state – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Pathways for the Post-COVID New Old World

Part 5 of 5 of the COVID-19 Series. Some are openly proclaiming, “you don’t want to waste a crisis,” as they calculate how the crisis could become a series of opportunities to “change things”. We have to question whether strategic pre-positioning to shape the “post-COVID normal,” might end up even unconsciously shaping the authorities’ responses […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Economic Citizenship and Resource Nationalism

What is resource nationalism, and why is it important? One of Wikipedia’s shortest entries, “resource nationalism” nonetheless appears in 372 files published by WikiLeaks. Resource nationalism seems to be of especial concern to US diplomats and private interests particularly among corporations specializing in the extraction of minerals and petroleum. States which practice resource nationalism include […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Which States? Which Secrets? Secrets from Whom?

From the journal of the World Policy Institute comes “The Big Question“ for its Fall issue on Secrecy and Security. I have maintained a research interest in the area of the anthropology of secrecy, and understandings of power in connection with secrecy in both anthropological theory and in the work of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (more to come […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Causes and Consequences of the Destabilization of Afghanistan

Over the last 30 years, the polity of Afghanistan has undergone several overlapping transformations. The structure of power at the center has collapsed, causing the center-periphery relationship to evaporate. The movement of economic and human resources from various regions of Afghanistan to locations across international borders, especially in Iran and Pakistan, has intensified. Ethnic, sectarian, […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Review of Johannes Fabian’s Ethnography as Commentary

The Three Bloggers…and Tweeting versus Telepathy I am writing about an event that I advertised earlier here, Johannes Fabian’s address to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, co-organized with the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. The event lasted from 5:00 to 7:00pm and was heavily attended, with at least […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Useful Anthropology (and “Political Gonorrhoea”)

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 […]