The Apotheosis of St. Christopher of Libya

“Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends,” the president said, quoting scripture. … “Because of these patriots, and because of you, this country that we love will always shine as a light onto the world.” In an effort not to seethe further at the absurdity […]

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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 […]

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Still Standing: Zimbabwe

“Mr. Mugabe, at the age of 88, is rumored to be in poor health. In April, rumors spread in Harare that he was on his deathbed in Singapore, but he appeared at the country’s independence day celebration a few days later, looking fit as he walked around a soccer stadium under a blazing sun for […]

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Keep Your Money: A Series on Dignity

This is the first part of a series on dignity that will appear on ZA, featuring the usual collage of songs, history, documents, and short essays. While there are treatments of “dignity” in Western philosophy, it is interesting to note the absence of the idea as a concept in the works of most anthropologists, which […]

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Colonialism in the News: Roundup No. 2

Continuing from the first post on July 23rd of what was intended to be a series, the reader can look forward to more regular roundups of news and media commentary that feature or engage concepts of contemporary colonization and historical colonialism, as well as past and present decolonization efforts. As much as we would all […]

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Mahmood Mamdani on the “lessons of Zimbabwe”

Looking down at the three previous posts on this blog, it seems that this is proving to be a rather busy day filled with news of anthropologists in the public media sphere. Some will remember that anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani was recently elected as one of the world’s top 10 public intellectuals (and you can see […]

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Imperialism Reloaded: Media Roundup

One of the purposes of this collection is to highlight the increased recognition of the renewed validity and utility of the concept of imperialism as underscored in a range of media. Only extracts of each item are featured below (click on the titles to read the complete items). Even support for African slavery makes a […]

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