A Canadian anthropological approach to the study of empire and the human condition
When and how did the polarization of political opinion become so mainstream in the US? When was acrimony institutionalized? When did it become acceptable to deny a political opponent’s right to exist, and to commit oneself to the destruction of one’s opponents? When was incivility validated? Why are personal attacks, smears, and character assassination legitimized […]
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Miami, and what became a Miami aesthetic, was probably one of the most distinctive and memorable features of the 1980s in North America. Hit shows like Miami Vice and the music of Jan Hammer; movies like Scarface; and, new fashions like white cotton or linen jackets and pastel-coloured t-shirts, plus a revival of art deco […]
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Why is there growing inequality in wealth distribution in the US? Is inequality inevitable? If inequality is inevitable, can it be useful? Can inequality become a problem? If so, when does inequality become a problem? How can a society reduce problematic inequality? Which model of growth should the US be emulating? What are the keys […]
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Review of: Afghanistan Post-2014: Power Configurations and Evolving Tragectories. Edited by Rajen Harshe’ and Dhananjay Tripathi. (New Delhi: Routledge), 2016, pp. xix+248. The colonial and postcolonial writings about of Afghanistan are marked by the absence of a systematic and critical awareness about the country as an offspring and dependency of Western colonialism. The ethnographic, historic […]
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Review of: Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, by Stephen Gowans. Published by Baraka Books, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 6 x 9 inches. 280 pages. ISBN No 9781771861359. Paper, $24.95 CDN; PDF/EPUB, $19.99 CDN. “It is easy to lose a country, but difficult to win it back”. —Kim Il-sung (quoted in […]
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Review of: Washington’s Long War on Syria, by Stephen Gowans. Published by Baraka Books, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 6 x 9 inches. 280 pages. ISBN No 9781771861083. Paper, $24.95 CDN; PDF/EPUB, $19.99 CDN. Why does Syria matter? What “threat” does Syria represent to the US? Is Syria a democracy? Is the Syrian government a legitimate one? […]
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Abstract What is “silencing” and is it out of place in the contemporary North American university? How do “silencing” and “public anthropology” intersect? What are the roles of academic power and academic capital? Readers are invited to explore the proposition that “silencing” is really about the political economy of value—the destruction or creation of value, […]
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In Canada, “a yoga instructor…says her free class at the University of Ottawa was cancelled because of concerns over cultural appropriation….‘There were some cultural sensitivity issues and people were offended’,” this despite the fact that yoga was deliberately spread to the West by Indian gurus and was meant to be shared. In Lethbridge, Alberta, high […]
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How Orthodoxy, Professionalism, and Unresponsive Politics Finally Doomed a 19th-century Project What a sight to behold. These are the dying days, counting down soon to the final hours, of the defeated political project of liberalism, inherited from the 19th-century. The centre—if there ever was one—could not hold after all. What a thing it is to […]
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Immigration, rightly or wrongly, has been marched to the frontline of current political struggles in Europe and North America. Whether exaggerated or accurate, the role of immigration is situated as a central factor in the Brexit referendum in the UK, and the rise of the “America First” Trump movement in the US. It seems impossible […]
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Canada, Mexico, and the US: we could argue that any one of these nation-states “lost” because of NAFTA while the others “won”. That is Donald Trump’s position: that the US’ trade partners have “won” from NAFTA, at the expense of the US (which would also validate NAFTA as a “good thing” for both Canada and […]
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Has anything out of the ordinary happened to the US as an imperialist power since the ascent of Trump to office? While the continuities between Trump and his predecessors are considerable, have there been any significant discontinuities that mark the first year of this presidency? Is there any reason to think that the rise of […]
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Reaction against globalization often takes a visceral nationalist turn in many parts of the globe, no less in the US where the impacts of globalization are increasingly registered as an increased “Third Worldization” of large parts of the society and economy. The nationalist reaction to peripheralization within the centre takes shape in ideas of “taking […]
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After decades of protests and riots against neoliberal structural adjustment; after anti-globalization mass movements flourished across North America and Europe; after a large portion of Latin America and the Caribbean elected socialist governments; after waves of anti-Western cultural and religious revitalization movements (some violent, some not) have spread from Indonesia to Europe; after nationalist and […]
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Where does “progress” come from? What does “progressivism” mean? Which cultural tradition and ideological discourse makes “progressive” movements or parties thinkable? Why is it always important to be “moving forward,” as in the now clichéd phrase used by some many US politicians, journalists, and public commentators? When does thinking about “going forward” start to look […]
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Against the Labouring Classes: Identity Politics in the New Victorian Age The New Victorianism serves to not only divert politics into issues of morality and identity, it works to obfuscate the bases of increasing inequality. Focusing on the Democratic Party, and its abandonment of the working class over the past forty years, Adolph Reed Jr. […]
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Social Imperialism? New Victorianism’s Domestic Moral Code and the Political Economy of Identity Politics “The nation-state in its imperialist guise was the inescapable context within which all political action necessarily took place: it determined the range of possibilities against which the left as much as the right were compelled to define their positions”. (Eley, 1976, […]
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Victorian Parallels in the New Imperialism “The New Imperialism” is not a very efficient conceptual phrase since it requires a lot of labour to clarify what one means each time one invokes it. For me, one of the noteworthy features of this particular phrase is that it came into currency at two notable points in […]
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“A man…lives not only in the spot which he personally occupies, but in every spot to which he may extend his action, or to which he may conceive it possible that his action should be extended. And so, wherever over the world British influence penetrates, or can conceive itself penetrating, there, and not in the […]
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“Proletarian” has acquired many layers of meaning over the centuries, possibly in part because the many, historically changing situations of proletarians became more complex. Since the advent of western European capitalism in the sixteenth century, proletarians were defined as “members of the lowest class”. By the mid-1800s, they were “the lowest class” composed of “indigent […]
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As Canada commemorated its 150th anniversary on July 1st, 2017, it seemed appropriate to present a topic in the history of anthropology, and Canadian anthropology in particular, that has received little attention. It is understandable that what is presented below has received little attention among Canadians generally, who have other concerns, but not so understandable […]
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Is there a Canadian anthropology or is it just anthropology in Canada? If it is “anthropology in Canada,” then from where has it been imported? If what we are doing is primarily US anthropology, then what are we importing when we do US anthropology in Canada? How do we do US anthropology in Canada? Does […]
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Read Part One Read Part Two Download the complete paper Importing Empire, Exporting Capital: Canadian Universities as Retail Outlets for US Anthropology The “Americanist tradition” has been reproduced in Canada in terms of the structuring of the leading anthropology departments according to the US discipline’s four fields of archaeology, linguistic, cultural and biological/physical anthropology. This […]
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