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 […]

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Democracy in Cuba and at Home

Review essay, Part 1 (see Part 2) Cuba and its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion. By Arnold August. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing; London: Zed Books. 2013. ISBN 978-1-55266-404-9. 267 pages (not including Preface and Acknowledgments) Arnold August’s Cuba and its Neighbours is a richly documented and thus very detailed description and analysis of the history, theory, and […]

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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 […]

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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” […]

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Encircling Empire: Report #13—Revolution, Intervention, Anthropology

In this report, first two maps of social media penetration in the Middle East and North Africa, in relation to ongoing revolts; then, a long overdue catalogue of anthropologists writing online about the revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa; then a series of opposing items, those dealing with rejections of any foreign military intervention in Libya (a position best articulated by Fidel Castro), followed by statements by what would otherwise be willing interventionists, in the U.S. government, who find multiple problems with imposing a no-flight-zone, and then those articles and statements that strongly favour intervention, and the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P); finally, we end with notes on empire at work in Afghanistan.

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Empire and the Liberation of Veiled Women: Lutz & Collins

In “The Color of Sex: Postwar Photographic Histories of Race and Gender,” by Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins (reprinted in The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, 2002, pps. 92-116), we encounter this very illuminating passage dealing with the figure of the veiled, non-Western woman, photographed by National Geographic, placing the apparent obsession with […]

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Hortense Powdermaker and the Mechanized Mind: The Problem of Method and the Prizing of Know-How

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 […]

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