progress

Progress, Progressivism, and Progressives

Where does “progress” come from? What does “progressivism” mean? Which cultural tradition and ideological discourse makes “progressive” movements or parties thinkable? Why is it always important to be “moving forward,” as in the now clichéd phrase used by some many US politicians, journalists, and public commentators? When does thinking about “going forward” start to look […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Education as Oppression: One Bedouin’s Perspective on Progress

To say that anthropologists have long been interested in pastoral nomads would be an understatement. As Rada and Neville Dyson-Hudson described the situation in their 1980 article in the Annual Review of Anthropology: “Pastoral nomads have had a persistent fascination for anthropologists,” a fascination that has to do with the “intriguing and difficult to unravel” […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The Exodus Story and Western Conceptions of Progress, Movement, Revolution

Exodus: Movement of the People Thinking still of Gastón Cordillo’s essays on resonance—“Resonance and the Egyptian Revolution” and “The Speed of Revolutionary Resonance,” and others writing about “The Phenomenology of the Resonance-Reverberation Doublet”—I remember writing to Gastón that the concept of resonance reminded me of “agitation,” which raised other associations of political terms that are […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

I have been working and thinking about this particular project, featured below, for a while now. It is my newest “open source music video” featuring a Trinidadian calypso by King Austin (Austin Lewis), from 1980. I owe King Austin an enormous debt. I first heard this song in the pub of the University of the […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

“Head-Decay-Shun”: Literacy, tool of the dependent and displaced?

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 […]