Blueprints, judgment, and perseverance in a corporate context

Current Anthropology

Volumn 52, Issue SUPPL. 3, 2011, Pages

  Guyer, Jane I ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79953159146     PISSN: 00113204     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/657893     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. All Project documents are publicly available in English and French at http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/EXTREGINI/ EXTCHADCAMPIPELINE/0,menuPK:843277~pagePK:64168427~piPK:64168435~theSitePK: 843238,00.html. The site includes the IAG terms of reference, all the IAG reports, many notes on specific topics, our introduction to the company's Baseline Environmental Studies, the binding Environmental Management Plan, and the IAG final report.
2. An interesting comparative question can arise about the difference between undertaking projects that have been assigned a virtualist definition of a crafted end point (Carrier and Miller 1998; Devji 2008; Rabinow 2008) as distinct from those undertaken under a processual definition of a range of possible vistas. The former would seem logically to entail a deontological ethics, while the latter veer toward consequentialism and/ or virtue ethics. Underlying this distinction are the further questions of how, when, and for whom life takes on the project form at all and in what sense any temporal series of such projects is thought to have a cumulative nature. Such questions are much clearer in an explicitly religious frame of reference than the secular one described here: life moves toward what form and timing of accounting? Are judgment, retribution, and reward-both moral and pragmatic-rapid and decisive (as they are in oracular religious cultures), or do they accrue complex debits and credits over lifetimes and generations? The present limited article raises such issues, but they would demand a much broader comprehensive treatment than is possible here.
3. Thanks to Anand Pandian for reminding me of Arendt's discussion of judgment and conscience.
4. My thanks to Clara Han for this very interesting suggestion.
5. I have been interested in the analytics of the mid-time frame in two other works. In the land use studies, a group of us developed analysis of the decadal frame that had seemed particularly neglected (Guyer et al. 2007). In economic studies, I tried working with the concept of the "near future" in social imagination (Guyer 2007).
6. An early description of the project was written up as a briefing (Guyer 2002). The final report is posted on the IAG Web site. Other midstream analyses of the project include prominently Ian Gary and Terry Karl's Bottom of the Barrel (2003).
7. See par. 4.1.1, law 001, report on Mission 9, May 15-June 6, 2005; par. 2.5, amending law 0001, report on Mission 10, September 25-October 18, 2005; and Communique, January 4-9, 2006.
8. Questions with respect to conscience might include its temporal reach; for example, does any part of it expire with age? How do acuity of memory and techniques of imprinting make conscience even possible through time?
9. This was one of many insightful suggestions made by Joel Robbins.
10. Naveeda Khan made the fine suggestion that I read Devji (2008) on militant Islam and the deontological trajectory. If the task is intergenerational, then persevering is simply a permanent way of life to be realized at all stages and at all levels of personal capacity.
11. African scholars Adigun Agbaje, Wale Adebanwi, and Ebenezer Obadare (2009) have launched a new journal, Review of Leadership in Africa, dedicated to the study of leadership, in light of the gap they see between the quality of the scholarship on the topic and the depth of the need for it.
12. A legal case is being pursued in Nigerian courts as I revise this article. It involves KBR, which was a contractor in the Chad-Cameroon Project. Although an unconnected case and subsequent to the Project, it certainly raises general concerns about industry practice. The U.S. page document filed in a Houston federal court alleged massive bribes in connection with the construction of a natural-gas plant on Bonny Island requiring US$7.5 billion. KBR pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay US$420 million in penalties, nearly all of which was covered by Halliburton. Former CEO Albert Jackson Stanley, who ran KBR when it was a subsidiary to Halliburton, was sentenced to 7 years in prison via plea agreement (Wikipedia, August 4, 2010; http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/KBR-(company)).