New Book: ARIMA BORN

Arima Born Revealing the History of Arima and its Mission through the Catholic Church’s Baptismal Registers, 1820–1916 by Maximilian C. Forte Montreal: Alert Press, 2019 The Catholic Mission of Santa Rosa is something that helped to make Arima a distinctive town in Trinidad, accounting for nearly half of the Amerindian population of the colony in […]

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Democracy in Cuba and at Home

Review essay, Part 1 (see Part 2) Cuba and its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion. By Arnold August. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing; London: Zed Books. 2013. ISBN 978-1-55266-404-9. 267 pages (not including Preface and Acknowledgments) Arnold August’s Cuba and its Neighbours is a richly documented and thus very detailed description and analysis of the history, theory, and […]

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On Eritrea: Cross-Talk Without Dialogue

What follows immediately below is a letter sent to me via email today. Beneath that is my response. Academic Research, Intelligence Gathering, and Character Assassination: Is It the Same Everywhere? We are among an international group of researchers – social scientists, historians, legal scholars and journalists – with decades of experience working on the Horn […]

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Anthropology: The Empire on which the Sun Never Sets (Part 1)

Questions and debates about the end of anthropology are highlighted here for their potential value in revealing what the ‘crisis talk’ in the discipline really means, and what it may be masking. In this article the reader is invited to reflect on several questions: about anthropology as a discipline or as a praxis; about how anthropology can be not just revitalised, but revolutionised; about the place of ethnography in anthropology; and, the quest for distinction and the accumulation of disciplinary capital. More broadly, this article deals with the restructuring of anthropology within a context of continued imperialism.

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Neocolonialism: It’s Post-Independence, Not Post-Colonial

Unintended Open Source Ethnography For as much serendipity as conventional, on the ground, ethnography is known to entail, the “approach” discussed here is barely an approach at all: it was unprovoked, unplanned, without coordination, being neither methodical nor systematic.  It became a collaboration, out of mutual interest, from distinct and separate positions, but there was […]

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The Diary of Ted the Tongue: Pinecone Anthropologist

In an earlier article, “More European Press Coverage of the Human Terrain System,” I referred to an article in Germany’s GEO Magazine which carried an extensive article about anthropology and the Human Terrain System, on 05 May 2010, the whole of which can be viewed and downloaded from here, titled “Ein Ethnologe im Krieg.” Online you can […]

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Cyberspace Ethnography (2.0): Course

For anyone who might be interested, I have launched the website for the revised version of my course, Cyberspace Ethnography, which I am offering this semester. I have made numerous changes to the previous version, and I am seriously looking forward to the outcomes in this course. The last time I offered the course, many […]

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More on the Open Anthropology website

Since beginning this informal and loosely conceived project, I have become more sensitive to the differences between a blog and a HTML website, of the limitations and advantages of each. I originally intended for openanthropology.org to serve as a back-up for this blog, that is, to serve in a secondary and supportive role. Instead, what […]

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