Abstract: Mary Kaldor has influentially argued that understanding vio-lence in the current period... more Abstract: Mary Kaldor has influentially argued that understanding vio-lence in the current period of globalization depends upon the recogni-tion that this is an era of 'new wars'. This article critiques that view and in so doing proposes a global warring hypothesis to help explain cur-rent ...
NAKED SCIENCE ANTHROPOLOGICAL IN QUIRY IN TO BO UNDARIES, PO WER, AN D KN OWLEDGE LAURA NADER Pag... more NAKED SCIENCE ANTHROPOLOGICAL IN QUIRY IN TO BO UNDARIES, PO WER, AN D KN OWLEDGE LAURA NADER Page 2. Naked Science Page 3. Naked ...
It has become something of a truism that crude oil underlies all aspects of our lives. Yet only r... more It has become something of a truism that crude oil underlies all aspects of our lives. Yet only rarely are the specific relations of this well-worn fact subject to much scrutiny. We all know oil matters; exactly how, it matters not. The point of Crude Domination is to direct ethnographic attention to the question of how oil matters. This edited volume aims to describe, with boots on the ground, the effects of hydrocarbon development: the easy, fabulous wealth it seems to offer alongside the intractable violence that often swirls around such petro-promises. There is much to be commended in the ambition of this volume, building as it does on the work of Andrew Apter, Suzana Sawyer, and Fernando Coronil and suggesting as it does the timely need for a more deliberate, a more vivid, and a more grounded anthropology of oil. One would hope such an engagement to be a two-way street: reworking the practice of anthropological inquiry around the particulars of crude oil, from pipelines to poll...
This project argues for a four point anthropological project as an aid to achieving the Enlighten... more This project argues for a four point anthropological project as an aid to achieving the Enlightenment goal of progress. The argument might be likened to a drama in three acts. The first act introduces Enlightenment understandings of progress. The second act gets into undulating Anglo-American anthropology, documenting the vicissitudes of the concept of progress in 19th and 20th century anthropology. Unilinear evolutionary (1850s-1880s), historical particularist (1890s-1930s), neo-evolutionary (1950s –early 1970s), and post modern (late 1970s-present) anthropologies are considered. This third act synthesizes understandings achieved in the two previous ones, arguing for a four point cosmopolitan anthropology that combines elements of Immanuel Kant’s and Franz Boas’ thought. A more radical Kant is introduced, as are notions of relativistic universalism, and exploitative progress.
There are a number of bodies of knowledge concernin g Darfur about which assessments can, and sho... more There are a number of bodies of knowledge concernin g Darfur about which assessments can, and should, be made. These include: ecological dynamic s relevant to the conflict, mortality levels resultant from it, the war itself, its representati on n different media, humanitarian efforts to mitigate the violence, peace negotiations and confl ict resolution measures to resolve it, health issues generated by combat, migration/refugee probl ems consequent upon war, plus wartime changes in cultural dynamics, influencing questions f identity formation. This is an enormous corpus of knowledge to inspect, beyond the confines of a thirty minute talk. So my goal in what follows is to highlight particular areas of assessm ent of especial importance -the ecology, war, and its mortalitiesto suggest research initiative s of significance, both with regard to understanding the Darfur situation and more general issues. Other areas of assessment are considered in Appendix A. Let us begin with the eco lo...
In his article, ‘‘The Endurance of Critique’’ Didier Fassin (Anthropological Theory 17:1 4–29) af... more In his article, ‘‘The Endurance of Critique’’ Didier Fassin (Anthropological Theory 17:1 4–29) affirms that critique, through its ‘‘multiple forms, is inherent to the anthropological project,’’ and is urgently needed in these troubled and dangerous times. Fassin argues ‘‘against ‘‘the unbearable lightness of being that paradoxically characterizes certain forms of alleged radicalism as well as certain retreats in an ivory tower,’’ and endeavors ‘‘to give some weight to critique, as I believe it does matter for the times’’ in which we live. Anthropological Theory is calling for a global debate on the meaning and significance of critique in anthropology. In the following pages of this issue, we welcome the first three responses to Fassin’s article. Tania Li’s contribution elaborates on the possibility of critique to (slowly) foster vocabularies which connect social groups to social movements. Whereas Lori Allen takes a more historical approach to the effect of ethnographic critique – its creation and its dissipation – learning from the history of Palestinian civil society. Martin Holbraad calls us up for taking the risk of exposing our basic intuitions about what can count as critique to ‘alternative critiques’ as expressed in the contemporary currency of ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, or the ‘post-factual’. We continue to encourage further interventions that speak to the role of theory within critical engagements in the ongoing challenges of social transformation and we will publish these in forthcoming issues of AT.
List of Figures PART I: GENERALITIES Chapter 1. The Crazy Curse and Crude Domination: Towards an ... more List of Figures PART I: GENERALITIES Chapter 1. The Crazy Curse and Crude Domination: Towards an Anthropology of Oil Stephen Reyna and Andrea Behrends Chapter 2. Oiling the Race to the Bottom Jonathan Friedman PART II: AFRICA Chapter 3. Blood Oil: The Anatomy of a Petro-Insurgency in the Niger Delta, Nigeria Michael Watts Chapter 4. Fighting for oil when there is no oil yet - The Darfur-Chad border Andrea Behrends Chapter 5. Elfs and Witches: Oil Cleptocrats and the Destruction of Social Order in Congo-Brazzaville Kajsa Ekholm Friedman Chapter 6. Constituting Domination/Constructing Monsters:Imperialism, Cultural Desire, and anti-Beowulfs in the Chadian Petro-state Stephen P. Reyna PART III: LATIN AMERICA Chapter 7. The Persistent Imaginary of 'the People's Oil': Nationalism, Globalisation and the Possibility of Another Country in Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela John Gledhill Chapter 8. Now That the Petroleum is Ours:A" Community Media, State Spectacle, and Oil Nationalism in Venezuela Naomi Schiller Chapter 9. Flashpoints of Sovereignty: Territorial Conflict and Natural Gas in Bolivia Bret Gustafson PART IV. POST-SOCIALIST RUSSIA Chapter 10. Oil Without Conflict? The Anthropology of Industrialisation in Northern Russia Florian Stammler Chapter 11. 'Against - Domination': Oil and War in Chechnya Galina Khizrieva and Stephen P. Reyna Postscript: Instead of a foreword Gunther Schlee Notes on Contributors
... Barma response to the question Who should live in households? was a litany of: mudj kinji ro ... more ... Barma response to the question Who should live in households? was a litany of: mudj kinji ro mudj (brother live beside brother) or gongaba kinji ro bob (son lives beside father). Normatively then, the Barma propose patrilocal extended families resident within the household. ...
This paper presents a learning-theory approach to social evolution. It shows how contingencies of... more This paper presents a learning-theory approach to social evolution. It shows how contingencies of reinforcement (COR) qualify as a Darwinian selection mechanism, and suggests that some evolution in social forms is due to behavioral selection by COR. The analysis is illustrated with material concerning proposed evolutionary changes in Abu Krider village composition. Defense of the position against anticipated criticism includes consideration of allegations of tautology and teleology in a learning-theory analysis of social evolution.
Validating and theorizing are understood as parts of a common intellectual practice – theory crea... more Validating and theorizing are understood as parts of a common intellectual practice – theory creation – to know why reality is, or is changing, the way it is. This essay’s goal is to encourage debate about the role of validation in anthropological practice, with the aim of increasing that role. Argument is presented in Socratic fashion by posing, and responding to, questions. The first question inquires: What is validation? The second asks: Is getting the facts important in validation? The third queries: How do you get the facts? The fourth probes: What about objectivity in a biased world? The fifth demands: Why are intersubjectivity and representativeness important? Finally, the sixth section asks: If you do validate, can you get to the truth of something? It is concluded that skilled validation creates approximate truth, which is as close to knowing what is that people get.
Abstract: Mary Kaldor has influentially argued that understanding vio-lence in the current period... more Abstract: Mary Kaldor has influentially argued that understanding vio-lence in the current period of globalization depends upon the recogni-tion that this is an era of 'new wars'. This article critiques that view and in so doing proposes a global warring hypothesis to help explain cur-rent ...
NAKED SCIENCE ANTHROPOLOGICAL IN QUIRY IN TO BO UNDARIES, PO WER, AN D KN OWLEDGE LAURA NADER Pag... more NAKED SCIENCE ANTHROPOLOGICAL IN QUIRY IN TO BO UNDARIES, PO WER, AN D KN OWLEDGE LAURA NADER Page 2. Naked Science Page 3. Naked ...
It has become something of a truism that crude oil underlies all aspects of our lives. Yet only r... more It has become something of a truism that crude oil underlies all aspects of our lives. Yet only rarely are the specific relations of this well-worn fact subject to much scrutiny. We all know oil matters; exactly how, it matters not. The point of Crude Domination is to direct ethnographic attention to the question of how oil matters. This edited volume aims to describe, with boots on the ground, the effects of hydrocarbon development: the easy, fabulous wealth it seems to offer alongside the intractable violence that often swirls around such petro-promises. There is much to be commended in the ambition of this volume, building as it does on the work of Andrew Apter, Suzana Sawyer, and Fernando Coronil and suggesting as it does the timely need for a more deliberate, a more vivid, and a more grounded anthropology of oil. One would hope such an engagement to be a two-way street: reworking the practice of anthropological inquiry around the particulars of crude oil, from pipelines to poll...
This project argues for a four point anthropological project as an aid to achieving the Enlighten... more This project argues for a four point anthropological project as an aid to achieving the Enlightenment goal of progress. The argument might be likened to a drama in three acts. The first act introduces Enlightenment understandings of progress. The second act gets into undulating Anglo-American anthropology, documenting the vicissitudes of the concept of progress in 19th and 20th century anthropology. Unilinear evolutionary (1850s-1880s), historical particularist (1890s-1930s), neo-evolutionary (1950s –early 1970s), and post modern (late 1970s-present) anthropologies are considered. This third act synthesizes understandings achieved in the two previous ones, arguing for a four point cosmopolitan anthropology that combines elements of Immanuel Kant’s and Franz Boas’ thought. A more radical Kant is introduced, as are notions of relativistic universalism, and exploitative progress.
There are a number of bodies of knowledge concernin g Darfur about which assessments can, and sho... more There are a number of bodies of knowledge concernin g Darfur about which assessments can, and should, be made. These include: ecological dynamic s relevant to the conflict, mortality levels resultant from it, the war itself, its representati on n different media, humanitarian efforts to mitigate the violence, peace negotiations and confl ict resolution measures to resolve it, health issues generated by combat, migration/refugee probl ems consequent upon war, plus wartime changes in cultural dynamics, influencing questions f identity formation. This is an enormous corpus of knowledge to inspect, beyond the confines of a thirty minute talk. So my goal in what follows is to highlight particular areas of assessm ent of especial importance -the ecology, war, and its mortalitiesto suggest research initiative s of significance, both with regard to understanding the Darfur situation and more general issues. Other areas of assessment are considered in Appendix A. Let us begin with the eco lo...
In his article, ‘‘The Endurance of Critique’’ Didier Fassin (Anthropological Theory 17:1 4–29) af... more In his article, ‘‘The Endurance of Critique’’ Didier Fassin (Anthropological Theory 17:1 4–29) affirms that critique, through its ‘‘multiple forms, is inherent to the anthropological project,’’ and is urgently needed in these troubled and dangerous times. Fassin argues ‘‘against ‘‘the unbearable lightness of being that paradoxically characterizes certain forms of alleged radicalism as well as certain retreats in an ivory tower,’’ and endeavors ‘‘to give some weight to critique, as I believe it does matter for the times’’ in which we live. Anthropological Theory is calling for a global debate on the meaning and significance of critique in anthropology. In the following pages of this issue, we welcome the first three responses to Fassin’s article. Tania Li’s contribution elaborates on the possibility of critique to (slowly) foster vocabularies which connect social groups to social movements. Whereas Lori Allen takes a more historical approach to the effect of ethnographic critique – its creation and its dissipation – learning from the history of Palestinian civil society. Martin Holbraad calls us up for taking the risk of exposing our basic intuitions about what can count as critique to ‘alternative critiques’ as expressed in the contemporary currency of ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, or the ‘post-factual’. We continue to encourage further interventions that speak to the role of theory within critical engagements in the ongoing challenges of social transformation and we will publish these in forthcoming issues of AT.
List of Figures PART I: GENERALITIES Chapter 1. The Crazy Curse and Crude Domination: Towards an ... more List of Figures PART I: GENERALITIES Chapter 1. The Crazy Curse and Crude Domination: Towards an Anthropology of Oil Stephen Reyna and Andrea Behrends Chapter 2. Oiling the Race to the Bottom Jonathan Friedman PART II: AFRICA Chapter 3. Blood Oil: The Anatomy of a Petro-Insurgency in the Niger Delta, Nigeria Michael Watts Chapter 4. Fighting for oil when there is no oil yet - The Darfur-Chad border Andrea Behrends Chapter 5. Elfs and Witches: Oil Cleptocrats and the Destruction of Social Order in Congo-Brazzaville Kajsa Ekholm Friedman Chapter 6. Constituting Domination/Constructing Monsters:Imperialism, Cultural Desire, and anti-Beowulfs in the Chadian Petro-state Stephen P. Reyna PART III: LATIN AMERICA Chapter 7. The Persistent Imaginary of 'the People's Oil': Nationalism, Globalisation and the Possibility of Another Country in Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela John Gledhill Chapter 8. Now That the Petroleum is Ours:A" Community Media, State Spectacle, and Oil Nationalism in Venezuela Naomi Schiller Chapter 9. Flashpoints of Sovereignty: Territorial Conflict and Natural Gas in Bolivia Bret Gustafson PART IV. POST-SOCIALIST RUSSIA Chapter 10. Oil Without Conflict? The Anthropology of Industrialisation in Northern Russia Florian Stammler Chapter 11. 'Against - Domination': Oil and War in Chechnya Galina Khizrieva and Stephen P. Reyna Postscript: Instead of a foreword Gunther Schlee Notes on Contributors
... Barma response to the question Who should live in households? was a litany of: mudj kinji ro ... more ... Barma response to the question Who should live in households? was a litany of: mudj kinji ro mudj (brother live beside brother) or gongaba kinji ro bob (son lives beside father). Normatively then, the Barma propose patrilocal extended families resident within the household. ...
This paper presents a learning-theory approach to social evolution. It shows how contingencies of... more This paper presents a learning-theory approach to social evolution. It shows how contingencies of reinforcement (COR) qualify as a Darwinian selection mechanism, and suggests that some evolution in social forms is due to behavioral selection by COR. The analysis is illustrated with material concerning proposed evolutionary changes in Abu Krider village composition. Defense of the position against anticipated criticism includes consideration of allegations of tautology and teleology in a learning-theory analysis of social evolution.
Validating and theorizing are understood as parts of a common intellectual practice – theory crea... more Validating and theorizing are understood as parts of a common intellectual practice – theory creation – to know why reality is, or is changing, the way it is. This essay’s goal is to encourage debate about the role of validation in anthropological practice, with the aim of increasing that role. Argument is presented in Socratic fashion by posing, and responding to, questions. The first question inquires: What is validation? The second asks: Is getting the facts important in validation? The third queries: How do you get the facts? The fourth probes: What about objectivity in a biased world? The fifth demands: Why are intersubjectivity and representativeness important? Finally, the sixth section asks: If you do validate, can you get to the truth of something? It is concluded that skilled validation creates approximate truth, which is as close to knowing what is that people get.
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