calypso – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Bury Me Rolf Harris in Wolf Creek, Zeke

Exceeding charm may come with a harmful flipside. For decades, Rolf Harris was an icon of Australian popular culture. Yet in recent months, the icon has been erased: a result of his trial and conviction on charges of sexual assault against numerous minors, the details of which can be incredibly chilling. He has been sentenced […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Keep Your Money: A Series on Dignity

This is the first part of a series on dignity that will appear on ZA, featuring the usual collage of songs, history, documents, and short essays. While there are treatments of “dignity” in Western philosophy, it is interesting to note the absence of the idea as a concept in the works of most anthropologists, which […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Dis Location: Arrival as Independence

I know I am not the only one who misses the verbal lashes of The Watchman (Wayne Hade of Trinidad, a former police constable) and I thank Guanaguanare very much for taking the time to produce a written transcription of this calypso, as follows below the video. Of course trinidesi also deserves many thanks for […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Me Today … You Tomorrow

(My thanks to Guanaguanare for putting up the words of Shadow’s song, the extract below caught my attention.) Crazy people [yey yey], lazy people [woh oh woh] You see the piggy biting up his brother, yey He don’t care who die, he just want war But when his time is come to face the butcher […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

PROGRESS

I have been working and thinking about this particular project, featured below, for a while now. It is my newest “open source music video” featuring a Trinidadian calypso by King Austin (Austin Lewis), from 1980. I owe King Austin an enormous debt. I first heard this song in the pub of the University of the […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

“The Mongoose” from a Trinidadian, Indian, Greek Point of View

My comrade Guanaguanare has published a different take on “The Mongoose.” Naipaul has been a deeply problematic figure in Trinidadian cultural politics, loved and reviled, admired and scorned. I had the pleasure of seeing him speak in Port of Spain, in 1991 I believe, in the company of friends from the University of the West […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Alien Abduction: Doing Calypso “the Right Way” in the USA

Another episode of “Monday Morning Madness” — and given all of the posts that dealt with Trinidadian “wining” (here, there, and over there), I felt it necessary to introduce some sense of balance, a sense of decorum, of good old fashioned propriety. I want to first send my big thanks and a big hug to […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Show Me Your Motion! (Of Mentors, Peers, and Mimesis and Alterity in Trinidad)

True scientific knowledge, on the contrary, demands abandonment to the very life of the object — G.W.F. Hegel, Preface, The Phenomenology of Mind Discourse of all kind is heavily embedded with speech that has previously occurred, typically in the form of the first person direct quotation. — Joel Sherzer, quoted in Michael Taussig (1993, p. […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Another Caribbean musician “endorses” Obama

This is definitely a trend now, for Caribbean musicians to sing their praises of Barack Obama. For example, see this previous post on this blog, as well the one previous to that. The latest entry is from King Short Shirt (Stanley Humphreys) titled simply, “Barack We Love You.” (I have to be frank, this is […]