[book post] The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

As an actual professional might say: "Starred review."

Bevins's aim with The Jakarta Method is straightforward: he wants to tell a history of the Cold War, not from the perspective of the US, nor from the perspective of the Soviet Union, but from the perspective of the global south: those countries that dared to try and forge their own path in the new world economy, post-decolonization. And the central set piece in his narrative is the fallout from the 30 September Movement in Indonesia (1965), when the US aided and abetted a right-wing coup, and helped to produce & disseminate propaganda for the new regime, resulting in the extrajudicial slaughter of somewhere between 500,000 and one million people.

Which, uh, sure was news to me.

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[book post] The Anti-Politics Machine by James Ferguson

God this book was such a total delight to read. Like, yes, it's some anthropologist's PhD thesis, and I don't think it's supposed to be laugh-out-loud hilarious. But, well, allow me to retitle some chapters to match what I experienced while reading:

Conceptual apparatus: the constitution of the object of "development"—Lesotho as "less developed country" In which the author takes the 1975 World Bank Country Report on Lesotho, compares it side-by-side with basic literal facts about the country, observes how bonkers-wrong the World Bank report is, and then stares into the camera like The Office dot gif. Oh, also, he reverse-engineers where the report got half of its totally made-up statistics and, damn, this sure is some big Recent Harvard Grad Was Told To Bullshit Some Tables And Graphs And Bullshitted Accordingly energy

The Bovine Mystique: a study of power, property, and livestock in rural Lesotho It turns out cattle serve as 401k retirement plans for dudes who work in mining, once they're too old to work in the mines. That's it, that's the story. It is not that cattle hold some "sacred" "spiritual" place in Basotho culture, but also, it's not like these dudes are idiots acting against their own economic self-interest by not selling the cows the second they're offered a good price, jfc y'all need to learn to do field interviews

The decentralization debacle In which the author interviews various government employees, asks who they report to, and then he draws an org chart based on the results. Finally he goes to some of the upper-level bureaucrats and asks if the org chart is accurate; turns out they disagree; hilarity ensues!

It's a quick enough and engrossing enough book that I'd recommend just reading it yourself if any of that sounds entertaining to you, but, a few of my high-level thoughts:

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