Geoffrey Clarfield is a Canadian-Israeli anthropologist, political analyst, ethnomusicologist, journalist, film producer, and classically trained musician. He came about his music interest as a talented boy soprano who became a member of the children’s chorus of the Canadian National Opera through training at the Royal Conservatory of Music in his hometown. Later, after an audition he would be invited to become one of the early teen performers in the Broadway production of the musical “Oliver” that came from London, England to America.
Clarfield spent twenty years in Africa, the Middle East and Asia as a development anthropologist, researcher, policy advisor, and project manager having worked for, among others, archaeologist Richard Leakey and primatologist Jane Goodall. Recently he spent three years in Manhattan as an ethnomusicologist, working at the Alan Lomax Archive where he is still a consultant.
His clients have included the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Norwegian, Israeli, Swiss, Italian, Canadian and British governments.
In addition to scores of proposals and reports he has written more than one hundred articles on anthropology and music for New English Review, National Post, The Globe and Mail, New York Post, The Brooklyn Rail, the American Thinker, Books in Canada, and Minerva magazine in England.
Mr. Clarfield is a contributing editor at the New English Review as well as a member of their board of directors.
As executive director of the Mozuud Freedom Foundation, Geoffrey co-founded Project Abraham, which successfully lobbied the Canadian government to declare that the persecution of the Yazidi in Iraq by ISIL is a genocide, and to bring up to 1,000 government-sponsored Yazidi refugees to Canada in 2017.
He produced Ghosts of Our Forest, which documents the hunter-gatherer peoples in Uganda who have been expelled from their forest homeland without a word of protest from any UN agency—and who are now living a marginalized life in the slums of that East African nation
Clarfield believes that Western civilization alone has and may continue to protect the rights of individuals under the rule of law, including freedom of speech.
American cultural anthropology has a lot to answer for. Its icons—people like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Edward Sapir—were the indispensable precursors of the woke ideology now so deeply entrenched in our schools and universities, courts, politics, and business. This is not to say that cultural anthropology [...]
If you are married with kids, during the COVID lockdown you may have, like many other millions of American parents, discovered that your local school boards are teaching your children an ideology that is at odds with your most cherished beliefs and practices. This new curriculum teaches that [...]
