In every academic publication there is a little section at the front where people put their acknowledgements, making sure they thank their funding body, their colleagues who have offered advice, and not least the people who actually took part in the research. These are always useful to read as they give interesting insights into how the work was conducted and so on, and sometimes they offer a bit of gossip. One prolific publisher is also a notorious Lothario, and it is possible to trace his affairs with various colleagues by looking at how the dedications at the beginning of each book change.

I have something that is in the slow grinding wheels of final editing for publication, and the acknowledgements for that are fairly mundane, thanking various colleagues who have made suggestions and so on. When I finally get round to writing up my current research I have a different idea in mind. There will be the standard piece of text expressing my sincere thanks to whoever and whatever made the whole thing possible - I suppose I ought to thank my funding body and my colleagues, not least because I will almost certainly need them in the future. In addition, I am toying with the idea of putting a list of “no thanks”, denouncing the people who, instead of making my research possible, actually made it more difficult and less enjoyable.

(may I take a moment to assure the reader that they are not being considered for this category).

I am aware that this might be considered as un-gentlemanly conduct, but it would none the less be very therapeutic. There are a number of people here in the DR who have acted to delay, distract, or stop altogether my research. In particular, I will have to non-thank the numerous botellas who I have come across. These are people who work in government jobs not because they are qualified, but because they are members of the right party, and so need to be rewarded for this. They are called botellas (bottles) because one government building, due to its shape, is nicknamed “the crate”, and so the purpose of the bottles is to fill the crate. My particular favourites are the librarians in the archives of one ministry who turn out to be illiterate, and so are totally useless in finding any record. Various institutions would be non-thanked for their inexplicable and intolerable tendency to write reports and publish studies, yet not make copies available. I have yet to work out the reason why an NGO or government department would spend millions of pesos and years of time writing a report, then making absolutely sure that no one read it.

I have recently been doing some lectures at one of the universities here, and I was contemplating doing a public lecture for various academics, NGOs, government people and members of the public who might be interested in my work. Instead of talking for an hour on my research, I would use it to denounce the various bits of corruption I have come across, which range from the blatant to the nefarious. This is a process that would take up a whole hour, and which would be much more enjoyable for me rather than the normal dry dross I churn out. In particular, I would particularly enjoy denouncing the exploits of people who would appear not just in the lecture material, but also in my non-thanks list, as a kind of cold revenge.

Depending on which tit-bits I throw at the audience, I may have to have a taxi waiting at the back to whisk me straight to the airport, lest the lecture offends too many of the wrong sort of people.