Eurocentrism – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

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 […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Distorting Theory and Misreading Society in Afghanistan

This is in response to M. Nazif Shahrani’s piece titled “The Taliban Enigma: Person-Centered Politics & Extremism in Afghanistan” published in ISIM Newsletter 6, October 2000, pp. 20-21. Crucial ethnographic details, structural principles and historical processes, especially those dealing with social inequality and political instability in contemporary Afghanistan, are misunderstood, garbled, and oversimplified by the […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Keep Your Money: A Series on Dignity

This is the first part of a series on dignity that will appear on ZA, featuring the usual collage of songs, history, documents, and short essays. While there are treatments of “dignity” in Western philosophy, it is interesting to note the absence of the idea as a concept in the works of most anthropologists, which […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The Wrong Way and the White Way

Given the post, “Stuff White People Like: Anthropology, apparently,” and Teaching Anthropology‘s “MTV’s ‘Exiled’ Debate: Seems we are riding a wave of sensibility,” this passage in a recent Newseek article (“The Real, Real World“) rang loudly with me, with an import that might exceed the specific context in which the comments were made. With reference […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

“The Mongoose,” by Derek Walcott, has a bigger bite than one might think (1.2)

“It’s going to be nasty,” Derek Walcott said, prefacing his war on V. S. Naipaul with a warning. “The Mongoose” was the last of Walcott’s new poems at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica last weekend [May 2008]. He’d wondered whether he ought to read it, Walcott said, “and then I figured if I don’t […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Useful Anthropology (and “Political Gonorrhoea”)

A variety of thoughts on the “uses” and “usefulness” of anthropology were provoked by Lorenz Khazaleh’s synopsis on African anthropology, which also contains links to online papers of the World Anthropologies Network, a source of especial importance to some of the issues I wish to cover in this blog. Within the North American context it […]