Janine Wedel - Collision and Collusion - The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe

    5. The author would like to thank Erind Pajo for helpful discussion on this issue and for contributing the image of the bridge.

    6. The concept of “transidentities” draws on Fredrik Barth’s work exploring “repertoires” of identities and establishing that actors employ different identities depending on the situation. See Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1969).

    7. See, for example, the comments of USAID official Thomas A. Dine in chapter 4.

    8. As discussed in Chapter 4, “transactors” are players in a small, informal group who work together for mutual gain, while formally representing different parties. Although transactors may share the stated goals of the parties they represent, they have additional goals and ways of operating of their own. These may, advertently or inadvertently, subvert or subordinate the aims of those for whom they ostensibly act.

    9. There is, of course, a sizable literature in social science, and especially in anthropology, on the “other.” See, in particular, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, United Kingdom: Verso, 1991); and Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983).

  10. Another international organization that has been seen as an integral part of joining “the West” is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). After the Warsaw pact’s collapse, NATO formed the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC), which included NATO members as well as former Warsaw Pact countries. In 1994, NATO began the Partnership for Peace (PFP) program, under which non-NATO countries were permitted to begin participating in NATO military exercises and planning. More than 20 nations, including Russia and other former communist countries, joined PFP, which involved placing NATO advisers in the ministries of defense in the recipient countries. Despite involvement in PFP, not all countries were viewed as eventual members. Membership in NATO was a major part of the foreign policies of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, which were admitted on March 12, 1999.

APPENDIX 2

    1. Cris Shore and Susan Wright, “Policy: A New Field of Anthropology,” Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power, Cris Shore and Susan Wright, eds., London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 1997, p. 14.

    2. Laura Nader, “Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying Up,” Reinventing Anthropology, Dell Hymes, ed., New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1974, pp. 284-311 (quote appears on pp. 292-293). See also Nader’s “The Vertical Slice: Hierarchies and Children,” Hierarchy and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Bureaucracy, G. M. Britan and R. Cohen, eds., Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980. For a recent discussion of “studying up,” see Susan Wright, “‘Culture’ in Anthropology and Organizational Studies,” Anthropology of Organizations, Susan Wright, ed., London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 1994, pp. 14-17.

    3. Eric R. Wolf, “American Anthropologists and American Society,” Reinventing Anthropology, Dell Hymes, ed., New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1974, p. 261.

    4. See, for example, Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996, and “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination,” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 1, February 1999, pp. 111-143; Gideon Kunda, Engineering Culture, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992; George Marcus, Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992; Philip C. Parnell, “The Composite State: The Poor and the Nation in Manila,” Ethnography in Unstable Places, Carol Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz, and Kay Warren, eds., Duke University Press, forthcoming 2001; and Cris Shore and Susan Wright, “Policy: A New Field of Anthropology,” Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power, Cris Shore and Susan Wright, eds., London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 1997.

    5. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology,” Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1997, p. 15.

    6. Sherry B. Ortner, “Fieldwork in the Postcommunity,” Anthropology and Humanism, vol. 22, no. 1, 1997, p.76. Increasingly, anthropologists have been conducting delocalized fieldwork among people connected with one another. For example, Ortner studied a high school graduating class that once had been part of an “actual on-the-ground community” that is now dispersed throughout the United States (ibid., pp. 61-80).

    7. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist, vol. 26, no. 2, 1999, p. 294.

    8. Poland, the most populous nation in the region and the first to carry out a revolution and post-communist economic reforms received far more aid than any other single country in the initial aid push. Some 60 percent of U.S. grant aid and 36 percent of EU PHARE aid to the region was obligated to Poland during 1990-92 (appendix 1: tables 3.1 and 4.1).

    9. J. Van Velsen, “The Extended-Case Method and Situational Analysis,” The Craft of Social Anthropology, A. L. Epstein, ed., New York, NY: Tavistock Publications, 1967, p. 145.

  10. As anthropologist George Marcus has put it, “In multi-sited ethnography, comparison emerges from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose contours, sites, and relationships are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making an account that has different, complexly connected real-world sites of investigation” (George Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 24, 1995, Annual Reviews Inc., p. 102).

  11. In practice, this means representing myself accurately to informants (that I am an anthropologist, whom I work for, in what capacity, and the ends for which the information is gathered). It also means entering into agreements with my informants (“sources” to journalists) as to whether the information they are providing is “on background,” “off the record,” or “on the record” and not confusing those in publication.

  12. For more on this topic, see Janine R. Wedel and David A. Kideckel, “Studying Up: Amending the First Principle of Anthropological Ethics,” Anthropology Newsletter, vol. 35, no. 7, October 1994, p. 37.

  13. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology,” Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1997, p. 37.

  14. See Janine R. Wedel, “Tainted Transactions: An Exchange,” National Interest, no. 60, Summer 2000, pp. 98-110.

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