Posturing

“And as for the style of detachment, surely the posture of neutrality is just that, a posture recognized as such, a charade acknowledged as a public secert by one and all? This would make most social scientists and their funding agencies even better material for study than Andalusians”

-Michael Taussig, 1999 (Defacement. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Pg 75)

a moral view

“My Political view of anthropology is also a moral one.  I believe…that making the things of this world a bit more intelligible, especially when they appear opaque, incomprehensible, and irrational, can make them less unjust, ineluctable, or unacceptable…I am convinced that social science would not be worth a moment’s attention or labor if it had no political role”

-Didier Fassin, 2007 (When Bodies Remember.  Berkeley: U California Press.  Pg xxii-xxiii)

Man-eaters

“To large extent, is not the noise of the revolver fired into the condemned man’s temple the same as the gas expelled by the autocrat in a shattering burp after a sumptuous meal?  The fact is that power, in the postcolony, is carnivorous…”

-Achille Mbembe, 2001 (On the Postcolony.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  Pg 201)

Ale-house

“The ale-house is the key to every town; to know where German beer can be drunk is geography and ethnology enough”

-Walter Benjamin’s “One Way Street”, 1926 (Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926.  Cambridge MA: Harvard.  1996.  Pg 485.)

Books, Babies

“Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.”

-Walter Benjamin, #10 of ‘The Critics Technique in Thirteen Theses’,  1926.  (in “One Way Street”. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1 1913-1926.  Cambridge MA: Harvard.  1996.  Pg 460.)