Gerald Sider is well known for his critical commentary on both the failure of anthropological practice and the simultaneous possibility that an anthropological eye has for noting the potential for progressive engagement through critique. The blog, Zero Anthropology, picks up a recent article by Sider and presents a critically supportive reading of Sider’s attack on naive anthropology.

My thanks to the new magazine, AnthroNow, for placing the article by Gerald M. Sider online in its current issue (vol. 1, no. 1, April 2009), titled: “Can Anthropology Ever Be Innocent“. This turned out to be quite a valuable and relevant article for me, in helping me to reconfigure what ethnography can mean, and what it might look like, in the shadow of the national security state and the so-called “long war against extremism” (which, of course, exculpates American state extremism). My sole function below is to produce a list of the sections I extracted that strike me in particular as most important to my own work, with occasional commentary. Sider’s words are in block quotes, and all bolding is mine unless otherwise noted.

Read the full post from Zero Anthropology Blog here.