Almost a shame that, as being an afficionado of his work, I hadn’t noticed till now, and only via antropologi.info, that Maximilian Forte launched a new blog just about a month ago: Open Anthropology.
Known from KACIKE: The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology as well as The CAC Review, he currently is a professor in Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal. Careful readers of warauduati might also recognize his name from the debate on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean 2.
Open Anthropology now is an epistemological and political project developed along Cyberspace, Open Access, Decolonization, Liberation, Resurgence, Collaboration, Advocacy, Accountability, Transparency as well as Restructuring Knowledge and Reconfiguring Subjecthood.
„A project designed to liberate anthropology from the confines of discipline, profession, and institution, as a new form of knowledge acquisition and production, in a changing world, and in the struggle to create a new world.“
„Open Anthropology arises from a dissastisfaction with the state of knowledge in contemporary and classical anthropology, and is meant to significantly restructure and move anthropology beyond its current confines, beyond the constraints of professionalization and institutionalization, transcending the very ‚disciplinari- ness‘ of a discipline that has often foundered on its own shoals since its inception as ‚anthropology‘.â€
(Maximilian Forte introducing his new project on 11th of October 2007)
Maximilian Forte’s main research focuses on indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and their current cultural and political resurgence, in the past especially in Trinidad and Tobago. His theoretical interests include questions of indigeneity, nationalism, indigenous self-representations, ritual and tradition, and the indigenious translocalism and transnationalism of the Caribbean. His latest books are „Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival„, New York: Peter Lang, 2006, and „Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post) Colonial Representations of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago„, Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2005.
„Lastly, and at least for now,“ he states, „Open Anthropology will be only an illusion of a ‚one man show.‘ Behind and beneath this project is a wellspring of criticism, enthusiasm, and vision that is brought to bear here from numerous sources of encouragement.“ I wish him all the best with his new project. There is already lots and lots to read and think about …
