Dr. Walter Rodney: Revolutionary intellectual, socialist, Pan-Africanist and historian ... - 0 views
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October 2016 marks the 48th anniversaries of the expulsion of Rodney from Jamaica and the subsequent Rodney Rebellion that took place as a reaction to his banning and the general exploitation of the African-Jamaican masses by the neocolonial regime.
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Rodney was not an arm-chair revolutionary who sequestered himself on the academic plantation theorizing on what must be done to transform society. He waded into the messy, complicated and threatening world of practice to facilitate resistance to the violent forces of oppression.
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“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” [4] The oppressed do not have the luxury of separating radical or revolutionary thought from the requisite transformative practices that are needed to create the just and emancipated society.
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Social sciences neglect leads to narrow development view by Wachira Kigoto / CODESRIA - 0 views
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“Attempts to improve Africa’s development prospects by focusing on scientific advances and the benefits accruing from them have masked the critical role of social sciences and humanities as torchbearers of African values, systems of power, production and distribution,” said CODESRIA coordinator Professor Ibrahim Oanda Ogachi.
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Scholars in the diaspora will mentor and conduct PhD supervision in order to alleviate shortages of academics in the social sciences and humanities in African universities, and to bolster institutions with valuable international experience and insights.“Currently there is under-enrolment in certain disciplines, as well as a prevailing perception that social sciences and humanities disciplines do not matter, especially in the debate on Africa’s development agenda,” Ogachi told University World News in Nairobi
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In order to increase the numbers of scholars with PhDs in African universities, Langa stressed that deliberate efforts should be made to provide flexible conditions for teaching, research supervision and thesis examination.He also called for strengthening the academic culture in universities through joint research initiatives with scholars in the diaspora, as well as regional partnerships.
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The public afterlife of ethnography - FASSIN - 2015 - American Ethnologist - Wiley Onli... - 0 views
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Thus, Angelique Haugerud (2013) analyzes the difficulties faced by anthropologists who work to make alternative voices heard in the field of economics and finance,
Three Contemporary Spinozas | The Los Angeles Review of Books - 0 views
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For them, one of the most necessary critiques of liberalism hones in on the problem of recognition, the fact that our political and social systems function on the basis of definitions of personhood (sometimes citizenship, sometimes “humanness”) that often exclude many aspirants on the basis of their race, gender, sexuality, religion, mental or physical capacity, and so forth. Existentially spun, this yields the question of what kind of life is considered worthy of mourning when it is lost; politically spun, this yields a politics of identity, for which many march in the streets and which has become so familiar that certain of its basic assumptions can attain invisibility.
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While Sharp is even-handed on Butler’s treatment of Hegel and Spinoza, her insistence on the distinctiveness of the conatus raises questions about what a practical politics of renaturalization would look like. The politics of recognition, after all, is not a merely theoretical matter but one in which we are always finding ourselves “thrown” by the very inequities of the civilization within which we live. It is unclear to me that a better appreciation of vital processes, and a displacement of the anthropos that sings at the heart of the political, is a replacement for recognition. Sharp herself doesn’t seem blind to the necessity of political struggle. Perhaps instead renaturalization is, as Sharp sometimes seems to suggest, a necessary supplement, a reminder that our natures can never be summed up by the terms recognition gives us.
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Spinozism in 20th-century France yielded what Peden calls a philosophy of the concept, a striking alternative to the channel of French thought most familiar to Anglophone audiences: the philosophy of the subject. (Its best-known exponents include Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.) While the lineage of subjectivity or consciousness can be traced back to Descartes, in the 20th century it was not just watered but soaked by the aquifer of phenomenology, originating in the Austro-German Edmund Husserl’s meditations on Descartes’s Meditations, revised by Heidegger’s “New Thinking,” and imported to France by thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas.
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Eric Hobsbawm and MI5 | openDemocracy - 0 views
Authorship and the writer | Savage Minds Backup - 0 views
We need more mainstream social science, not less. | Savage Minds Backup - 0 views
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According to Christakis, “the social sciences have stagnated” because “They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years.” To be sure, there are important links between the institutionalization of academic disciplines and their intellectual content. But to judge progress and development merely by these institutional measures is patently ridiculous.
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Christakis claims that “One reason citizens…lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers.” This is completely true. My discipline of anthropology has declared victory and moved on to new frontiers several times in the course of my career. However, we rarely have a chance to explain our findings to the public because the public finds them so unintuitive. As a result popular anthropology is left explaining again and again and again the most preliminary findings of our discipline — the low-hanging fruits regarding cultural relativism and the underdetermination of conduct by biology that we figured out in the 1920s. Anthropologists could do more, of course, to move public opinion by writing frequently for the public.
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It has certainly done so in the past (think: Margaret Mead). But given the decreasing personnel and funding of our discipline, few of us have the time to do this. If only 1% of scientist are able and willing to write for the public, and that means there will be 2 anthropologists writing for the public and 200 in the natural sciences.
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reddit.com: submit - 0 views
Ira Bashkow reviews Jared Diamond in the TLS | Savage Minds Backup - 0 views
Ayn Rand and Al Qaeda » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views
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why isn’t the FBI infiltrating the Ayn Rand Institute with agents trained in the art of provocation? Why isn’t anyone concerned with the explicit calls to political terrorism in Rand’s writing? Why is representative Bachmann focused on the imagined terrorist sympathies of Huma Abedin and not those of Leonard Peikoff? The answer is simple: ideology.
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Perhaps most striking is Rand’s depiction of her railroad baroness heroine’s cold-blooded execution of a fresh-faced, young United States soldier after what can only be described as an ideological rant that runs almost a hundred pages. In this scene, Rand makes it clear that the murder is being committed for what amounts to a violent political disagreement, and she praises her character’s calm, remorseless, methodical execution of a uniformed member of the US military. And this is just a sampling of the terrorist acts extolled in Rand’s novels.
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"why isn't the FBI infiltrating the Ayn Rand Institute with agents trained in the art of provocation? Why isn't anyone concerned with the explicit calls to political terrorism in Rand's writing? Why is representative Bachmann focused on the imagined terrorist sympathies of Huma Abedin and not those of Leonard Peikoff? The answer is simple: ideology."
anthropologies: Climate Change, Power, and the Marginalization of Indigenous Adaptabili... - 0 views
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the combined forces of crop diseases, deforestation, forest fires, and climate change have forced most farmers here to turn to subsistence farming. No longer able to produce high-value yields, farmers here now rely on the bare minimum to nourish their households and either store surpluses or send them to markets.
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""It just doesn't make sense anymore," she told me. "We used to plant cocoa and plantains on this very plot, and now it can't even sustain maize." Indeed, this part of the Volta Region used to be one of the highest-yielding areas for cocoa production in Ghana. However, the combined forces of crop diseases, deforestation, forest fires, and climate change have forced most farmers here to turn to subsistence farming. No longer able to produce high-value yields, farmers here now rely on the bare minimum to nourish their households and either store surpluses or send them to markets."
anthropologies: Re-describing Diabetes:Toward A Political Ecology of Health and Bodies - 0 views
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How does a society, a government, or the academy explain away eighteen years? In Arizona, eighteen years marks the disparity between the average life expectancies of American Indians and non-Hispanic whites (Arizona Department of Health Services, 2005; Indian Health Services, 2001). With what technologies and mythologies do we naturalize such a stunning gap?
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Inequalities in the prevalence and experiences with this disease are unambiguous. Incidences in indigenous people exceed 200% of the national average, and some groups are grappling with astonishing rates at 700% the average (Warne 2006). That means for some native communities, half their population is afflicted. And their experiences with diabetes are more agonizing than their non-native counterparts. American Indians are more likely to suffer severe complications associated with adult onset diabetes—ischemic heart disease, retinal failure and blindness, lower limb amputation, kidney failure—and to die prematurely (Gohdes 2006). How we, as citizens, researchers, health workers, policy advocates, politicians, or fellow humans, respond to this health crisis is shaped by how it is narrated.
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But is this a proliferation of hybrids that never finally resists nature-culture binaries? Do the society-nature couplings in their theoretical titles function by way of one term’s explanation for the other, the way socio-biology and human ecology tend to collapse culture into organicist explanatory frames? Or do they radically re-describe health as a kind of quasi-object, imagined from the beginning as networks of co-constituting processes—material, semiotic, and social?[2] If the practical and ethical impetus of most critical fields for health discourse is to build a social and environmental justice or human rights approach to disease and wellness, how we theorize health and bodies matters.
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anthropologies: Integrating Agencement/Assemblage into Political Ecology - 0 views
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Thus, while there exists a general consensus that political ecology involves some sort of interaction between nature and culture (loaded terms to be sure), there is no agreement as to what each of these spheres encompasses and how, when and where interactions occur.
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This essay will specifically examine assemblage theory as a way to bring together these supposedly disparate political ecologies and to overcome the pitfalls of sticking too rigidly to one theoretical camp, concluding with an example of how I used assemblages and political ecology together in my own research.
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Marxian political ecology has often been criticized for either ignoring the “agency of nature” or placing too much emphasis on global capitalist processes at the expense of “the local” (see Bryant 1998; Zimmerer and Bassett 2003), with many political ecologists turning to Latourian actor-network approaches in order to overcome the structure/agency problem (see Murdoch 1995; Castree 2002, among others).
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"Thus, while there exists a general consensus that political ecology involves some sort of interaction between nature and culture (loaded terms to be sure), there is no agreement as to what each of these spheres encompasses and how, when and where interactions occur. As Brian Grabbatin has written previously, scholars from many disciplines and theoretical interpretations have approached political ecology in many different ways."
anthropologies: On Political Ecology - 0 views
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How to explain a summer of sliding up and down scales within China—the national in Beijing, the provincial in Kunming, the prefectural in Baoshan, then down to the township, the administrative village, the natural village and finally the particular households each with their own dynamics and situations. By what other justification would I follow the cascading translation and mutation of policy through actors at various levels down to its ultimate manifestation at the local level, as well as the variegated, unexpected ways in which experiences feedback upwards into international conversation? And the hearing of stories all the way.
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With a particular bent on the environment, it’s how to take all of these everyday details (a choice to grow coffee this year, a new concrete courtyard), all of the narratives—from peasant farmers, but also from NGO employees, government officials and policy makers, private actors—and tie them back into broader structures and frameworks, understandings of concrete small things enriched by concepts of space and scale.
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How do you understand the walnut you are eating in a small village near the Myanmar border in southwestern China as a physical manifestation of a participatory development approach to poverty alleviation and environmental degradation, an approach conceptualized in distant metropolises such as Beijing or as far west as Rome, implemented by agencies in places, still remote from the village, like Kunming or even Baoshan? How was this approach molded by, and also to, a specific place and time, by and to the particular environmental policies within a certain nation-state context?
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anthropologies: Dimensions of Political Ecology - 0 views
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The few books dedicated to surveying and summarizing political ecology do an excellent job of identifying important foundational texts and explaining political ecology’s diverse origins from political economy, to cultural ecology and natural hazards research (Robbins 2004, 2012; Neumann 2005). However, these texts are not written to policing boundaries. Instead, the authors search for common questions, while celebrating the ways that political ecologists continue to branch out into unexpected topical, theoretical, and methodological territories. We too embrace this dialectical approach to political ecology by appreciating these expanding dimensions on the one hand, while emphasizing moments of unification on the other.
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More specific edited volumes and special issues reveal a similar diversity, but focus on persistent and emerging themes such as feminism (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, Wangari 1996; Elmhirst 2011), regional approaches (McCarthy and Guthman 1998; McCarthy 2005; Schroeder et al 2006), historical analysis (Offen 2004), ethnographic methods (Biersack and Greenberg 2006), and science studies (Goldman, Nadasdy, and Turner 2011). The dialectical process of doing and making political ecology, however, runs deeper than the printed page.
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As active participants and co-founders of the Dimensions of Political Ecology: Conference on Nature/Society (DOPE) and its organizing committee, the University of Kentucky Political Ecology Working Group (UK-PEWG), we reflect on how these efforts strive to celebrate the multiplicity of approaches in political ecology, while searching for common themes.
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anthropologies: Introduction: Page 17 and then some - 0 views
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Anyone who has read about the formation of this thing we call “political ecology” has undoubtedly seen more than one reference to Blaikie and Brookfield’s oft-cited passage on the seventeenth page of the groundbreaking text Land Degradation and Society. They write: “The phrase ‘political ecology’ combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy. Together this encompasses the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself” (1987:17).
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along with a focus on the dialectical tensions between nature and society.
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I really like this tool analogy. For me, political ecology is not some movement, theory, or “camp” to follow. I personally don’t “believe” in political ecology any more than I do political economy, actor network theory, or a hammer for that matter. As the UC Santa Cruz folks argue, it is indeed a took-kit: something to be put to use. Political ecology is not a church, or a club, or some group that meets every Wednesday night to talk about “the environment” and then goes home to regularly scheduled programming. It’s not a slogan, that’s what I’m saying. It is a set of ideas, practices, methods and, yes, tools that can be brought to bear upon serious contemporary issues.
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Social Construction of Race = Conservative Goldmine - 0 views
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As this ritualized game is rehearsed and replayed, it is worth taking stock of an essential but overlooked fact: the social construction of race is a goldmine for conservative political positions. The social construction of race is the gift that keeps on giving, far more helpful for conservative politics than for a progressive-liberal front.
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What’s puzzling here is that should one pause to resist the denunciation, there is yet another counterattack: Oh, yeah, of course race is a social construction. Everything is. Everyone knows that. Perhaps in some bland sense everything is socially constructed. But that misses several points. Social constructions are very real, and to say something is a social construction is not to be equated with illusion or fiction. It also misses the point that some social constructions are more powerful and with more far reaching consequences than others. Last, it misses the whole idea, that “the social construction of race” should have never been a stopping point, but as a way to analyze the particular circumstances that result in current configurations.
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Trouillot was developing in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History–navigating between the equally untenable extremes that history is merely the documenting of retrievable fact and that history is merely just another story: Between the mechanically “realist” and naively “constructivist” extremes, there is the more serious task of determining not what history is–a hopeless goal if phrased in essentialist terms–but how history works. For what history is changes with time and place, or better said, history reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters are the process and conditions of production of such narratives. (1996:25)
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More than Guns, Germs, and Steel - Anthropology 2.5 - 0 views
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Diamond has almost nothing to say about the political decisions made in order to pursue European imperialism, to manufacture steel and guns, and to use disease as a weapon. As a results, accounts like Guns, Germs, and Steel end up supplanting the real historical accounts like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History:
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Europeans and Americans would never have encountered these supposed bearers of a pristine past if they had not encountered one another, in bloody fact, as Europe reached out to seize the resources and populations of the other continents. (1982:18; and see blog-post Anthropology is Necessary)
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The Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel has almost no role for human agency–the ability people have to make decisions and influence outcomes. Europeans become inadvertent, accidental conquerors. Natives succumb passively to their fate. But in 2005 out comes another book from Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Suddenly choice and agency are back!
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