“The academic game is the game of knowledge (and ignorance) which is inextricably, if not always intentionally, also a game of power. The only way to put an end to this game (…under conditions of domination…) is to play it better than the players themselves. The only way to undermine the power of Western definitions of the world that burden the rest of the world is to beat the powers at their own game….play enough or as much as necessary to expose it for what it really is — only a game — a game not because it is innocuous but because it is arbitrary and cannot be grounded anywhere.”

—   Vassos Argyrou, “Anthropology and the Will to Meaning”, cited at Zeroanthropology

(My only caveat with this is to suggest it needs the word imperial added before the word West. It is the fundamentally imperial (state-centric) nature of the organization of knowledge – the privileging of elite schools, of certain forms of learning, of certain evidence of expertise – that is the problem. It is Western in so far as the west is the predominant carrier and transmitter of the virus. But the state everywhere is infectious….)