Hollywood – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

From Hollywood to Hitler: Rethinking the Cultural Politics of Propaganda

What is propaganda? What does cinema reveal about the Third Reich and its people? What are German films about during the Third Reich? What do they reveal? And what are they hiding? What does cinema know that we don’t? What is it that Germans dreamed about? What does German cinema tell that we have forgotten? […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

American Exceptionalism, American Innocence

Review of American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. By Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong. Foreword by Ajamu Baraka. Afterword by Glen Ford. 256 pages. Published: April 2, 2019. New York: Skyhorse Publishing Inc. ISBN: 9781510742369. Hardcover, $24.99 US; e-Book, $16.99 US. We […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Militainment: Militarized Romance that Kills

The following is a series of extracts from Laura Powell’s chapter, “Glorification of the Military in Popular Culture and the Media,” published in Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 167-184: Overview: Laura Powell argues that while our military members are generally perceived as heroes, this romanticized perception of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Encircling Empire: Report #19—Militainment

Encircling Empire Reports is a selection of essays, blog posts, and news reports covering a given time period, providing links and representative extracts or key passages from each resource, usually focusing on certain countries/continents and/or processes in each report. The focus of the reports ranges from imperialism discussed in broad strokes, to specific facets of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Hortense Powdermaker and the Mechanized Mind: The Problem of Method and the Prizing of Know-How

An establishment anthropologist, and a renegade–Hortense Powdermaker (bio1, bio2, bio3, bio4, bio5) worked on some unique projects that differed from the anthropological standard of her time (especially given her training by Malinowski, and the dominant influences of Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard), and that differ from some of the standards even of our time, though her work […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Militainment: U.S. Military Propaganda in the News Media, Hollywood, and Video Games

“Propaganda is at its most effective when the audience does not know it is being manipulated and one of the best, glitziest examples of that is when propaganda is delivered on the big screen in the guise of a Hollywood blockbuster.”–The Listening Post, 12 June 2010 Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post had an excellent review […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The Ethnographic Adventure of a “Rogue Sociologist”: Gang Leader for a Day goes Hollywood

Thanks to “Anthroman” (also known as Dr. John L. Jackson, Jr., an anthropology professor and filmmaker, not to mention blogger) for his article in The Root, “Hustle and Show.” The article is about a book by Sudhir Venkatesh, co-author of Freakonomics, titled Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, which […]