Pierre Bourdieu – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

US Anthropology is Imperial, not Universal

Part Two of: “Canadian Anthropology or Cultural Imperialism?” Read Part One “today numerous topics directly issuing from the intellectual confrontations relating to the social particularity of American society and of its universities have been imposed, in apparently de-historicized form, upon the whole planet. These commonplaces, in the Aristotelian sense of notions or theses with which […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Scientific Imperialism

“A fundamental law of Netwonian physics applies also to military maneuver: one can achieve overwhelming force by substituting velocity for mass”. (Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, 2003) “Are we to reserve the techniques and the right to manipulate peoples as the privilege of a few planning, goal-oriented and power-hungry individuals to whom the instrumentality of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Realism or Iconography? The Pentagon’s Implicit Theory of Visual Representation

The following is an extract from my chapter, “A Flickr of Militarization: Photographic Regulation, Symbolic Consecration, and the Strategic Communication of ‘Good Intentions’,” published in Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 185-279: US military documents make it quite clear that, for the military, a photograph is a straightforward, […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

0.178: The Social Production of Science and Anthropology as Knowledge for Domination

The intellectual heritage of European expansion that we inherit as anthropologists – certainly not without modification and criticism – is again the subject in this series. If Immanuel Wallerstein explained which agendas became dominant with the institutionalization of the social sciences, with some notes on why they became dominant, Pierre Bourdieu provides some explanation as […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

0.179: Imperialism, Americanization, and the Social Sciences

Cultural imperialism rests on the power to universalize particularisms linked to a singular historical tradition by causing them to be misrecognized as such. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 41) If the social sciences are Eurocentric, does this also mean that they are imperialist? Where Immanuel Wallerstein finds liberalism as the underpinning of the geoculture of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

An Anthropological Preview of the Post-9/11 World

I accidentally came across this piece by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a Norwegian anthropologist, titled “The Paranoid Phase of Globalisation.” It was published in openDemocracy just a little over a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington D.C., and it was interesting to note Eriksen’s predictions at the time: Imagine this […]