David Graeber
David Graeber is the subject of the cover story in the latest issue of the Bloomberg Businessweek magazine where he is is profiled as one of the founding activist of the Occupy Wall Street movement: David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and […]
Anarchy in the UK?
Sean Carey writes at anthropologyworks.com about the attribution of the UK Riots to “outsiders:” But how true is the “outsider” hypothesis in accounting for riots? In the UK in the early 1980s, people often thought that “outsiders” were responsible for disorders simply because a large crowd would gather when there was an incident which then […]
Saudi Arabia
Madawi Al Rasheed, a professor of social anthropology at Kings College in London, spoke about Saudi Arabia to Elizabeth Jackson, an ABC Australia’s correspondent. Saudi Arabia tries to project itself as a stabilizer, as a force that would stabilize the region, but this means that they interfere in a very big way in other countries’ affairs. […]
Minding Arab Fundamentalism
Gabriele Marranci, an anthropologist based at the National University of Singapore, writes at his blog on the revolts in Arab Countries and on how anthropologists have helped to perpetuate the myth of a fundamentalist Arab-Muslim mind: Although we need to acknowledge that each revolt finds its raison d’être in local contexts and issues, we have […]
Yemen’s Uprising
Daniel Martin Varisco, Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University writes at CNN about the uprising in Yemen: While the world focuses on bombing raids in Libya, a different scenario has been unfolding in Yemen, which would be the first country outside of North Africa in this recent era of uprisings to lose its long-term strongman, Ali […]
The War in Libya
“The Libyan Revolution is Dead” declares Maximilian Forte in his Zero Anthropology Blog. …this is an autopsy, identifying the weapons used, and the criminals responsible for killing the Libyan revolution. This is no longer a Libyan story–that chapter is now closed. My autopsy is divided into several broad categories of actors: the humanitarians, the rebels, […]
On Libya’s Tribal Dynamics
Philip Carl Salzman, a McGill University professor of anthropology tells CNN, “Libyans have a strong loyalty to tribe…A tribe provides welfare in times of need…they have a collective responsibility.” However, Khalil Ali Al-Musmari, a retired professor of anthropology and sociology in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, says “the foreign media have often crudely misrepresented the […]
William Beeman on Libya
A PressTV interview with Professor William Beeman, Chairman of Anthropology department of University of Minnesota “The US led the regularization of relations with Colonel Gaddafi, after he had given up his nuclear program, which in my opinion was non-existent anyway. But the US issued a declaration saying this is a new era of friendship, legitimizing […]
Anthropologists Write on Arab Uprisings and US Foreign Policy
Paul Stoller in BigGovernment.com: “If my many years living as a field anthropologist in sub-Saharan Africa are applicable, most senior diplomats appear to be far removed from the realities of the street…. With some exceptions, I would suggest, most of our senior diplomats and political officials do not know the street.” Saba Mahmood in The Nation: The […]