In the BusinessDay of January 5, 2010 Anthropologist Karen Ho carried out a seventeen-month-long fieldwork on Wall Street, interviewing and observing investment bankers. She first started out working as a rookie management consulting analyst in a hybrid investment and commercial bank. She planned to first work in finance herself for a while before going back to graduate school to study [...]

In the BusinessDay of December 29, 2009 There is a thing about being so close to something that one does not see it anymore. Anthropologists normally refer to it as going native. You have gone native when you no longer see the obvious things anymore, when the things that an outsider notices stares you in the face but you are [...]

In the BusinessDay of December 22, 2009 Nigeria is not known as a country that has contributed a lot to the development of democracy, what with very many years of dictatorship and all. But the Athens-born mode of governance might just be getting a big make-over from the state of affairs in Nigeria. If the way Nigeria has been run [...]

In the BusinessDay of December 15, 2009 Recently, we got the news in Germany that the most famous German investigative journalist dyed his hair dark and painted himself black in order to experience what it means to be black in Germany. The reaction of the Black German community was simple: they found his treatment of the issue very distasteful and [...]

In the BusinessDay of December 1, 2009 Sometime ago, in a forum of Nigerians, someone said that he did not know whether to be proud to be a Nigerian.  The response: “How dare you say you might not be proud of Nigeria? That is the kind of thing that makes other countries dump on us! When they hear that someone [...]

In the BusinessDay of November 9, 2009 In Africa, generally, the left-right political divide does not make much sense. I do not remember the last time I heard of a Nigerian political party with meaningful social democratic ideals. I have instead listened to populist politicians talk about how they would make education, health care, and social welfare available to all, [...]

In the BusinessDay of November 3, 2009 I was not a Nigerian until I lived outside Nigeria. Let me explain.The realization that I am Nigerian hit me right between the eyes when I went to study in Sweden. Apart from the fact that I was a foreigner, that is. Foreigner I was prepared for. The reason I chose to go [...]

In the BusinessDay of October 27, 2009 The most popular way of looking at China in Africa is through the dual lenses of international relations and international trade. One main argument that comes out of this is that, the way China does business in Africa has made the countries that are pushing some African countries to do better on human [...]

In the BusinessDay of October 20, 2009 Sometime a couple of years ago, during the Christmas season, I was at a bank in Ibadan with a friend. A man came into the bank sometime after us with three children. My friend looked at the kids who were busy tossing a filled balloon over their heads and asked if I still [...]

In the BusinessDay of October 13, 2009 The world recently marked a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an incident that has been described by many as the beginning of the global financial crisis. This seems a decent time to take a look at one anthropologist’s take on the crisis.Gillian Tett, a Ph.D in social anthropology from Cambridge University, [...]