New York University cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor Allen Feldman is visiting the University of Sydney, notes the blog site of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry (SOPHI) - they named the site SOPHIstry, which may be a little too clever, since sophists in ancient times were the people real philosophers made fun of because they were trying to be too clever and prove up is down and other nonsense.

What exactly is a 'cultural anthropologist', since anthropology studies culture?  I have no idea, but then again my Ph.D. is in Theoretical Phys Ed so someone in anthropology, or perhaps Quantum Paleontology, may be more qualified to answer.

What is a cultural anthropologist is not the puzzle - contextually anyone can put together the words and deduce/abduce/induce that he only focuses on politics or something - the puzzle is what the heck he is talking about.

Tim Blair at The Daily Telegraph posts this synopsis:

The violence that is poised between humanitas and inhumanitas speaks to the metaphysical ordering and phantasms of everyday political terror. Are practices of political aggression separable from the Western metaphysical divide between human and animal, and what are the ideological utilities of this divide? Are acts and discourses of inhumanization how philosophical anthropology (and all anthropologies are ultimately philosophical and political) confesses itself, not as theorem or disciplinary taxonomy, but as a political culture with the most severe material criteria and bodily consequences? Does political animality point to an anthropological sovereignty that only acquires positivity, tangibility, and figuration through its displacement onto, and passage into, the extimacy that is animality? And why does subjugated or expelled animality perennially threaten anthropological plenitude as an uncontainable negativity? These questions imply that the many thresholds of language, labor and finitude that have repeatedly delimited, governed and consigned the animal and human in metaphysical thought and practice can be remapped as a properly political dominion; a wildlife reserve in which philosophical, ethological, and anthropological declaratives and descriptions encrypt zoopolitical relations of power and force, and where the animal predicate circumscribes a concentrated time and space of subjugation, exposure, disappearance and abandonment.

Can you turn that into human language? I mean, we all can figure out what the words mean and maybe even do logical backflips into human sentences, but does this not read like some machine-created parody of anthropological mumbo-jumbo? "Does political animality point to an anthropological sovereignty that only acquires positivity, tangibility, and figuration through its displacement onto, and passage into, the extimacy that is animality?"

Ummm, let me guess, since Feldman got his PhD at the New School; yes?

I'm not the only one baffled.  Even other anthropologists think this is made up.  Blair says he got an email from Ron Bruxton of the Institute of Public Affairs, who wrote, “Although I have been an anthropologist for over 40 years, I have no idea what this means. As I have often said, a really clever country would close most of its universities."

PUT IT ON A BUMPER STICKER by Tim Blair, The Daily Telegraph
H/T Five Feet of Fury