ISSN 2562-9948
A manifesto for the Open Anthropology Project
“Sometimes,” remarked a wise colleague of mine many years ago, “It seems all I know how to do is critique.” We were postgraduate students, I in anthropology, she in sociology, but our paths crossed several times in the classes of a VFM whose task it was to bathe us in the critical light of dialectics. […]
Read More…The following is a Spanish translation of the original and unrevised document that appeared in English on this blog on 09 September, 2008. Lo siguiente es una traducción al español del documento original que apareció en Inglés en este blog el día 09 de septiembre, 2008. Algunos de los cambios en el texto original no […]
Read More…Revised: 21 September 2008 This document is meant to be the start of a decolonized code of ethics, ethics as seen not from the point of view of the foreign anthropologist, but from the vantage point of the community “receiving” that anthropologist. The history behind this document is quite long, dating at least to Vine […]
Read More…Apolitical, as in Conservative “Apolitical intellectuals” is a poem by Otto René Castillo from Guatemala, appearing on Deathpower. An apolitical intellectual is an interesting idea, and there may be one some day. What I think Castillo is referring to as “apolitical” is not the absence of political subjectivity, but rather disengagement from the politics of […]
Read More…For many of those who are 40 and older, 1968 stands out as an emblematic year for the transnational politics of dissent, for the development of countercultures and various avant gardes, for the emergence of non-class social movements, and the appearance of what some call the “revolution of the forgotten peoples” in the social sciences […]
Read More…SING OUT, SHOUT OUT forty years ago today independence came our way welcomed by our struggling songs it came but would not stay and we, wanting to believe, let ourselves be deceived by the well-groomed speech of ambitious men who time proved to be thieves but the years went by and nothing came new flag, […]
Read More…I was very happy to receive a reply from Illcommonz, in response to questions I sent regarding the meaning of “Anthropologix,” what the words were next to the MTV logo on the screen (I was not sure if I had read them clearly), and to ask questions about the makers of the film. The response […]
Read More…Many thanks again to Lorenz Khazaleh at antropologi.info for bringing my attention to this fascinating interview with Maurice Bloch, where views are expressed that sit perfectly well with the thrust of the Open Anthropology Project. This also ties in with my response to the comment that I am “ambivalent” about my own work that one […]
Read More…Previously I outlined briefly the meaning of “new world knowledge” and its Caribbean roots in the New World Movement. Since the late 1960s, a number of new schools of theory, research, and anaylsis have developed and taken root, in a ways that furthered, added to, or otherwise amended the research and activist orientations of the […]
Read More…Many thanks again to inspiration from fellow bloggers at Savage Minds with their article by Dylan Kerrigan who teaches the Anthropology of the Caribbean course at the St. Augustine, Trinidad, campus of the University of the West Indies (I had met his predecessor back in 2002, and thanks to a failing memory I am disappointed […]
Read More…NO DIVIDE Owen Wiltshire has a very thought provoking blog at nodivide.wordpress.com that shares his research project on anthropological collaboration through new media, anthropological blogging, and the decolonization of anthropological practice. It is a very unique and innovative research project that is essentially an anthropological study of anthropology itself. The guiding principle of his work […]
Read More…Purely by coincidence, and to my very great shock and deep sorrow, I only just discovered a few moments ago that Dr. Roi Kwabena, whose articles and news we had reproduced on The CAC Review, a man who had regularly corresponded with me over several years, suddenly died on 09 January, 2008, a day after […]
Read More…In conjunction with my last post, decolonizing anthropology must at the same time involve a breakdown of barriers between the so-called disciplines and faculties of a the typical university. The typical university, as Wallerstein and others have amply demonstrated, derives its fundamental structure from the nineteenth-century European fragmentation and classification of knowledge into the distinctive […]
Read More…The notion of academic colonialism that is used to refer to the extraction of information from one place, which is then repackaged, reconstructed, and published in another (often at a cost that proves prohibitive for buyers in the place from which the information was extracted) is something I have found to be both useful and problematic as […]
Read More…Still speaking of comments posted in the discussion on the AAA’s new blog, I noted that one writer in particular posted the following reasonable objection, one that unveils certain facts that I myself have downplayed: Recently, I listened to McFate, the HTS [Human Terrain System] designer, present the basic structure of the HTS as well as […]
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ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY 