Author Archives: kevinkarpiak

Secularism & Security after Charlie Hebdo

On Charlie Hebdo: metaphor and the tyranny of secular liberalism

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[Note: I struggled, as have many in the US media, over whether to include an example of Charlie Hebdo’s ugly ugly cartoons here.  I struggled in part because I think it’s necessary to have a sense of how callously, pointlessly, vile they could be when having rather abstract discussion of “freedom of speech”.  In the end, I still couldn’t include a drawing of a religious figure bent over and naked soliciting his own anal rape]

The difficult spot many of us who wish to take a critical stance towards the broader reaction to the Charlie Hebdo killing is that broad-based reactions such as #jesuischarlie immediately paint one as either “for” the supposed satire of Charlie Hebdo or “for” the slaughter of cartoonists in their board rooms.  It is possible, in fact probably necessary to be “for” neither.

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Announcements

Anthropoliteia in 2015

Comical Repast (Banquet of the Starved) James Ensor (Belgian, Ostend 1860–1949 Ostend) Date: ca. 1917–18 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 45 1/2 x 57 1/4 in. (115.6 x 145.4 cm) Classification: Paintings Credit Line: Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967 Accession Number: 67.187.68

Comical Repast (Banquet of the Starved) James Ensor ca. 1917–18

 

As we welcome a new year and get ready for the new semester, we at Anthropoliteia would just like to take a moment to reflect on the many exciting changes that occurred here over the course of 2014.  We redesigned the site with a snazzy new look.  We welcomed several new section editors as well as guest editors and contributors.  We launched new features (Book Reviews, DragNet, In the Journals, Interrogations, Practicum and Tip of the Cap), several on-going forums (What’s Going on in Ukraine?, Security in Brazil:World Cup 2014 and Beyond, and #Ferguson & Elsewhere), organized several panels and events at #AAA2014, and even created a new format for Dispatches and Dossiers “From the Field”.

Once we catch our breath, we hope to continue the fun in 2015.  Until then, here’s a look back at our most popular posts of 2014:

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere

Policing as a Well-Protected Craft

The editors of Anthropoliteia would like to welcome Peter K. Manning with the latest entry in our developing forum #Ferguson & Elsewhere
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#Ferguson & Elsewhere

Die-in Protest at the 2014 American Anthropological Association Meetings

Here at Anthropoliteia we have plans to continue the conversation we’ve already been engaged in, for example through our series #Ferguson & Elsewhere, around police, violence, justice and anthropology.  For now we would just like to share with you some images from today’s protest at the American Anthropological Association Meetings in Washington DC, courtesy of visual anthropologist Richard Freeman (whose work you can also find at visualquotations.com).  We welcome reactions, ideas and comments, either here, via our Open Forum or by contacting us directly at anthropoliteia@gmail.com.

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere, Announcements

Open Forum on #Ferguson and Elsewhere

Today at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, there was a Special Session on Ferguson and police brutality hosted. At the session, there was a voiced a general desire for a forum through which to discuss and move forward on the issue, as anthropologists.  Out of that meeting there were a series of actions, whose planning is in motion, but the Editors of Anthropoliteia would like to offer this space as a general forum open for discussion of the issue. We invite you to share your ideas below in the comments section

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere, Pedagogy

Anthropoliteia reacts to #Ferguson

It’s hard to know what exactly to say, to think, to feel or how to react at a time like this; even as a scholar of police.  Which is not to say that everything in the case is terribly ambiguous.  Quite the opposite: another young black man has been the victim of a deadly and unaccountable state violence in front of our very eyes.  I suppose the disorientation lay in how to move forward, and for that I have no strong answers.

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Having said that, several of us at Anthropolitiea have been active on Twitter, I imagine in an effort to make sense of exactly that existential question. This is not dissimilar to my own reaction during and after the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman affair.  Below are some of our thoughts, as we form them:

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Announcements, Tip of the Cap

New Feature: Tip of the Cap

tip of the hat

[Head of Man with Hat and Cigar] Leon Levinstein ca. 1960 © Howard Greenberg Gallery

The Editors of Anthropoliteia are happy to announce yet another addition to our “Bibliographeme” suite of features.  This new feature, which we’re calling Tip of the Cap, will be edited by Jenny Carlson, a sociologist of policing  at the University of Toronto.  You can see more about her and her work under the About Us section and at her own personal website.

The series ‘tips the proverbial hat’ to the major works and big ideas that inspire established and up-and-coming scholars alike. In it, we’ll showcase these scholars and the classic works that shaped them.

The first installment of this series is written by Randol Contreras, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and author of The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream (University of California Press, 2013), and focuses on C. Wright Mill’s The Sociological Imagination.  If you are interested in seeing a scholar featured here please send an email to anthropoliteia@gmail.com with “Tip of the Cap” in the subject line. Enjoy!

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Announcements, Conferences

Anthropoliteia @ #AAA2014

As long time readers may know, we like to offer a run down of the sessions, papers and events at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association that may be of interest for readers of this blog.  This has been made considerably easier the last couple of years by AAA’s personal scheduler function, which allows for the creation of sharable schedules.  You can see a full* list of these papers and sessions via our shared Google Calendar, here.  If you’re also a user of Google Calendar, you can easily copy individual events to your own schedule there.

In particular, though, I’d like to highlight a few events that are either directly sponsored or otherwise associated with Anthropoliteia.net.  Perhaps the most important of these is the first ever Anthropoliteia “Tweet-Up.”  Based on the previous success of similar events hosted by Savage Minds (among others), our Editorial Board has decided to extend an invitation to anyone interested to come meet with us–along with a select group of our various Section Editors and Contributors–to discuss, imbibe, and otherwise commiserate.  You can find** us Thursday, December 4th from 6-8pm at Murphy’s Irish Pub, around the corner from the conference hotel [UPDATE: Harry’s Pub, in the Wardman Park Marriott].

Besides the tweet-up, there are a few official sessions that come out of collaborations on Anthropoliteia and the CFP we circulated earlier this year:

On Wednesday, December 3rd from 4-5:45pm in Washington Room 3 of the Marriott Wardman Park will be the panel “Thinking Through Police, Producing Anthropological Theory: police ethnography as a tool for critical thought,” organized by and featuring yours truly, along with Avram Bornstein (John Jay-CUNY), Mirco Gopfert (U Konstanz), Beatrice Jauregui (U Toronto), Matthew Wolf-Meyer (UC Santa Cruz) and Matthew Hull (U Michigan).

On Friday, December 5th from 6:30-8:15pm in the Diplomat Ballroom of the Omni Shoreham will be a roundtable on “Critical Potentialities of the Anthropology of Policing.  Accounts of Police, Power and Politics on Public Display?” organized by our own Paul Mutsaers (Tilburg U) and featuring Beatrice Jauregui (U Toronto), Eilat Maoz (U Chicago), Simanti Dasgupta (U Dayton), Daniel Silva (Unicamp), Michelle L Stewart (U Regina), and Craig William Schuetze (UC, Santa Cruz).

Finally, on Saturday, December 6th from 9-10:15am, again in the Diplomat Ballroom of the Omni Shoreham, will be the panel “Violence and Ethics in Ethnographies of Security in Latin America,” organized by Stephanie Savell (Brown U), guest editor of this summer’s Forum “Security in Brazil: World Cup 2014 and Beyond“, and featuring Erika Robb Larkins (U Oklahoma), Aldo Civico (Rutgers U), Stephanie Savell (Brown U), Kristen Drybread (University São Paulo/ NEV) and Danial M. Goldstein (Rutgers U).

We hope to see you all there!

* As always, if you notice any oversights or would like to suggest additions send an email to anthropoliteia@google.com
** If you’re not sure who to look for, I basically look like this, possibly with shaggier hair.  Also, I’ll try to be attentive to twitter–@anthropoliteia and @kevinkarpiak–especially towards the beginning

 

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#Ferguson & Elsewhere, What's going on in Ukraine?

Monica Eppinger, one of the contributors to our Forum “What’s Going on in Ukraine?“, also happens to be Assistant Professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law, which offers her a unique insight on one of our other recent Forums “#Ferguson and Elsewhere“.  Over at her other blog, the Comparative Law Prof Blog, she has some interesting reflections on the two.  Here’s just a snippet:

Serhiy Nigoyan memorial, Ukraine (c) Monica Eppinger 2014

Two commonalities invite comparison between late summer in Ferguson and deep winter in Kyiv.  First is the form of public action, street protest.  It speaks of an electorate that, despite a polity’s record of holding fair elections, resorts to alternatives to usual democratic processes.  The second, and most striking, commonality is the kind of spark that ignited protest, the relationship between citizen death at the hands of police and public assessments of state legitimacy.

via Comparative Law Prof Blog.

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