Anthropologists as Counter-Insurgents
Montgomery McFate, an anthropologist at the Office of Naval Research, thinks anthropological knowledge is essential to modern warfare, and is on a campaign to bring this Gospel to the Department of Defense. Her long article at RedNova — originally published by the Military Review — is a backhanded compliment to stubborn anthropologists whose knowledge and expertise is “urgently needed in time of war” but who, “bound by their own ethical code and sunk in a mire of postmodernism”, “entirely neglect U.S. forces”.
I’ll leave the long history of anthropological involvement in wars of conquest and national defense to Ms. McFate and cut straight to the chase: a functioning anthropology can never be on the side of “U.S. forces”. This is a practical as well as an ethical argument — it simply is not possible, even were there enough anthropologists who shared McFate’s priorities.
Consider, if you will, a generic anthropologist studying the Middle East. She has spent several years in the region, learning Arabic and ultimately performing fieldwork, and published a stack of articles and a couple books on her work. She is approached by the Dept. of Defense and offered a job as an advisor to the military, which is planning an invasion of the region she has spent her career becoming an expert on. In effect, she is being asked to help in the conquest of the people she has lived with, worked with, studied with, learned with. And she’s being asked to do so in the name of her homeland, in the name of patriotism.
Now, despite McFate’s scornful dismissal of postmodern strains of thought, I happen to agree with the principal (hardly postmodern, but lumped in with it by McFate) that the people we are studying have a right to know the uses to which our work with them might be put, and the right to refuse to work with us if they don’t like the answer. Had our imaginary Middle Eastern specialist approached her subjects in the field and told them “My research is intended to make it easier and more efficient for my nation to invade and conquer your nation”, I very much doubt she would have been invited to stay very long.
As it happens, it is one of the prevailing (mis)perceptions anthropologists have to deal with in the field anyway. It is generally assumed that anthropologists are CIA agents or otherwise connected with Western military apparatus. It certainly helps anthropologists in dealing with these accusations if they can honestly say that they are not. This is why most anthropologists look down on covert research, why Franz Boas exposed the activities of anthropologists who had worked as spies during WWI — in the words of the current referendum to uncensure Boas:
Boas insisted on the distinction between researchers — scientists whose lives are dedicated to “the service of truth” — and spies under the employment of the US Government….
It is crucial that anthropologists be taken at their word in the field — not being able to dispel these perceptions can be harmful not only to our research, but to our lives.
[ASIDE: Here's an odd thing: McFate writes that
The AAA's current "Statement of Professional Responsibility" says: "Anthropologists should undertake no secret research or any research whose results cannot be freely derived and publicly reported. . . . No secret research, no secret reports or debriefings of any kind should be agreed to or given."
This is indeed part of the "Principles of Professional Responsibility and Ethical Conduct", but not of the present-day AAA -- it is the code of ethics for the the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand! It should be a part of our Code of Ethics, but isn't.] [UPDATE:Alex notes that this is, in fact, in the AAA's Principles of Professional Responsibility -- I had searched the AAA website and couldn't find them, so I assumed, wrongly, that they'd been excised in the 1998 revision of the Code of Ethics.]
On some level, McFate knows all this, so her real argument is saved for the end (if you’ve made it that far). To wit:
[I]f anthropologists remain disengaged, who will provide the relevant subject matter expertise? As Anna Simons, an anthropologist who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, points out: “If anthropologists want to put their heads in the sand and not assist, then who will the military, the CIA, and other agencies turn to for information? They’ll turn to people who will give them the kind of information that should make anthropologists want to rip their hair out because the information won’t be nearly as directly connected to what’s going on on the local landscape.”
This is hardly anthropology’s problem — but it is a good indication of the military’s problem, and why those anthropologists who have cooperated with the military have often come to regret it. To return to my imagined example above, the military is committed to invade the region our researcher’s expertise is in, regardless of the quality of their intelligence. Given that level of disregard, can any anthropologist hope to have any positive effect? The carrot being held out here is that, if anthropologists cooperates, the military action might be less hard on the people we’ve studied. If we don’t cooperate, though, the military is perfectly content to use second-rate, or even third-rate information.
McFate’s example only makes the prospect of anthropologists cooperating with the military seem even worse:
Seymour Hersh notes that Raphael Patai’s 1973 study of Arab culture and psychology, The Arab Mind, was the basis of the military’s understanding of the psychological vulnerabilities of Arabs, particularly to sexual shame and humiliation.Patai says: “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . , and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world.” Apparently, the goal of photographing the sexual humiliation was to blackmail Iraqi victims into becoming informants against the insurgency. To prevent the dissemination of photos to family and friends, it was believed Iraqi men would do almost anything.
In other words, with better information, with the kind of information that anthropologists could provide, the military would have had a much better idea of the psychology of the Iraqis it had imprisoned during the course of the invasion and its aftermath. They thus would have been able to develop much better and more effective means of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Great.
The bottom line is that the needs of anthropology and the needs of military action are radically at odds. McFate is arguing for an enlightened tyrrany, but a tyrrany nonetheless. Although there are anthropologists like McFate who will, I’m sure, put nationalism ahead of science and ethics, most of us see pretty clearly who holds the leash in the kind of relationship McFate is advocating. Anthropologists — even pacifists like Boas — were willing to work with the war effort when the enemy was a clear threat, as Hitler was. But few of us are willing to make the same sacrifice for the “luxury wars” being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fewer still to willingly accept the kind of blackmail McFate has presented us with: “We’re going to war whether you help us or not; your only choice is whether that’s going to be heinous or just really, really ugly.”
(Thanks to Athropologi for the link.)
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I wrote about Patai last year, when the Hersh article came out. What Hersh negelects to mention is that
Talk about “applied anthropology.”
When the Shining Path was active in Peru under Guzman’s leadership, rest assured the clandestine counter insurgency efforts sponsored by American interests relied heavily on established methods and principles of interacting with bush people/3rd worlders as set forth by Anthropologists. Most of this was picked from the shelves of libraries. Any SEAL or Green Beret worth his salt is going to have some cross culturual training and are probably as familiar with shamanism for instance as most any undergrad would be. Professional obligations and ethics probably can have little impact on much of this. If anything, the proverbial carrot in the form of generous donations from a defense contractor would entice ‘assistance’ more than anything along the coercive lines of persuasion. We in the West are more susceptible to bribes than blackmail I think.
Of course, as scientists, anthropologists are committed to making our work public — sometimes. There’s nothing to stop the military, the CIA, or anyone else from checking out our work in libraries or wherever. For instance, during Vietnam, Eric Wolf’s work on peasant revolutions was apparently used as a tool in planning counter-insurgency. But the system of writing up and publishing data is under the anthropologist’s control — s/he decides what to publish. I know anthropologists who have chosen not to publish work because the political situation would have exposed their sources to risks.
Even once it’s public, there’s limits. Yes, the military may well use the work — but their enemies have the same access, and may plan according to the assumptions our military is working with. What McFate is advocating is different — an advisory role for anthropologists. We’re talking debriefings, reports, perhaps even embedded anthropologists — and such work is hardly likely to be made public. This is what happened in the Thailand Controversy, it’s what was intended in Plan Camelot — secret research contracted by the military. Bad for anthropology, and bad for the people anthropologists work with.
Yes, funding does matter — but even the strictest foundation grant rules leave anthropologists in charge of their own research. Even attached to corporations, anthropologists have some degree of control over their work — and if they feel threatened, they can walk. Is the government willing to fund research under these terms. The answer is, of course, no — they used to do exactly that, and they stopped, right about the time, actually, that McFate says anthropology “withdrew” from national service.
Thanks so much for posting this, and the comments too.
I’m about 1/4 into David Price’s Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists and am just blown away by the information he presents. I like to consider my self an activist anthropologist, but damn if that doesn’t seem dangerous in this climate.
Has anybody here read Anthropologists in the Public Sphere there is an excellent intro for this book.
Also, quick little note, does it concern anyone here or does anyone have any thoughts or comments on Daniel Gross as World Bank(tm)anthropologist? Especially in regards to World Bank: Wolf at the door i.e. Paul Wolfowitz.
I don’t know anything about Gross specifically, but everytime I read about the WB, knowing as I do that they hire and ostensibly use anthros, I have to ask myself, “what the hell are the anthros doing at that place?” As far as I can tell, the WB has *one* policy — the same set of structural readjustments — applied over and over, regardless of sociocultural context, and regardless of effectiveness in any area that anthros would care about.
Price’s book is, as you say, fantastic — I’m hoping, if I can find a publisher, to print some of his “outtakes” in an edited volume I’m trying to get together. I don’t always agree with the way he interprets specific materials, but he has managed to compile enough material to simply pummel you with point after point after point. I can’t remember where it is, but there’s a letter reprinted in _Threatening Anth_ in which GP Murdock rats out a bunch of his colleagues that is, all by itself, worth the cost of the book!
It was stated:
“… she is being asked to help in the conquest of the people she has lived with, worked with, studied with, learned with.”
This is menat to be a serious question:
Would it therefore be unethical to *not* help liberate the people if they were under the dictatorial rule of a sociopathic murderer?
This is a true story. Many years ago I was in the Peace Corps in W. Africa. As a lark and in part thinking I stood a very remote chance of running a cheap hustle for some free money, I wrote a very informal grant proposal to the CIA requesting $1500.00, prior to my departure. Two items I vividly remember wanting to purchase with their money was tobacco seeds and ( I swear on my mother’s grave this is true!) trade beads! Oh my! What a hoot as I look back on it.
Anyway, once in country, I would pull out of the bush every couple of months and go to the capitol to get supplies and eat some western food. Lo and behold, about 5 months into my stint I met a guy who was hanging around the Peace Corps compound. I forget the agency he said he was connected with, but he had lots of money and treated me and several friends to some good meals and cold beer on several different occasions. The last time I ever saw him was at a Lebanese resturant where we had a fantastic meal that he bought. I remember thanking him and I will never forget his words. He said, ” Oh that’s all right. Anytime we get a request for $1500.00, we want to check the person out”. My point is the issues and concerns raised by this topic are not going away any time soon, when already 25 years ago what I just related transpired, and I was nothing but an amateur.
I bought Threatening Anthropology a week ago and after reading the first 50 pages I just shut down and read the whole thing in about two days. I found it to be the best anthropology book I’ve read in over a decade, well researched and he’s a great writer & theorist. I don’t know how he was able to gather all this information and focus his critique in a way that speaks so clearly to the issues of the present. The Graeber case fits exactly into the frame Price uses in this book. Why the hell is Price teaching at some backwater university, was he purged from a mainstream university?
Oneman:
The AAA Code of Ethics doesn’t prohibit secret research, but the principles of professional responsibility do, just as McFate writes. They’re at:
http://aaanet.org/stmts/ethstmnt.htm
Re: Principles — my mistake, then. I searched the AAA site for the Principles, using several different search terms, and nothing came up, so I assumed that part had been excised in the 1998 revision.
Re: Liberation — There’s a general answer to this, and a more specific one. The general one is: It would be unethical if doing so involved the anthropologist using unethical means, such as withholding the real reason for their research. An anthropologist who went to a people and said “I am here to gather information to use in order to help you work free of your oppressor” would no doubt be cooperated with. I can’t think of an instance where that might happen, but in theory, anyway, it is possible.
The more specific answer rests in an assumption you’ve made, and that McFate has made, that military intervention can conceivably work in the best interests of people other than the military and the nations that control it. While I suppose this is theoretically possible, historically this has not been the case. It is interesting that almost all of McFate’s examples — and I assume she cherry-picked “best case scenarios” to support her argument — involved situations that few anthropologists would think of as “helping” the people they had studied. She writes of efforts to put down movements for cultural autonomy, impose a centralized governance system on traditionally uncentralized peoples, establish an international surveillance program, and so on. All of these things may have been in the US’ national interest, but none of them in the interest of hte peoples on whom the anthropologists involved had expertise — and most of them were (or would have been) actively harmful to those people.
The bottom line is, can the military be a viable channel for anthropological knowledge? McFate gives examples of well-documented studies being ignored, watered down, or twisted into unrecognizability by the military mindset. The issue is not so much whether there are causes that an anthropologist could actively get behind, but whether anthropologists — or the people we study — can risk giving up our research autonomy to institutions whose ethics, practices, and interests are generally at odds with those that make for good anthropological research.
It seems counterproductive for anthropologists to work for militaries, not only because it makes the population they are studying less likely to cooperate, but also because it makes them – and all anthropologists – targets of whoever the other side of the conflict is.
On the other time, it is foolish for any government deciding to perform military operations in a foreign country not to review the anthropological research that has been published, since – if viewed fairly – it will provide insight into the culture of that country. If the Administration had paid any attention to what anthropoligists (and historians, and international relations experts, etc.) had said about Iraq, we wouldn’t be there now.
Er, I meant “hand” instead of “time”. Oops!
I’am agreeing with what has been said here, anthropologists simply can’t do true and responsible anthropological research and go at the same time to the military to help them to win their counter-insurgency wars in the region studied, especially if it is (and this is in every single case the one and only reason why wars have been and will be conduct by political decisionmakers) only in the interest of the nationstate to which the anthropologists belong.
But, the problem is that many graduate anthropologists, especially with a master-degree, already do work in or for gouvernmental institutions like developmental organizations, the world bank, or other similar organizations. The military would be only one of the last (and surely the one with the most extreme policies) of foreign-oriented gouvernmental institutions without a considerable amount of anthropologists working in. Of course, it doesn’t matter if one works for the peace-corps or for the military, but the point is, that gouvernmental organizations applying also political policies regardless of their use for the people targeted in developmental programs. US-Aid would be such an example, actually I doubt that they spend any money if it would be useless for US-national interests.
So the question is, makes it really a difference if one works within a program to bring the market-economy to the people of highland XY and risc a destruction of the socio-economic structure of their society (and transfered them from independent farmers into wageworkers with low incomes) or if one works for a military program with the goal to subject these peoples under political authority of the US-gouvernment? The means would be different the outcomes are not.
In response to McFate’s article I must preface that I am quite familair with her work and her own personal former ethical delimmas in their presentation. She for instance refused to publish her doctoral thesis from Yale on Military Insurgency in Northern Ireland for fear that it would be used to destroy the IRA, having been allowed into their covert world, as an observer and a suppossed sympathizer. She was torn as to what end the information she had gathered would be used. I am dishertened to see that for her the cost is simply that, how much she is willing to be paid to “spy” for the military. Something that she does and has done often in her personal life, having been previously employed as a corporate spy. Curious times indeed. Sad to see when your friends turn into neo cons over night for a pay check.
As damnable as McFate’s compromise with the military is, it seems to me that there is an even more insidious ethics compromise among practicing anthropologists: working for multinational corporations. Like the government and its military, corporations don’t care a rat’s posterior about the so-called target population studied by anthropolgists on the behalf of their corporate patron.
I would go further. The point that Paul Baran made fifty years ago holds with greater intensity today–that economists (and he could have added other social scientists) have become “virtuosos of that which does not matter.” Perhaps it’s time that we ask whether corporate foundations are exercising censorship by funding the mass production of professional trivia–and whether that funding constitutes a form of intellectual control.
To my mind the matter is simple. If you are an anthropologist you are a human being first. You have an ethical obligation to leave people better off not worse off. But that isn’t recognized as an obligation by corporations, or governments, or the military arm of governments. Historically their purpose has been to use people–including indigenous people–in behalf of private profit, leaving them worse off than before. Life and death are no object to a corporation or to the government it runs. Oil in the ground water, land expropriation, underpaid labor–and worse as we all know–are to be expected. An anthropologist should not invite these but oppose them. Therefore there is no question: do not collaborate–oppose.
I think it was in 1966 I was offered a research opportunity in NE Thailand. A colleague of mine said it was State Department sponsored and I shouldn’t take it. A word from him was enough. I’m thankful to this day I didn’t. Later in 1968 after field research in New Guinea I was offered by a Rand Corporation mathematician a position to help create a mathematical model of rainforest ecology to assist our “effort” in Vietnam. Of course that was impossible too, but I knew it right away; and it was the last time I saw that “friend.”
One of my biggest regrets was giving too detailed data, in my first field report, of land use in a Native American community on a reservation. I was naive, thinking it was a scientific document and therefore confidential. I only hope it wasn’t used against the very native Americans who had been so hospitable to me, but in all honesty, I cannot imagine that it wasn’t. This made me more cautious in my New Guinea research, where every person’s name and all economic and kinship data are put through a “filter” which screens the actual people without changing the ethnography.
I would never again make actual data easily accessible for anyone to use, if they wished, as a weapon against the very people who were kind enough to let me collect it. I only hope I’ve been successful in this endeavor.
I also hope other anthropologists do not let anyone get hold of data that can be used against people.
Arnold;
This kind of issue (confidentiality, disclosure of information, goal of research etc) came up in a debate a few weeks back. If you’d like to see the kinds of points that were brought out, you could have a look at oneman’s post on morality in anthropology and then have a look at the comments section. Sorry, I am really bad at HTLM otherwise I would link to it here.
The below update on the AAA’s decission to stop running CIA appeared in today’s issue of the Times Higher Education Suppliment. Funny how we Brits are so far ahead of you Yanks when it comes to opposing these programs.
“US Society Rethinks its Policy on CIA Job Ads”
Mandy Garner
Times Higher Education Suppliment Published: 16 December 2005
The American Association of Anthropologists has removed CIA recruitment adverts from its publications after a row over academic independence.
The association, which held its annual conference in Washington last week, is setting up a committee to investigate its relationship with intelligence agencies after members expressed concern that being involved with the CIA could affect their research.
The Royal Anthropological Society’s journal, Anthropology Today, has been leading the discussion about the adverts for the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (Prisp), which funds students who will subsequently work for the national security agencies.
Prisp is conducting a two-year pilot to sponsor up to 150 trainees a year, including anthropologists, to boost the linguistic and scientific skills of the intelligence services in the fight against terrorism. The identities of the students are secret – defenders of Prisp say that to disclose them could endanger the lives of any students who work for the CIA in the field.
Gustaaf Houtman, Anthropology Today’s editor, showed the journal’s December editorial on the issue by David Price of Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, Washington, to the AAA president and director before publication.
He said it was a major factor in the decision to set up the scrutiny committee.
He added: “As a result of the publication in Anthropology Today of an early debate on this issue, all major international anthropology organisations have declared themselves against involvement in covert training.”
The Association of Social Anthropologists, for example, said that Prisp’s plans “threaten to compromise the ethical foundations of the discipline”.
Peter Nas, secretary-general of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, added: “If spies are clandestinely planted for anthropological training and research, with the aim of covert collection of information about people and places, they will most certainly violate our professional ethical codes and bring the anthropological scientific community into disrepute. This will result in serious mistrust of anthropological fieldwork and may personally endanger anthropologists working in the field.”
According to Dr Price, University of Kansas anthropologist Felix Moos – an advocate of contacts with military and intelligence agencies – is the driving force behind the project. After the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Professor Moos elicited the support of his friend, former CIA director Stansfield Turner, to curry support in the Senate and CIA to fund his vision of a merger between anthropology, academia, intelligence analysis and espionage training.
Professor Moos’s vision for Prisp was more comprehensive than the pilot programme, and it included classes on topics such as bioterrorism and counterterrorism, Dr Price said.
http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx
Thanks for posting this — I’ve been trying to track down some information for a post on the AAA’s move, and it’s been difficult. The normal academic procedure is that the Resolution will be printed in the Anthropology News in February — hardly in sync with the news cycle…
This entry reminds me of an article I recently found during a literature review where an anthropologist collaborated with administrators of the Japanese internment camps during WWII:
Wax, Rosalie H.
1953_____The Destruction of a Democratic Impulse: An exemplification of certain problems of a benevolent dictatorship. Human Organization 12(1):11-21.
When I read this article, I was shocked. I wonder if Montgomery McFate could read that same article and start getting ideas of reprising Rosalie Wax’s study in Guantanamo Bay.
The only merit I can think of to ideas like this is that anthropologists might gain access to field sites that might otherwise be inaccessible, which could be seen as following up on Laura Nader’s call for anthropologists to study up. This small benefit hardly outweighs the costs that everyone here has mentioned, of course, and I doubt anthropologists who participated in these kinds of studies would be free to reveal what they discover anyway.
I saw something on a listserv not too long ago about Felix Moos from someone who knew the guy. This person said:
“During the war in Vietnam, he used to have an autographed photo of Kissinger on his wall, next to one of himself with a gun standing over a dead Korean soldier. He was very reactionary and very provocative about it.”
I’m not familiar with that Rosalie Wax article — of course, “Human Organization” doesn’t seem to be available in any of the online databases I have access to, and is not physically available at the local Uni library. Lovely. But I am familiar with Wax’s (then Hanke) work in the internment camps. Peter Suzuki, who was himself an internee, has written extensively on anthropology in the camps, which involved not just Wax (who worked for a Uni project and only coincidentally provided information to the authorities) but dozens of applied anthropologists working directly for the government under the War Relocation Authority. See:
The last one deals explicitly with Wax’s case. As Wax later admitted, her behaviour in the camps was none too admirable. Having become crather close to, and defensive of, a group of Japanese radicalized by their experiences in the camps (labelled “pro-Japan” in the parlance of the camp administration), Wax suffered a shock when a “pro-American” was killed, the death blamed on “her” faction. Feeling betrayed, she quickly “turned sides” and informed on the leadership of the “pro-Japan” faction to the FBI. (The quotes aren’t entirely gratuitous — Wax herself later wrote that she’d been misled in her assessment of the situation, and that the labeling of factions, and even of calling them “factions” was too facile for real understanding.) The man she informed on was subsequently and conveniently deported to Japan — “conveniently” because he was one of the few who had filed a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the internment.
Wax’s “crime”, if we can call it that, consists of two things: first, an emotional involvement with her sujects that, while not bad in and of itself, led her to indulge feelings of betrayal and revenge and, second, the wielding of the not-insignificant power invested in her as an agent of the State, however tenuous her attachment to it may have been (in relation to the victimized and essentially de-nationalized internees, *any* connection was significant). But more importantly, the whole project was plagued with difficulties, both pragmatic (being an anthropologist in the service of the STate is not an easy thing!) and theoretical. For one thing, many of the anthros working with the WRA found themselves “sucked into” the bureaucratic language of the situation — a language which at once dehumanized their subjects while portraying the camps as functioning “communities”, even “democracies”. Second, a legacy of applied anthro derived largely from the industrial anth and psych of the ’30s led them to perceive violence and conflict as obstacles to the functioning of the “communities”, rather than as endemic to the camp situation. In industrial anth, for example, a strike might be seen as a “problem” interfering with the smooth running of a factory — rather than as a way of achieving some sort of balance between the conflicting demands of the workers and management. The applied anth of the time (and since?) tended to identify with management, not least because management paid their salaries, and in doing so took on management’s view of what the “society” should look like.
Which is not to say that there were no dissenting voices among anthros in the camps. Notably Morris Opler produced a string of astute observations about Japanese culture *in the camps*, mostly by ignoring the demands of the administration — which, as you can guess, just about got him removed from the camps. But by and large, the anthros involved were content with a position that consisted primarily of reassuring the administration that their policies were right. The occasion of Opler’s near-removal was his predicition that the application of loyalty oaths (which were at the center of the “pro-Japan/pro-American” conflict above) would lead to riots and massive discontent. His nay-saying was seen as a dangerous lack of faith in the program of the camps — that he turned out to be right in no way lessened this perception.
Obviously this is a complex situation, not least because of the dozens of anthropologists were involved — all with personalities and motivations of their own. I do not doubt that many of them were motivated, as Orin Starn wrote in his assessment of the camps (1986. “Engineering internment: anthropologists and the War Relocation Authority”. American Ethnologist 13 (4): 700-719), by the desire to lessen the negative impact of what was clearly an unjust policy. Some weren’t — Weston La Barre’s work in the camps, for the most part explicitly racist, seems motivated more by dislike of the Japanese than any protective intention. But whatever their motivations, little of the anthros’ work actually *did* anything to lessen the abuses inherent to internment — and most bought in fully to the invented-on-the-spot assimilation-and-dispersal program that became the ostensible raison d’etre of the camps, contributing directly to the dissolution of the Japanese-American communities they were ostensibly trying to protect. What bothers me about McFate’s position is that she does not seem to recognize these complexities at all, let alone connect them to the inherent difficulties of maintaining loyalty to both the state and a subject community. Further, she blames anthropology’s and anthropologists’ “failure” to render their services up for military use to a rather recent history of postmodern wishy-washiness — ignoring the rather conflicted history of such relations during the ostensible “golden age” of anthropological participation in the war machine, WWII. Wax was still writing about her internment camp experiences well into the ’70s; two and a half decades were still inadequate for her to grapple with the ramifications of her participation — but McFate acts as if it were all really simple, if anthropologists would just get over their attachment to their cushy ivory towers.
I disagree that this is a problem in the way that you have phrased it. It’s not as though good information on the Arab world and the cultures of the middle east was NOT available to U.S. forces because ethical anthropologists were nobly hiding it from the naughty administration.
Any administration member or Pentagon muckety muck could have spent a rewarding afternoon in any of the excellent libraries in Washington D.C. and gathered a wealth of freely available (and rightly so!) information about the part of the world they were prepping to invade, and they could have learned that most of their assumptions about culture, politics, and history were wrong. They weren’t reading the work of neocon idiots who’d never been to Iraq because it was ALL that was available to them, they were reading the crap work of neocon idiots because they PREFERRED to.
Anthropologists keeping results secret seems a much lesser concern to me than the vast amounts of excellent results we produce that no. one. wants. to. hear. Of course the former problem is excitingly cloak and dagger and makes us seem important (a key function of secrecy in all social settings). But the latter one is the more truly worrisome problem.
Alexander Cockburn gave an interesting paper in Washington at the AAA meetings two weeks ago on anthropologists’ complicity in the locking up of American citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War Two. He mentioned Morris Opler as well as Rosalie Wax in his critique.
At the end of the talk Peter Suzuki stood up from the back of the large crowded room and began yelling about the injustices committed by George Stocking and other historians of anthropology in “covering up” American anthropology’s involvement in these imprisonments. He went on for several minutes. When he finished a very angry George Stocking stood up and said that his historical writings shouldn’t be criticized as not addressing information that wasn’t known at the time of his writing. The anthropologists I was sitting around seemed surprised to hear Stocking claim that he hadn’t known what anthropologists in these camps were doing.
Here’s another article:
Orin Starn. 1986. Engineering Internment: Anthropologists and the War Relocation Authority. American Ethnologist 13(4):700-720
http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/ae.1986.13.4.02a00070
Ozma – I’m not sure exactly what “this” it is you disagree with, but let me say that I’m not talking here about the *use* of anthropological data by whomever — I take that as a given in an open society with an open science. Neither is McFate talking about that — she wants to see anthropologists join hands with the State by working directly with agencies such as the military. Ironically, neither anthros nor military administrators are particularly interested — remember, her pitch isn’t to anthropologists (or she’d have published in the AA or a similar anthropological outlet) but to the military. As you say, they prefer not only a certain style of presentation but data that aligns with a pre-existing world-view, one which is not widely held by anthropologists, or, I argue, compatible with anthropological data.
Richardo – Thanks for yet another reason to regret not being able to attend the AAAs this year. I would find it very hard to believe that Stocking is wholly ignorant of what went on at the camps, especially as many of the major players came from or went onto careers at U Chi.
Rex – Thanks for linking to the Starn article — I should have thought of that myself. Starn’s assessment falls far, far short of Suzuki’s critical stance, and is why I spent some time above talking about “motivations”. For Starn, the anthros of the WRA are excused by their motivations; for Suzuki, both their ideals and their failure to live up to them are condemnable.
I guess the part I didn’t agree with was this:
>>>I happen to agree with the principal (hardly postmodern, but lumped in with it by McFate) that the people we are studying have a right to know the uses to which our work with them might be put, and the right to refuse to work with us if they don’t like the answer. Had our imaginary Middle Eastern specialist approached her subjects in the field and told them “My research is intended to make it easier and more efficient for my nation to invade and conquer your nation”, I very much doubt she would have been invited to stay very long.>>>>>>>>
Informed consent is one thing; attempting to anticipate, in advance, how every piece of research may potentially be used is entirely another. Turning to secrecy or retreating from undertaking research as a _default_ mode strikes me as wrong-headed: the more pressing problem is that policy makers DON’T use our collective body of peer-reviewed research, not that they DO.
The part about anthropologists having to be extra-careful about avoiding working FOR U.S. forces also strikes me as a basically farcical concern. The AAA is not a licensing body, and I think it would be an incalculable disaster if we followed the professional models of, say, the AMA or the ABA and said — if anthropologists wield their disciplinary knowledge in ways x, y, and z they will be defrocked. It’s a ludicrous model for anthro as it is actually practiced.
Let’s say that some kid gets a degree in anthropology at Liberty University (I have no notion if this is possible), accepts CIA funding for graduate training
at some similar institution, goes on to enter the CIA, and then applies his disciplinary knowledge toward the end of rendering “extraordinary renditions” more effective.
There is nothing, NOTHING, not a thing, not one pea-pickin’ thing we can do about it as “anthropologists”. Only the last step in that process is any of our beeswax, and it’s something we can only oppose as citizens, and that — in my opinion — is as it should be.
About Stocking — not writing about something and “covering it up” are two different things, and I think to imply Stocking is claiming ignorance while in fact being possessed of guilty knowledge is a very serious charge and shouldn’t be sort of casually thrown out there (I’m looking at you, Richardo and Oneman).
I do know, from a course lecture years ago, that Stocking has reflected on these issues with respect to the involvement of anthropologists in the war effort in Vietnam. There was a somewhat notorious case, involving an anthropologist whose name I have forgotten — anyway, a guy who worked with Montagnards. The Montagnards, for historical reasons of their own, allied themselves with the Americans against the bulk of the Vietnamese population (my enemy’s enemy is my friend…). The anthropologist apparently faciliated this in some way. Anyway, Stocking made the point that it was easy for American anthropologists to reflexively condemn the guy as a lackey of U.S. military imperialism, but his position was a genuinely difficult one — which loyalties come first? Those to the people the anthropologist immediately works with, or those to the big-picture outcome the anthropologist believes to be more just?
Anyway — I have no idea what that anthropologist’s personal politics were all about, but my round-about point regarding STocking is that to my certain knowledge he has indeed thought seriously and sensitively about the stakes of these kinds of questions.
I agree with Ozma — and again perhaps it is because I know George personally. I am sure that, like all scholars, his work contains errors and omissions and there are many criticisms of his work that can and ought to be made. But this is quite a different thing that criticising someone because they don’t have the same research focus that you do — George’s just hasn’t written a leftist critique of anthropology’s complicity in various atrocities. That’s just not his program.
Finally, I think it’s a sign of his success that given the choice of believing him to be ignorant of something or deliberately covering things up, people always assume he is covering something up. I mean the man has written a lot, but he is not actually omniscient folks. He could actually not know something. His original scholarly speciality IS the late nineteenth century, after all, not mid-century twentieth.
I’m not accusing Stocking of explicitly “covering up” anything — as noted by Rex, his field has always been roughly Boas’ lifespan. Although, it bears noting that this is a decision that is informed more than simply by interest — in his few forways into post-WWII issues, Stocking (along with many historians of anthro) has been rather delicate. That few anthros have dealt with the relocation camps or other WWII-and-later topics needs explaining with regards to more than just their personal interests — it can’t be the case that nobody’s interested . And yet it remains true that you can count the *historical* material on anthropology after the death of Boas on one hand, two if you count articles.
On Stocking’s success, I have no argument. Stocking is why I do history of anthropology; he’s probably why Suzuki does history of anthropology. But that success puts him squarely in the middle of the field, a position which makes him a fair target for questions about the silences and occlusions that the field exhibits.
On professionalism and the AAA, I have to say, I fail to see this as a meaningful criticism. After all, neither the AAA nor any other professional organization represents all anthros, and I doubt non-membership has been a burden for anthros who feel over-constrained by even the AAAs weak Code of Ethics. My concern is not with enforcement of some prodessional code, but with the question of how — and whether — anthropology can function when wed to the concerns of the State. Whether enshrined in a professional organization or not, we as a discipline have developed and continue to develop a set of standards for what a valid anthropological representation does or should look like. This standard is not, and may never be, fixed, but that’s hardly a “get out of criticism free card”. It is my contention that direct involvement with military and intelligence agencies distorts the work anthropologists do, a distortion evident in several examples. It is also my contention that their is a moral component to such work that has to be considered. It is not my contention that there needs to be an “anthro police” to punish offenders.
Let us, indeed, imagine an anthropologically-trained agent rendering renditions more efficient — is it only as citizens that we have a right to criticise this work? Do anthropologists have nothing to say, as anthropologists, about the use and abuse of the methodologies, knowledges, and practices that make up our discipline? Are we not, again as anthropologists, in the best position to draw attention to these issues? And, finally, if we are not willing to speak out against such work as anthropologists, can we expect anyone else to care about it as citizens?
There are three strands in Oneman’s argument which I think he has confused. He first claims that you can study why a scholar chooses to write about one topic rather than another. Obviously this is true, and uncontroversial.
He also claims — uncontroversially — that you can criticize someone’s work. Again: no surprise there. What is controversial is his conflation (once again) of these two topics. Describing someone’s motives is not the same thing as criticizing their work.
These are two different things — providing a psychological sketch of Oneman that describes why he is fixated on these topics is different than proving he is wrong about any one of them.
A third and very different thing that Oneman discusses is being personally unhappy with someone’s research agenda — taking issue, in other words, not with their motives or their work, but their choices. Example: I find Sol Tax boring. Oneman finds him interesting. The fact that I think Oneman is wasting his time studying Sol Tax is not a criticism of Oneman’s study, its a statement of our divergent preferences.
You can write a life history of George Stocking’s culturo/poitico/psycho/economo situation and use it to explain the motives that lead to his choice of topics. You can claim that he falsified his data, or that his argument is incoherent, or that his research is shoddy and lacks depth and breadth. Or you can complain about his choices — that if YOU had founded the history of anthropology as a discipline YOU would have done things differently. Only one of these is actually a CRITICISM of George — the second. The first is ethnography, and the third is your opinion.
(btw I promise I can provide 11 or more citations on anthropology after 1942. Oneman man’s claim to the contrary are either hyperbole or ignorance. Since this is supposedly his dissertation topic, I’m assuming it’s the former)
Rex, by and large I’m not particularly worried with Stocking’s particular research agenda. That there are silences and occlusions in his work is, in fact, what makes it possible for myself, Suzuki, and a bunch of other history of anthro types able to do work in the field. When Stocking worte his long, long article on Tax, I worried that a big chunk of my own work was going to be rendered irrelevant.
But. Stocking is not merely an academic who has chosen to focus on certain things, and not focus on other things. He is, without even a near competitor, the pre-eminent historian of anthropology in the country. In addition to writing about certain topics, he oversees (or oversaw — I think he’s mostly retired now) dissertations, teaches, edited the primary outlet for work in the field, established some of the key structuring ideas in the field, peer reviews books and articles, reviews grant and fellowship applications, and so on. I’m not ascribing to him absolute power over what gets said and done in the field, but he does have some degree of power in shaping and maintaining the field as it is.
Again, this is not an argument to have him cuffed and dragged away by the anthropolice. I am merely pointing out that he does have a significant presence in the field that needs to be reckoned with — that what he decides is important or unimportant matters, far more than, say, my own. When I put together my panel on anthropology in the Cold War, I took it for granted that Stocking should be on it, and considered it a personal success when he agreed to do so. And I consider it a testament to his character that he did so despite having read my dissertation proposal, which is somewhat critical of him (a sentiment reinforced by his magnanimous review of David Price’s Threatening Anthropology, which is more than just “somewhat” critical of his work).
It should be pointed out that I haven’t accused Stocking of anything — I do, however, see something of merit in Suzuki’s challenge of his, and other historians of anthropology’s, work. Historians of anth have tended to shy away from overt criticism of anthropologists of their own and their teachers’ generation. Stocking has been very protective of Tax, and of the U of Chi in general — and given the ties between the WRA and U Chi’s rise to prominence in the wake of WWII, it is fair, I think, to at least question Stocking’s position.
But, again, I can only say that because I’ve learned so much from Stocking, because he made the critical examination of anthropology’s history not only respectable but anthropological. And it is because he has provided both the tools and the motivation to look at the institutional history of the discipline that his place in the institutional history of his sub-field merits closer examination.
It should be clear that I have no qualms with Stocking’s use of data, nor with most of his interpretation. Nor am I particularly concerned with how he came to focus on the topics he focuses on (though that may well make an excellent topic!) — nor even whether the field would look differnetly had I been in his shoes. He has opened up a space for serious history of anthropology, and provided many of the tools to take advantage of that space — what more should I ask for? And yet it remains true that, with a few exceptions (maybe more than 11), the history of anthropology has largely remained focused around the topics Stocking has chosen, offering to a new generation of historians like myself a field to work in but also depriving the field as a whole of a critical examination of topics like the WRA. Suzuki is right in this — it is a problem that the history of anthropology has largely remained confined to a “safe” period before WWII. I wasn’t there, but from the account above, it doesn’t seem that he singled out Stocking — that Stocking rose to represent the field suggests that it is not only me who thinks Stocking has a larger role than just writing about topics that interest him.
Ozma writes,
This point strikes me as critical. The default mode that she describes is a recipe for disengagement leading to irrelevance. Going down that path means that anthropology survives, if at all, as something like medieval history, fascinating to afficianados but of near-zero consequence in shaping the world we inhabit.
I also recall a remark by John Wager, a contributor to lit-ideas, who points out that moral judgments always involve ambiguity. There is no judgment to be made when a case is black and white. From this perspective, a reflexive disengagement not only leads to irrelevance, it is, in the strictest sense, to abidicate moral responsibility.
John,
I’m really not sure I get your point here. Not working for the military is an “abdication of moral responsibility”? You know me too well to claim that I’m arguing for a “reflexive disengagement”, whatever that is.
But Oz, and you, raise a good point — secrecy and the abaondonment of research problems is not a recipe for engagement. So consider: It took 60 years for the research David Price recently wrote about, on anti-Japanese “racial weaponry” to become public. 50 years to discover the CIAs efforts at creating a database of AAA members and their specialities. As Suzuki notes, anthros in the relocation camps were consistently discouraged from doing certain kinds of research — producing a decided lack of any sort of traditional ethnographic results. The same thing happened at Fort Berthold during the construction of the Garrison Dam (anthros were hired to assist in the relocation of the Three Affiliated Tribes, who were being flooded out). Most of the work of WWII applied anthropology remains unknown.
The AAA’s position against secrecy has always rested on an ideal of open science, on worries about anthropological knowledge becoming “trapped” and thus invisible outside of the contexts of their creation. This is bad enough, but when it comes to military research, I think the problem is worse than just that — my worry is that the structure of the relationship itself distorts the research, creating a de facto “retreat from research”. While this does not, by itself, necessarily condemn such relationships — I am willing to concede in theory that the problems could be addressed and a situation created in which anthros retained enough autonomy to create valid research even while attached to military or intelligence agencies — historically this has simply not been the case, not in the US at any rate, and the current nature of USAnian military and intelligence communities does not seem to offer much practical hope that this utopian state of mutually beneficial cooperation is feasible. I simply do not see much hope for an engaged anthropology in service to military/intelligence needs.
One of the arguments that has surfaced repeatedly against what I’ve said here and elsewhere (or, perhaps, what it is perceived I have said) is that the concern over how anthropological knowledge not created under such stifling conditions might be used. I have, so far, not advocated a regime of secrecy among anthros, dedicated to purging from our work any data that might fall into the “wrong hands”. While individual anthros may well protect what they perceive as sensitive information — and who will stand against them? — I hardly advocate this across the board. But the argument that this somehow lessens the quality of such work is, I think, misguided. It’s not as if, by naming names, so to speak, the work is therefore any more “complete”. But it’s also not as if the individual anthro can foresee all possible uses and abuses of their work, and given the option between not publishing at all and publishing, I take the latter. That does not, however, let anthros “off the hook” — we are, after all, best qualified to see when our own work is being abused, and I think we do have a moral obligation to recognize this potential. What I feel is that, because there is no one path that inherently absolves us of any responsibility (nor the reverse), many would just as soon not deal with the moral dimension at all. How is that “engaged”?
I don’t know if the history of anthropology tends to focus on the pre-WWII part because it is “safer” or just because it is more, well, historical? I mean, Stocking is an old guy — focuses on an earlier period. Younger scholars like yourself (Oneman) focus on a more recent period, and so it goes. Let the circle be unbroken and what not….
John McC — obviously we are simpatico on this one, but I do think it is also important to champion the stand-alone importance of scholarship in fields like medieval history. If everything scholarly had to be judged according to criteria of current relevance (or what feels like current relevance), well, sakes alive! (as I reckon you’d agree anyhow).
As for whether we can disavow certain practices specifally *as anthros* — I dunno about this, really. For example, “clandestine ethnography” is one definition of spying, right? But my problem with government agents getting sneaky abroad is in no way limited to distress about whether they call themselves “anthropologists” as a cover story while doing it. Getting too worked up about that one dimension strikes me as, at base, a worry about such charades making the rest of us “real anthropologists” look bad. But it’s not like U.S. undercover operatives’ (potentially nefarious) actions would be made more okay if they called themselves fairy princesses rather than anthros while carrying them out, right?
So it seems to me there is another motivation for critical scholarship like that of Price and Suzuki (and the sum total of my knowledge of their work has been gathered here, I should make clear). It is to suggest there is something *inherently* naughty about American anthropology, itself, not just “American anthropology when used as a cover story by agents of American naughtiness”. I mean, I am all for exposes of American naughtiness. But I am actually very unsympathetic to the proposition that American anthropology is (or, alternatively, once upon a time was) somehow a quasi-criminal endeavour, or a rogues’ gallery of malevolent wankers. I’ll freely admit I feel that way sometimes at the AAAs… but I think it is incorrect as a guiding principle of historical scholarship.
In respect to oneman’s question, I don’t say that “Not working for the military is an abidication of moral responsibility.” What I do say is that a categorical decision that I would never, under any circumstances, work for the military (corporations/the FBI or DEA/the UN/NGOs) is morally suspect.
It could, in fact, be a perfectly moral decision—if, that is, it were taken after careful consideration of all of the implications. But the case is parallel to that of the conscientious objector who is asked if he would never, ever kill another human being….even if the human being in question were raping and torturing to death his wife, daughter, or neighbor. The answer might still be yes, but the consequences would have been considered.
In the case in hand, I agree completely with Ozma when she writes,
It is one thing—and a very desirable thing, indeed—to recognize the sins of the past. It is another entirely to be so caught up in self-flagellation that considered judgment of circumstances becomes impossible.
I should like to plead with all list members to read
the following
article
“Insurgency and Counterinsurgency” in Iraq by Stephen
Metz. He is a
leading figure on this issue at the US War College and
teaches many of
the
officers now facing and in the future to be facing the
counterinsurgency
task in many lands.
http://www.twq.com/04winter/docs/04winter_metz.pdf
There is now much of an historic record for what was
done in our
counterinsurgency response to the Iraq insurgency and
how it worked
out.
Mr. Metz’s article is important because it was written
early in the
insurgency and offered solutions to ongoing problems,
many of which
were
put into practice. Thus, this article is invaluable,
not only for what
it
admits to be the misjudgments of the Pentagon but also
for its
assumptions as to what the insurgency and Iraq are all
about. To my
mind,
this article is a radical departure from the Vietnam
experience. So I
particularly look forward to the opinions of those who
may have
experienced Vietnam insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Personally, I
fear
that, unless this article was neutralized by others–
and I think not–
it
represents a pathological gold mine to understanding
where we went
wrong and
where we thought wrong, being culture blind and
language deaf. Worst of
all,
it seems to me, the Pentagon operated on a series of
ideological assumptions, as this article indicates,
that support my
opinion
that we went in truly intelligence blind.
Daniel E. Teodoru
************************************************
A very interesting story made yet another scandal
for
the White House:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050100854_pf.html
At the end of a basic training ceremony, Iraqi Army
recruits in Anbar province tore off their uniforms and
refused to serve. According to the Wash. Post:
The protest was triggered by an announcement that the
new soldiers, all residents of Anbar province –
widely considered the heartland of Iraq’s Sunni Arab
insurgent movement — would be required to serve
outside their home towns and outside the province as
well.
To me, having posted Mr. Metz’s 2003 article on the
Iraq insurgency, I am encouraged that someone finally,
in effect, said: Rumsfeld goes or we go!
To understand this view, one must first recall the
imperial McNamara solution to the Vietnam War: a large
central army. I was in Danang Airport waiting for my
plane to Saigon when I met and ARVN soldier on
emergency leave to go back home to his Mekong Delta
village. He was stationed in a unit near Danang and
the local Viet Cong Committee of his village tried to
talk him into deserting, using the well known
nice–>mean “binh van” tactics scripted way back by
Lenin. First he was sent requests to return to protect
his family; then he was sent a death warrant if he did
not desert; then he was sent a threat to his family;
finally, he received a package with a small child’s
hand in it. Thinking it was his young son’s, he asked
leave to return home. There was no other way to
confirm that. I have no idea what happened. But the
story came to mind when I read the above story about
the Anbar training camp. In fact, we succeeded in
Vietnam only after the Tet Offensive, when we
concentrated our assets and efforts into training
local forces– RFs and PFs– to resist the VC from the
villages. That spelled the end of the Viet Cong and
the war became against Hanoi’s regular troops sent
south.
Let us remember that Rumsfeld ordered our “liberator”
troops to not interfere with looting, violence and
murder after Saddam fell on grounds that “freedom is
messy.” Thus, the insurgency began as a crime spree.
As a result, we could not disarm people; they needed
their AK-47s to protect their homes. It was only when
our troops came under constant attack that all Iraqis
were deemed suspect of trying to kill our troops until
proven innocents.
The more we preempted, barging into homes in the
middle of the night, the more we turned the Iraqis
into outraged resistors. Soon they went from avenging
insults to their Iraqi dignity to avenging dead
relatives. Apparently none of Gen. Sanchez’s
commanders read Lora Blumenfeld’s book REVENGE, as
seen by Mediterranean peoples. We kept, as Metz wrote,
assuming that we were dealing with Jihadists from
abroad. And so, as in Vietnam, when we realized that
we couldn’t stay, we concentrated on building up an
Iraqi army to replace ours.
To make a long story short, we turned an unleashing of
criminals into a foreign Jihadist insurrection from
abroad (for Rumsfeld ideology substituting for
intelligence). And so we focused on creating a Shi’ite
Army to protect against Sunni insurgents and then a
Sunni Army to protect against Shi’ia Death Squads (not
to speak of the Kurd Peshmerga we fully armed). When
we tried to put it all together into a national army
that we control, we only repeated the ARVN catastrophe
of mass desertions.
But now the lowest soldiers have made it clear that
this is a LOCAL war, to protect their neighborhoods
and villages. Perhaps now Mr. Bush will go the next
step and fire Rumsfeld and replace our military
trainers with able Arab speaking advisers who can
train local police forces to protect their own
families.
At the same time, withdrawing our troops on a fixed
schedule and asking the UN to replace us with police
advisers will refocus this war into the many local
wars that it really is. The Central Government can be
helped by us with reconstruction funds that are
performance standards based (their corruption could
never be as bad as that of our contractors).
In the end we may not get credit for Iraq’s police
suppression of a bandit insurgency fought and won at
the local level, the UN police advises will, but them
we also will be remote from any final failure if it
occurs. Yet I really think that our ability to
persuade Iraq at the central and local levels will
only manifest once we remove our ham-bone military and
empower Iraqis one local sector at a time.
Daniel E. Teodoru
The following remarks are my personal views only…
I am not an anthropologist; however, I am an analyst who studies the sciences and complexities of cultures. I feel the need to defend Dr. McFate within the confines of this blog. I have read many of her articles and as for her work coming a little to late (February 2nd, 2006 at 11:44 am Anthropology.net) it is better late than never for I don’t see very many others working dilligently to assist our military folks in understanding the culture of a country they are trying to assist, and I repeat the word “ASSIST”. The need for cultural understanding isn’t always a weapon of the war, in some cases it could become such a weapon; hoewever, our world has many cultures where good and evil exists. How that knowledge of a countries culture is utilized determines if this is a weapon or not. Basically this is for our troops to understand not only the “evil” but the “good” as well so not to misunderstand those they are trying to assist.
McFate is coming pretty late to these discussions and all she does in this article is try and rewrite the sources she draws upon so that the critical points of the original authors are muted so that she can use their writings for the status quo.
McFate’s “scholarship” is pretty shoddy. Is this really the best that the Washington intelligence establishment can come up with? She uses no original sources in this article and in fact, having just read many of the article and chapters she draws up (and mostly cites) I think her “paraphrasing” of some of the work of other scholars comes very close to plagiaraism. There are passages that are very close to those appearing in Wakin, Nader, Price, Horowitz, Hickey and Gusterson.
The article didn’t really give all that clear an idea of the concrete details of McFate’s work. Reading her article in the Military Review “Iraq: The Social Context
of IEDs” http://usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/CAC/milreview/English/MayJun05/MayJun05/mcfate.pdf
was interesting. She’s suggesting analyzing Iraqi social networks in order to better target insurgents. I can’t imagine that military intelligence isn’t doing that already- but I would bet that she gets into thicker detail in things that aren’t for public consumption.
It presents a much less benign view of things than the profile. She isn’t just providing the cultural knowledge to prevent misunderstandings in encounters between Iraiqs and US soldiers, or developing better governing methods. She’s providing instructions for tracking down and killing people.
Even if you accept that people who produce IEDs are bad, she’s providing tactical guidance for a venture that is being undertaken in bad faith (to put it mildly). The fact that she thinks that anthropology has a place in that sick little venture is troubling.
And I take issue with the fact that she’s described as a former punk. Anyone who could pass a background check for security clearance can’t have been that much of a punk.
Just to respond to Justaguy: tracking down and killing people is part of what the military does, in addition to building schools, wells, banks, etc. Shouldn’t they do it efficiently if they’re going to do it at all?
Also, just to let you know, even for a top secret security clearance, you only need to disclose activities going back ten years. Thus, even you might be eligible, regardless of what you did as a teenager….
Jane, No. Anthropologists should not help the military track down and “efficiently” kill people. If anthropologists are doing this, we should expect people to increasingly hunt down anthropologists and kill us in the field. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.