradition," leaving villagers to interpret and engage with events in the idiom of sorcery. Now when the lions prowl plateau villages, suspected sorcerers are often lynched.
In this historical ethnography of sorcery, Harry G. West draws on a decade of fieldwork and combines the perspectives of anthropology and political science to reveal how Muedans expect responsible authorities to monitor the invisible realm of sorcery and to overturn or, as Muedans call it, "kuplikula" sorcerers' destructive attacks by practicing a constructive form of countersorcery themselves. "Kupilikula "argues that, where neoliberal policies have fostered social division rather than security and prosperity, Muedans have, in fact, used sorcery discourse to assess and sometimes overturn reforms, advancing alternative visions of a world transformed.