Counterinsurgency…A Growth Industry: Maximilian Forte brings us this great post on the Canadian military’s recruitment of social scientists for work in Afganistan, including recently published anonymous interviews of scholars who have worked with the Canadian military.
Want to Talk with Common People, like you: Mark Dawson from ethnography.com has a new project. It’s part visual ethnography, part Studs Terkel, part road trip movie. And the first installment is really good. The ‘Ordinary People Project’ has Dawson driving around Northwest Canada and Alaska documenting the everyday stories of people who live there. The first installment is already up.
Losing Ground: Journalist Mark Dowie writes in the UK Guardian about his new book on the struggles between environmental conservation movements and the indigenous people displaced by declared wilderness areas.
Native American Construction: Material World posted an essay by Joana Alario discussing the cultural politics of building Native American casinos and museums in the Northeast U.S.
Caught in the Middle: Jean Jackson published a report on the AAA Human Rights website about the precarious situation for rural indigenous groups in Colombia still stuck between the politics of the FARC and the Uribe government. The report comes after a massacre of at least 8 Awa people, who the FARC accused of being military informants.
Traveling Exhibit: Valeri Russ at The Philadelphia Daily News writes a review of the AAA’s ‘Understanding Race’ exhibition which will run this summer at the Franklin Institute in Philly this summer. Russ’s article mixes a discussion of the exhibit with local Philadelphians experiences of race.
Ethnographers’ Personae: Lorenz at anthropologi.info reviews the new online edition of Anthropology Matters, with 11 articles by students on the identities one is forced to take on during fieldwork.
Want something else included? Post in the comments or email me.
James Von Brunn, today’s alleged shooter, devotes a full seven page section of his manuscript, “KILL THE BEST GENTILES!”“Tob Shebbe Goyim Harog!”, at http://www.holywesternempire.org/tob_shebbe_goyim_harog_first6.pdf, to attacking Franz Boas. He begins his chapter on Boas this way (p. 150):
“FRANZ BOAS, JEW (1858-1942) was born in Germany.
As Marx and Freud he was a KHAZAR, distinguished
by his repellent physical ugliness. He was not an anthropologist,
and where he got his doctorate remains uncertain (Kiel,
Ger.?). Albeit, he was appointed professor of Anthropology,
Columbia University, in 1899, remaining there for 40-years.
His sponsors undoubtedly were ILLUMINISTS.”
He goes on to list Boas’ students and their subversive activities, pointing out that many of them were investigated by the FBI and CIA. He writes (pp. 151-52) that, “All of these MARXISTS/LIBERALS/JEWS, spreading JEW syphilis, established chairs of Cultural Anthropology at America’s most prestigious universities.”