Published!

While I was working at NDU, my boss Jim Keagle and I wrote a paper titled "Organizing for National Security: Unification or Coordination?" It has finally been published and is available for download at this link (thanks Gina!). It's part of the Defense Horizons series. If you want a paper copy, let me know and I'll send you one.

Reactionary anthropologists

A followup on my previous posts on anthropologists at war.
The New York Times published an oped by Richard Shweder, an anthropology professor at the University of Chicago, on the contribution of anthropologists to American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan (via Abu Muqawama). Professor Shweder frames the current debate between "help US military efforts" on one side and "US government evil and corrupting" on the other side. He concludes:

The real issue is how our profession is going to begin to play a far more significant educational role in the formulation of foreign policy, in the hope that anthropologists won’t have to answer some patriotic call late in a sad day to become an armed angel riding the shoulder of a misguided American warrior.

A good point, but how are you going to build the significance of anthropology as a discipline if you don't want anthropologists to work for the branches of government most relevant? It seems to me that a substantial portion of American academics would prefer the purity of irrelevance to dirtying themselves with relevancy to policy:

While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world, protects US soldiers on the battlefield, or promotes cross-cultural understanding... such work breaches relations of openness and trust with the people anthropologists work with around the world and, directly or indirectly, enables the occupation of one country by another.

Funny but sad

Via Ethan Zuckerman's blog (direct quote from my sister yesterday: "I would be a lot smarter if I read Ethan's blog more often"), we have "the best thing on the internet."


In The Know: Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex

Laugh it up! Cultural and geographic illiteracy is one of the major reasons why we need smart people to tell us how to operate in foreign cultures, whether that's Lonely Planet writing guidebooks for tourists or anthropologists providing intelligence to the military. My gut (which is never wrong) tells me that some of the reason why Americans ignore the world is that we feel safe in doing so in our unipolar moment - we are powerful enough to ignore the world, and our country is big enough that you can vacation all your life without going abroad. This creates a cycle in which our ratings-driven news business ignores world news to go after the lowest common denominator, which means that Americans never know why they need to know (it took four years to create Human Terrain Teams)... the media is run by the invisible hand of the free market, but one of the preconditions of that market is the information required to make a good choice. But the media is the institution that's supposed to provide that information in the first place....

/rant

More on anthropology in war

The New York Times has an article up that I missed on my post on anthropologists in Iraq yesterday: "Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones." Mostly it deals with Afghanistan:

The anthropology team here also played a major role in what the military called Operation Khyber. That was a 15-day drive late this summer in which 500 Afghan and 500 American soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan’s most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on American troops and local governors.

In one of the first districts the team entered, Tracy identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one village, Colonel Woods said. Their lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, she determined, a burden that could drive the young men to join well-paid insurgents. Citing Tracy’s advice, American officers developed a job training program for the widows.

In another district, the anthropologist interpreted the beheading of a local tribal elder as more than a random act of intimidation: the Taliban’s goal, she said, was to divide and weaken the Zadran, one of southeastern Afghanistan’s most powerful tribes. If Afghan and American officials could unite the Zadran, she said, the tribe could block the Taliban from operating in the area.

“Call it what you want, it works,” said Colonel Woods, a native of Denbo, Pa. “It works in helping you define the problems, not just the symptoms.”

SCARED - Concerned Anthropologists

Academia and government are two very separate cultures. As Sandy Berger noted, there isn't much cross-pollination (to the detriment of both), and the Network of Concerned Anthropologists would like to keep it that way, at least where their profession would be most useful:

We, the undersigned, believe that anthropologists should not engage in research and other activities that contribute to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq or in related theaters in the “war on terror.

These anthropologists believe that they have a bond of openness and trust with "studied populations" and that assisting American counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq would harm those bonds.

The Small Wars Journal posted a response from the Seriously Concerned Anthropologists for a Ridiculously Enfeebled Defense (SCARED):

Pledge of Non-participation in Counter-insurgency

We, the undersigned, believe that anthropologists should not engage in research and other activities that contribute to counter-insurgency (COIN) operations in Iraq or in related theaters in the “war on terror.” While some people say COIN reduces the need for massive bombing that results in untold civilian casualties, we say we will not get our hands dirty even if it saves lives.

US military and intelligence agencies and military contractors have identified “cultural knowledge,” “ethnographic intelligence,” and “human terrain mapping” as essential to US-led military intervention in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. We prefer that they remain hopelessly ignorant and ineffective, thereby dragging out the war on terror and multiplying the death count. Rather than instilling cultural understanding in US military operations, we prefer that soldiers in the battlefield never learn to distinguish ordinary peaceful Arab and Muslim culture from the death cult of suicide terror and insurgency.

Today's US military practices the cultural imperialism that privileges some native peoples (the so-called "moderates") at the expense of others (the so-called "terrorists"). But, as anthropologists, we know that such normative evaluations are inherently subjective and we refuse to abet such cultural hegemony. Rather than impose the normative American value structures (such as "freedom" and "democracy") on foreign peoples, it is our responsibility to allow competing normative schemes (such as "fascism" and "theocracy") to assert their normal roles in such societies without the interference of colonialist Western powers.

Marcus Griffin (who to my knowledge has no connection with SCARED) is an anthropologist working with US forces in Iraq who maintains a blog (I wish he would update more but I guess he has more important things to do). He has some good posts on what his work means for anthropology more generally, such as whether it puts other anthropologists in danger, and a response to criticism from one of the founders of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.