Reclaiming a Broken Future for the Past
The revolution in information and communications technologies, which had so much promise for broadening access and participation in scholarship, certainly seems much darker and more ominous now. Socia…
Tag: democracy
The Nerds’ Turn: Battling for a Democratic Academia in Poland
As students and academics in Poland are fighting to defend democracy and autonomy of the universities, this post is a battle cry. It outlines the threats to intellectual…
Meddling
When the news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller III indicted a Russian “troll farm” and 13 individuals associated with it, news and commentary reacted with outrage over…
Populism and the Conundrums of Democracy in Italy
There is one pattern that characterizes post-Cold War Italy: new political figures emerge, espousing an anti-establishment rhetoric, but end up bringing the people more of the same. Whether…
Book Review: The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on ‘the People’ in Late Modern Democracy by Péter Csigó
In The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on ‘the People’ in Late Modern Democracy, Péter Csigó argues that the financial crisis of 2008 has prompted the development of novel forms of sense-ma…
REDUX: “Cleaning Up the Streets” #AnthroState
Hillbrow, Johannesburg: It’s April 2008. I am in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, one of Johannesburg’s most happening nightclubs since the Apartheid era. As with the Hillbrow…
The Price of Eggs: Iran’s protests beyond democracy and capitalism
As the dust settles on Iran’s recent bout of protests, the surge of commentary, punditry, and analysis is likely to continue, no longer working to explain these apparently…
Democratization vs. Liberalism in Canada
Many North Americans (leaving aside Mexico), would likely not know that the official acronym for “North Korea” is “DPRK,” and if they did then fewer still might realize…
Colonialism’s Orchestrated Disasters in Puerto Rico
“María, María, perdí la esperanza, María, María, perdí la esperanza.” I am reminded of these lyrics from the bomba group, Yuba Iré, when I see the pictures and…
Trump’s Wall and the Dictator Aesthetic
Well, look, we’re going to have a border. It’s going to be a real border, and we’re going to build a wall and it’s going to be a…
Alan Bradshaw: On the prospect of a Tory majority!
This post is part of a feature on the 2017 UK elections, moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bern). As an Irishman living in England, I…
Animating Resistance
Anthropology as Public Pedagogy The horned serpent serves as a witness to the events that unfold during the Pueblo uprising. Warren Montoya On January 25, President Trump signed…
Whose Populism? Which Democracy?
“Populism” conflates widely disparate political projects under one conceptual category. The term demands closer anthropological analysis. “The new enemy.” In a recent column in El País, the Peruvian…
Populist Protest and Counter-Protest in Germany
Protesters disrupt Pegida-inspired rallies with their own rowdy demonstrations. The sound of a man yelling rapidly and angrily into a microphone pierced the silence in my car as…
All Populisms Are Not Created Equal
Venezuelans chose between two competing populist projects with starkly different visions of inequality and privilege. Hugo Chávez is back. A seemingly endless stream of commentators insists that the…
Turkey Votes
The Turkish referendum could extend President Erdoğan’s one-man rule. A piece of bicolored paper. On the left is printed EVET (YES), in black font over a white background,…
Bruce Kapferer: Ideas on populism: The paradox of democracy and the rise of the corporate state
“All forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy.” — Karl Marx, Critique…
From Erdoğan’s Turkey to Trump’s America
Since signing a petition to end state violence against Kurds in southeast Turkey, academics critical of the Turkish regime have come under increased scrutiny. These “dopey academics” as…
Disrupting Nativism (Part One)
We must confront the nativism, xenophobia, and racism that youth in our “diverse classrooms” experience head on. I began writing this article in June 2016. At that time,…
What Did Hosni Mubarak Mean By “Democracy”
That democracy means different things to different people is a truism so obvious as to be banal. But the intercultural problem that raises remains perpetually interesting: what do…
Creating Participatory Democracy (Or Trying, Anyway)
In hindsight, the biggest problem with the extraordinary protests in Tahrir Square was the lack of a coherent plan for creating democracy once Mubarak stepped down. I hear that…
Why to Read Winnicott after the US Election, and How by Leo Coleman
Commentary and speculation after this election have focused on voters’ motives and emotional states, and, especially in the day or two after the result, why experts didn’t know…
Trump and Anthropology
“We are the new Indians…there are people today who want to discover us again, who want to conquer, enslave, and colonize us, and who want to use us…
Marc Edelman: The nastiest candidate won: Now what?
In the end it was filmmaker Michael Moore who got it right. It wasn’t Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, with his sophisticated polling models, or Nobel Prize winning economist…