surveillance – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

The Pandemic Narrative and the War Against the People: Day 2 of an Online Interdisciplinary Symposium

Friday, July 30, 2021 was Day #2 of an online international and interdisciplinary symposium organized by Doctors for Covid Ethics (see the report for Day #1). The symposium was titled, “Call for Immediate Intervention: Gold Standard Covid Science in Practice” (full program PDF, flyer PDF), and the five hour period for the second day was […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

New Book: Emergency as Security–Liberal Empire at Home and Abroad

Kyle McLoughlin and Maximilian Forte “Just as our vision of homeland security has evolved as we have made progress in the War on Terror, we also have learned from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina….We have applied the lessons of Katrina to this Strategy to make sure that America is safer, stronger, and better prepared. To […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Slouching Towards Washington

Does the U.S. have “friends and allies”? Or does the world merely consist of targets and tools? As we learned today the U.S. National Security Agency has been spying on a series of buildings and offices of the European Union, spying on Internet communications, phone calls and more. NATO headquarters has been used to spy […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Anthropology, Global Scouts and Expeditionary Democracy

This and the previous post feature two chapters by Brian Ferguson dealing with the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, and broader issues of militarization, global surveillance, and cultural counterinsurgency that arise. One of the chapters was nearing publication, but the very sad passing of our friend and colleague, Neil L. Whitehead, this past March has […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Global Ethnographic Surveillance

This and the next post feature two chapters by Brian Ferguson dealing with the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, and broader issues of militarization, global surveillance, and cultural counterinsurgency that arise. One of the chapters was nearing publication, but the very sad passing of our friend and colleague, Neil L. Whitehead, this past March has […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Encircling Empire: Report #16—War, Hegemony, Ideology, and Resistance

Encircling Empire: Report #16—War, Hegemony, Ideology, and Resistance 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 […]

by Eliza Jane Darling

Invisible Freedoms

It is the singular affliction of whiteness to suffer the slings and arrows of righteous indignation on the rare occasion its privileges are infringed by the power structures meant to secure them. High on the list of stuff white people don’t like is surveillance, at least when its traditional contours are involuted, the lidless eye […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Wikileaks: Bradley Manning, Sweden as Safe Haven, and Pentagon Propaganda

Those who won’t listen, will feel. With the mainstream media and Pentagon-generated negative publicity of Wikileaks nearing its fourth week, it should be apparent what is rendered absent: any apology from the U.S. military for the civilians it has killed in Afghanistan and Iraq; any discussion of military responsibility for engaging informers whose lives it […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Canadian Responses to the Militarization and Securitization of Anthropology: Report #2 from the CASCA-AES Conference in Vancouver

At the University of British Columbia in Vancouver last Saturday morning (16 May 2009) more than two dozen individuals gathered within the setting of the joint conference of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) and the American Ethnological Society (AES), for an “open session” titled, “Canadian Responses to the Militarization of Anthropology,” which followed from the […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Québec-Vermont: An Even Better Union, Against State-Sponsored Fear

Another Chapter in “Border Studies” I was reminded of one of the stuffier, starchy clichés in Barack Obama’s speeches, about a “more perfect union,” as I thought of two seemingly disparate facts: the strong subterranean movement of socialist and anti-imperialist thinking and practice within Québec, and the fact that Vermont is one state within the […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Gerald Sider: “Can Anthropology Ever Be Innocent?”

My thanks to the new magazine, AnthroNow, for placing the article by Gerald M. Sider online in its current issue (vol. 1, no. 1, April 2009), titled: “Can Anthropology Ever Be Innocent“. This turned out to be quite a valuable and relevant article for me, in helping me to reconfigure what ethnography can mean, and […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Exposing the Network

I am concerned about a number of comments that have been made, in connection with HTS anthropology, that the military can use anthropological work with or without the help of anthropologists. Collin Agee, who signed in as being with the “United States Army”, apparently a US Army operations officer for the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Cyberspace News, 1

From CBC News: Virtual furniture theft leads to real bust Thursday, November 15, 2007 Online currencies in 3D social networking sites are becoming more present, resulting in what is virtually a second economy, and with in-world thefts resulting in arrests as in this case: “Dutch police have arrested a 17-year-old for stealing virtual furniture from […]