Podcasts about soviet tajikistan

#MOSCOW: The low-tech attack by hirelings claimed by ISIS-K & What is to be done? Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/business/media/moscow-attack-narratives.html undted Soviet Tajikistan

Happy New Year and welcome to a new series where Chris talks about books he read in grad school. This week we are reading and discussing Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan by Artemy Kalinovsky. Kalinovsky, Artemy M. 2018. Laboratory of Socialist Development : Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Head over to our Patreon and join for $2 a month to hear the whole episode and join the Discord to take part in the discussions.Support the show (http://patreon.com/theregrettablecentury)Support the show

Development as an approach to policy, as a theoretical paradigm, and as a force that can transform everyday life has been a powerful tool in changing societies on both sides of the Iron Curtain and in the so-called Global South. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Artemy Kalinovsky (Temple University) discusses these and related topics with Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (RECET). In their conversation they touch upon development assistance to Central Asia and its role in contemporary geopolitics as well as the various meanings and scales of development. Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor at Temple University and a historian of Soviet Union, Cold War, Central Asia, foreign policy, and development. He is the author of two monographs: A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011) and in 2018 he published Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan which won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Currently, he is working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.

A translator and spy turned international arms dealer, Viktor Bout is to be part of a proposed prisoner swap between the US and Russia for the return of Americans Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan.Griner was found guilty on drug smuggling charges by a Russian court, and convicted to 9 years in a penal colony after 1 milligram of cannabis oil, prescribed by her American doctor, was found in her vaping pen in her luggage in Moscow. The charges are obviously a political play by Putin in response to Ukraine sanctions. If you like our content, please become a patron to get our extra premium episodes every month, as well as our public episodes ad-free. 1 Trevor Reed, a former marine who was also imprisoned in Russia after allegedly attacking a policeman, another Kremlin fabricated story, was recently released in a successful prisoner swap and he said that Brittney Griner will experience "serious threats" to her health if she is sent to a labor camp. Moscow asked for a second Russian to be added to the mix for this proposed swap, an FSB agent, Vadim Krasikov, a Russian spy / murderer, who was convicted in Germany for carrying out a killing on behalf of Russia, an act the judges called “state terrorism.” It is hard to separate fact from fiction in Bout's resume. He's believed to have been born in 1967 in then-Soviet Tajikistan. He studied as a linguist at  Moscow-based Soviet Military Institute for Foreign Languages, a training school for officers, diplomats, and in many cases, spies. He learned Portuguese and he then started his career with the Red Army as a translator in Angola. 2 When the Soviet Union broke up, arms were scattered across the 15 new nations created by the dissolution, especially Bulgaria. These countries had neither the money to pay an army nor the infrastructure to keep the weapons they'd inherited. Viktor saw an opportunity. He assembled a fleet of ex-Soviet cargo planes, massive Antonov and Ilyushin aircraft, and began shipping arms and other goods all over the world. He set up a freight charter in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates and soon became the inspiration for Lord of War, an exceptional movie featuring Eamonn Walker, Nicholas Cage, Jared Leto and Ethan Hawke. Bout kept company with African warlords and dictators such as Jean-Pierre Bemba, Masavenya and Jonas Savimbi. After 9/11, the US needed scapegoats and Bout fit the bill. By entrapment, he was captured in Bangkok, Thailand and extradited to the US where he was convicted of aiding terrorists. The judge's opinion coincides with ours: “Until DEA went after Bout, he had not committed a crime chargeable in an American court in all his years as an arms dealer. And but for the DEA approach made through this determined sting operation, there is no reason to believe that Bout would have ever committed the charges brought against him.” 3, 4 Merchant of Death DubiMiter – 9.5 1. Mike Eckel. Merchant Of Death. Lord Of War. The McDonald's Of Arms Trafficking: Who Is Viktor Bout?. Radio Free Europe. August 2022. ⇤2. The Notorious Mr. Bout. Market Road Films. January 2014. ⇤3. Benjamin Weiser and Colin Moynihan. Conduit to Arms Sting, a Star Witness Apologizes for His Crimes. New York Times. May 2012. ⇤4. United States of America v. Viktor Bout. International Crimes Database. February 2012. ⇤

Hear how anthropology can send your business zooming to the top I love to read the Financial Times. It provides a very different perspective of the world from our US papers. As I was browsing recently, I came upon a story about Gillian Tett, FT's US Managing Editor, and her new book, Anthro-Vision. Curious as I am, my question was, What is a journalist doing writing a book about anthropology, and promoting AI (Anthropology Intelligence)? My joyful discovery was that Gillian is an anthropologist who became a journalist, a bit by chance and then by design. Her book is about the power of observation. Whether in Tajikistan as an aspiring anthropologist studying marriage rituals or reporting on a major conference before the financial crisis of 2008, she mastered the art of listening to the stories being told, the resistance to change that people demonstrate, and the wisdom an anthropologist can offer—if only others are willing to listen. As a fellow anthropologist, I am fascinated and I know you will be too. Enjoy. Watch and listen to our conversation here As anthropologists, our job is to see what is unseen Anthropologists love to observe, and by capturing the real lives of people, we offer insights that other data capture methods might complement or even might ignore. We know that people don't really know what they are doing and often tell you what they think you want to hear. It's their stories that offer opportunities to better ascertain the meaning of their daily lives and see the patterns that their cultures command.  In Gillian's book Anthro-Vision, there are wonderful stories about how cell phones have become the way in which kids growing up in the pandemic have built social lives, and why this is probably not going away. There is a great story about Bad Babysitters and how an anthropologist could open up their eyes to why they were messaging incorrectly to potential customers. She and I spoke at length about the social silence that gives us a view into what people are thinking. You will enjoy listening to her and love her book as I did. Our interview was at times deep and at others filled with humor, as we shared our journeys and who we are, not what we do. You can contact with Gillian onn LinkedIn.      Gillian's 5 big ways Anthropology Intelligence (AI) could help you:  Recognize that we are all creatures of our environments. Accept that there is no natural cultural frame. As humans, we create this diversity. Find ways to immerse ourselves in the minds and lives of others to gain empathy. Look at ourselves through the lens of an outsider to see ourselves more clearly. Listen to what is not said, that social silence.  To learn more about how we at SAMC apply corporate anthropology to businesses to help them get off the brink and soar, read the first chapter of my book, On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights. For a deeper dive into anthropology and how it can help your business thrive:         Blog: Will You Adapt Or Die? How Cultural Anthropology Can Transform Your Business Strategy Blog: What is Corporate Anthropology and Why Should I Try It? Podcast: Rita Denny—Maybe You Need Anthropology To See Yourself In New Ways Additional resources for you My award-winning second book: Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business My award-winning first book: On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights Simon Associates Management Consultants    Read the transcript of our podcast here Andi Simon: Welcome to On the Brink with Andi Simon. Hi, I'm Andi Simon. I'm your host and your guide and my job is to get you off the brink. So I try to find people who are going to give you a fresh perspective, see things through a clear lens. Let's just step back and take a moment to be a little anthropological and begin to understand that you really don't know what's happening until you pause and think about it differently. And as you know, in my books, I help you see things through the eyes of my clients who all got stuck or stalled because their stories were so great that they couldn't see all the things that were going on around them. And that's why a little anthropology can help you change, grow and your companies get unstuck. As you know, I myself am a corporate anthropologist, which is why I'm so excited to bring to you today's guest. Today, Gillian Tett is with me. Let me tell you about why she's so special, and why you're going to enjoy watching her or listening to her. Listen carefully to the stories she has to tell. Gillian serves as the Chair of the Editorial Board and Editor at Large in the US of the Financial Times. Forgive me for reading this, but it's very important that you hear it. She writes weekly columns covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues. She's also the co-founder of Financial Times Moral Money, a twice weekly newsletter that tracks the ESG revolution in business and finance, which has since grown to be a staple FT product. In 2020, Moral Money was the SABEW best newsletter. I'll tell you, it's a great newsletter. Previously, Gillian was a Financial Times US managing editor. And she's also served as assistant editor for the Financial Times markets coverage, and a lot of other things of great importance. I love to read theFinancial Times and I bet you do as well. She's the author of The Silo Effect, which looks at the global economy and financial system through the lens of cultural anthropology. She's also authored Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed Catastrophe, a 2009 New York Times bestseller and Financial Book of the Year at the inaugural Spirits Book Awards. I must tell you she has written really good books. I brought her here today because she has a new book out called Anthro-Vision. And as you might imagine, it touched me and my heart. And I read right through it. I couldn't stop because it was all about how, what she's calling AI, not artificial intelligence, but anthropological intelligence, more intelligence and a whole new perspective. And what I would like you to understand is how a little anthropology can, in fact, help you and your business see things through a fresh lens and why it's so important. Gillian, thank you for joining me today. Gillian Tett: Well, thank you for interviewing me. And it sounds like we not only have a lot in common, but a lot to learn from each other. I'm interested in your own career and your own story because it sounds fascinating. Andi Simon: Well, I have enjoyed reading about yours. But I'd like you to tell the listeners or the audience about who Gillian is because you've had a great journey that's taken you to many places. And as an anthropologist, I smiled. Just a little aside, I took my daughters when they were four and five to Greece to study Greek women. And I know you'd appreciate this, I learned a whole lot about the Greek woman through my children. I'm not sure what my children learned, but they still love me. And so that's all that matters. Tell us about yourself. Gillian Tett: Anyone who reads my biography would think that I'm thoroughly weird. That has been the reaction of many business leaders, political leaders, economists, grown-ups who pretend to run the world, when they hear about my background because most people who work in high finance or business assume that if you're going to be a journalist writing about them, you should have a PhD in economics or an MBA, or some kind of training in quantitative intellectual pursuits. And my background is actually in cultural anthropology. And I did a BA and then a PhD at Cambridge University in the UK. And what anthropology really is about is looking at human cultures and systems, and what makes people and societies tick, not just in terms of the obvious things that we recognize, but most importantly, the things that we tend to ignore around us all the time. Just like psychologists look at our hidden biases in our brains, anthropologists look at our hidden biases and patterns and assumptions in society. So in my case, I went into anthropology because I was fascinated by the rest of the world. I've always loved to explore and travel. And as a child, I dreamed of going to wacky weird places or places that seem weird to me. But like Indiana Jones, if you like the intellectual world, and cultural anthropology pretty much came out of that impetus in Victorian England, the idea that people would go off to other cultures to find the essence of what it meant to be human. And a lot of what anthropologists did in that way mid-century was indeed to go and travel. That's changed a lot in the 21st century. I'll come on to that in a moment. But I went off in my case to a place called Soviet Tajikistan in 1989. And I spent about a year and a half of my life up in the high mountains in Tajikistan living with a group of wonderful villages. I imagine most people listening are saying, I've got no idea where Tajikistan is on the map, or what it's like there. But basically, if you imagine the scenes you might have seen of Afghanistan on the news, and take out the black veils and put on very brightly colored clothes, then you roughly have the idea of what my village was like. It was in the high, high mountains of the Hindu Kush. And I was studying Tajik wedding rituals there. But I wasn't just studying wedding rituals, I was looking at these rituals and symbols and ceremonies, and all the economic exchanges associated with weddings as a key to try and understand how the Soviet Tajiks reconciled their identities of being Islamic and communist at the same time. Now, after I did my PhD, I then left Tajikistan. I actually became a journalist, originally a war reporter. And then I joined the FT and became an economics correspondent. And for the first few years, it felt as if all my training in cultural studies was completely irrelevant. But it's funny how life works. Because a few years after I started writing about finance, I suddenly realized that actually human beings are humans wherever they are. And in just the same way that I went studying Tajikistan wedding rituals in the Hindu Kush, and looked at how they use symbols and ceremonies to express ideas about their world. To give you an example, two investment bankers get together for gigantic ritualistic ceremonies called investment banking conferences, where they have all kinds of rituals like PowerPoints, and bar meetings, and golf tours. And those rituals and ceremonies and symbols also create social networks, and express all kinds of assumptions which could and should be studied through an anthropologist lens. So the latter part of my career has been all about trying to use this anthropological vision, and apply it to the world of business and finance and economics. And frankly, I think it's something that anybody could benefit from, particularly now, given that COVID has ripped up our normal lives and has thrown us all into culture shock. And we can all benefit by thinking about what makes us really tick. Andi Simon: When you think about that, you in your book play out some of the stories in there. You've provided us with a broad range of fascinating illustrations of the application of anthropology to different situations. Whether it was to a childcare center that wasn't doing well, or getting into pet care, or to the economic crisis of 2008 or what happened with Cambridge analytics, give us some illustrations, some case studies that are some of your favorites. The reason I ask is that, as you were describing, I could imagine being in the highlands of Russia. I took my kids to see what it was like to be a woman in Greece, and I studied the Greek immigrants and they returned to migration. But if you haven't done that, there's no way you know what it's like. And when you do it in modern society, in our businesses, people say, Well, what do you really do? I say, Well, I hang out a lot. And I listen a lot. And I'm looking for all the gaps that are on the sides of what people assume to be true. The only truth is, there's no truth, I tell people, and then they get really frustrated because it's all an illusion that we're living. So some illustrations, some great stories that you enjoy sharing about the ones that really make a difference. Gillian Tett: Well, one of the problems with anthropology and trying to communicate it in a corporate setting is that the corporate world likes to see things in shades of black and white, and things on PowerPoints. And anthropologists say, well life is grey and subtle and often contradictory. And in reality it is, that's really the only way to understand situations. But it's not always easy to boil down into a single chart. But for me, one of the most important moments in my own career was when I realized that actually the same tools I looked at Tajikistan weddings with in terms of analyzing and symbols could and should be applied to investment banking conferences. I went down to the Mediterranean in 2005 to an event called the European Securitization Board and looked at those rituals as if I was seeing them like an anthropologist. It showed me that the bankers that were engaged in that securitization business back in 2005 had all kinds of assumptions that they were barely aware of themselves which were distorting their vision of finance quite significantly and laying the seeds for the subsequent 2008 financial crisis. So when I looked at the bankers at play in their conference, I can see that they were a tribe set apart with a strong sense of their own identity. And like any social group that has a tight network, that was birthed and being reflected and reproduced in the banking conference. And they had a creation mythology. You know, every group has a creation mythology. Their creation mythology was that perfectly liquid markets, so called liquefaction of financial markets, was the ultimate perfect gold, the Holy Grail. And they were so addicted to this idea of a perfect free market. So they kind of failed to see all the contradictions in their creation mythology, like the fact that, although they were creating these innovations supposedly to make markets more innovative and more safe and more prone to perfect trading, most of these new products were so complex, they weren't being traded at all. And they weren't even able to value them with free market prices. Because it wasn't at the market prices, they had these models, the tools they were using to disburse risk were actually introducing new risks in the system because they were too complex for people to know where the risks were. And they said that these tools were done entirely to help people. But there were no faces in their PowerPoints. It was all Greek letters that indicated it wasn't just an accident that there were no faces. And their PowerPoints reflected a mentality that the end user had been kind of screened out of the way they saw finance. And you can say, well, that's kind of a pity. But actually, it had a really practical implication because what it meant was that the people creating new financial products were so caught up with the creation process, they couldn't actually see how the products were being used on the ground at the end of the financial chain. There's a wonderful scene in the movie, The Big Short, where a hedge fund trader goes and meets a pole dancer in Florida. Great scene. The financier, the hedge fund guy, goes, Holy crap, these people are doing this with subprime mortgages. And it was a real shock. And the thing that was shocking was not the fact that subprime mortgages were being used and abused on the ground, it was the fact that so few financiers could see what the end result was because they were so detached. So I came back from my conference, having spotted all this in terms of how the bankers were conducting their rituals, and it's one thing that led me to later warn that there was going to be a financial crisis. And I kept issuing those warnings over and over again. So that's one example where you can use anthropology tools to look at how a social group is blinkered and has blind spots that don't see, which can be dangerous. But in my book, I talk about ways that consumer industry groups can use anthropology to try and understand consumers, to try and understand what really drives fashions and trends to try. And also I've talked about how businesses can use anthropologists to see what's going wrong in their companies. General Motors did that very effectively several times. And you can also use anthropology to understand how other offices really work, or how they don't work. So almost any sphere of life where people are operating can benefit from some anthropology. Andi Simon: Often, I'll take a client with me out to their clients, to go spend a day in the life of their clients. So I'm going to teach you a little anthropology, I say. Let's go watch and see what's going on. You sell them solutions that you think are perfect. Let's watch how they're actually using them. Because to your point, if I went out and looked and came back, they would delete me. You didn't hear it, right? You didn't see it, right? So we go with them. And the two of us watch in the same factory exactly how it's being used. A sensor that's actually measuring the color of something or some technology that's being applied. Then we go out and we write down everything we saw. And the two of us were in two different places at the same time. We were each seeing completely different things. The conversation that follows is fascinating to me, because they're still trying to figure out what it was I was looking at and listening to. To your point, this is about listening and seeing and what they were listening to and why they were trying to fit it into their box. Like, you're a wonderful economist, we're trying to fit it into their illusion of reality, and what the reality actually was and I might claim as mine in a better reality, but I'm looking for the gaps for you and you're looking to fit it into your box, which may no longer be the right box anymore. And that's so important now, coming out of the pandemic The way we used to do things isn't any longer the way we're doing it. So people are hiring us to figure out, what do we do now? What's happening out there? Come watch with us. So as you were putting together your book, I have a hunch each of the stories touched you in some of the same ways.  Gillian Tett: I mean, the power of anthropology, in many ways I would argue, is essentially what you're doing is trying to engage in a three part journey. And the way I put it, that basically you are trying to simultaneously immerse yourself into the minds and lives of others so that you can understand them better. You're trying to not just immerse yourself in the mind of others, but really trying and seeing the world through their eyes in a kind of humble, open-minded way and to collide with the unexpected. You're trying to then use that knowledge to look back at yourself. Because, there's this wonderful Chinese proverb that a fish can't see water. None of us can see the assumptions that shaped us unless we periodically jump out of our fishbowl, go with other fish and talk to other fish and then look back at ourselves again with clarity of vision. And then you use that inside-outside perspective. The experience of being a stranger in your own land to not just look at the parts of the world that you talk about, the visible parts, but also the parts of the world that you don't talk about, or the assumptions that you ignore because they seem boring or geeky or dull or taboo or obvious. And that sort of three-part journey can be really powerful. An example: General Motors brought in an anthropologist to look at why some of its meetings were going so badly wrong, why some merging initiatives were going so badly wrong. There was an attempt in the latter part of the 20th century to create a sort of joint car between German and American engineers.They tried and tried for about two years to create a joint small car by bringing this team of engineers together. And at the time, they assumed the problem was because of linguistic differences. I know the tendency to think oh, those Germans don't understand the Americans and Americans didn't ask the Germans, because that was the obvious difference and distinction that was in everyone's faces. But some anthropologists observed the group and realized that actually it wasn't a straight story of German versus American clash. There was a bigger clash between different teams of Americans between Tennessee and Detroit. And because they all had very different cultures in their factories. And the really interesting thing was they kept calling meetings to try and resolve the problems without realizing that all three different groups had different ideas about what a meeting was and what the whole point of it was. The Germans thought it was basically to rubber stamp a decision that had already been taken and that it was very hierarchical  Their meeting didn't really count as work because work was what you did elsewhere. The Tennessee group thought that a meeting was there to kind of brainstorm and you had to have some kind of collaborative consensus-based system and they thought meetings were work. And the Detroit group had another idea all over again. So all of the people were coming into that meeting with different expectations, and because they weren't actually talking to each other in advance, and they weren't looking at the story behind the story, which is basically what were their different cultures, and what were their expectations of meetings, they kept wrongly describing it as a German-American thing, and it wasn't. So those patterns played out over and over again in offices. And it's really important to think about that now for two reasons. Firstly, most businesses right now are in the grips of radical tech transformation, as automation and digitization takes off. And that's creating a whole different bunch of cultural clashes, because the way that a group of techies in San Francisco are trained to think about meetings is not the same as say, a group of metal bashers in Detroit. But secondly, COVID and the pandemic and lockdown has challenged all of our ideas about how offices and work and meetings should happen. And we haven't been together in groups to kind of learn from each other and thrash it out. We've all been scattered and isolated. So within every company, the longer that COVID and lockdown has gone on for, the more you've created micro subcultures, who may be totally talking past each other all the time. And often exasperated senior managers who are middle aged, go, Oh, these millennials, they're so weird. But what about the age gap between different generations? Or maybe just the fact that different subcultures are growing up inside companies as we're scattered. And as we return hopefully to the office, different cultural patterns will develop all over again, and we need to think about it. Andi Simon: Well, you're not Malinowski, and you're not going off like Margaret Mead to a small island. To some degree, that's just what's happened during this pandemic, islands have been created. And as we're watching them...for example, I have a wonderful client that I'm going on my fifth year with them all in transformation. And they used to give remote work as a benefit to their partners and their employees, until the pandemic hit and everyone went remote. All 70 employees. Now they can't get them back into the office. And they said, Well, what was valued before as a benefit, it's now a penalty. And how do you take the same thing: remote work one minute is wonderful and in one minute it's awful. What are the values that are coming, and the partners are lonely. And the reason they want them back together is for human companionship. And what's so interesting for me is to watch the dynamics going on. Because they don't find a way to articulate what really matters here. It isn't about having them come back in the office, and that's not bad, and people decide with feelings. Their logic is, Well, I don't have to commute for an hour plus, I can get so much work done. Why do I have to be there to have lunch together, we're not going to do that. I mean, it's so interesting to watch the head and the hearts here at odds with each other on this island that I'm not quite sure was perfect before. And I'm not quite sure it's so bad right now, but nobody's quite sure what we should do to build coming out of it. And I have a hunch this is the proliferation of islands that all of us are watching happen across the country and across different industries. It's really interesting as an anthropologist to step back and just observe and laugh a little and cry a little bit too. Gillian Tett: I guess the point that you know very well that you've seen in your own kind of work, which is so important, is that we need to talk not just about what people are obviously talking about all the time, that's in your face, but also we need to always ask ourselves in any context, whether we're in an office or any other setting, What are we not talking about? What are we missing? What is the story behind the story? What's the context? And one of the ways I try to illustrate that point is through an issue that isn't to do with work. Practically, everyone who's middle aged with teenage kids is grappling with why are teenagers so addicted to their cell phones? And if you ask people that question, they go, it's because of cell phone technology. Or is it because of those wretched teenagers or it's because you know, evil tech companies are busy designing algorithms, which are addictive? Certainly that's true to some degree. But the reality is that you can't understand teenage cell phone usage without stepping back and looking at what people don't talk about, which is how teenagers move in the real physical world. And if you go back 100 years, teenagers had a lot of opportunities to physically roam, to meet their friends on the streets, even 50 years ago, they went to the shopping mall. They cycled to school. They would hang out with their friends on the fields, without parents watching every move. But in the 21st century, and even before lockdown, you had a whole generation of middle class American teenagers, particularly in suburbs, who essentially are overscheduled. They are driven everywhere by their parents constantly being monitored. And then you go into the pandemic, and suddenly this sense of physical constraint is even more extreme. So is it any surprise that you have a generation of people who think that the only place as a teenager that you can test boundaries, congregate spontaneously, explore the world without parents watching is online, in cyberspace? You can't talk about cyberspace experience without looking at the physical world. That's the social silence, to use a word that anthropologists sometimes use. And that model or metaphor applies over and over again to almost any aspect of modern life. Andi Simon: You said something very profound and well worth emphasizing. The times make the man or the man makes the times. Here we have a transformation of trust and of safety. When I was a kid growing up, we would go outside and play stickball on the street, and get on my bike and ride to the mall to go shopping with nobody. As my kids grew up, we began to realize how much more structured their lives were without thinking about the implications of it. I don't think we spend our time saying that's good or that's not good. We sort of flow with what society is doing and then you have all of the after effects of transformation. I've had several university clients who are frustrated because they couldn't get their Gen Ys, now the Gen Zs, to come in and play athletics. They spent their days on video games. And they were much happier playing a video game and not coming in to go play baseball or basketball or watch them. And socializing with more challenges. I actually had a grownup client, a professional, who spent his weekends playing games. His whole friendship network was there. And as an observer, I said, Oh, this is really a pure point, a transformation of our society without much intentionality here, if you know the world he was in, he never met any of the folks that he played with, which by itself was sort of an interesting and new and bizarre society in which we're in. You know, as you're thinking about what's coming next, I don't know when the pandemic is really going to end or if we're going to live in a COVID world for a while. Are you? As this is a futurist podcast, I would like to ask what are the signs you're seeing? What do you hear coming through? I have a hunch, you're picking up little signals already that you're curious about? Because I know I am. What do you see? Gillian Tett: Well, I think that people have been forced to re-examine how they're living. And what is fascinating was the late 20th century was a time when people had quite rigid boundaries between home and work in many professional contexts. Not always, but most western professionals thought that the office was a place you worked in, you might bring work back to home. But that was separate, you had a work time and a home time. You had your office colleagues, your friends, your family, they all sat in different buckets and we took that for granted. The reality is that actually that pattern of the 20th century is an absolute aberration throughout most of human history, and even throughout many parts of the world today. And what COVID has done has tossed most of us back into a state of being something like a peasant farmer, where your house is your locus of work, and your family is mixed up with your colleagues and everything else. And we may not like it, but it certainly challenged our boundaries. I don't think it'd be that easy for people to recreate those boundaries in such a rigid way going forward. A second change that's happened, which is not so bad, is because we've been locked down in our own groups, I think maybe we've become myopic. We've basically been locked down with people just like us, our pod, our friends. And people thought initially that when we went online, we would somehow break down our tribalism. Quite the reverse has happened because the key thing to understand about the internet is that it allows us to customize our identities and experiences in a way that's never been possible before. And I think it's changed our vision of how we as individuals relate to society. You know, most societies in human history have seen the individual as a derivative of society.  We're a cog that fits into a machine with identities that are pre-assigned. You know the enlightenment in Europe and this idea that we are the center of our society.  The "me generation." "I think, therefore I am." Society's derivative of me. 21st century with digital tools has given us the capability to basically customize our world as we want to know. We customize our coffee choices, our media sources, our friendship groups, and identities online. We customize our music tastes. Today's generation doesn't want to have a vinyl record, which has been pre-assembled with someone else. We want our own pick of a mix of music to listen to when we want, exactly what we want. And that's really a shift that's been exacerbated by the pandemic because we've been so reliant on cyberspace. And it's made us even more tribal, I think, in a very bad way. Another shift that's happened is that people's sense of the future, being a predictable, rigid path that goes in one direction has been shaken by the pandemic. Late 20th century was a time where most Westerners had lived a pretty stable life, pretty predictable life...no longer. And it was also a world where people thought okay, so I have business economics in one bucket, and sort of a do-gooding environment, social issues in another. And I think, again, that's breaking down. And you can see that in the corporate world where, essentially, companies are realizing that environmental, social and governance issues aren't just about activism, they're about risk management, about making sure that you don't suffer reputational risks, or the loss of assets that lose value if the regulatory climate change changes, and you don't alienate your customers and your employees. So people are no longer seeing business in just such a rigid tunnel vision way, it's more about lateral vision. And that's very, very important. And last but not least, I'd say that another shift has been in terms of cryptocurrencies and finance. In some ways, the move into cryptocurrencies, the move into meme stocks, is also part of this pick and mix culture. Patterns of trust are changing. As anthropologists, we used to say there was either vertical trust, or horizontal trust, where people trusted each other in peer-to-peer groups. This provides a social group glue to keep groups together. Or, you had vertical trust, which was trust in institutions and leaders on a large scale. It was presumed that when you had big groups, you couldn't have horizontal trust. Digital platforms have enabled something called distributed trust to explode. Suddenly, huge groups of people can do things on the basis of trusting each other via digital tools. That's how Airbnb operates. It's also how most cryptocurrencies operate. You trust the crowd through a digital platform, but not through an organizational hierarchy. And that's, again, changing people's attitude toward money and value and exchanges in a fascinating way. Andi Simon: If we write about this in about five years, we will have captured a major catalytic moment transforming society. If you listen to the multipliers of what we've just described, when I work with my own CEOs, mostly mid-market size clients, they are becoming far more stuck, stalled and immobilized than they've ever experienced in the past. They don't know what to do. And what's so fascinating to me is that they really don't know what to do. And they're not willing to go out of their corner office, out of their comfort zone to begin to see. And so they're really struggling with whether or not their businesses are going to survive. And there's no reason why they can't survive, they just have to change. And all of a sudden, that entrepreneurial spirit that got them there is stalled. And the certainty you spoke about, I'm not sure that was true, or an illusion that humans prefer certainty versus being fragile. But in fact, it's really raising up those people who can see opportunity in being agile, and I'm willing to change. The brain hates me when I go into a company to say, You're going to change and immediately all that cortisol is produced, and they go, Oh, please get out of here. But in fact, I do think there's going to be a training ground now for the agility that's needed for the next phase. Because as we come out of this, it's not going to be certain either, and nobody can really plan the way they might have thought. And I don't think that you should plan anything. I think you should try to be nimble, agile, adaptive, and talk to people. You speak about the silence, it's a great time to start listening. Just talk to people and you don't have to do it in person if you don't want to, but you can try. But I do think it's a time to listen to each other and not decide anything, just pull it in and just be anthropologists. Just listen to the conversations. Judith Glaser has a wonderful book on conversational intelligence, that you start by saying all of society are conversations. And I truly think that's a simple way of saying, Yep, just listen to each other. But the conversations are hanging out, and begin to think about what's really going on in those conversations. It's a little like that picture of that scene when they say, Who's doing the subprime mortgages. What are we missing? You have some great five big things in Anthro-Vision. Do you want to share them with our audience? I guess I'm pushing people to bring a little anthropology into your life. It's important and one of those five things. Gillian Tett: Absolutely. Well, having said you can't boil anthropology down to a PowerPoint, here's my PowerPoint. Lesson one: recognize that we're all creatures of our own environment. In a cultural sense, we're all fundamentally shaped by a set of assumptions that we inherit from our surroundings that we never usually think about. And they matter. Lesson two: recognize that just because we are shaped by sort of assumptions, that doesn't mean they're universal. It sounds very obvious, but the reality is that it's human nature to assume that the way that we live and operate and function is not just inevitable, but natural and proper, and that everyone else would kind of live like us. And guess what, there's a multitude of different ways to live and think, and if you think that yours is the only right way, you're going to suffer badly in business. Lesson three: coming out of this is to take time to immerse yourself periodically in the minds and lives of people who seem different from you. In my case, I went to Tajikistan, which for someone having grown up in England, it was very, very different indeed. But you don't have to go to the other side of the world of Hindu Kush. Just go talk to someone down the end of your road who lives in a different world. Go talk to someone in a different department, go take a different route to work, go swap a day with someone with a different profession. And if you can't do it physically, because of the pandemic, get online and basically explore another tribe online. And then mentality: I mean, just change the people you follow on Twitter, say for a week, and you'll see a completely different perspective on life. And then lesson five: for us, the experience of immersing yourself in the minds of others to become a stranger in your own land, and to look back at yourself with fresh eyes, and see what a stranger would consider to be weird or shocking, or impressive about how you live and your assumptions. And think about what you're not thinking about. What are the parts of your life that you're ignoring, the social silences, often thinking about the rituals that you're using in your everyday life, the symbols, the patterns that you use to organize your space, and your family groups, or your time. Those can often be very revealing, if you step back and look at them with an inside or outside his eyes. You know, why would you consider it to be odd to keep your hairbrush in the fridge? What does that mean? I mean, what are you missing? Well, what is one of your ideas about different body parts and about your mouth versus your hair, or you know all these inbuilt assumptions, which you take for granted, but are often very revealing. There's nothing wrong with the patterns we inherit from our surroundings, unless we remain prisoners of them and cannot imagine alternatives. And right now, as we come out of the pandemic, try to reimagine the world and recover and rebuild. It really is time to have an open mind, particularly after a pandemic that's kept us locked down mentally and physically, and in danger of being captured by tribalism. Andi Simon: What a beautiful ending, Gillian. Thank you so much. I've had such fun. It's fun to wander with you. Any last thoughts? How can they reach you? And how can they buy your book?  Gillian Tett: First, let me say what a great joy it has been to do this with you. And I greatly salute what you've done in your own career, which is fascinating. I write for the Financial Times, twice a week with columns. I also oversee a platform called Moral Money, which is the ESG sustainability platform at the FT, which is a newsletter that goes out three times a week. And my new book, Anthro-Vision, is out on sale. I should say last but not least, as another sign of culture, if you're listening to this in America, you can find my book Anthro-Vision, with a bright red jacket cover, and a picture of me on the back wearing a bright red top looking like Fox TV because that sells in America. If you pick up my book in the UK, or any part of the former Commonwealth as they say, you'll find my book is sold with a nice white understated cover with a picture of me on the back, wearing a blue shirt on a stoop clutching a cup of coffee. The British publishers thought that a picture of me looking like a Fox TV babe was too scary for the British market. And therein lies a story about why culture matters. Andi Simon: And you hope they're right. Well, I think that for the listeners, and our audience, whether you're watching this or listening to us, it's been truly a special time to share the essence of On the Brink with Andi Simon, our podcast, but my job is to help you get off the brink helping you to see, feel, and think through a fresh lens. There is so much going on today that's going to expand in a positive way the possibilities that are before you. It's the art of possibilities now. And rather than trying to go back...people say, I can't wait till the old comes back. It's not coming back because I don't even know what the old was and you don't either. But you also know that the new is giving you opportunities that are tremendous. Think about them in a positive way and you'll see them turning lemons into lemonade or limes into margaritas as somebody said to me recently. It's a great time. Gillian, thank you for joining me today. And for our listeners, don't forget, here's what I'd like you to do. I get emails from across the globe at info@Andisimon.com. You send me your ideas, you send me people whom you want me to interview. Send them to me, give me some ideas about topics that would be cool for you. I actually am doing a Leadership Academy and one of the gentlemen there, a physician, said, You know, my sons are listening to your podcast, and I laughed, and I said, How old? Eight and ten! I said, so that's my target audience. And I will keep talking to them, but they should listen because I think they and you will really benefit from understanding how a little anthropology can help you and your business soar. Bye bye now. Stay well. Bye bye.

From the outside, the study of anthropology might seem obscure and irrelevant, but editor-at-large, US of the Financial Times, Gillian Tett, argues that the skills she learned at university, and studying marriage rituals in Soviet Tajikistan, have helped her predict and understand the 2008 financial crash, the rise of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, the surge in sustainable investing and the digital economy.

I'm going to start, as I do with all the authors that we have on this podcast, by asking you, Gillian, the audience we're aiming at here is people who are interested in how we can do a better job at improving the state of the world and who are interested in public service in some way. And the question to you is, in a sentence, why should people, our audience, read your book?Gillian Tett (GT): In a sentence, most of the problems in policy making and corporate life, and as general citizens, stem from the fact that we have tunnel vision. We can't see the consequences of what we're doing or the context. And I believe that cultural anthropology is one discipline that can really help you overcome tunnel vision, and get lateral vision, a wider view of how our actions impact the world.MB: Now, you've written a fantastically wide-ranging book. I mean, it starts with you as a young student in Tajikistan, studying marriage rituals under a communist state in a Central Asian country. But you go across everything from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and trying to make sense of Trump, the financial crisis back in 2008, the emergence of ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] and impact investing, more recently, and sort of interesting issues in car manufacturing and consumption habits and all sorts of things. But can you start us off with what drew you to anthropology in the first place, and how you found yourself in Tajikistan and why that actually led you into journalism, which is where you have spent your career?GT: Well, I got into anthropology, like many things in life, by accident. I wanted to have adventure and travel the world, and I was curious about the wider world, which is something that I hope we teach all of our kids to be. And so, I studied anthropology as an undergraduate, then went to do a Ph.D. in it, and ended up in a place called Soviet Tajikistan, just north of Afghanistan, where I was studying marriage rituals as a way to look at the clash between Islam and communism. And just at the end of my research, the Soviet Union broke up. There was a very brutal war where I'd been living. So, I went to journalism partly because I was frustrated that no one was paying attention, and I wanted to draw attention to it for human rights reasons. But I then quickly realized, actually, the business of telling people about other people can be, in some ways, quite similar to anthropology, but also a way to try and drive some change in the wider world as well.MB: So, it's a very natural follow up to your previous book, The Silo Effect, where you talk about the problem that people lock themselves into siloed thinking and here you talk a lot about lateral vision, this ability to sort of see things from multiple perspectives, but also to see yourself as others might see you. You know, if there's a single message about anyone going into public policy work or policymaking, what is it that anthropology teaches them?GT: I think this single message can be presented in two ways. One, is to think about culture. And that kind of sounds obvious because we all know we're affected by our culture. But defining culture is a bit like chasing soap in the bath. It's kind of everywhere, but nowhere. And we know it affects us, but we don't actually have many ways to think about how to reflect on that. And what I offer in the book is really an argument that we all need to take a three-step process. Periodically, immerse ourselves in the lives of others or people who seem different from us. And that being different can be at the end of the street, in a different department, or the other side of the world. And to do that to get empathy not just for others and realize that not everyone thinks like us, but also then to fit the lens and look back at ourselves and see what we're missing. And see above all else, the kind of social silences, the parts of our world that we tend to ignore, because they seem boring or dull or irrelevant or just too obvious to talk about. So, in many ways, the second way, I think I'd frame it is to say that anthropology gives you lateral vision in a world of tunnel vision. It enables you to see the context, the cultural context, beyond our models, or balance sheets, or simple policy programs. And when you wrap those different points together, what anthropology really gives you is an awareness that if you are engaged in public policy, you need to look at the world in a connected way, with empathy, both for others and a sense of empathy for understanding all the shortcomings in your own approach.MB: You have a very interesting chapter on contagion where you start with the Ebola crisis in Africa. And actually, with a character, Chris Whitty, who went on to be quite a central figure in the British response to this current pandemic that we're going through. You also cite Paul Farmer [co-founder of Partners in Health] in this in this context. At various points, you note that a lot of the international aid failures around Ebola were due to not thinking through and understanding the culture of people on the ground. But then you flip it, I think very nicely, and talk about how we didn't necessarily do a good job of understanding our own culture when we were pushing many of the public health messages that needed to be communicated as we responded to the crisis. In fact, Chris Whitty himself didn't necessarily do a brilliant job in the U.K. I mean, I'm wondering, as you reflect now, on how we've responded to the pandemic, what should we if we brought an “Anthro-Vision” approach to it, should we have done differently?GT: Well, I think, that we could have done two things differently. The first is to actually be curious about people who seem different from us and try and learn lessons from how they've handled pandemics in the past. This is a fundamental point in my book, that actually it pays to embrace strange, not run away or deride it. And to ask questions and be curious about how other people live. If we'd had that mentality at the beginning of COVID-19, it could and should have prompted policymakers to pay more attention to Wuhan. Look at the experience of SARS. Look at what happened with Ebola in West Africa. Not just assume it was a bunch of strange, weird people in a faraway place that had nothing to do with us. Because the reality is that the pandemic has shown us the world is interconnected and prone to contagion at all times and contagions come from people who we don't necessarily understand. And if nothing else, we need to try and understand that to, you know, protect ourselves. I happen to think there's a moral reason why we ought to try and understand each other. But if you want to just play to fear and greed, that's it. But separately, if we had actually paid more attention to lessons from other countries at the beginning of COVID, we might have learned some really good lessons and tips. Like the efficacy of masks, that was well-known by anthropologists from the SARS epidemic in Asia. And what they'd learned was actually the way a mask helps in an epidemic is not just through the physical barrier of germs, but also through the simple act of putting on a mask each day as a psychological prompt to remind you to change behavior, or the fact that masks can be a signaling device culturally to show adherence to a wider group of norms, and a desire to uphold civic responsibility. And that really matters and it could and should have been imported into the West a lot earlier. But the flip side is, of course, that thinking about how other countries handled an epidemic enables you to then look back at yourself, too, and say, “well are we making the right decisions or not?” So again, a tiny example is that in the U.K., there was a tremendous focus on top-down messaging and orders and coercion in terms of trying to change behavior during the COVID-19 lockdown. The messaging was very often conflicting and changeable. And the U.K. didn't use its existing excellent network of health centers, which were bottom-up local areas, which they should have done. If they'd looked at the experience or something like Ebola or even Asia with SARS and others, they would have seen what a mistake that was. And they would have actually asked themselves, you know, “why are we in the U.K. not using our wonderful local network of healthcare providers to try and battle the pandemic, you know, get messages about lockdown across in the way that people feel empowered, and want to relate to?” You know, “what can we do better?”MB: And I mean, this theme of top down versus bottom up is another theme that comes throughout the book. And particularly in a chapter that you start in Davos with the gathering of the World Economic Forum (WEF), where we've both been there many times. And it's hard to imagine a more top-down orientation than the global elite gathered in Davos. What do you feel if Klaus Schwab [founder of the World Economic Forum] was to say, “Gillian, tell me how I should change WEF so that we can get Anthro-Vision at WEF?” What would you say to him?GT: I would say two or three things. Firstly, look at the Davos tribe with an anthropological lens and see all the elitism, see the networking, and see above all else, how it often encourages people to ignore other people's points of view. You know, you need to probably get people who are not part of the Davos elite into the room much more effectively and get their views actually embedded into the conversation. Recognize that not everything can be solved through top-down analysis in the form of big datasets, economic models, corporate balance sheets, political polls. Those can be very useful, but you need to supplement top-down models and intellectual tools with some bottom-up analysis that looks at qualitative, not just quantitative metrics. I'm not saying that, you know, anthropology has all the answers, but I'm saying it's a really useful way to conduct checks and balances to provide other perspectives into a conversation. Or to use another metaphor, you know, most of the tools we use today to look at the world, our bird's eye views, those taken from 30,000 feet. Anthropology basically cherishes a worm's eye view, a bottom-up view. And that can be incredibly important.MB: You touch on that issue a lot. One of the questions I would have is why is it that we're so dismissive? I mean, it seems by now, we should be recognizing that we operate in silos. I mean, you wrote a book about this many years ago, it seems to be a well-observed effect. And yet, you actually quote this one point, a famous author pointed out that getting people to understand when their job depends on not understanding it is actually very hard. Is that what's going on, that our policymakers, our leaders are locked into this? They have too many incentives to ignore the general view, so they certainly don't go down to the worm's eye view?GT: I think the reality is that someone in the book asks "why, dude, don't more companies hire anthropologists” or look at themselves, not other people? One reason is that what anthropologists say often make people uncomfortable. Because if you're part of the elite, if you are in a position of power, you tend to be there not just by controlling economic capital by making money, or political capital, net worth of power. You shape cultural capital in the sense that you have a belief system, which often reaffirms the social order and makes it seem natural, that elites are in charge. And that's very comforting. But the reality is that, you know, every society has creation myths and cultural frameworks, which might prop up the position of the elite, but are often full of contradictions and leave people prone to tunnel vision. And that's why we need to challenge them. To give you a couple of tangible examples, before 2008, financiers working in the field of financial innovation derivatives had this wonderful creation myth about how innovation was going to make the financial system safer, because they were going to create perfectly liquid markets, where risk was dispersed. And that was riddled with contradictions when you dug into it. But the people who were peddling it couldn't see it, because they were such a tribe set apart, such a tunnel, they had so little challenge. So, the value of anthropology to come in and say, "well, this is what you're not looking at". It offers checks and balances above all else.MB: You have this very interesting discussion of Trump and how the media and many people in the global elite missed what it was that gave him a connection to so many voters and particularly you focus on this word "bigly" that he used and how the elite was sneering at this interesting linguistic "cofefe", I guess you might call it. But what is it that we should now be thinking about the Trump tribe who, again, I think, in the elite, there was this feeling that January 6th and the storming of the Capitol would, you know, would somehow bring the Republican base to its senses, whereas the opposite seems to be the case? Are we failing again, to understand what's really going on with the Trump tribe?GT: What I write about in the book about the elite and Trump is really a sort of mea culpa on my part because when I heard the word bigly in one of the debates I laughed, too, instinctively. Laughter is always very revealing, because it reveals the social group boundaries, you know, you have to be in a group to get a joke. If you're not in a group, you don't get the joke. And laughter tends to reveal unresolved contradictions in our own cultural patterns, or ones we don't talk about. And what laughing about the word bigly really revealed was that the ingroup of journalists tended to assume and take for granted that to be in a position of power and have credibility, you had to have command of language. And in some ways, you know, having command of language and being educated, you know, has hitherto been one of the few accepted forms of snobbery in America. And the reality is that lots of people find that very irritating, and they resent it. But the fact that I was part of the in group that laughed, meant that I kind of was failing to see what a lot of Trump supporters and voters were actually seeing in Trump and applauding, which was that he spoke in a way that used not just so much words, more a kind of performance, ritualistic style of communication, that connected very deeply with a lot of his base. I write in the book that a lot of it was borrowed from the world of wrestling, in fact, in terms of how it tapped into emotions, and had stage mock fights and things like that, which was, again, a set of performative cultural messaging and signaling that was very familiar to Trump voters, but not elite journalists for the most part. So, I missed a lot of Trump's appeal because I didn't really get it on an emotional level, because of my own tribalism. I tried to counter that by listening to people in 2016. And that did in fact that help me see the likely victory of Donald Trump.MB: You were certainly one of those people who was, I mean, actually you're harsh on yourself in the book, because you say you missed the Brexit vote, but on both Brexit and Trump's victory, I heard you saying that you were quite concerned that would be the result before they happened. Do you feel now that there's this danger that we still haven't learned that lesson about Trump and his appeal to his tribe?GT: I think there's a danger even today, that we fail to see that what we're dealing with in America today is not just a political split, but an epistemological split. And that sound like a very big grandiose word or at leastMB: A bigly word, I guess.GT: A bigly word definitely. An epistemological split means, basically, a split in the system of knowledge, in how we communicate and actually reason. And anyone who has been trained for years in education, as I have been, tends to have a rational, logical one direct mindset in terms of evaluating knowledge, and to take things fairly literally and to try and pass them. And, you know, that's a very valid mindset. But it's not the only mindset out there. There's another type of mindset out there, which is much more about impressionistic, emotional, holistic reading of situations. And, you know, looking at performative signaling, and that's the mindset that Trump uses as much of the time. In the book, I talk about the difference between weird and non-weird cultures meaning “Western, educated, individualistic, rich, and democratic.” That's the use of man called Joseph Henrich, who is brilliant, who looked at these different modes of reasoning. And I think even today that when we talk about political splits, we need to recognize that there's a part of America that's responding to events like the January 6th events at Capitol Hill, not through one-dimensional, logical reasoning, passing, etc., that we value as journalists, but instead through much more emotional, impressionistic, performative, signaling patterns. I see the same truth in other areas as well, by the way. I mean, you can't hope to make sense of say, some of the mean cultures erupting in the financial markets, unless you recognize that there's performative signaling going on that can be very potent, but which can't be passed through any economic economist's model of rational expectations, or any kind of portfolio allocation approach to mind.MB: Now you talk at various points about the media as a tribe, and maybe a tribe that it's got its own narrative a little out of whack or doesn't look at itself through a lateral lens. I mean, what do you feel is the biggest danger that the media has at the moment, in terms of how it might go, you know, way off track in understanding how the world is going at the moment?MB: Well, I do look at the media, because I think we have to be honest as journalists, and if we're going to analyze other people, we have to analyze ourselves. And the real issue is, I do think we should realize how we're tribal how we're creatures of our own environment. And how, in many ways the sheer polarization in America and the attacks in the media have intensified the sense of tribalism. And that affects us in two ways. Firstly, in terms of how we define stories, and what stories we look at, and how we communicate them. And, you know, I think that in many ways, it's natural that we're tribal, everyone's tribal, it's part of human nature. But it has been exacerbated also by the competitive pressures afoot in journalism today, where essentially, there's a very crowded marketplace for information. So, there's a presumption that you have to shout loudly to get attention. There's a presumption that you have to try and get a really sticky audience, which tends to force people to take quite extremist views. Journalists are under tremendous time pressure. So, they tend to gravitate towards the areas of social noise, the things that are easy to see, and ignore the really important areas of social silence. And also journalists tend to have silos within their own news operations, which reflect a ton of silos in the outside world. You know, we have banking teams, and political teams and legal teams. Stories often fall between the cracks, and sometimes get caught, sometimes not. So, in an ideal world, you know, journalists would be given a lot more money, and the ability to go forth and roam and collide with the unexpected and look at social sciences. They'd be encouraged to try and communicate with audiences in ways that didn't just reaffirm existing prejudices. I mean, you can connect with where the audience's head is up front, as if you're playing dominoes. And match one half a domino to someone else's domino, but then you can take them somewhere else, with a second piece of a domino if you like. And in an ideal world, you'd have journalists who were able to, essentially, you know, get out of their own mental tunnels and explore different points of view. But that's hard to do with the media under such pressure. And when essentially, there's constant demand to create quick hits and returns in the form of stories that meet the normal pattern.MB: So, you're optimistic that journalism will change or are you quite fearful about it?GT: I hope journalism tries and changes. And one of the things that does make me more optimistic is a checks and balances are emerging. Partly because the sheer plurality of voices coming through, partly because we're seeing new models of journalism coming through, like investigative units funded by donations by ProPublica, in podcasts, and in other forms that are actually creating ways to have checks and balances. But I'm concerned about the degree to which it has become politicized and polarized. And above all else, I'm concerned that not enough journalists are flipping the lens and looking back at their own tribe and trying to work out how that is creating a sense of tunnel vision.MB: Now, one of the big trends that's been going on for the past few years has been to see business and finance as a way of making the world better in some ways, you know, through ESG and impact investing and so forth. And that's attracted a number of people who probably would have gone into traditional public service in government in the past, to think they can drive change, positive change through business and investing. And you founded Moral Money at the Financial Times. But in the book, you're quite candid, that initially, you used to roll your eyes at the letters ESG. And so, what caused you to change? And how substantial do you think this phenomenon is? Is it really going to deliver the goods or is it still more in the greenwashing/stakeholder washing category than real change?GT: Well, I initially used to call ESG, "eyeroll, sneer, and groan," because I thought it was basically about corporate BS. And that's the way the most journalists think. And so, I just missed it. I used to delete all the emails about ESG. And then I finally thought you know what, that's my view about what ESG is, as a journalist, who is paid to be cynical. I should at least try and listen to what the people's view is of the people who are trying to do ESG. And when I try to look at the world through their eyes, I realized that there was a bigger Zeitgeist shift going on, which was really to do with the fact that ESG had started out as a, you know, campaign to change the world in a really positive active way, which was very laudable, driven by, you know, nuns and Danish pension funds and people like that. But by 2016/2017, which is when I began to look at it, it was also being driven for the most part by a desire amongst companies and executives and finances to save themselves, and essentially engage in risk management, because people were increasingly realizing that if they ignored things like environmental risk or gender issues and sexual harassment, slavery in the supply chain, they could end up suffering reputational damage, regulatory controls, loss of employees, clients, customers, investors, etc. And you can be cynical and say, "Well, listen, that's just, you know, very hypocritical in the part of ESG it is just a way for companies to engage in self-defense at a time when radical transparency and changing societal norms, and it's all just for show.” Or you can say, “actually, it's pretty amazing that ESG has gone so mainstream, that companies feel they even need to talk about it or make the effort to do it.” And that, you know, revolutions succeed, not when a tiny, committed minority of activists are screaming, but when the silent majority thinks they need to go along with a change, because it's dangerous to resist it. And I think that's where we are with ESG right now. Does that mean there is a lot of greenwashing, woke washing, reputation washing? Yes, there is some. Does it mean that the rituals of ESG, to be anthropological, don't match up with the reality? Yes, quite often. But you know, anthropologists believe that rituals are interesting, because they show an idealized version of what people think the world should be like. And the very fact that people have a different idealized version today from what it was 30 years ago, I think is very interesting. And overall, what is striking is that, you know, as say, fossil fuel emissions become less acceptable, you're actually seeing that feed through to changes in the cost of capital for energy companies, and dashboards embracing renewables, and a change in actual corporate behavior, to a degree. I can't stress strongly enough you need government action too. You know, companies alone, ESG alone, are not going to fix problems. But if people are all rowing roughly in the same direction, and cultural norms are changing, it makes it easier to both force government action, and potentially to do business and financial action as well that's going to be in the right direction.MB: Now, I want to bring up an issue that you touch on at various points tangentially in the book, but not head on. So, I'm going to push you a bit. I'm very concerned at the moment about the quality of government. We could do with better people going into government and we could do with much more joined up government. It just seems to me the narrative around government is pretty horrible, and that most people that aren't in government are quite put off by it. There's not much attraction to it, except for people that have big egos or ambitions to be famous politicians or whatever. It's not an attractive narrative. Have you thought much about that with your “Anthro-Vision” lens on like, why it's got into that bad narrative and also what how we might encourage more people to see it positively?GT: I think you made a great point there, Matthew about the issue of government, because I was very struck, talking to Paul Volcker, the wonderful former Fed Chairman, who had gone into public service in the post-war years, when public service was revered, and spent many years working in public service and was very dismayed to see how attitudes towards public service changed as the 20th century wore on. So upset that when he finally left government, and, you know, had time on his hands, he created a center at the Harvard Kennedy School to try and champion the idea of good governance, and then found it almost impossible to get funding because it was so unpopular and unfashionable. And I think that's terribly dangerous. And I think we need good government. We need respect for good government and better organization. Michael Lewis's book, The Fifth Risk, showed that so clearly. What I think's interesting is that history shows that, you know, we go in pendulum swings in terms of Zeitgeists, and anthropology shows that in fact nothing is ever fixed in stone. Culture is like a river. It is constantly flowing and changing, and new streams are coming in. And I suspect we may, just may, be at a point when the pendulum is beginning to swing a tiny bit away from the idea that government is the source of all problems towards slightly more respect for government. I think the pandemic could end up being a bit of a turning point in attitudes, not just in the sense of public and private are working together, and also private and private, over things like the vaccine, which is laying down train tracks for the future. But also, I suspect that the idea of having a government mission looks a little less unfashionable than in the past.MB: If someone is thinking about going into government or a career in public service, is there a tip that you would have as to how they can use Anthro-Vision to sort of be a different sort of government leader, different sort of bureaucrat, civil servant?GT: In a nutshell, I'd say that a key tip from Anthro-Vision is to embrace a concept that at the heart of the American political system, which has checks and balances. What anthropology does is give you intellectual checks and balances. You embrace whatever field you are passionate about, be that medicine or economics or law, or whatever part of government you're working in. You do that job well, but you never forget to look around corners and think about context and think about the cultural patterns that you're working in and how it might make be giving you tunnel vision and make you blind to what you can't see. And you respect the fact that there are going to be cultural dynamics inside the office and outside the office. And I think that getting that wider vision of what you're doing is perhaps the most important thing of anyone who's working in public service today.MB: Well, that's a great note to end on. And as I say, this is a really interesting book. It's full of great stories and tremendous practical advice about how to learn some of the tips from anthropology, even if you aren't an anthropologist yourself. And I think you certainly succeed in making the case that we do all need to get some “Anthro-Vision”, so we can see the world differently. So, thank you. Gillian Tett and the book is highly recommended. GT: Thank you. Great to be on your show.  This transcript has been lightly edited for context and clarity. 

Gillian Tett, chair of editorial board, US of the Financial Times, began her career as an anthropologist studying marriage rituals in Soviet Tajikistan before becoming a leading financial journalist using many of the same tools. In her newest book, ANTHRO-VISION: A new Way to See in Business and Life, she explains how viewing the world through the lens of anthropology reveals how underlying human behavior helps to explain an increasingly technological and data driven world.   Inside the ICE House: https://www.theice.com/insights/conversations/inside-the-ice-house

Botakoz Kassymbekova’s Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) is a terrific study of early Soviet rule in Tajikistan based on extensive archival research. Her work explores technologies of governance used in early Soviet Tajikistan in order to implement Soviet plans for industrialization and collectivization. The study highlights the importance of individual leaders who used such technologies to try and adhere to the commands coming from the Politburo. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how the early Soviet government sought to overcome ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity across a vast space. In a field often bogged down with unsatisfying comparisons to Western-style colonialism, Kassymbekova’s work shows new directions that historians of Central Asia and the Soviet Union can take in order to problematize the application of terms such as “empire,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” in the Soviet context. She shows that the nature of rule in the Soviet Tajikistan, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union was ever-changing and often could not be easily defined purely by these theoretical concepts. Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Botakoz Kassymbekova’s Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) is a terrific study of early Soviet rule in Tajikistan based on extensive archival research. Her work explores technologies of governance used in early Soviet Tajikistan in order to implement Soviet plans for industrialization and collectivization. The study highlights the importance of individual leaders who used such technologies to try and adhere to the commands coming from the Politburo. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how the early Soviet government sought to overcome ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity across a vast space. In a field often bogged down with unsatisfying comparisons to Western-style colonialism, Kassymbekova’s work shows new directions that historians of Central Asia and the Soviet Union can take in order to problematize the application of terms such as “empire,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” in the Soviet context. She shows that the nature of rule in the Soviet Tajikistan, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union was ever-changing and often could not be easily defined purely by these theoretical concepts. Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Botakoz Kassymbekova’s Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) is a terrific study of early Soviet rule in Tajikistan based on extensive archival research. Her work explores technologies of governance used in early Soviet Tajikistan in order to implement Soviet plans for industrialization and collectivization. The study highlights the importance of individual leaders who used such technologies to try and adhere to the commands coming from the Politburo. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how the early Soviet government sought to overcome ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity across a vast space. In a field often bogged down with unsatisfying comparisons to Western-style colonialism, Kassymbekova’s work shows new directions that historians of Central Asia and the Soviet Union can take in order to problematize the application of terms such as “empire,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” in the Soviet context. She shows that the nature of rule in the Soviet Tajikistan, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union was ever-changing and often could not be easily defined purely by these theoretical concepts. Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Botakoz Kassymbekova’s Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) is a terrific study of early Soviet rule in Tajikistan based on extensive archival research. Her work explores technologies of governance used in early Soviet Tajikistan in order to implement Soviet plans for industrialization and collectivization. The study highlights the importance of individual leaders who used such technologies to try and adhere to the commands coming from the Politburo. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how the early Soviet government sought to overcome ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity across a vast space. In a field often bogged down with unsatisfying comparisons to Western-style colonialism, Kassymbekova’s work shows new directions that historians of Central Asia and the Soviet Union can take in order to problematize the application of terms such as “empire,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” in the Soviet context. She shows that the nature of rule in the Soviet Tajikistan, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union was ever-changing and often could not be easily defined purely by these theoretical concepts. Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Botakoz Kassymbekova’s Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) is a terrific study of early Soviet rule in Tajikistan based on extensive archival research. Her work explores technologies of governance used in early Soviet Tajikistan in order to implement Soviet plans for industrialization and collectivization. The study highlights the importance of individual leaders who used such technologies to try and adhere to the commands coming from the Politburo. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how the early Soviet government sought to overcome ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity across a vast space. In a field often bogged down with unsatisfying comparisons to Western-style colonialism, Kassymbekova’s work shows new directions that historians of Central Asia and the Soviet Union can take in order to problematize the application of terms such as “empire,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” in the Soviet context. She shows that the nature of rule in the Soviet Tajikistan, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union was ever-changing and often could not be easily defined purely by these theoretical concepts. Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Botakoz Kassymbekova’s Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) is a terrific study of early Soviet rule in Tajikistan based on extensive archival research. Her work explores technologies of governance used in early Soviet Tajikistan in order to implement Soviet plans for industrialization and collectivization. The study highlights the importance of individual leaders who used such technologies to try and adhere to the commands coming from the Politburo. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how the early Soviet government sought to overcome ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity across a vast space. In a field often bogged down with unsatisfying comparisons to Western-style colonialism, Kassymbekova’s work shows new directions that historians of Central Asia and the Soviet Union can take in order to problematize the application of terms such as “empire,” “imperialism,” and “colonialism” in the Soviet context. She shows that the nature of rule in the Soviet Tajikistan, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union was ever-changing and often could not be easily defined purely by these theoretical concepts. Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guest: Artemy Kalinovsky on The Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan published by Cornell University Press. The post Decolonization and Development in Soviet Tajikistan appeared first on SRB Podcast.

Guest: Artemy Kalinovsky on The Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan published by Cornell University Press. The post Decolonization and Development in Soviet Tajikistan appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

Artemy Kalinovsky’s new book Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) examines post war Soviet Tajikistan, situating Soviet industrial, educational, welfare and agricultural development projects within the broader historiography of post-colonial economic developmental projects in the Third World. The Soviet Union and... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artemy Kalinovsky’s new book Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) examines post war Soviet Tajikistan, situating Soviet industrial, educational, welfare and agricultural development projects within the broader historiography of post-colonial economic developmental projects in the Third World. The Soviet Union and the US, and later, the People’s Republic of China competed for allegiances in the developing world by offering advice and resources to post colonial leaders. The Soviet Union’s semi-colonial periphery proved to be a fertile testing ground for such large-scale development projects, which Kalinovsky compares to European colonial and post –colonial development projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Additionally, the local Tajik elites took advantage of the USSR’s interest in the Third World to argue for large-scale investment in development projects in primarily rural and agrarian Tajikistan. Like leaders of post-colonial states they too hoped that dam construction, industrialization and education would transform Tajikistan and make the Tajik people modern subjects. Soviet projects were not just designed to modernize the physical landscape but the people as well. The Russian concept of kul’turnost’ (culturedness), a concept that overlapped with many elements of European modernity, or specifically notions of European middle-class modernity, was imprinted in Tajik modernization campaigns as well. But, like other Soviet notions, it was surprisingly mutable, with local elites often creating their own definition of cultured behavior. Laboratory of Socialist Development grapples with how universal ideas were negotiated locally and ultimately reshaped. Throughout the book Kalinovsky demonstrates how the modernizing paradigm changed as large-scale investment failed to yield the hoped for result for both European and Soviet modernizers, who sought to recreate European style modernity in the Third World and Central Asia but instead often wound up marginalizing indigenous communities and destroying livelihoods.  He offers comparisons with experiences in countries such as India, Iran, and Afghanistan, and considers the role of Soviet and Tajik intermediaries who went to those countries to spread the Soviet vision of modernity to the postcolonial world. Laboratory of Socialist Development provides the reader with a new way to think about the relationship between the Soviet, primarily Russian, center and its Turkic periphery as well as the interaction between Cold War politics and domestic development. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artemy Kalinovsky’s new book Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) examines post war Soviet Tajikistan, situating Soviet industrial, educational, welfare and agricultural development projects within the broader historiography of post-colonial economic developmental projects in the Third World. The Soviet Union and the US, and later, the People’s Republic of China competed for allegiances in the developing world by offering advice and resources to post colonial leaders. The Soviet Union’s semi-colonial periphery proved to be a fertile testing ground for such large-scale development projects, which Kalinovsky compares to European colonial and post –colonial development projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Additionally, the local Tajik elites took advantage of the USSR’s interest in the Third World to argue for large-scale investment in development projects in primarily rural and agrarian Tajikistan. Like leaders of post-colonial states they too hoped that dam construction, industrialization and education would transform Tajikistan and make the Tajik people modern subjects. Soviet projects were not just designed to modernize the physical landscape but the people as well. The Russian concept of kul’turnost’ (culturedness), a concept that overlapped with many elements of European modernity, or specifically notions of European middle-class modernity, was imprinted in Tajik modernization campaigns as well. But, like other Soviet notions, it was surprisingly mutable, with local elites often creating their own definition of cultured behavior. Laboratory of Socialist Development grapples with how universal ideas were negotiated locally and ultimately reshaped. Throughout the book Kalinovsky demonstrates how the modernizing paradigm changed as large-scale investment failed to yield the hoped for result for both European and Soviet modernizers, who sought to recreate European style modernity in the Third World and Central Asia but instead often wound up marginalizing indigenous communities and destroying livelihoods.  He offers comparisons with experiences in countries such as India, Iran, and Afghanistan, and considers the role of Soviet and Tajik intermediaries who went to those countries to spread the Soviet vision of modernity to the postcolonial world. Laboratory of Socialist Development provides the reader with a new way to think about the relationship between the Soviet, primarily Russian, center and its Turkic periphery as well as the interaction between Cold War politics and domestic development. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artemy Kalinovsky’s new book Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) examines post war Soviet Tajikistan, situating Soviet industrial, educational, welfare and agricultural development projects within the broader historiography of post-colonial economic developmental projects in the Third World. The Soviet Union and the US, and later, the People’s Republic of China competed for allegiances in the developing world by offering advice and resources to post colonial leaders. The Soviet Union’s semi-colonial periphery proved to be a fertile testing ground for such large-scale development projects, which Kalinovsky compares to European colonial and post –colonial development projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Additionally, the local Tajik elites took advantage of the USSR’s interest in the Third World to argue for large-scale investment in development projects in primarily rural and agrarian Tajikistan. Like leaders of post-colonial states they too hoped that dam construction, industrialization and education would transform Tajikistan and make the Tajik people modern subjects. Soviet projects were not just designed to modernize the physical landscape but the people as well. The Russian concept of kul’turnost’ (culturedness), a concept that overlapped with many elements of European modernity, or specifically notions of European middle-class modernity, was imprinted in Tajik modernization campaigns as well. But, like other Soviet notions, it was surprisingly mutable, with local elites often creating their own definition of cultured behavior. Laboratory of Socialist Development grapples with how universal ideas were negotiated locally and ultimately reshaped. Throughout the book Kalinovsky demonstrates how the modernizing paradigm changed as large-scale investment failed to yield the hoped for result for both European and Soviet modernizers, who sought to recreate European style modernity in the Third World and Central Asia but instead often wound up marginalizing indigenous communities and destroying livelihoods.  He offers comparisons with experiences in countries such as India, Iran, and Afghanistan, and considers the role of Soviet and Tajik intermediaries who went to those countries to spread the Soviet vision of modernity to the postcolonial world. Laboratory of Socialist Development provides the reader with a new way to think about the relationship between the Soviet, primarily Russian, center and its Turkic periphery as well as the interaction between Cold War politics and domestic development. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

CIES Conference 2008