ISSN 2562-9948
Review essay, Part 2 (see Part 1) Referring to the process by which he studied Cuban democracy, August explicitly refers to it as “ethnographic research” (p. xiii). This is an important point, because he was trained as a political scientist in Montreal, but he is producing the kind of book that no anthropologist has offered, […]
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Within the question of the professionalisation of the discipline lies a still largely unexplored area of how Anthropology serves as a western, largely white, middle-class mode of ‘consumption’, specifically the consumption of knowledge about the world that has been ‘appropriately’ filtered, organized, and translated. Of course getting a degree in Anthropology is not just like any other form of consumption, just as it is not merely an expression of curiosity: the process results in formal certification.
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Anthropology as a discipline, and anthropology as curiosity about difference or as a philosophy of the human condition, certainly overlap but they are not the same. Enforcers of the discipline have tended to monopolistically speak in the name of the project as a whole. This appropriation, whether intentional or simply a mistake, confuses analysis of the purposes of institutional Anthropology.
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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 […]
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An establishment anthropologist, and a renegade–Hortense Powdermaker (bio1, bio2, bio3, bio4, bio5) worked on some unique projects that differed from the anthropological standard of her time (especially given her training by Malinowski, and the dominant influences of Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard), and that differ from some of the standards even of our time, though her work […]
Read More…About 739 posts ago, I published “Exposing the Network,” wherein I expressed my worries about making data on resistance movements and anarchist networks available to open source intelligence gathering by the authorities. The value of such research may be great for discussions internal to anthropology, but the data on which the discussions are based are […]
Read More…Unintended Open Source Ethnography For as much serendipity as conventional, on the ground, ethnography is known to entail, the “approach” discussed here is barely an approach at all: it was unprovoked, unplanned, without coordination, being neither methodical nor systematic. It became a collaboration, out of mutual interest, from distinct and separate positions, but there was […]
Read More…First, my thanks to Erik Davis (colleague, long time friend of this blog) for directing my attention to this brilliant piece by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: Lara Logan, You Suck, from which I will quote extensively in the extracts that follow. This is a “notes and quotes” feature of this blog, apart from this […]
Read More…[This is a paper that was originally published under the title of “Anthropology and the Representation of Recent Migrations from Afghanistan,” as it appeared in Rethinking Refuge and Displacement: Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants, Volume VIII, 2000. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association. Eds. E. M. Godziak and D. J. Shandy. Pp. 291-321. Given the […]
Read More……CONTINUED FROM PART 1 We continue the discussion of the American Anthropological Association’s Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) which released its “Final Report on the Army’s Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program,” in early December of 2009. Though not a comprehensive summary, nor a thorough […]
Read More…When the American Anthropological Association’s Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) released its “Final Report on the Army’s Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program,” in early December of 2009, there was a fair bit of media coverage that zeroed in on one paragraph in particular: When […]
Read More…While still small, the number of YouTube videos that pertain in some way to the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) is growing, and one can find a neatly arranged selection (which for some reason bears the exact title of one of my articles), on the World News Network. I will focus on only two, […]
Read More…This interlude in the series is to finally introduce the work of Dr. Vassos Argyrou (Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull), specifically his book, Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: A Postcolonial Critique (London: Pluto Press, 2002) which I have referred to in the past on several occasions (a condensed version of […]
Read More…The intellectual heritage of European expansion that we inherit as anthropologists – certainly not without modification and criticism – is again the subject in this series. If Immanuel Wallerstein explained which agendas became dominant with the institutionalization of the social sciences, with some notes on why they became dominant, Pierre Bourdieu provides some explanation as […]
Read More…Professional Knowledge Creation in the World-System Building an anti-imperialist “anthropology,” plus an anthropology that studies imperialism, and that studies itself as a received invention of imperialism, means much more than just analyzing and questioning how anthropologists served this or that colonial venture. It means totally unthinking anthropology as a social science; more than that, it […]
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ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY 