Some New Year’s thoughts on popular support for militarism in the United States.

Herein I want to think not individual evil (or sociopathic self-aggrandizement), but the consequences of collective violence as implemented in and through state policy. The occasion for this is the new year, though in truth I’ve been looking for an excuse to publish a blog post on the topic. More specifically I want to look at a year end commentary on the Foreign Policy site (http://foreignpolicy.com/), “The GOP Plan to Bring Back a Unipolar World” by Gordon Adams and Richard Sokolsky (December 30, 2015), and read it in tandem with Jonathan Waverley’s important—though deeply flawed—book Democratic Militarism: Voting, Wealth, and War (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Continue reading Hegemony, Militarism, Democracy →

I am writing this, mostly, in response to Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa’s article “#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States.” Published in the Vol. 42, Iss. 1 (February 2015) of American Ethnologist, I only just got round to reading it. Given my interests in the concurrent militarization and “prisonization” of American life, with an ongoing racialized basis, this is unfortunate. Bonilla and Rosa’s article is an important point of departure, even though I find it deeply unsatisfying.

Continue reading Hashtag Ferguson Ethnography →

The good people at the Open Anthropology Collective (OAC) have produced a new volume of essays titled Emancipatory Politics: A Critique (available here as with a Creative Commons license: Emancipatory Politics), edited by LSE anthropologists Stephan Feuchtwang and Alpa Shah.

Continue reading Emancipatory Politics →

The experience of organizing and chairing a panel for the American Anthropological Association meetings this year (Denver 2015) made me realize that all of the mediocre experiences I have had on “residual” panels, where I submitted a paper to the AAA and they lumped me either with a partial panel, or with others doing supposedly related work, were the result of this less than cohesive process.

Continue reading Post-AAA reflections #demystifyingacademics →

Forever War, The – Revisiting

Posted on January 19, 2013

My sabbatical semester-or the functional equivalent, a competitively-awarded research semester-is coming rapidly to a close. In a few days I will leave behind my laptop desk and comfortable chair at Garner Narrative in Louisville, Kentucky for a short visit with my family in (the vicinity of) Portland, Oregon and then return to a hectic teaching schedule in Abu Dhabi. Continue reading Forever War, The – Revisiting →

David Nather at Politico has written a nice polemic (” Drones: Tough Talk, Little Scrutiny “) taking American lawmakers to task for posturing and hot air–at best–in response the current moment of awareness regarding drone warfare, indicting them with their own words. Continue reading Droning →

Biocultural approaches to the study of human behavior, institutions, and circumstances promise to be among the most powerful tools ever developed. But as the technology for gene sequencing has thus far vastly outstripped the interpretive science of meaningfully mapping genes to human scale outcomes, there is a lot of over-reaching. Continue reading Bad Science →

Below is a privately distributed piece of writing by my cousin, Dan Shea, artist, activist and Marine Corps veteran. I was moved by his reflections and put in mind of so many conversations I have had with veterans in recent years, reflecting on war and its human aftermath. Published here on my blog by permission. Continue reading White Noise – Veteran Writing →

“If the truth be told, the less the world knows about a place, the easier it is to generalize about. Are not all ethnic and religious conflicts, Muslim societies, underdeveloped economies, terrorist movements, and failed states fundamentally alike, especially in poor countries? Unfortunately they are not, and assuming that they are imposes a uniformity that is deceptively dangerous” (Thomas Barfield 2010, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, Princeton University Press).

Of all of these, the “terrorist movement” is probably most alien, and thereby easiest to generalize, when if practice the shared use of terror as tactic is almost absolutely devoid of meaningful information.

Sadly, or at least sadly for me, many of my previous Xenophilia posts are more-or-less permanently lost, including some of my commentaries on David Graeber’s brillian book, Debt: The First 5000 Years . I have, in the interim, modified my workflow to make sure this doesn’t happen again, even if the blog itself explodes. Continue reading Renting and Selling →