ISSN 2562-9948
Building better building blocks for the ways we perceive and understand the world.
Surely we have heard and seen enough by now that any lingering “optimism” about Trump governing as an anti-interventionist in foreign affairs has totally evaporated. What Trump promised in foreign policy terms in 2016, and what he instead delivered, are two radically different things—the same could be said of Obama, the so-called peace candidate of […]
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Where does “progress” come from? What does “progressivism” mean? Which cultural tradition and ideological discourse makes “progressive” movements or parties thinkable? Why is it always important to be “moving forward,” as in the now clichéd phrase used by some many US politicians, journalists, and public commentators? When does thinking about “going forward” start to look […]
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To the extent that “white privilege” continues to exist in the US, is it the highest form of privilege? How might a focus on domestic race relations misdirect us from an examination of US society in its proper geopolitical context? Related to the last question: is this introverted, America-centric focus itself a sign of “American privilege”? In practice today the tendency […]
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Against the Labouring Classes: Identity Politics in the New Victorian Age The New Victorianism serves to not only divert politics into issues of morality and identity, it works to obfuscate the bases of increasing inequality. Focusing on the Democratic Party, and its abandonment of the working class over the past forty years, Adolph Reed Jr. […]
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Social Imperialism? New Victorianism’s Domestic Moral Code and the Political Economy of Identity Politics “The nation-state in its imperialist guise was the inescapable context within which all political action necessarily took place: it determined the range of possibilities against which the left as much as the right were compelled to define their positions”. (Eley, 1976, […]
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Victorian Parallels in the New Imperialism “The New Imperialism” is not a very efficient conceptual phrase since it requires a lot of labour to clarify what one means each time one invokes it. For me, one of the noteworthy features of this particular phrase is that it came into currency at two notable points in […]
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“A man…lives not only in the spot which he personally occupies, but in every spot to which he may extend his action, or to which he may conceive it possible that his action should be extended. And so, wherever over the world British influence penetrates, or can conceive itself penetrating, there, and not in the […]
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Originally published as: “Nativistic Movements” By Ralph Linton and A. Irving Hallowell American Anthropologist, 45(2), 1943, pp. 230-240 NATIVISTIC MOVEMENTS By RALPH LINTON ———-page 230———- AT THE time that the centennial meeting of the American Ethnological Society was planned, the writer was invited to contribute a paper on nativistic movements in North America. When he […]
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This and previous issues have been archived on a dedicated site—please see: ENCIRCLING EMPIRE. For frequent updates, please “like” our Facebook page and/or follow on Twitter. Over the period of a month, from October to November of this year, an experiment was attempted: to deliver an extended “lecture” via Zero Anthropology and its Twitter and […]
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From the journal of the World Policy Institute comes “The Big Question“ for its Fall issue on Secrecy and Security. I have maintained a research interest in the area of the anthropology of secrecy, and understandings of power in connection with secrecy in both anthropological theory and in the work of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (more to come […]
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The Independence of What? In early August, Jamaica commemorated its 50th anniversary of Independence. At the very end of this month, Trinidad & Tobago will also mark its 50th anniversary of independence. Both “celebrations” were first made possible by Jamaica disrupting the West Indies Federation by dropping out in 1962 and choosing to take its […]
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“Mr. Mugabe, at the age of 88, is rumored to be in poor health. In April, rumors spread in Harare that he was on his deathbed in Singapore, but he appeared at the country’s independence day celebration a few days later, looking fit as he walked around a soccer stadium under a blazing sun for […]
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A lot of people really do not like Robert Mugabe. Now, moving on to matters of interest and importance…. The Problem of Defiance “Mugabe Remains Defiant,” read the subtitle of a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, from July 14, 2009, written by U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz, and published by WikiLeaks. (A lot […]
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Helpless, pleading, wanting, needing, small, weak, staring at you, black–this is the anti-bogeyman invented by Western humanitarianism, what passes as morality in the ideology of empire (yet again). Past the time of a London Missionary Society, we now have the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the moral dogma of a white, western elite that projects its […]
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It is the singular affliction of whiteness to suffer the slings and arrows of righteous indignation on the rare occasion its privileges are infringed by the power structures meant to secure them. High on the list of stuff white people don’t like is surveillance, at least when its traditional contours are involuted, the lidless eye […]
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ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY 