civilization – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Bare Feet

Encoding Poverty, Backwardness, and Dependency in US Military Imagery Bare feet. Ever since I was a small child, I have been made aware of how not wearing shoes was symbolically loaded with ideas of poverty, backwardness, primitiveness, or being low class. Images of barefoot people in newspapers and magazines almost always showed villagers in Africa […]

by Donnchadh Mac an Ghoill

Book Review: The Tribal Imagination—Civilization and the Savage Mind, by Robin Fox

The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind. Robin Fox. Harvard University Press. Hardcover. ISBN 9780674059016. Publication: March 2011. 432 pages, 28 line illustrations, 3 maps. Professor Robin Fox is one of those mildly conservative, somewhat eccentric, Englishmen that even we Irish Revolutionaries cannot help but find likeable. I had read his The Red Lamp of Incest some years ago, and […]

by Brendan Stone

Colonial Feminism, Liberal “Progress,” and the Weakness of the Left

[Max Forte: Welcome to Brendan Stone who, along with Donnchadh Mac an Ghoill, joins ZA as a writer.] In view of Quebec’s Charter debate, the resurgence of discussions of the burqa and the niqab, and the continuing stories in the Western press of women’s oppression in Afghanistan, readers may be interested in this update of a paper written in […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

A Russian Lesson on the Anthropology of International Relations

At the end of a long statement, coming as the response to the last question in a press conference in Moscow on August 26, 2013, Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov (above), delivered what might be useful to understand as an anthropological statement on international relations, specifically on the treatment of people(s). It is reproduced here […]

by John Allison

Amerika, Hu Akbar! A people of Mammon, or Love in a Land of Fear

Provocaine: “Love and Duty and Charity and Patriotism; That’s what makes America Great.” Barack Obama’s speech, second term election victory, 2012 You see! It all seems to need to be merged into One Human Society, with common language and rules of behavior called “law”, an easily managed Human Capital Unit (HUCU) grouping of occupational and […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Education as Oppression: One Bedouin’s Perspective on Progress

To say that anthropologists have long been interested in pastoral nomads would be an understatement. As Rada and Neville Dyson-Hudson described the situation in their 1980 article in the Annual Review of Anthropology: “Pastoral nomads have had a persistent fascination for anthropologists,” a fascination that has to do with the “intriguing and difficult to unravel” […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Nation-building, Democracy, Free Markets: A Note to the Occupiers

Thanks to another anthro blog for a link to the new (2004) translation of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (published in 1961 as Les damnés de la terre). The first chapter of the 1963 translation was posted here on this blog. In the new translation by Richard Philcox, we also find a foreword […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

What is “American Art”? Thin-Lipped Gravitas

In an essay by John Updike, in The New York Review of Books titled “The Clarity of Things” (Vol. 55, No. 11, June 26, 2008), he asks what is American in American art? He quotes a 1958 essay by Lloyd Goodrich who wrote: One of the most American traits is our urge to define what […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Anthropology is Dead, Long Live Anthropology! (Who Wants to Leave those Golden Rule Days in the Jungle?) – 1.3

I just love being in Anthropology. I think it is a great privilege to be in institutional Anthropology in this time…it’s like being among old colonials, secluded in a beautiful jungle estate house, as we ponder the demise of our empire, the disrespect and sometimes fury of the restless natives who sense that independence is […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The Colonization Will be Televised

“For a long time — at least six decades — photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one”—Susan Sontag When a conservative British daily such as The Telegraph can feature a commentary (“Execution gives Saddam a martyr’s crown“) condemning […]