Law, Opacity, and Information in Urban Gambia

Hultin, Niklas

doi:10.3167/sa.2013.570303

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Moreover, the collection of certain kinds of information, like that enabled by CCTV cameras in the milking parlor, may further enforce doubts about different groups’ trustworthiness (Strathern ). The nature of trust and relationships is complicated by the fact that information sharing, especially when information is uncertain, also creates relationships (Hultin ). Here, who collects the information and how it is collected matters, reinforcing hierarchies between company, managers, and farmers.…”

Section: Making Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodality, Transparency, and Food Safety in China

Tracy

2016

PoLAR

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In September 2008, revelation of melamine‐contaminated milk supplies in China's dairy industry rocked its manufacturing sector still reeling from highly publicized food and safety scandals in 2007. Despite state and corporate interventions, regulatory and quality management issues highlighted in these earlier scandals remained. Local government and corporate actors’ attempts to suppress information about the scandal highlighted concerns about transparency, accountability, and corruption. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2009 and 2010 in Beijing and Shanghai and across 2012 and 2013 in Beijing and China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. My goals are twofold. First, I seek to move forward discussions of transparency in China, which often suffer from easy dismissals by academics, the media and the public alike. Second, I aim to broaden our understanding of transparency as not just fulfilling multiple functions but also as multimodal in that it is actively produced across different scales of experience and through diverse mechanisms. Using data focused on the production and monitoring of food safety, I describe the structural challenges that led to the 2008 scandal, the measures implemented in the industry to prevent future problems, and the broader discussions and interventions designed to improve China's overall food safety record.

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Section: Making Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodality, Transparency, and Food Safety in China

Tracy

2016

PoLAR

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“…Taussig 1999: 2). Thus, the experience of exclusion, of being denied access to secret information would also be a powerful source of ethnographic insight (Hultin 2013;Jones 2014;Masco 2006Masco , 2010, and prove to be epistemologically generative (Gusterson 2008) as the very exclusion may be part of the performance of secrecy (de Jong 2007: 19).…”

Section: Researching Transnational Think Tanksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discreet Diplomacy

Garsten¹,

Sörbom²

2023

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

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This article aims to expand both the analytical gaze of diplomacy studies and anthropological interests in the field of transnational think tanks, advocacy and policy advice. Drawing on ethnographic data from three such organisations, it investigates secrecy practices, focussing on how such practices amount to discreet diplomatic efforts. In a variety of ways, secrecy is utilised as a resource in foreign relations and diplomacy; it is a means to leverage status and influence. Although outwardly striving for transparency, think tanks use secrecy practices in their effort to establish themselves as actors of consequence in foreign relations and diplomatic circles. The practices of secrecy are part and parcel of the power games such organisations play, in which all participants learn and master what to discuss and what to keep silent about. These practices, however, pose a clear challenge to matters of accountability and transparency.

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“…The experience of exclusion from secrecy can also be a powerful source of ethnographic insight. Just as some ethnographers have written perceptively about the initiatory experience of becoming the kind of person with whom secrets are shared, others describe the exclusionary experience of being the kind of person from whom information is withheld (Hultin 2013, Masco 2010. For instance, de Jong (2007) writes, "When subjects sought to exclude me from secret places and performances, it might be argued that my exclusion was part of their performance of secrecy.…”

Section: Ethnography's Secretmentioning

confidence: 99%

Secrecy

Jones

2014

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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Although expansions of state secrecy and the countervailing leaks of classified documents imbue the anthropology of secrecy with urgent relevance, secrecy has a long-standing status as a paradigmatically anthropological topic. In the ethnographic record, initiatory secrets often stand for the quiddity of culture, and the revelation of concealed realities is an organizing trope in much ethnographic writing. While situating research on secrecy as a reflection of epistemological and ethical dimensions of cultural anthropology more broadly, this review simultaneously explores parallels between different anthropological traditions by focusing on descriptions of the media through which social relations involving secrecy are transacted. Attending to ethnographic accounts of the way secrets travel across different media and coexist simultaneously in various mediated states provides both a novel intellectual framework for surveying recent research and a basis for conceptualizing the anthropology of secrecy itself as a practice that involves intermedial and transmedial knowledge flows.

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Law, Opacity, and Information in Urban Gambia

Cited by 9 publications

References 16 publications

Multimodality, Transparency, and Food Safety in China

Multimodality, Transparency, and Food Safety in China

Discreet Diplomacy

Secrecy

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