Matthew Archer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Society Studies at Maastricht University. He is an interdisciplinary social scientist interested in the role that non-state actors such as banks and corporations play in sustainability governance. His research uses ethnographic methods to explore topics including corporate sustainability, voluntary sustainability standards, and impact investing, with a strong focus on their ethical and political dimensions.
Sarah Besky is Professor of the Anthropology of Work in the ILR School at Cornell University. Her books include Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press, 2020) and The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014). She also co-edited with Alex Blanchette How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019). She is currently working on a new book about the countryside in the eastern Himalayas.
Brian Brazeal is a Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Chico. He works in the anthropology of religion and in visual anthropology. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the African-derived religions of Brazil and on religious communities in the global gemstone trade, studying the ways in which religious beliefs and practices shape, and are shaped by, mundane economies.
Les W. Field is Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He has pursued research with indigenous communities in South, Central, and North America, and in Palestine that hinges upon establishing collaborative relationships concerning the goals, methods, agendas, products, and epistemologies of anthropological work. His main areas of interest and research center on narrative and history, nationalist ideologies and the state, resources and development, social transformations and landscapes, and conflict zones.
Alex Golub is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His main area of focus is the Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea, and he has broader interests in the anthropology of mining, extractive industries, and the corporation. His publications include the book Leviathans at the Gold Mine (Duke University Press, 2014) as well as the edited volume A Practice of Anthropology (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016). He is currently writing a biography of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.
Emanuel Hermann is Project Associate at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, focusing on organized crime and peacemaking. He studied at the Graduate Institute Geneva and was previously at the Peace Academy Rhineland-Palatinate, where he conducted research on natural resource governance and human security in post-conflict societies, with a focus on Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Sarah Osterhoudt is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University at Bloomington. Her research takes an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to study the relationships between people and the environment, especially in times of change. She has worked with smallholder vanilla, clove, and rice farmers in northeastern Madagascar, investigating how agroforestry landscapes support ecological diversity, political memory, and cultural meanings. She also investigates how commodity boom and bust cycles affect environmental, economic, and social relationships.
Nethra Samarawickrema is a cultural anthropologist, coach, and consultant. Her research focuses on speculative mining and the transnational trade of Sri Lankan gemstones in the Indian Ocean region.
Shaila Seshia Galvin is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research examines intersecting processes of agrarian and environmental change. An abiding interest in this intersection has led her to focus particularly on how emerging practices of sustainability – from organic agriculture to climate change mitigation – become bureaucratized and standardized, and with what implications for human–environment relations more broadly. She is the author of Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya (Yale University Press, 2021) and currently serves as a co-editor of the Journal of Peasant Studies.
Sam Shuman is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Their research situates Hasidic Judaism within a global context and, in so doing, allows us to rethink larger questions in political theology about race and religion, global capitalism, gender and sexuality, sovereignty, and empire. Their first project focused on Antwerp’s regulation of the diamond sector and the restructuring of its Hasidic workforce.
Andrew Walsh is Associate Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. His research involves ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative research and teaching in Madagascar’s northernmost province of Antsiranana. He has focused on a wide range of topics, dictated largely by developments in this region: artisanal sapphire mining, conservation, ecotourism, and, most recently (as of 2015), the proliferation of small-scale transnational humanitarian, conservation, and development projects.
Contributors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2026
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- How Transparency WorksEthnographies of a Global Value, pp. viii - xPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
- Creative Commons
This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/
Accessibility standard: WCAG 2.2 AAA
Why this information is here
This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.Accessibility Information
The HTML of this book
complies with version 2.2 of the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
(WCAG), offering more comprehensive accessibility measures for a broad range
of users and attains the highest
(AAA)
level of WCAG compliance, optimising the user experience by meeting the most extensive
accessibility guidelines.
Content Navigation
Table of contents navigation
Allows you to navigate directly to chapters, sections, or non‐text items through a linked table of contents, reducing the need for extensive scrolling.
Allows you to navigate directly to chapters, sections, or non‐text items through a linked table of contents, reducing the need for extensive scrolling.
Index navigation
Provides an interactive index, letting you go straight to where a term or subject appears in the text without manual searching.
Provides an interactive index, letting you go straight to where a term or subject appears in the text without manual searching.
Reading Order & Textual Equivalents
Single logical reading order
You will encounter all content (including footnotes, captions, etc.) in a clear, sequential flow, making it easier to follow with assistive tools like screen readers.
You will encounter all content (including footnotes, captions, etc.) in a clear, sequential flow, making it easier to follow with assistive tools like screen readers.
Short alternative textual descriptions
You get concise descriptions (for images, charts, or media clips), ensuring you do not miss crucial information when visual or audio elements are not accessible.
You get concise descriptions (for images, charts, or media clips), ensuring you do not miss crucial information when visual or audio elements are not accessible.
Visualised data also available as non-graphical data
You can access graphs or charts in a text or tabular format, so you are not excluded if you cannot process visual displays.
You can access graphs or charts in a text or tabular format, so you are not excluded if you cannot process visual displays.
Visual Accessibility
Use of colour is not sole means of conveying information
You will still understand key ideas or prompts without relying solely on colour, which is especially helpful if you have colour vision deficiencies.
You will still understand key ideas or prompts without relying solely on colour, which is especially helpful if you have colour vision deficiencies.
Use of high contrast between text and background colour
You benefit from high‐contrast text, which improves legibility if you have low vision or if you are reading in less‐than‐ideal lighting conditions.
You benefit from high‐contrast text, which improves legibility if you have low vision or if you are reading in less‐than‐ideal lighting conditions.
You have
Access
Open access