======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
Counterpunch Weekend Edition
March 4 - 6, 2011
The Financial Times' "Anthropologist in America"
How Will Gillian Tett Connect With the Natives of the US Left?
By BRIAN McKENNA
Gillian Tett is an anthropologist on the move. She's worked for a
Pakistani non-profit (at 17), covered war in the former Soviet
Union and documented Japan's financial fall (Tett, 2003). For her
Ph.D. fieldwork in anthropology, Tett studied marriage rituals in
Tajikistan. But Tett's greatest anthropological achievement came
when she studied "the tribe" of J.P. Morgan, (a global financial
services corporation) right in her own backyard of London,
England. Tett sleuthed how a group of Gordon Gekko-type hot-shots
brought capitalism to its knees.
“It was completely mad in places,” said Tett.
As a columnist for the Financial Times, in 2005-2007, Tett went
out on the limb and told the world about her ethnographic
findings, warning of a catastrophe ahead. Her bestselling "Fool's
Gold" (2009) tells this story with dramatic punch, unpacking the
history of obscure financial processes known collateralized debt
obligations and credit default swaps, which she had suspected lay
at the root of a possible nightmare. It turns out that these
instruments were a chief spark for the meltdown. Why weren't more
people aware of this fact?
"It was all incredibly tribal," said Tett, "people's loyalties are
tribal. They are in separate silos [canisters of specialization]
and all these silos are competing with one another, so people hog
onto information at all costs, so only people at the top can see
what is going on." But those people did nothing, so Tett did.
And she's now a movie star. Tett plays a significant role in the
award-winning film “Inside Job” (2010) the first film to provide a
comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008. If
you do not have time to read the book, go see the movie, the
counter-curriculum to neoliberal deceptions. Narrated by Matt
Damon it is highly entertaining and dreadfully depressing.
As Managing Editor of the Financial Times, Tett is one of the most
powerful women in media. She arrived in the U.S. this past
summer and is prepared to take the country by storm, suiting up to
take on rivals at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
FT management so appreciated her fieldwork in Fool's Gold that
they gave her a column, "An Anthropologist in America."
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/mckenna03042011.html
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
