Social Analysis

The analytical question uniting the following essays is: What are the processes whereby knowledge is incorporated, verified, and integrated into new institutional wholes in the context of what Mark C. Taylor (2001) has termed “emerging network culture”?

This paper traces the epistemic practices and ideologies that Stasi (East Germany's former secret police) used to construct the GDR peace and civil rights movements during the 1980s as one of the GDR's key enemies. In particular, the paper addresses the question of how communications in organized social encounters that are hierarchized by a cultivation of secrecy (legitimized by a Manichaean worldview) and corresponding myths about the distribution of knowledge and the proximity to an absolute social good have shaped interpretive processes. The particular epistemic style of Stasi is analyzed as a peculiar conflation of ethics and epistemology which was, ironically, profoundly undialectic, that is monothetic, and thus unable to react constructively to interpretive failures in response to a fast changing environment.

How is the knowledge embedded in a global institution such as psychiatry integrated into taken-for-granted understandings and everyday medical practice in a non-Western setting such as Japan? How can ethnographic research address this question without simplifying institutional complexity and cross-cultural variations? This paper argues that the ethnography of apprenticeship can resolve these tensions between global and local sources of cultural knowledge. Recent work in cognitive anthropology and practice theory has demonstrated the value of examining apprenticeship as a window onto dynamics of institutional production and reproduction. As an ethnographic strategy, the study of apprenticeship makes the processes through which knowledge crosses cultural boundaries accessible to research. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research on the training of Japanese psychiatrists, I describe the institutional structure in which psychiatric knowledge becomes embedded in newly trained psychiatrists. This system, known as the ikyoku system, reproduces many characteristics of Japanese organizational patterns. Examining the details of this system offers additional insight into the particular way in which psychiatric knowledge becomes situated in contemporary Japanese society. The theory of apprenticeship, however, has a much broader potential for informing ethnographic research strategies for studying contemporary global institutions.

The rollout of the euro as a hard currency involved unprecedented logistical organization oriented toward security; yet just as central to its success was the pedagogical project of enlisting those within the euro-zone to be competent with the new currency. This paper explores two forms of euro competence in Greece: the accurate recognition and use of the currency, and the learned refiguring of the values of everyday products. These competencies were, however, only partially anticipated and targeted by the institutions involved in the rollout; in key respects these competencies were generated by the rollout event itself. These competencies can furthermore be seen as epistemic practices; they came to serve as the grounds for truths about the monetary system itself, about Greeks as Europeans, and about the morality of economic transactions.

Since the 1980s, game theory has become a standard feature of management school curricula, treated extensively in textbooks and core courses in managerial economics and competitive strategy. It promises a formal and rational set of procedures for formulating decisions in situations of dynamic interaction. I suggest that the appeal, and key symbolic effect of game theory is not due to its actual influence on the decisions reached. Rather, it is due to the reframing of decisions and the contexts in which they are made, in terms of the framework of game theory. When strategic action is formulated and justified in terms of game theory, the theory serves as a kind of sociodicy, a social theory which justifies suffering as a necessary evil. I suggest that the increased appeal of game theory since the 1980s has to do with changes in the social organization and managerial culture of corporations.

Following the 1962 coup of Burma's first post-Independence and parliamentary democratic government, a succession of military régimes has asserted their legitimacy on diverse grounds. Their ability to keep the upland minorities contained and the country unified, to implement a socialist-style redistributive system, and contemporaneously to act as chief patron to the sangha (order of monks), have each functioned as claims to legitimate rule and to nation-statehood. In 1990, the régime refused to hand over power to Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party, following a landslide election. Aung San Suu Kyi's resistance to the régime, and claims for her own political legitimacy have been asserted, predominantly through an emergent `global society' (universalizing) discourse about human rights, régime performance, and democratic self-determination. In this paper, I examine these separate assertions for legitimacy as distinct but interrelated frameworks for thinking and action, the inconsistencies among which complicate the process of stable state making in Burma.

The essays in this forum collection are concerned primarily with the application of expert knowledge in fields where there is the expectation of considerable cultural, social, and political consequence for human populations, as a result of state, corporate, or non-governmental organizational action. The essays here are, with a couple of exceptions, written by anthropologists whose knowledge—insofar as it may be distinct from others in the social sciences—is based conventionally in a methodology of long-term fieldwork of a small-scale, faceto-face kind, and founded in theoretical orientations which are sensitive to cultural and social difference.

Caroline Nordstrom and Antonious C. G. M. Robben, eds., Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995), 300 pp. ISBN 0-520-08994-4.

Michael Humphrey, The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma (London: Routledge, 2002), 192 pp. ISBN 0-415-27413-2.

Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997), 232 pp. ISBN 0-415-91790-5.

Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999), 376 pp. ISBN 0-8050-6511-3.

Samir Khalaf, Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalisation of Communal Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 368 pp. ISBN 0-231-12476-7.

‘Hybridity’ and ‘globalization.’ Magic words. They can generate academic conferences. Salman Rushdie, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Arjun Appadurai, Gyan Prakash, Lata Mani, Gouri Vishwanathan, Akhil Gupta, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Amitav Ghosh, Talal Asad, Pal Ahluwahlia. Magic names for the most part. Draw cards for conferences.

Notes on Contributors