COLLABORATION – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

When does reciprocity not matter? When you’re a journalist and not an anthropologist

Continuing from my last two posts, I have been thinking about instances where reciprocity, collaboration, control over representation, advocacy, and even informed consent simply did not matter at all to the indigenous community in question and to its friends in the wider community. I thought of the occasions where I had to share space with […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Is the “lone researcher” a myth?

Elitists, isolated in their ivory towers, serving out life terms in self-imposed exile. It’s a great image, if you are writing a comedic novel, or perhaps aiming to produce a take on Great Expectations applied to an academic setting, or likewise some rendition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. One can indeed think of how […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Internet Indigeneity & Anthropological Advocacy: text of a presentation at the University of South Florida (March 19, 2008)

INTERNET INDIGENEITY & ANTHROPOLOGICAL ADVOCACY Practicing Anti-Extinctionism, Diffusing Indigeneity, and Web Development as Action Research. For the past several years I have been working on two separate gaps in anthropological research and practice that would normally be viewed as separate and distinct. For some time now, speaking in ethnographic terms about either contemporary indigenous peoples […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Diane Lewis: Anthropology and Colonialism

In the opening paragraph to her 1973 article on “Anthropology and Colonialism” (a relatively unique focus for an article, even at that late time), Diane Lewis writes: ANTHROPOLOGY is in a state of crisis. This is demonstrated in the field and in the classroom by the marked estrangement between anthropologists and the nonwhite people they […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Anthropology’s Dirty Little Colonial Streak

In good times it might appear to be a minor streak; at other times it is a big, broad swath. The coloniality of anthropology might be something hidden and obscured by the passage of time, perhaps seemingly esoteric; at other times, such as the present, anthropology’s role as an instrument of empire can come back […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Introducing the beginnings of the Open Anthropology Project

OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY arises from a dissastisfaction with the state of knowledge in contemporary and classical anthropology, and is meant to significantly restructure and move anthropology beyond its current confines, beyond the constraints of professionalization and institutionalization, transcending the very “disciplinariness” of a discipline that has often foundered on its own shoals since its inception as […]