Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

David Rolfe Graeber the 52 year old American anthropologist, anarchist, and involved in social and political activism. Graeber has been featured in an article by John Kampfner in the Japan Times titled ‘The story of the Occupy movements by one of the leaders’. Kampfner states “I’m torn. I can’t work out whether the Occupy movements were responsible for their own demise; and I can’t work out whether I’ve had enough of reading tomes about the brave new world of revolutionary consensus-building. The case for the defense of the spirit of 2011 should be overwhelming. Groups of activists around the world came together, determinedly but also nonviolently, not just to protest at the criminality of the banks and their backers, but also to put into practice another way. So why did it dissipate? David Graeber was a leading light in the Occupy Wall Street movement. An activist, anarchist and anthropologist (note his useful alliteration), he writes vividly about his experiences. He captures the joys and fears of a movement that believed it was on the cusp of achieving something special. Beyond the default complaints of police brutality and media narrow-mindedness, he struggles, however, to explain why in the end so little was achieved. His observations engender rage and smiles in equal measure. The tie that bound the activists in Zuccotti Park, night after night, was pizza. Local delivery firms thrived, as people from far and wide phoned in orders for pizza to go directly to the camp. …Graeber’s unwillingness to set out credible economic and political alternatives is curious. He confines his analysis to process, arguing that many problems would be solved if the manner of political engagement changed. He goes to great length to explain how democracy by consensus or collective problem-solving works, describing this as “something vaguely like jury duty, except noncompulsory, with some way of screening obsessives, cranks and hollow-earthers, but nonetheless allowing an equal chance of participation in great decisions to all who actually do wish to participate.”

Inspired by John Kampfner, The Japan Times ow.ly/laSvB Image source David Graeber ow.ly/laSlg

Sarah Kendzior the American Anthropologist who studies politics and the internet in the former Soviet Union has published an article on Aljazeera titled ‘Why email is and must remain private’ on the premise that private communication, if monitored, will damage trust between individuals, making it harder to form relationships. Kendzior states “When I was a child, my grandfather offered me some advice: “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want to read about in the newspaper”. To my nine-year-old self, this advice seemed strange, almost flattering. What could I possibly do that would be worthy of public interest? Why would anyone care? Decades later, this advice still seems strange, but not for the reasons my grandfather envisioned. The internet has made us all the media, able to broadcast the indiscretions of ourselves and others with ease. What seemed horrifying to him – transgressions exposed to an audience of thousands, maybe even tens of thousands – now seems like a comparatively good deal. How quaint to experience personal humiliation on a local level, endured for a day instead of preserved for eternity. The aftermath of the Petraeus scandal, in which the CIA director’s emails to his mistress biographer were considered grounds for his resignation, has sparked debate on whether email should be considered private communication. …The expectation that private communication will be monitored will damage trust between individuals, making it harder to form relationships and exchange ideas. Email, the most intimate form of online communication, should be considered private by default and legal rights to privacy must be strengthened. The self-censored life is not worth living.”

Inspired by Aljazeera ow.ly/fKf7f image source Wustl ow.ly/fKf2v

Jim Yong Kim the 52 year old Korean-American physician, anthropologist and current President of the World Bank has been the subject of review by Jason Hickel in an article published on Aljazeera titled ‘The World Bank and the development delusion’. Hickel states “When Jim Yong Kim took the helm of the World Bank in July, progressives in the development community hailed it as a turning point in the fight against poverty. For once the Bank is headed not by a US military boss or a Wall Street executive, but by an actual expert in the field of development. …I have deep respect for Kim and his past accomplishments, but I do not share the optimism that has overcome the development community. I find it astounding that we continue to place our hope for the end of poverty in an international financial institution that is fundamentally beholden to the interests of Wall Street and the US government. And we do so against all the available evidence. History shows that most of the countries that have come under the sway of the World Bank – and its sister institution, the IMF – have experienced declining development outcomes over the past 30 years or so.  …Kim probably won’t be able to accomplish these reforms because they would run up against enormously powerful economic interests. Real change will require rebuilding the global justice movement by linking together organisations that have been working on these issues for decades. As neoliberal policy has ravaged the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world, there’s a lot of anger out there ready to be mobilised. A revolution lies waiting in the wings; we have only to call it forth.”

Inspired by Jason Hickel ow.ly/eoiDC image source NIH ow.ly/eoiBc

Christopher Brian Stringer the 65 year old British anthropologist, one of the leading proponents of the recent single-origin hypothesis or “Out of Africa” theory, has been interviewed by John Noble Wilford for the New York Times. Stringers hypothesizes that modern humans originated in Africa over 100,000 years ago and replaced the world’s archaic human species, such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals, after migrating within and then out of Africa to the non-African world within the last 50,000 to 100,000 years. During the interview Stringer states “…if we went back 100,000 years, which is very recent, geologically speaking, there might have been as many as six different kinds of humans on the earth. All those other kinds have disappeared, and left us as the sole survivors. … We evolved globally, all over the world. There was a view that in the different regions an earlier species, Homo erectus, evolved relatively seamlessly to modern humans. This idea was known as multiregionalism. The argument went that we remained one species throughout that evolutionary process, because there was interbreeding among the different populations. It meant that the Neanderthals in Europe, for example, would be the ancestors of modern Europeans; Homo erectus in China would be the ancestor of modern Asians. And Java Man would be a distant ancestor of modern Australian aboriginal populations. What we have seen since then is a growth in the fossil record, in our ability to date that record and to CT-scan fossils and get minute details out of them. DNA studies have had a huge impact on our field. We now have the genomes of Neanderthals and of these strange people in Siberia called the Denisovans.”

Inspired by New York Times ow.ly/cEILc image source Natural History Museum ow.ly/cEIye

Anonymous' effacement of the self (May 25th 2012)

Enid Gabriella ‘Biella’ Coleman the American anthropologist, academic and author whose work focuses on hacker culture and online activism has published an article on Aljazeera about the Anonymous Hactivitst group. In the article Coleman states “… as a masked entity bearing the name Anonymous – it relays an urgent message about anonymity to contemplate. Given the contemporary reality of a corporate and state controlled surveillance apparatus, Anonymous stands out, compels, and enchants for a very particular reason: it has provided a small but potent oasis of anonymity in the current expansive desert of surveillance, much like the one quite literally being built in the Utah desert right now by the NSA. In an era when most of our personal data is archived online – in a time when states and corporations collect, market, and monetise our plans and preferences – there is indeed something hopeful, one might even say necessary, in Anonymous’ effacement of the self, in the cloaking of their identities, in striking at legislation seen to threaten privacy, and seeking to expose the depth and extent of privatised government contractors that have rapidly emerged as a security apparatus parallel to that of the national government.”

Inspired by Aljazeera ow.ly/aYePW image source Karora ow.ly/aYeN1

Neoliberal policy responsible for declining growth (April 29th 2012)

Jason Hickel a USA Anthropologist specializing in democracy, violence, globalization, and ritual has published an article on Sham Media speaking of today’s dominant economic ideology ‘ neoliberalism’ being taken for granted as natural and inevitable.  In the article Hickel states “In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had to convince people that there was “no alternative” to neoliberalism.  Today, this assumption comes ready-made; it’s in the water, part of the common-sense furniture of everyday life, and generally accepted as given by the Right and Left alike.  But it has not always been this way.  Neoliberalism has a specific history, and knowing that history is an important antidote to its hegemony, for it shows that the present order is not natural or inevitable, but rather that it is new, that it came from somewhere, and that it was designed by particular people with particular interests. If an economist living in the 1950s had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today’s standard neoliberal toolkit, they would have been laughed right off the stage. At that time pretty much everyone was a Keynesian, a social democrat, or some shade of Marxist. … neoliberal policy is directly responsible for declining economic growth and rapidly increasing rates of social inequality – both in the West and internationally.”

Inspired by Jason Hickel http://ow.ly/anIJb image source Sham Media http://ow.ly/anJps

Opening salvo over dissolution of American Empire (November 11th)

David Rolfe Graeber the 50 year old US anthropologist and anarchist is being hailed as the anti-leader of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Graeber has been profiled by Drake Bennett  in Business Week as “a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street.” Graeber although not the movements spokesperson, provides a favorable voice to the protests comparing them to the Arab Spring. Graeber, having an impressive history of both direct and indirect involvement in political activism, claims the contemporary Occupy Wall Street grassroots protest movement represents “the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire.”

Inspired by Drake Bennett http://ow.ly/7dQIO image source David Graeber http://ow.ly/7dRGs