"Anthro-Vision": 3 Ways To See Around Your Blind Spots

Or, Practical Tools to Hear What People are Not Saying, from Gillian Tett

Welcome! I’m Gregory, a podcast host and journalist (going through my own career transition, hence the name of this newsletter), writing about lives in a changing world. If you like, hit this button to subscribe:

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Trailer! Trailer! Trailer!

Oh, did I mention a trailer? It dropped today. (Hence my 2-day delay in posting this post.) So do your favorite podcast app and look for Rough Translation and enjoy a taste of the season that drops next week…

Now, onto today’s post.

Why an Investment Banking Conference is like a Tajik Wedding, a.k.a., Predictive Powers of Observation

Here’s a story. A journalist sits at in the back row of a darkened conference room on the French Riviera, “feeling stupid.” She is surrounded on all sides by “ranks of chino- and pastel-shirt-clad men” whose jargon she barely comprehends. The year is 2005. There are not many journalists in this room. It’ll be another few years before most of the media wakes up to the fact that the complex financial instruments these bankers are trading — with bizarro names like CDO (collateralized debt obligation) and CDS (credit default swap) — are going to topple whole industries, trigger millions of layoffs, and usher in a global financial crisis.

For now, even the journalist’s own editors at the Financial Times don’t particularly see what’s happening here as big news. This only adds to the journalist’s anxiety. She is a new mom. Does her assignment to cover this sleepy conference mean her bosses have demoted her to a less ambitious career track? Is she even cut out for a future in financial journalism? While some of her colleagues boast of degrees in statistics and calculus, her own academic credentials consist of a PhD in anthropology, for which she spent many happy months living in Tajikistan studying the modern marriage rituals of Islamic communities. She loved that work, but how did that have anything to do with her current assignment? 

That’s when she has a revelation. Perhaps, just as she’d once quickly mastered the basics of Tajik to talk with locals, she could learn the alphabet soup of derivatives - CDOs, CDSs, ABSs, CLOs - as a foreign tongue.

And if, in Tajikistan, she’d learned to map human networks - where were the alliances? who held power? who called the shots even if they said the fewest words? - then might she learn to observe these bankers’ social ties?

In Tajikistan this occurred with a complex cycle of wedding ceremonies, dancing, and gifts of embroidered cushions. On the French Riviera, bankers were exchanging business cards, rounds of drinks and jokes, while engaging in communal golf tours and watching PowerPoints in darkened conference rooms. But in both cases the rituals and symbols were reflecting and reproducing a shared cognitive map, biases and assumptions. (Tett, 2022, loc 374 of 1287)

As an anthropologist, she’d tuned her ear for origin stories, founding myths, and other unspoken narratives that locals themselves did not question and thus could hardly explain to an outsider. Might she be able to hear these bankers’ collective origin story, a story that none of them spoke aloud, and yet powerfully bound them as a community and - dangerously - allowed them to justify their work to themselves? 

The journalist’s name is Gillian Tett. She’d go on to predict the 2008 financial crisis before much of the financial press. Now she’s written “Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life,” which when I first looked it up on my Kobo e-book reader immediately shunted me to a library of books about Anthro-wolves.

dmuth, CC, via Wikimedia Commons

So yeah. Not that kind of anthro vision. But this is a handy book, even if you don’t work in journalism or in academia (Gillian Tett is a actually a heavy-hitter in both.) There are practical observational tools she proposes that you can readily put into practice, to get perspective on your own blind spots.

And if you’re dealing with any kind of career or life or national transition, you probably know about blind spots. You probably know the feeling that predicting the future, or even sketching its rough outlines, just went from hard to impossible. So here are three tips to use conversations with people to get your anthro-vision goggles on. In upcoming posts, I’ll give you a few more detailed prompts and exercises that we can do as a group to see how these tools work for us in real situations. (Wow. Aren’t I earnest??? I am. I am! I unashamedly believe in turning listening skills into a superpower. Do you? Then consider sharing this with a friend, or even buying a gift subscription for someone!)

“Anthro-Vision”: Three Tools

“What we are familiar with we cease to see." (Anaïs Nin)

1. Active Listening

You’re probably familiar with the old anthro-truism about “making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” Still, the second part of that phrase gets less attention than the first. “When we look at the world through someone else’s eyes, we can look back and see ourselves more objectively too, seeing risks and opportunities,” Tett writes. She’s specifically talking about immersing yourself in another culture, but you don’t have to think about “culture” as exclusively ethnic or geographical. Consider her example of the investment banker conference. Any social group you encounter that has a shared cognitive map - i.e., they see the world in a similar way — can reveal (partial list): “the power of symbols, the use of space (habits), foot-dragging, and the definition of social boundaries.” Traveling from one group to another, try to notice the different conventions and see how they condition people’s view of themselves and the world. (For example, my own family’s relocation from Nairobi to NYC did a number on my 5-year-old son’s concept of personal space.)

2. Sketch a Worm’s Eye View of Your World. Then Ask Others To.

In an age of Big Data, large-language neural networks, and an army of analysts hawking the “bird’s eye” view 🦅, Tett makes a case for the view of the worm.

Not a worm. But cute! Photo by Daniel Holtzhouse on Unsplash

The worm’s eye view means looking up at the world from one person’s perspective, instead of through the data set of millions. In Tett’s journalism, she sometimes gives people a pencil and sheet of paper, and asks them to sketch “how the different parts of their world fit together.” One person’s sketch may be hopelessly subjective, but ten people’s might help you see patterns you’re not seeing. If you’re going through a transition, or just trying to understand an industry or a situation a bit better, find an excuse to give an acquaintance a blank sheet of paper and pencil. Then prompt them with open-ended questions. Do the same exercise yourself. Resist trying to make sense of it right away.

3. Listen to Laughter

Tett tells a story of watching the 2016 presidential election, when Trump said the ludicrous non-word “bigly” in a debate and chuckles erupted in the Financial Times newsroom. (Trump later insisted he said “big league.”) Either way, it was non-standard English, and thus, to the assembled reporters, funny. But as Tett heard herself laugh too, she wondered, “Am I forgetting my training, yet again?”

Laughter, after all, is never neutral or irrelevant - or not to anthropologists. We tend to ignore it, since it seems like just an inevitable piece of social interaction or a psychological safety valve. But laughter inadvertently defines social groups since you have to have a shared cultural base to “get” a joke. Insiders know when to laugh, even instinctively; outsiders do not “get it.” (Tett, 2022, loc 665 of 1287)

For example, she says, consider that investment conference room of bankers, and their “ritualistic bouts of laughter.” (For further reading about how banker humor quietly justifies dehumanizing financial practices and massive income inequality, see ‘Don’t Mix Paxil, Viagra, and Xanax: What Financiers’ Jokes Say About Inequality.’)

Am I saying we’re being a**hole bankers when we let off steam? Am I saying don’t laugh at Trump! No! I’m just saying that the moment of hearing ourselves laugh out loud is also an opportunity to think about what we’re socially signaling, even to ourselves. And as journalists, or just curious people trying to understand where this world is headed, understanding what other people find funny is a way to get more anthro-vision on our own blind spots. “People like me might laugh at the word “bigly” because it was not part of a logical sentence;” Tett writes, “others just heard it as a sign that he was not elite — and cheered.”¹

Further Listening…

I know that you’re reading this from all around the world, so I’m hoping that you can share some of your own experiences with the rest of us. What do people find funny that mystifies you? What institutional behavior or social groups do you want us to try to decode? Some of our most popular episodes of Rough Translation are about these acts of inquiry. For example, our story of Aktham, a Syrian refugee in Germany who seeks the advice of a dating coach to decode his texts after a date gone wrong. Or Kaitlin, an American in France who rebels against the French law forbidding workers to eat lunch at their desk. Or Pavel, who attempts to live a small town American life without ever leaving his home in Eastern Ukraine. The common thread of all these stories is that the act of navigating other cultures and customs teaches us something profound about ourself.

Aktham Abulhusn and his “flirt coach,” Sophia Lierenfeld. Jacobia Dahm/NPR.

On this newsletter, I’m going to tell you more of those stories from around the world, but I’m also investigating ways that we might get better at noticing our own. Tell me how it’s working for you.

Poll of the Week

1. that’s Tett’s sentence not mine. Please no angry comments about how Trump is actually an elite masquerading to be an everyman. I know.