Gillian Tett of the Financial Times has been one of my favorite sources for commentary and analysis during the financial crisis. Perhaps one reason she is capable of providing fresh insights is that her background is not one you would expect for a financial journalist. No MBA. No journalism degree. Not the usual career path at all.

Nope — she earned a Ph.D. in social anthropology before joining the FT staff. Her fieldwork was in a mountain village in Tajikistan “where I analyzed how marriage rituatals were used to preserve religious and ethnic identity in the Soviet System,” she reports in a fascinating essay titled “Icebergs and Ideologies: How Information Flows Fuelled the Financial Crisis” in the October 2009 issue of Anthropology News.

It was, she writes, perfect training to understand global finance. “That is partly because,” she say, “bankers (like Tajik villagers) operate as a tightly defined group, with specific cultural patterns and a quasi language (or jargon) of their own. Also like Tajik villagers, bankers are generally trained to think in rigid “silos” and, as a result, find it hard to see how their overall system operates, or to see the contradictions in their own rhetoric and internal organizations.”

Tett’s brief article is a must-read if you want to understand the human dynamics of the financial crisis — and why so many well-informed people didn’t see it coming. Click here to download the article.