ISSN 2562-9948
Big Chief, Big Daddy, Big Babysitter to the World If “winning hearts and minds” is at the top of your global campaign agenda for strategic communication, then you need to insert yourself into some of the most intimate, domestic, and familial places of restive, hungry, and increasingly angry populations. Getting all domestic is what the […]
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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 […]
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This and previous issues have been archived on a dedicated site—please see: ENCIRCLING EMPIRE. For frequent updates, please “like” our Facebook page and/or follow on Twitter. Over the period of a month, from October to November of this year, an experiment was attempted: to deliver an extended “lecture” via Zero Anthropology and its Twitter and […]
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The following is an extract from my chapter, “A Flickr of Militarization: Photographic Regulation, Symbolic Consecration, and the Strategic Communication of ‘Good Intentions’,” published in Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 185-279: US military documents make it quite clear that, for the military, a photograph is a straightforward, […]
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The following is an extract from my chapter, “A Flickr of Militarization: Photographic Regulation, Symbolic Consecration, and the Strategic Communication of ‘Good Intentions’,” published in Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 185-279: In 2009 the Department of the Army produced a field manual titled, “Visual Information Operations” (US […]
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The following is an extract from my chapter, “A Flickr of Militarization: Photographic Regulation, Symbolic Consecration, and the Strategic Communication of ‘Good Intentions’,” published in Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 185-279: One of the possibly more fruitful areas of inquiry to come out of studies of contemporary […]
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Could it be any more obvious how the Pentagon has learned to mimic certain styles of anthropological photography as shown in the instance above? Resembling any of a vast number of photographs of or by anthropologists, such as famous ones of Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead “in the field,” this one also features the note-taking […]
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“A significant addition to research, Who Is an Indian? provides an extended examination and a clear picture of Indigenous identity issues in the Americas. Among the book’s important contributions are its examination of the site of interface between the modern state and Indigenous peoples, as well as its analysis of how state discourses of identities […]
Read More…Further to the Pentagon’s response to the Wikileaks Iraq War logs, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior military adviser to President Obama, apparently had no qualms about posting the following in Twitter–posted without remorse, apology, or disgrace over the release of documentation (from his own troops) of multiple U.S. war […]
Read More…Republished from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism October 22nd, 2010 | by admin The Bureau of Investigative Journalism sent two letters – which listed a number of significant allegations regarding U.S. forces and U.S. defence policy – to the Department of Defense Press Office at the Pentagon, so as to provide an opportunity to respond […]
Read More…[If anything, this is long overdue, and surprising that it did not come from an anthropologist first — not that the professional designation ought to be taken too seriously, especially as a lot of good anthropological work on issues of great public significance is now done by many non-anthropologists. I am speaking here of Nick […]
Read More…Two previous articles on this site (Innocently Informing State Terrorism: Journalism, Knowledge, and Counterinsurgency, and Human Terrain System Under Investigation: HTS Link to JIEDDO & US Death Squads) dealt with the figure of Michael Furlong and what some claim was a “rogue” program of extrajudicial execution. Here, Ishtar Enana, an Iraqi writer (blog: غار عشتار, […]
Read More…Over 470 reports have been published online concerning the relationships between anthropology, other parts of academia, and the military and intelligence agencies since 2001. The items covered here consist of online publications of the mainstream and alternative media, documents online referred to by journalists, statements and reports from professional associations, and journal publications by some […]
Read More…Here is a medley of updates concerning previous posts on this blog: Concerning Montgomery McFate’s doctoral dissertation: Montgomery McFate’s PhD dissertation (when she was Montgomery Cybele Carlough) has been digitized in its entirety and is available for download by persons using libraries with subscriptions to ProQuest. What follows are some of the significant details about […]
Read More…This is John Stanton’s 20th article on the Human Terrain System, with his previous ones available here at: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19. John sent this article a few days ago, my apologies for being late. It is reproduced here with his permission, and has already been published in CounterPunch, which is also featuring an extended […]
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ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY 