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Anansi Tactics — texts of critical thinking and political analysis.
Anansi Tactics is an attempt at critical thought without guarantees.
We come from different traditions of radical thinking. We agree—and we disagree. That is not a weakness. It’s the method. Critique that doesn’t begin with your own is worth nothing.
We look for affinities with what is emancipatory—with what we can meet without cancelling our disagreements.
We write about what burns: history, politics, sociology, anthropology, economics, theory, movement critique, analysis of the present, literature, cinema, and more. No thematic limits. No respect for the obvious. We follow the thread wherever it goes—even when it turns against us.
Anansi Tactics(?)
Anansi is the trickster-spider of West Africa, from the Akan cultural world (today’s southern Ghana). In the stories, “the small” defeats “the big” not by force, but by wit, cunning, and reversal.
Anansi travelled to the Caribbean through the transatlantic slave trade and there—as Anancy/Annancy—became a figure of survival under violence: how you deceive power, how you find cracks in the rule, how you keep language, memory, and dignity. In that context he is often read as a symbol of resistance in plantation societies.
Emily Zobel Marshall, in Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance, uses the phrase “Anansi tactics” to describe cultural/everyday strategies that undermine domination—resourcefulness, deception, linguistic craft, “subversion from within”—as they appear in historical contexts of enslaved people and Maroons in Jamaica.
We didn’t choose the name to adopt a specific “method of action”. What matters here is the logic of analysis.
Anansi weaves webs. He sees power relations, maps them, finds weak points. He refuses the surface—he looks for the threads that connect things to each other.
Critical thinking as weaving.
And the web of Anansi is also the web of writing: a weaving of analyses.
Notes on method
(a) Caution / suspicion.
Nothing is exhausted by a first reading. Behind words sit frameworks, motives, interests, and histories. We unwind the thread: we look at how one thing connects to another—and what gets left outside the frame.
(b) Lived experience.
We don’t write from nowhere. We write from where we stand—from experiences, defeats, contradictions. Theory that doesn’t touch life is decoration.
(c) Narrative.
Societies also run on stories: who speaks, who stays silent, what is treated as “natural”. We try to tell our own stories—in our own language, from our own angle.
Our starting point is that the world should not be like this—and that it can change
The project
Anansi Tactics is not only a blog of texts. It is a project of slow, stubborn analysis—against the speed of hot takes, against the comfort of ready-made explanations.
Over the next months, alongside the texts we publish, we are building a second axis:
A monthly thematic research dossier (once a month)
Once a month we will publish an extended special feature: a desk-research dossier of original research, on issues of public interest.
Not “content”. Not a neutral report.
A thematic investigation that collects sources, maps actors and relations, follows institutional trails, traces narratives, and lays out what is usually kept scattered—or hidden in plain sight.
One theme per month. One long piece. A public file.
Who runs this
Anansi Tactics is run by a small collective of writers.
Aktaioros Samano_.
Aristonikos_