The Saklan Institute of AnthropoGeography is a collection of individual scholars who strive to provide usesul and interesting publications to further reasearch in the fields of Geography and Anthropology. As such, we seek to produce both our own research and that of others who, though fascinating, have been forgotten or purposely ignored in past history.

Our roots stretch back to the Sixties and Seventies when we vainly apptempted to found a 'physical' institution in the turbulent days of Watergate and the Vietnam war. Those efforts were very dissapointing due to the restrictive non-profit tax regulations and the Nixon recession. We discovered that although many wanted to support us, few were able to match those feelings with any kind of funding.

Today, we have set up a "virtual" institute relying on the facilty of the web to both exchange with others and present our publications and research online.

But we have not forgotten our roots and what follows are the first paragraphs of the original founding statement we wrote in 1972.

"The Saklan Institute was conceived by academic exiles, exiles forcefully separated from the university by budget cuts. But there are other exiles from academia not necessarily physically removed from their formal positions and they include virtually any scholar who has found his work made meaningless to some degree in the context of the changing world around him. Such exiles include too those who see the university becoming once again the stifling and repressive environment it was in the fifties and who wish to follow Marcuse's plea that we not leave the university but stay inside and learn to use it. The Saklan Institute of AnthropoGeography is thus designed for and by the many formal and functional scholar/exiles now firmly alienated from the educational process. "

"More precisely, the Saklan Institute is an anti-university, acting as an alternative by virtue of its very form. Where the university is highly centralized in authority, we work in a diffuse and democratic collectivity; where it holds careerism above scholarship, we promise no one a job and offer only the chance to learn and to teach. The university also has a small interlocking elite of patrons and benefactors, while we accept help with no strings attached and commit ourselves together with our work to the very survival of all mankind itself."

"The name of the institute is taken from the almost mythical Native American village of Saklan, which now survives as a number of archeaological sites near Pinole California, in the upper region of the San Francisco Bay Area. Spanish and Mexican historical records speak of it as a legendary town, longer and wider than other native settlements around, but one Anglo scholar records its significance as a major population center that managed to avoid the net of Christian missionization. It is this 'rebelde' tradition that we wish to memorialize in our name, the tradition of resistance to the onslaught of an arrogant, self-righteous orthodoxy bent on suffocating its victims in the name of uplifting moral ism and civi1izing zea1."

Saklan Institute of AnthropoGeography