ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

A Canadian anthropological approach to the study of empire and the human condition

The Visual Imperium

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: One of the possibly more fruitful areas of inquiry to come out of studies of contemporary […]

The Colonization Will be Televised

“For a long time — at least six decades — photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one”—Susan Sontag When a conservative British daily such as The Telegraph can feature a commentary (“Execution gives Saddam a martyr’s crown“) condemning […]