Gillian Tett, Anthro Vision : how anthropology can explain business and life (2001)

Gillian TETT, Anthro Vision : how anthropology can explain business and life (2001).

Dr Tett is a highly-respected journalist with the  Financial Times. In this readable and interesting book she draws upon her education as a working anthropologist and looks at the cultures that fill the financial world. She guides non-specialists into the anthropological mindset to good effect, though the later chapters are perhaps more dense than the earlier ones, and occasionally the halo slips.

Anthropologists try to immerse themselves into a culture whilst also staying independent of it. This allows them to see what is hiding in plain sight —fish, as Dr Tett observes, are not conscious of water. Not only does anthropology enlighten the ignorant outside world : it enlightens the unconscious insider too.

Lack of that enlightenment can have serious effects. IT users, for example, know just how baffling their communications with equally frustrated IT specialists can be. General Motors had three plants with different cultures that gave rise to three different assumptions about processes and aims. The sub-prime nonsense that triggered the 2008 Crash is an even grimmer example of bubble thinking. The Ebola crisis was made worse by Western technicians not understanding how sanitized funerals, big hospitals and strict isolation were in fact driving sufferers away and spread the infection more widely. We live in separate silos. Anthropology should make us less blind and deaf.

Well, yes. But literary critics, historians, linguists and many others can reasonably make the same claim for their own disciplines. That is the value of education. The difficulty for anthropology comes when one culture clashes with another, or when elements of a particular culture are dangerous or wrong —like embracing dead bodies in an epidemic ; or when an Indian prince declares that “Suttee is a vital part of our culture,” and a District Commissioner replies that “Hanging murderers is a vital part of ours.”

And sometimes cultures are assailed by a new unknown. It took time to find out what Covid 19 would or would not do. Dr Tett describes Sir Chris Whitty as a “British bureaucrat” who should have listened to anthropologists sooner. But in their recent book Spike Dr Jeremy Farrar and his FT [sic] co-author Dr Anjana Ahuja pour scorn upon the non-medical establishment that would not follow Sir Christopher’s science. Which of them is right? Both books are valuable and revealing. But if anthropology is a useful weapon in the human arsenal, it is not alone ; and it is no silver bullet.

Ophicleide