ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

ISSN 2562-9948

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Book Review: Afghanistan Post–2014—Misreading Afghanistan’s Crypto-coloniality

Review of: Afghanistan Post-2014: Power Configurations and Evolving Tragectories. Edited by Rajen Harshe’ and Dhananjay Tripathi. (New Delhi: Routledge), 2016, pp. xix+248. The colonial and postcolonial writings about of Afghanistan are marked by the absence of a systematic and critical awareness about the country as an offspring and dependency of Western colonialism. The ethnographic, historic […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Rula Ghani: Preaching for Christianity, Israel and Empire

In the name of liberating Afghan women several American feminist organizations joined forces with various American Zionist groups (including the Zionist “neocons”), manufacturers of weapons, and other American militarist groups to invade Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 incident. There is a substantial volume of academic and popular literature dealing with this general subject. This […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Pamphleteer Anthropology and the Production of Knowledge about Afghanistan

The military occupation of Afghanistan by the United States and its partners has spawned floods of popular and academic writings and visual effects about the culture, history and politics of the country. A leading contributor to these stores of information about Afghanistan is Thomas Jefferson Barfield, currently professor of anthropology at Boston University and president […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Encircling Empire: Report #24—Regime Change

In this report, our first for 2014, the reader will find links and article extracts for a selection of some of the very best resources to have been published online, focusing on the topic of regime change, along with an extended essay on Imperialism and Democracy. Here we address the current cases of Venezuela and Ukraine, and […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Zero Anthropology: Top Articles for 2013 That You Probably Missed and Shouldn’t Have

This was a year of giant losses, especially with the passing of monumental figures such as Hugo Chávez (March 5) and then Nelson Mandela exactly nine months later (December 5). While Chávez’s successor seems to have rebounded successfully, lengthening his electoral lead in what is already the second election victory for Venezuela’s ruling PSUV since […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Distorting Theory and Misreading Society in Afghanistan

This is in response to M. Nazif Shahrani’s piece titled “The Taliban Enigma: Person-Centered Politics & Extremism in Afghanistan” published in ISIM Newsletter 6, October 2000, pp. 20-21. Crucial ethnographic details, structural principles and historical processes, especially those dealing with social inequality and political instability in contemporary Afghanistan, are misunderstood, garbled, and oversimplified by the […]

by Brendan Stone

Colonial Feminism, Liberal “Progress,” and the Weakness of the Left

[Max Forte: Welcome to Brendan Stone who, along with Donnchadh Mac an Ghoill, joins ZA as a writer.] In view of Quebec’s Charter debate, the resurgence of discussions of the burqa and the niqab, and the continuing stories in the Western press of women’s oppression in Afghanistan, readers may be interested in this update of a paper written in […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Drones and the Production of Terror in Afghanistan

In his “Drone Strikes” (Anthropology News, March/April 2013) Daniel Varisco softly counsels the raging and confused American warfare machine about the futility of its bloody military operations in the lands of the Others in pursuit of its sadomasochistic “war on terror”. I partially agree with Daniel Varisco; yes, the acts of terror committed by the […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

A Massacre for a Moral Martyr: ‘Person’ versus ‘Population’ in Humanitarianized Afghanistan

Massacred by “Good Intentions”? On April 7, 2013, the BBC reported this awful story, one of a long string of such NATO airstrikes on areas with civilian populations in Afghanistan: “Eleven children have been killed in a Nato air strike in eastern Afghanistan, officials and witnesses say. At least one woman was reportedly killed and […]

by John Allison

John’s Final Epistle to The Anthropologists, Part I: The Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at the Climax of the Neolithic

Peeping through a Keyhole, Down upon My Knees We are virtually here to discuss with you something that I would call InTRADOCtrination: Intelligent Design for Retraining the Masses The Mission?: We suggest that it is The Locking-In: The Prison-Industrial Complex, well-documented and contextualized by Angela Davis. In fact, she traces my essay’s central themes. You Say You Want […]

by John Allison

Separate Realities, Centers of Gravity and Global COIN’s Cultural “Solvent”

Maimana, the capital of Faryab Province, as I photographed part of it in 1969 The new USNATO military base at Maimana. Note the farmland plowed up to prevent approach and to prevent improvised explosive devices to be hidden there by the occupied peoples. Stand back! You are too close. [Note: this article incorporates some text […]

by John Allison

The Goat Caught in Bushkazi: Personal Effects of One’s Role in the Great Game

The beginning of this story, for me, was in the spring of 1969. I had applied for funding to do a cutting edge project combining methods and techniques of visual anthropology that I had learned from John Collier, Jr, my own version of cognitive anthropology arising out of the works of Edward Sapir and the […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Vending Distorted Afghanistan Through Patriotic ‘Anthropology’

First published in Critique of Anthropology, 2011, 31(3) 256–270 Review Essay: Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, xi + 389 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-14568-6. $29.95 (hbk) The destabilization and military occupation of Afghanistan by the United States over the past three decades has triggered the hasty production of […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Peace Corps and Afghanistan

The information and discussion about the activities of and the accumulation of various forms of capital by some Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs)—all in South America—is interesting (Anthropology News, December 2011, March 2012). President John Kennedy adapted the blast “ask not what this country can do for you, ask what you can do for this country” […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

The U.S. War of Terror in Afghanistan

In the words of U. S. representative Michael Honda the U.S. war of terror in Afghanistan has become the longest and “everlasting war” in the history of the United States. The vulgar asymmetry and injustice of this so called “war” has prompted its pre-industrial victims in Afghanistan and the surrounding region and their global supporters […]