Visual Anthropology – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Bagram Santa

Easily lending themselves to multiple forms of misunderstanding, the Pentagon nevertheless regularly produces images of military personnel dressed as Santa Claus. This too is a pattern, minor in terms of the number of such photographs, but still a recurring feature. The images in this third and final photo essay of this series, come out of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The Babysitter

Big Chief, Big Daddy, Big Babysitter to the World If “winning hearts and minds” is at the top of your global campaign agenda for strategic communication, then you need to insert yourself into some of the most intimate, domestic, and familial places of restive, hungry, and increasingly angry populations. Getting all domestic is what the […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Bare Feet

Encoding Poverty, Backwardness, and Dependency in US Military Imagery Bare feet. Ever since I was a small child, I have been made aware of how not wearing shoes was symbolically loaded with ideas of poverty, backwardness, primitiveness, or being low class. Images of barefoot people in newspapers and magazines almost always showed villagers in Africa […]

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

The US Military as Great Chief, Father, Doctor, and Babysitter

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: In 2009 the Department of the Army produced a field manual titled, “Visual Information Operations” (US […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

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 […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Pentagon Photography and Visual Anthropology

Could it be any more obvious how the Pentagon has learned to mimic certain styles of anthropological photography as shown in the instance above? Resembling any of a vast number of photographs of or by anthropologists, such as famous ones of Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead “in the field,” this one also features the note-taking […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

New Book: Good Intentions (Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism)

Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism is the fourth volume in the New Imperialism series published by Alert Press, and it has just been released in hardcover, paperback, and in a couple of free versions online (a simple PDF, a bookmarked PDF [also here], or individual chapter files as below). In addition, over […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

“In Complete World” at the International Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec, 2009

The following is the text of the presentation I made on Friday, 30 January, 2009, at the sixth annual student organized International Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec (FIFEQ6), at the day held during the Concordia University part of the festival which moves across several university campuses. My previous presentations at the Festival can be found […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The Revenge of the Local, the Horror of the Provincial, and Western Cosmopolitanism at Risk

Anti-Globalization? What Madness Is This? John Jarratt in Wolf Creek (Australia) This is true Monday Morning Madness, though I never expected to start anyone’s Monday off with a dosage of horror, or as I argue here, the Western elites’ perceived horrors of anti-globalization and resentful localisms. Nowhere, I think, is this sentiment best captured than […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

FIFEQ 2009: International Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec, call for submissions

The Festival du Film Ethnographique du Québec (FIFEQ) is now in its sixth year. From January 30th to February 1st 2009, approximately one hundred ethnographic films will be shown free of charge in both Montreal and Quebec. The screening of these films will be accompanied by lectures, roundtable discussions and social gatherings. We are now […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Questions about Race, Indigeneity, and Photography

Given the debate surrounding the proposed ban of “mixed-blood” marriages among Dominica’s Caribs, and the unexplained assertion that 1,000 “full blood Caribs” remain there, added to assertions made in the Taino Revival book that contemporary Tainos are really black people trying to deny their blackness by choosing a Taino identity, there seems to be a […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

International Student Ethnographic Film Festival, 2008, London

Please read this note from the organizers: Please ignore and delete previous ISEFF posting. The festival has now taken a new format and will take place on 11 and 12 November 2008. Our website is http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/iseff/ Here you can view information and download an application form to submit films. Deadline for submission is 22nd September […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

“Important Ideas” in Anthropology

Back in 1989, Edmund Carpenter joined in a particularly visceral polemic occasioned by the release of Robert Gardner’s film, Forest of Bliss. I will not recapitulate that debate here, which in part centered on Gardner’s art versus anthropological science, on Gardner’s visual poetry versus anthropological theory, on Gardner’s evocative imagery/imagination versus steady narration…I will just […]