fieldwork – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

The Razor’s Edge LLC Brings You “Reality Tourism”™

You are on top of the world. And sometimes it feels like that is the problem. That is where we at Razor’s Edge LLC come in to support you. If there is one thing that our many years of business experience have taught us, it’s that finding yourself means finding yourself in someone else’s shoes. […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Ethnographies of Resistance Movements: Legible to the Authorities

About 739 posts ago, I published “Exposing the Network,” wherein I expressed my worries about making data on resistance movements and anarchist networks available to open source intelligence gathering by the authorities. The value of such research may be great for discussions internal to anthropology, but the data on which the discussions are based are […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

“The Field”: Doing “Anthropology” (1.2)

“How was the field?” “Are you going to the field?” “I just got back from the field.” “I’ll be away, in the field.” One of the striking features of MIT’s Doing Anthropology video (see the video sidebar), an attempt to market and pitch anthropology, is that it actually looks and sounds an awful lot like […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Why Ethnography is Needed

On this blog a number of arguments have been and will be made that critique ethnography along both well established lines of critique and some newer, and perhaps more incisive critiques. What I want to avoid, however, is a result where only one form of attempting to gain or produce knowledge is dogmatically disqualified, while […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

“Models” of Anthropological Colonialism?

I have been considering the diverse ways in which a relationship exists between anthropology and colonialism, sketching some very rough ideas on this blog (as usual, I feel the need to apologize). In part this comes out of some productive engagements with essays written in ANTH 601 at Concordia University, to which I owe many […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

“Deep Hanging Out”? Yeah right.

Vignette #1: As the professor in charge of teaching introductory anthropology at the University of Adelaide, she enthusiastically told students in the lecture hall that participant observation basically involves some “deep hanging out” with people. Many chuckled, as if they were amused to hear that, after all, one of the main ways of doing research […]