Anthro-Vision Quotes

“The revolutions in Big Data and cyberspace give social and computer scientists powerful new tools to watch people. But they also show why Big Data alone cannot explain the world. There is a desperate need to combine social and data science, and a dire shortage of people who can do this. That creates opportunities that anthropologists should grab. In a globalized world where semiotic codes keep changing we should value people who can navigate different cultures in the real world and cyberspace. And as contagion risks arise, policy makers, businesses, and nongovernmental groups need people who have the imagination to see dangers in a holistic way, be that in relation to pandemics, nuclear threats, the environment, or something similar. In short, the world would benefit if there were more anthropologists who can blend their perspectives with other disciplines such as computing, medicine, finance, law, and much else, or inject their vision into policy making.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“Cultural patterns in the media mattered too.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“But it was hard to find these: few of the human financiers involved in debt, derivatives, or securitization world wanted to be quoted or photographed, and it was almost impossible to see the human borrowers at the end of the complex financial chains.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“It was surprisingly hard for insiders to draw this “map” of all the financial flows that shaped the City. They could see pieces of this picture. There was excellent data about equity listings, say. But none of the people working in private sector banks or government institutions could offer an easy-to-follow idiot’s guide to show how all these flows interacted.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“When people such as Malinowski went to the Trobriand Islands, they were coming from a society that was more powerful than the one they were studying. In the City of London, financiers were far more powerful than journalists or anthropologists; the challenge was how to “study up.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“wherever you sit, in whatever blend of familiar and strange, it always pays to stop and ask yourself a simple question that the bankers on the Riviera were not asking: If I was to arrive in this culture, as a total stranger, or as a Martian or child, what might I see?”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“people typically overemphasize risks that arrive from outside the group and underestimate the ones that are inside the group. Throughout history pandemics have been associated with xenophobia, even if people are complacent about domestic infection risks.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.” —René Dubos”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“During the next eight years Bell lived in an Aboriginal community of about six hundred people near Alice Springs.I “I dropped out of school, stopped wearing shoes, and went hunting with people every chance I got,” she said. She learned to extract water from desert frogs and snacked on “witchetty grubs,” a type of Australian caterpillar that lives among tree roots. “I was very fortunate. I had the most blessed childhood.”2”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“a compartmentalized mental, cultural, and spatial framework that appeared to be widespread.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“None of the women in the women were eating in the daytime, unless they were pregnant or working, because they were observing the Muslim fast.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“But while the early academic descendants of Boas and Malinowski had a clear sense of purpose, by the 1980s the discipline had become more fragmented. Anthropologists were haunted with a sense of embarrassment about the discipline’s colonial legacy and keen to refute it (even more so today.)15 They had realized that true “participant observation” was hard to achieve, since the mere presence of a researcher in a society tends to change what is being studied, and researchers arrive with their own biases.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“Burton and his ilk also had a distinctive philosophy: they believed that science showed that Europeans and Americans were biologically, mentally, and socially superior to others. “The savage is morally and mentally an unfit instrument for the spread of civilization except when, like the higher mammalia, he is reduced to a state of slavery,” wrote August Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers,”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“the need to make the “strange familiar,” to make the “familiar strange,” and listen to social silence.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“the workers were careful when handling oil drums marked as “full.” However, workers happily smoked in rooms that stored drums marked “empty.” The reason? The word “empty” in English is associated with “nothing”; it seems boring, dull, and easy to ignore. However, “empty” oil drums are actually full of flammable fumes.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“Tunnel vision is deadly. We need lateral vision. That is what anthropology can impart: anthro-vision.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“With people dying outside on the streets of Dushanbe, studying marriage rituals did sound exotic—if not irrelevant.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

“In Silicon Valley it is assumed that information on slick professional websites is more trustworthy than that from amateur sites, because that is how techies think. But conspiracy theorists only trusted scruffy sites, since they presumed that the hated elites created the “smart” sites. This insight matters enormously if you want to debunk conspiracies.”
― Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life