Caribbean: Of silences, elites and looking forward – by David Jessop

Of silences, elites and looking forward – by David Jessop

Sometimes it is easier to hold on to the past than to address the present; for elites to interact only with each other, to repeat the same actions, and to lose touch with those whom they seek to help.

Recently, the Financial Times journalist and author, Gillian Tett, one of the few who in 2006 accurately forecast the financial crisis and its origins, delivered a thought-provoking short lecture for BBC radio*.

She noted that as a social anthropologist she had discovered that her discipline had provided her with the tools to analyse issues in ways not normally considered by writers on finance.

Listening to her short lecture, the applicability of her theme to the silences now prevalent in the Caribbean, rapidly become apparent.   

In brief, she argued that her academic skills had provided her with an alternative framework to analyse markets, to navigate their contradictions and tensions, and to see how what was said within
elites differed from what was happening on the ground.
Her approach was based on the thinking of the French philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu, his focus on cognitive maps, how we arrange the world,imagine and talk about it, and how this relates to power. It enabled her, she said, to see the gapsbetween rhetoric and reality.     [ Read more]