ANTHROPOLOGIST’S TAKE ON WHAT MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND

Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life

Author: Gillian Tett

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Recommended Price: R350

For over a century, anthropologists have immersed themselves in unfamiliar cultures, uncovering the hidden rituals that govern how people act. Now, a new generation of anthropologists are using these methods in a different context – to illuminate the behaviour of businesses and consumers around the globe.

In this book, Gillian Tett – bestselling author, Financial Times journalist, and anthropology PhD –reveals how anthropology can make sense of the corporate world. She outlines how anthropology helps explain consumer behaviour, revealing the “webs of meaning” that underpin our shopping habits, and unpicking the subtle cultural shifts driving the rise of green business. She explores how anthropology can shed light on the workplace, identifying the “hidden tribes” within the office, and pinpointing which rituals bind people together as a team. And she shows how we can all use anthropology in our own lives, too: helping us make better decisions, navigate risk, and work out what our peers are really thinking.

Along the way, Tett draws on stories from Tajik villages and Amazon warehouses, Japanese classrooms and Wall Street trading floors. Chapters include one on how bankers misread the risks that led to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and one on the Cambridge Analytica electioneering scandal.

Commenting on the book, Melinda Gates writes: “Anyone working to rebuild a more equal world will benefit from Tett’s well-argued case that to solve 21st century problems, we must expand out fields of vision and fill in old blind spots with new empathy.”