Ghana + Anthro = Good Times!

            I’ve mentioned that I am currently doing anthropological research at the Madina Marketplace (just a 10-minute tro-tro ride north of campus) in past posts, so I wanted to fill you all in on what I’m doing. But first, before getting started on the meat of my blog post, I think I might start off with some quotes from my economic anthropology professor (this might turn into a series, depends on if he keeps being ridiculous). He goes on crazy tangents, likes to energetically talk about Ghanaian and world politics, and is very opinionated to say the least. He had some interesting quotes I wrote down yesterday that I thought you would find… interesting (keep in mind, this is a senior-level academic course – I have no idea how he got onto some of these topics):

(1) “Before I got married, I used to believe that love was the most important thing. It’s not true. Money is very important.”

(2) “What allows me to sleep at night is the knowledge that Good will always triumph over Evil.”

(3) “Everything that is predicted in the bible has come true.”

(4) “Gadgets don’t make you happy – only a woman can bring you happiness… when I was a bachelor, I always thought there was never going to be anything better. Now I realize how great marriage is: my wife cooks for me, my wife makes my bedsheets for me, and I even have someone to talk to.”

(5) “I believe the world will come to an end in the next 50 years.”

Not bad, right? Anyway, let me tell you a little bit about my research so you have a morsel of an idea about what I spend most of my time here doing (and hopefully learn a teensie-bit about Africa and Anthropology in the process). The way I’m going to do that is with splices of my ethnographic fieldnotes and a paper I wrote last week that might get published here shortly, along with other papers by California students. Feel free to read as much, or as little, as you like. First, the fieldnotes:

“Arrived via tro-tro at Madina market… As I step off the tro-tro, my senses are overwhelmed immediately: people everywhere, cars driving by the stop, the smell of trash in the gutters. There is a real life here – it might not all be pretty, often chaotic, but it’s alive.” 12:40pm, 2/14/2012

“Fortunately, on my way trying to find a stairway, I ran into Hannah at the foot of the stairs selling green leaf. She was very friendly, initiating the conversation (I have found that those who initiate are the most open to having prolonged conversations with me about the market)… I tell her I am interested in learning about the market and she seems receptive to the idea, nodding in approval. I ask about how she knows to set up here (it seemed like quite a random location, not particularly attractive as it is was right under the stairs to nowhere). She tells me that she is in the same spot every, single day. ‘But how did you know to set up here to start?’ ‘The Market Queen told me.’ Apparently, she told me that the Market Queen is primarily responsible for ensuring harmony among the sellers by solving conflict and maintaining order. If one misbehaved, the Market Queen could apparently blacklist the seller for 6 months as a form of punishment. When I asked, ‘what happened if one disobeyed that order by the Market Queen?’ Hannah just snickered and said, ‘you do not disobey the Market Queen.’ … It seems obvious, and essential, that I will have to interview a Market Queen for more in-depth information about this aspect of the marketplace. I was wondering why someone would buy Hannah’s green leaf over someone else’s; since she bought it at the market itself, there must be at least one other seller and there are probably many. The culture of entrepreneurship I have been brought up with in the Silicon Valley puts innovation on a pedestal, tweaking and inventing in a way to make you and your product unique. In Madina market, though, products were hardly unique, with many sellers having absolutely identical products with no distinguishable difference in quality (at least to my untrained eye). I asked Hannah about this. She told me that she has ‘her (regular) customers’ that she meets in much the same way she met me, starting a conversation and being friendly. It seems as though products here are not bought because of their unique or innovative nature, but because of the social relations surrounding the seller’s interaction with the customers. Those who one has good social relations with support the seller by buying their product consistently. Would it be a stretch to label the seller’s interaction with me and other would-be friends/customers marketing? Perhaps the important question is: would Hannah call it that? And what understandings would that lead us to?” 9:15am, 2/22/2012

“I… hustled over to the electronics shop, scared that they had already been setting up, only to awkwardly jump out of the way of a man carrying two chickens dangling from each arm, land on another man’s foot, and proceed to be yelled at as I scurried away.” 6:22am, 2/28/2012

Next, the paper. If you thought my writing was a little over-the-top in some of these blog posts, I apologize ahead of time for my writing in this paper… unfortunately, I am a Berkeley student:

“When I mention my interest in trying to explicate lessons from the interplay of business cultures between one of the world’s preeminent hubs of ‘modern’ entrepreneurial activity – California’s Silicon Valley – and one of the world’s historic centers for ‘traditional’ economic exchange – the Ghanaian marketplace – I generally receive either blank stares, or worse, muffled laughter. My intellectual curiosity has generally led me to seek out paths that have been placed out of the contemporary realm of thinkable thought; thus, I choose to regard the balking of my interlocutors as a sign that I have stumbled on an avenue of inquiry with profound opportunity…

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… For brevity’s sake, we must fast forward to Ghana’s Independence in 1957 – and as the first African colony to shake free of colonial hold – Darkwah depicts Ghanaians as filled with ‘great expectations for the economic fortunes of the country’ owed to an economy comparable to any other middle income country citing, as an example, Ghana’s 66% larger real GDP per capita over South Korea in 1960 (Darkwah 2002: 40). Unfortunately, the state’s initial success did not last long. Ghana’s average annual GDP growth rate went into the red between 1967 and 1984, inflation rates hovered at an annual 55% with a peak of 123% in 1983, and the state lost its status as the world’s leading cocoa producer in 1979 leaving the state ‘clearly fallen into the ranks of the low-income countries of the world.’ Darkwah introduces two common explanations for these failures: one economic and one cultural.  The economic argument focuses on Ghana’s ill-advised domestic economic policies; Darkwah highlights the ‘fixed exchange rate policy and expansionary fiscal deficits financed by excessive borrowing from the banking system.’ She then goes on to focus on the cultural argument, in line with Chamlee-Wright (1997), that Ghanaian governments from independence until the mid-1980’s were considerably antagonistic and neglectful of the indigenous marketplace – a mistake inherited at least partially from past colonial powers - which considerably harmed prospects for development by turning a blind eye to female Ghanaian traders as a potential economic backbone (Darkwah 41-55).

In attempt to revive its floundering economy, Ghana was forced to adopt a structural adjustment program to appease the conditions for a loan from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 1983 and remains the only African country to avoid deviation from the program making it ‘the World Bank’s bright and shining pupil’ (Darkwah 56). The International Financial Institutions (IFI’s) were now in charge and the goal was to liberalize the market – allowing the ‘invisible hand of the market’ to operate freely – employing the archetypal neoliberal cocktail of encouraging foreign direct investment, cuts in state spending and regulation, and the privatization of state industries. Foreign goods flooded the Ghanaian marketplace. Darkwah quotes a relevant statement from an interview conducted by Lynn Brydon in Accra: ‘[before liberalization], plenty money, no goods; now, plenty goods, no money’ (Darkwah 62). Although the IFI’s have attempted to tread in a more collaborative direction since the 1990’s, whether a true partnership with local stakeholders is in place and bearing fruit in terms of the Ghanaian economy is still yet to be seen. If I had to draw conclusions from the minor ethnographic data I have collected thus far at Madina Market so far, it would seem that results still remain at a distance. Informant reports of customer crowds dwindling and growing complaints of empty pockets coincide with a steady economic decline in Ghana since 2008 caused by the simultaneous dual tragedies of a serious food production shortage and dramatic increase in oil prices (Timoney 2011: 62)…

*I have learned since writing this that Ghana apparently had a record economic year this past year, so this is to be re-evaluated*

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… In carving away at several theoretical models – assessing, discarding, and combining them by applicability to her context – Robertson constructs a theoretical path that will serve as the foundation for her research; the forthcoming is an initial, admittedly quite incomplete, attempt to do the same. As a student of cultural anthropology, my first clue arrived in the very name of my discipline. Culture is generally understood to exist in the realm of the superorganic – ‘whatever transcends the biological individual’ as Alfred Kroeber put in his monumental Anthropology: Culture Patterns & Processes (Kroeber 1963, 1-6) – but in attempting to operationalize the concept so as to enact it theoretically, anthropologists have gone in a variety of directions. Cultural analyses are foundationally divergent when defined either holistically (Tylor 1871), dynamically (Boas 1940), functionally (Malinowski 1922), structuro-functionally (Radcliffe-Brown 1952), structurally (Levi-Strauss 1958), or cognitively (Goodenough 1957). Due to the limitations of these conceptual frameworks – as anthropology reckoned with a reflexivity attacking strains of positivist, behaviorist, and modernist approaches – some anthropologists sought to understand culture differently via symbolic interpretation (Geertz 1973; Ortner 1984) while others began to steer away from culture as a concept and toward practice (Bourdieu 1977), power (Foucault 1977), self-reflexivity (Marcus and Fischer 1986), simulation (Baudrillard 1994), ethics (Scheper-Hughes 1995), controlling processes (Nader 1997), and much more.

Not shy of eclecticism, perhaps a combination of some of the most applicable of these later theoretical models would prove potent, and therefore, a look at (business) organizational anthropology might be worthwhile. Since both culture and organization are images of order, collating patterns to dissolve the chaos of our social world, they are likely culprits for fusion (Smircich 1983: 341). Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s quantitative approaches called Organizational Climate Studies reigned supreme, but their effectiveness was brought into question with a boom of business anthropological study in the early 1980’s inspired by the potential – although lacking anthropological rigor – of a book titled Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life (Deal and Kennedy 1982). Rather than introducing culture as a mere variable that functions to define an organization, anthropologists ‘left behind the view that a culture is something an organization has, in favor of the view that a culture is something an organization is’ (Smircich 347). Leaving grossly oversimplified definitions of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ culture far behind, we arrive at a prominent theorist of organizational culture – Edgar Schein.

Schein uses the word culture as a domain representing the accumulated shared learning of a social group which – when operationalized as a concept – provides structural stability, depth, breadth, and integration to several other relevant concepts including norms, values, behavior patterns, rituals, traditions, etc. (Schein 1992: 14-17). He depicts the five levels of organizational culture, from shallow to deep, as follows: artifacts and symbols, patterns of behavior, behavioral norms, values, and fundamental assumptions. Schein goes on to define organizational culture formally as ‘a pattern of shared basic assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration… [and is] taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.’ Although Schein’s relationship between leadership and culture, as ‘two sides of the same coin,’ is intriguing, it must be coupled with more gradient, processual, power-sensitive, polyphonic, and contested understandings typical of post-colonial anthropology (Mahadevan 2009). Another synthesis of value is that of practice theory – understanding culture as something an organization is because it is something that an organization does (Jarzabkowski 2004). It would be hardly suggestible that I have in any way become a rigorous scholar of all these theoretical models, but it is my stern belief that dedication to comprehending, enacting, and integrating them to the best of my ability would only lead to more depth and innovation emanating from the intersection of Silicon Valley and Accra…

… In her work on Asante market women, Clark notes that:

Traders who accumulated more and survived serious crises better had a greater tendency to have stronger vertical linkages with individual customers or stronger horizontal ties with colleagues in formal groups or informal sets than others… personalized commercial relations give traders a chance to improve their control and utilization of critical market resources such as credit, information, and transport without putting additional capital at risk (Clark 216).

Preliminary findings from my ethnographic work in Madina elaborate on this fact. For example, I asked Hannah – a small-scale seller of kontomire (green leaf) in the central market – why customers would choose to buy from her rather than the many others selling kontomire when both the quality and price of the product is nearly identical. She replied, as if obvious, that she maintains a collection of ‘regular customers’ that she meets in the same way she met me – by being outwardly friendly and engaging people walking by in conversation. Plattner recognized the same phenomenon across marketplaces: ‘most shoppers have personalized economic relationships with some vendors, who reserve special items for them and minimize the bargaining required to get a fair market price’ (Plattner 174). This was a novel experience for me, hailing from the Silicon Valley where selling a unique product or service is believed to be crucial for success. Here, in the land of low income and lack of insurance, success was safer when nested within social relations because ‘the seller’s desire to stabilize and regularize their incomes and the buyer’s wish to do the same for their value over the long run’ mitigate risk and construct an equilibrium of reciprocity where short-term killings might be turned down for long-term value (Plattner 212). But was this really so different from what was happening back home?

Companies back home – including Ebay, Zappos, and even Microsoft – are seeking to reduce the degree of separation between executives and the ‘average Joe’ by curbing practices such as executive offices and parking places. Google and Facebook are commonly known as innovators of ‘corporate culture:’ demanding flat hierarchies for better exchange of ideas, motivating their employees with passion, joy, and camaraderie rather than just the paycheck, and mysteriously emanating a youthful innovative drive that somehow has not yet run out of fuel. In my time with Quixey (for example), although informal, it seems that they seek to really be on the cusp of this trend and find new ways to combine productivity, passion, and loyalty among the company community. In fact, many of their employees (whether CEO, engineer, or intern) have known each other for years before the company’s inception and it is company policy that every employee must facilitate a session in their Weekly Seminar Series to share their talents or knowledge with the whole office – truly a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. Could we be seeing a reintroduction of personal economic relationships into the theoretically cold, rational, and atomistic capitalist market – perhaps one could even call it bringing Accra to the Silicon Valley? And if so – what opportunities does that create, what are its consequences, and how can we better understand its dynamics so as to steer it in the direction we choose to? These are all questions to continue pondering and I hope this study will bring us closer to more definitive answers – but more importantly – more riveting questions.”

Woah, you made it to the end of the post - I’m impressed! For that, you get an ecstatic *high five* and a healthy dose of fan ice (if you can come over here to collect your prize)!