The 2010 WikiLeaks release of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables has made it eminently clear that there is a vast gulf between the public face of diplomacy and the opinions and actions that take place behind embassy doors. In At Home with the Diplomats, Iver B. Neumann offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a foreign ministry. Neumann worked for several years at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he had an up-close view of how diplomats conduct their business and how they perceive their own practices. In this book he shows us how diplomacy is conducted on a day-to-day basis. Approaching contemporary diplomacy from an anthropological perspective, Neumann examines the various aspects of diplomatic work and practice, including immunity, permanent representation, diplomatic sociability, accreditation, and issues of gender equality. Neumann shows that the diplomat working abroad and the diplomat at home are engaged in two different modes of knowledge production. Diplomats in the field focus primarily on gathering and processing information. In contrast, the diplomat based in his or her home capital is caught up in the seemingly endless production of texts: reports, speeches, position papers, and the like. Neumann leaves the reader with a keen sense of the practices of diplomacy: relations with foreign ministries, mediating between other people’s positions while integrating personal and professional into a cohesive whole, adherence to compulsory routines and agendas, and, above all, the generation of knowledge. Yet even as they come to master such quotidian tasks, diplomats are regularly called upon to do exceptional things, such as negotiating peace.
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There is a vast gulf between the public face of diplomacy and the opinions and actions that take place behind embassy doors. In At Home with the Diplomats, Iver B. Neumann offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a foreign ministry.
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Introduction: Who Are They and Where Do They Come From? Chapter 1. Abroad: The Emergence of Permanent Diplomacy Chapter 2. At Home: The Emergence of the Foreign Ministry Chapter 3. The Bureaucratic Mode of Knowledge Production Chapter 4. To Be a Diplomat Chapter 5. Diplomats Gendered and Classed Conclusion: Diplomatic KnowledgeReferences Index
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... Iver Neumann presents a bold new approach: the study of diplomacy as anthropology.... Neumann is well suited to parsing the grammar of this shared culture as a participant-observer of the diplomatic tribe.... By retrieving what this world looks and feels like, Neumann's work poses a series of questions that point the way to an exciting agenda for further research.
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Based on a close ethnographic and historical analysis of Norway's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iver B. Neumann’s book provides a detailed, fascinating insider account of the behavior of Norwegian diplomats. Neumann offers critical anthropological insight into the wider world of international diplomacy from its origins to the present day, including the cultural norms and values that define what it means to be a diplomat in our increasingly globalized world. A valuable contribution to the anthropology of elites and the study of modern government, this book should be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding modern bureaucracy and contemporary statecraft.
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A series edited by Dominic Boyer
Expertise isdedicated to publishing innovative scholarship situated at the vibrant juncture of the anthropology of knowledge, science and technology studies, and new media studies. The proliferation of new technologies across the world today is generating new forms of knowledge and techniques of knowing that are in turn transforming existing practices and institutions. Understanding these emerging cultures of expertise ranks among the most challenging and rewarding horizons of the human sciences. Expertise seeks to extend this horizon and to create new opportunities for conversation and collaboration. We seek theoretically sophisticated, historically attuned works of ethnography from anthropologists and other scholars. The following is an illustrative but not exhaustive list of areas of research and scholarship that interest us: •Professions, professionalism, and cultures of expertise •Technocracy, bureaucratic practices, and institutions •Expertise and authority in scientific, technical, and medical communities •The diversification of digital media and information technologies and their cultural and political effects •New media and information practices in contemporary political and social movements •The intersection of religious and spiritual knowledge with scientific and secular knowledge •Late liberal and neosocialist forms of political expertise, administration, and management •Contemporary efforts to commodify knowledge and capitalist knowledge industries and economies •Globalization, transnational ecologies of expertise, and circulating forms of knowledge and information The series editor for Expertise is Dominic Boyer, Department of Anthropology Rice University (dcb2@rice.edu). Praise for Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge "In Dominic Boyer's series, the long deferred and exotic anthropology of elites finally becomes, most productively, the ethnography of experts, on which so many lively topical openings in contemporary anthropological research depend. Experts are subjects, partners, sponsors, and audiences—all of which shape the spaces and questions that anthropologists distinctively create in their research. It is so important to have a series defined in this way, and it is exciting to watch as each new volume appears." —George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine "Dominic Boyer's aptly named Expertise series tackles issues that are of pressing interest globally and that will likewise define anthropology’s future: the effects of new media and technology, the contemporary threat of disease, the spread of capitalist management techniques, and more. Boyer has assembled exceptional scholars who adroitly analyze these emerging conditions and the knowledge practices they call into being. The Expertise series is an important venue for exciting, innovative, and urgent work." —Caitlin Zaloom, New York University “Imaginative, sophisticated, and, yes, displaying extraordinary expertise, this series brings together remarkable studies of the social life of contemporary knowledges—and of the actors and institutions central to their transformation. Individually fascinating and grounded in the textures of emergent practice, these volumes together constitute a rich and generative conversation of real consequence.” —Donald L. Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz “For the last decade or so interest in the nature of expertise and the operation of cultures of expertise has moved from the margins to the center of anthropological research. The Expertise series published by Cornell University Press not only fully anticipated this trend but also has been in the forefront of defining its intellectual interests and its ethnographic ambitions. The series demonstrates how a bold new synthesis of disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) agendas is gaining articulation, a synthesis that demands serious attention to how theory and data themselves operate within cultures of expertise. Encompassing many of the most important and challenging areas of global knowledge production--media, religion, politics, medicine, science, and technology--the books in the series reveal the creative role of expertise in defining the institutional imperatives and the managerial practices of our time.” —Douglas Holmes, Binghamton University “In a more or less tacit sense, anthropology has always involved the study of expert knowledge and expert practice. But this indispensable new series from Cornell University Press invites us to confront the problem of expertise as a conceptual object in itself, one that is at once grounded in particular institutional settings and constantly in a state of translation across domains of media, science, politics, and entrepreneurship.” —William Mazzarella, University of Chicago
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780801477652
Publisert
2012
Utgiver
Vendor
Cornell University Press
Vekt
454 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Dybde
18 mm
Aldersnivå
01, G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Forfatter

Biographical note

Iver B. Neumann is Professor and Director of Research at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of Uses of the Other: The "East" in European Identity Formation and coauthor most recently of Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality.