Maximilian C. Forte
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
CV (public)
CV (academic)
Faculty page:
http://socianth.concordia.ca/facultyandstaff/documents/MaxForte.php
Please note that this site is no way
connected to Concordia University, nor is it endorsed by Concordia
University, nor is it in any manner meant to represent Concordia
University.
QUOTED IN THE
MEDIA
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Reproduction and
translation into Farsi of my "America's
Iranian Twitter Revolution," click
here.
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Reproduction and
translation into Arabic of my "America's
Iranian Twitter Revolution," on
Al Jazeera or
here.
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Reproduction of my
article, "America's
Iranian Twitter Revolution," on
Mathaba or
here.
-
Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt): Date line: #IranElection
-
As-Safir (Lebanon):
«إيران إيليكشن»:
«تويتر» بدلاً من الخيار العسكري على إيران؟
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CubaDebate: Twitter, del miedo y las ilusiones
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Boston Globe: Anthropologist's War Death Reverberates
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Derek Walcott’s response to my question on the BBC
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Newsday (Trinidad): A Brief Overview of the History of Arima's
Indigenous People
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UAE’s
The National on the Human Terrain System
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Washington Post: Military’s Social Science Grants Raise Alarm
Contact details & guestbook follow below.
As of June
2008 I have been awarded promotion and tenure, and so my rank is
that of Associate Professor. I am also proud to say that in 2008 I
won two teaching awards, nominated and judged by students
themselves.
Views and
opinions expressed on this site are in no way meant to represent any
persons, units or offices of Concordia University. This site is not
endorsed by the university, and the reverse is true as well.
•••••••
Difference needs to be taken seriously. Difference is not
necessarily pretty, quaint, picturesque, or amenable to calm and
polite dialogue. Attempts to placate and obviate difference by
arguing that it is an illusion masking an underlying universal
sameness, is only further proof of how little difference is
appreciated, and how far we have yet to go.
This
project was part of an ongoing critique of institutional and
disciplinary anthropology, insofar as it has or may continue to
support, justify, participate in, or abide by imperial projects. My
central interests are ongoing colonialism, recolonization,
anti-imperialism, indigenous rights, Caribbean culture, and
discourses of liberation and social transformation. Tied up with
those is an interest in “public anthropology” and “radical
anthropology”. I wrote against the corporatization of the university, “professionalization”, the way that knowledge is
compartmentalized and “disciplined”.
The larger
concerns were with a global system of inequality, the diffusion of
social injustices, permanent war and imperial domination, and
cultural colonization that work together to maintain an
unsustainable system of mass consumption and an anti-democratic
system of corporate domination.
•••••••
Anthropology
was for me, when idealistic, a way of speaking
about the human condition that looks critically at dominant
discourses, with a keen emphasis on meanings and relationships,
producing a non-state, non-market, non-archival knowledge. I would
like to think that my work here was about undoing and unthinking
received “wisdom.”
While my
“professional discipline” is anthropology, neither my occupation nor
my discipline speak for me, and I can claim to speak for neither.
The best way to understand what I am did here is that I was trying to
keep some sense of epistemological distance from dominant
institutions. As a result, I made no special effort to answer to a
community of professional anthropologists who take their discipline
for granted, or who use the Internet to promote it uncritically.
•••••••
For many
years my favourite authors have been
Ashis Nandy, for cultural
criticism;
George
Orwell, as a political novelist and essayist;
Edouard
Glissant,
as a Caribbean philosopher of creolity;
Gerald
Taiaiake Alfred
and
Ward
Churchill
on decolonized indigeneity;
Pierre Bourdieu
for his many contributions on capital, distinction, hegemony
and orthodooxy;
Immanuel Wallerstein
for his critical analyses of the capitalist world-system and
the structuring of the social sciences; and,
Roi Kwabena
as a contemporary, friend, and example of the work of the
anthropologist as a public intellectual. I could list a great many
other authors, and the list can expand and shrink over time, but
these have been the fairly consistent influences on my thinking.
•••••••
I was also
the founding and soon to be former editor of a peer-reviewed, open
access journal–KACIKE: The Journal of Caribbean
Amerindian History and Anthropology (www.kacike.org),
and the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink (www.centrelink.org).
I also write for another blog, The CAC Review
(cacreview.blogspot.com).
KACIKE is not the first open access peer
reviewed journal in anthropology, but it is one of the earliest, and
thus far the longest lasting. Of course, it is not an anthropology
journal alone either.
•••••••
Send a private
message:
max.forte@openanthropology.org
Leave a public
message:
