ISSN 2562-9948
On August 4, an interesting event took place: “Stop the Shot”. This was a video press conference organized by the Truth for Health Foundation in the US, which was live streamed online and has since been uploaded to various alternative video hosting platforms—on the main one advertised, it has already received three quarters of a […]
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It’s a simple matter, even if one might lose oneself in the various details, names, places, and dates. The Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM), mostly made up of Anglophone Caribbean states, decisively stood up for non-intervention in the internal affairs of states by going against the push to recognize the illegitimate and illegal claim […]
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“The collectives TFTT [The Fire This Time] and IR/IR [Indigenous Resistance, Indigenous Reality] craft a hypnotic, militant dub music intended to transmit a supershock to the forces of global devastation. But most importantly, for TFTT and IRIIR, ‘dub’ is a comprehensive and enlarged term that refers to their aesthetic and musical sensibilities, philosophical orientations and […]
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The Independence of What? In early August, Jamaica commemorated its 50th anniversary of Independence. At the very end of this month, Trinidad & Tobago will also mark its 50th anniversary of independence. Both “celebrations” were first made possible by Jamaica disrupting the West Indies Federation by dropping out in 1962 and choosing to take its […]
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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 […]
Read More…A production of “West India,” a musical spoken poem of my late friend and collaborator, Dr. Roi Kwabena, from his Y42K album. This video plays on the weight of Eurocentric constructions of Caribbean history and identity, a zone where hegemonic European and American fantasies were played out. In response, Kwabena calls for a reclamation of […]
Read More…Unlike my previous post on Google Insight statistics for anthropology searches, this time I am not making the mistake of closing the pages without preserving a link so that others can investigate the searches. Having conducted a number of queries using Google Insights, I realize that I risk becoming addicted to this service, with the […]
Read More…One of the purposes of this collection is to highlight the increased recognition of the renewed validity and utility of the concept of imperialism as underscored in a range of media. Only extracts of each item are featured below (click on the titles to read the complete items). Even support for African slavery makes a […]
Read More…“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 […]
Read More…True scientific knowledge, on the contrary, demands abandonment to the very life of the object — G.W.F. Hegel, Preface, The Phenomenology of Mind Discourse of all kind is heavily embedded with speech that has previously occurred, typically in the form of the first person direct quotation. — Joel Sherzer, quoted in Michael Taussig (1993, p. […]
Read More…Apolitical, as in Conservative “Apolitical intellectuals” is a poem by Otto René Castillo from Guatemala, appearing on Deathpower. An apolitical intellectual is an interesting idea, and there may be one some day. What I think Castillo is referring to as “apolitical” is not the absence of political subjectivity, but rather disengagement from the politics of […]
Read More…Given the particularities of the way Jamaican creole English is pronounced, the word education often sounds like head-decay-shun. I once heard a Guyanese professor claim that this pronunciation, in this case, was more than just coincidental: it was a critical rejection of the formal school system by some Rastafarians in Jamaica, given what they saw […]
Read More…It has long been the contention of Immanuel Wallerstein, among others, that one of the cost-effective ways of maintaining an empire is to get the colonized to colonize themselves. That is obviously a simple rendition of a long history. Yet let us note that the British Empire engaged in warfare with the help of the […]
Read More…Slowly I have seen the emergence of Caribbean musical tributes to Barack Obama, something one ordinarily does not see happening with US presidential candidates, most of whom I would argue inspire indifference, resignation, or plain hostility in the English-speaking Caribbean which, without a language barrier, and with significant family connections, and blanketed by US media, […]
Read More…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 […]
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ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY 