ISSN 2562-9948
First shown at London’s East End Festival in June of 2017, Brexitannia was the very first documentary about Brexit. It is a striking and deeply pensive film, in contrast with the Brexit movie reviewed in the previous article. Brexitannia (2017) is a superb documentary that is remarkable for its sensitivity, balance, and the ability to […]
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“Obama, the cerebral son of an anthropologist”—this is how the Associated Press touted soon to be ex-president Barack Obama on his visit to Laos this week. The AP went even further, declaring Obama’s approach “soft diplomacy”. One has to wonder where all of the “soft diplomacy” was in the seven brutal wars simultaneously fought by […]
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Victorian Parallels in the New Imperialism “The New Imperialism” is not a very efficient conceptual phrase since it requires a lot of labour to clarify what one means each time one invokes it. For me, one of the noteworthy features of this particular phrase is that it came into currency at two notable points in […]
Read More…Finally, after three years of work, my newest edited volume is out: Indigenous Cosmopolitans Transnational and Transcultural Indigeneity in the Twenty-First Century Reviewers’ comments: “Timely and original, this volume looks at indigenous peoples from the perspective of cosmopolitan theory and at cosmopolitanism from the perspective of the indigenous world. In doing so, it not only […]
Read More…[This is the first in a descending series of articles that will bring this blog to a close.] Circle the Wagons! If the “nativism” that Adam Kuper alleges was spawned by the marriage of American post-modernism and radical political engagement means that only the native can speak for the native, then Kuper will have none […]
Read More…In his black jeans and striped shirt, Khaled resembles the stocky boss of some Algerian trucking company. You’d never guess that he is “the king of raï”, and one of the greatest celebrities of the Arab world. Khaled is the man who brought north-African music to a new audience in Europe, shaking up the pop […]
Read More…An Italian news crew, at times offering the kind of principled and socially engaged commentary I applauded earlier, produced a unique document of riots in Osaka, Japan, and they noted that no other journalists were present. The context was the G-8 meeting held there in June, and while we were made barely aware on this […]
Read More…Another Chapter in “Border Studies” I was reminded of one of the stuffier, starchy clichés in Barack Obama’s speeches, about a “more perfect union,” as I thought of two seemingly disparate facts: the strong subterranean movement of socialist and anti-imperialist thinking and practice within Québec, and the fact that Vermont is one state within the […]
Read More…Premesh Chandran, a Malaysian citizen who is the CEO of Malaysiakini and was attending the Global Forum on Media Development, in Athens, Greece, ventured into the streets and interviewed some non-anarchist protesters. We might call this one “video notes from the streets of cosmopolitanism.” Before I forget, I owe some thanks: Thank you, Greece, for […]
Read More…Anti-Globalization? What Madness Is This? John Jarratt in Wolf Creek (Australia) This is true Monday Morning Madness, though I never expected to start anyone’s Monday off with a dosage of horror, or as I argue here, the Western elites’ perceived horrors of anti-globalization and resentful localisms. Nowhere, I think, is this sentiment best captured than […]
Read More…At some point in the not so distant past a qualitative change occurred in the perception of the social order, so that it was no longer seen mainly in terms of conflict over the production and distribution of ‘goods’. Rather, it is the production and distribution of ‘bads’ that has come into conflict with the […]
Read More…The longer version of the title might have been: How many anthropologies does the West need to produce before they become ‘World Anthropologies’? The tradition of anthropomorphizing inanimate objects and abstract ideas has all of the shortcomings that we already know. Like “cultural extinction,” which suggests that cultures as ideas and practices can “die,” and […]
Read More…On the last day of the [ASA 2006] conference [on cosmopolitanism and anthropology], Keith Hart declared (perhaps a touch harshly), Anthropologists don’t care for cosmopolitanism. It’s just an excuse to come together. We’re not engaging in the world. We don’t talk about Iraq and Iran. Our detached discourse lacks wider relevance. As I have since […]
Read More…methodological cosmopolitanism in anthropology, is likely to invigorate the anthropological research agenda for some time. Methodological cosmopolitanism has been used as a critique of methodological nationalism. In anthropology, methodological cosmopolitanism can be a critique of an immoral methodology that treats the other as a specimen, as well as of theoretical provincialism (American anthropologists only quoting […]
Read More…A cosmopolitan research method and agenda would need to reckon with the primordial otherness of the humans we encounter either face-to-face or indirectly. Thereby, it would have to internalize methodologically the ethical constitution of any form of subjectivity. In this perspective, it is unethical to turn the other into an object of knowledge. This means […]
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ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY 