Comments on: Working for PRISP

By: Anthropology.net

Anthropology.net — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 06:31:30 +0000

“Culture”, Counterinsurgency, and the Military…

In the light of the debates over CIA recruiting of anthropologists, the Pat Roberts Intelligence Program (here and here) not to mention a yearning on the part of some anthropologists for the halcyon days of military/anthropological collaboration (also …

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » But We’re at War…

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 08:08:56 +0000

[...] The Association of Social Anthropologists has kicked off their new Ethics blog with a sharp critique of PRISP, the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, backed by anthropologist and unreformed cold warrior Felix Moos. PRISP offers funding to students in the social sciences, on the condition that they do summer internships and other activities with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, essentially serving as a recruitment tool for US intelligence services. I have posted about PRISP here before, voicing concern about the loss of autonomy this cozying up to the state may engender in the long run, and these concerns are shared by John Gledhill at the ASA: Many anthropologists and people with anthropology training working for NGOs and government sponsored agencies in places and situations deemed relevant to security concerns are now likely to experience new levels of state intrusion on their working lives and ethics. Sometimes, they will face serious risks as individuals if they chose to follow the path of conscience rather than acquiescence to these demands and restraints. [...]

By: BAdMonkEy

BAdMonkEy — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 04:59:51 +0000

This could have some positive impact on foreign policy. As Steve Sailer pointed out 2 years ago at VDARE.com, the war in Iraq was DOOMED from the start. (Although Tommy Franks seemed to know about the big NO-NO with regards to urban warfare, and BALED as soon as he finnihed the big push.)He accuratley predicted the outcome and WHY, according to socialogical background.He also stated (IHO) what could be done to help maximize success, (divide the country into ethnic regions, etc…)which is the only sensible alternative.

It seems that the Neo-cons thought they were Americans, and Iraq was France, circa 1944. This misinterpretation has cost thousands of lives, and billions of dollars, and threatens world stability….

Of course, if you LIE about why you are going to war in the first place……

Has anyone figured out WHY we went to war in Iraq? I think I missed that…

By: tigerbear

tigerbear — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 07:17:36 +0000

Hardly. Please deal with the argument, and please don’t be so disingenuous.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 00:02:50 +0000

Look, the key thing is, given your argument, don’t get tangled up in arguments about the indenture of scholarship, or the preservation of intellectual disinterestedness, etc. Your argument boils down to something simpler: the CIA is bad and anything that helps it is therefore bad. Which is an argument you’re entitled to make, but it’s got nothing to do with scholarships, anthropology, and so on as such. Pass Go and collect $200.00: deal with the CIA as such.

By: tigerbear

tigerbear — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 18:23:19 +0000

(If anyone’s interested you should probably stick a “…?” onto the end of the third paragraph).

By: tigerbear

tigerbear — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 15:34:13 +0000

No I didn’t, and the point was about the destructive nature of the program to anthropology in practice, rather than to the argument regarding authoritarianism, which was a critique of the way in which those who had not criticised the program had framed their argument.
Regarding the problematic nature of the program: you’d have to presuppose I consider all indentured scholarship to have a destructive influence on the profession. Which would be odd, and uncharitable.
I specifically set up why I think this specific program is destructive in earlier posts, and I specifically pointed out that I don’t think equivalence can be drawn between the production of a CIA agent and a bad historical novelist. Though presumably if pulpy publishing houses offered indentured scholarships I’d necessarily have to consider them destructive to anthropology as a profession, or something.
I believe the outsourced labour argument is accurate. The CIA could, if it chose to, teach anthropology inhouse as part of a recruitment training scheme. In practice it has farmed it out to anthropology departments, on the basis of a micromanaged program of study that also includes a CIA internship and leads to a very specific career path. Its that basis in a micromanaged, funded and structured governmental training scheme, not that it bears some resemblance to a set of ad hoc agreements any individual student could put together (which indeed it must, though since it is in practice currently opaque to academic anthropology, only those on the program and those they report to within the CIA can know what their training actually entails), which leads to the “outsourced CIA labour” argument.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 14:34:06 +0000

Actually, you did. You perhaps did not mean to, but there is nothing in your last two sentences that differentiates the PRISP program from other programs in terms of authoritarianism.

The “outsourced CIA labor” argument is just plain weird. It applies equally to the CIA as well as to every other employer on the globe. I took classes in anthropology; lets say that after I graduate I go work for the republican party (unlikely). Does that make my poor anthropology professor into outsourced labor for the republicans? What if I agreed to work for them prior to taking his class? I will be applying for jobs shortly. With luck, I will get hired prior to the beginning of the second semester. Does that make all of my professors during that semester into outsourced labor for whomever hires me?

By: tigerbear

tigerbear — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 14:21:10 +0000

I didn’t make an argument about all indentured scholarship, I think that’s clear from the last two sentences of my previous post.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 14:15:14 +0000

There are a lot of scholarships that come with conditionalities. Many developing nations have programs for funding educational training for citizens that require the recipients to return home and work in their home nation for a fixed duration. Athletic scholarships sometimes constrain their recipients. Businesses sometimes pay for retraining or continuing education on the condition that the employee receiving the assistance continue working for the company for a contractually specified amount of time. Are you against all such “indenture” of education?

By: tigerbear

tigerbear — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 13:29:41 +0000

To reiterate, ‘don’t question it, you “authoritarian”‘ was a comment about the misdirection of accusations of authoritarianism (as I see it) in this argument. In my opinion, describing any Bourdieuian patron-client paternalism on the part of academics as authoritarian in a discussion of a program where CIA-funded students are micromanaged through an educational program to a specific outcome is a problematic way of framing the discussion. This isn’t a scholarship where the “take the money and run” argument of scholarly independence can be made, this is indentured scholarship where university-based learning plays only a part. We do not know what comes attached to this, yet we are aware that it has potentially dangerous consquences for the profession. This is, in my opinion, destructive free-riding on disinterested scholarship.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 16:14:23 +0000

You can certainly question the program itself, and there are indeed potentially dangerous consequences for anthropologists doing research. Though I’d note the conflation in the field of spying and ethnography is old and in certain ways pretty well founded. In the contexts that many anthropologists and ethnographers work, I’m not sure their subjects would care much about the distinction. In the rural town in northeastern Zimbabwe that I did some work in, I don’t think the people I talked to would understand or care much about the difference between a CIA agent and a Ph.D student. In fact (and this is very common) most understood me as having some connection to development agencies and/or the Zimbabwean state, regardless of how I explained myself and my purposes, because those are the only two institutional entities that routinely concern themselves with the production of knowledge about rural communities in places like Zimbabwe. (That was 1990; today I don’t think I’d be seen as a representative of the Zimbabwean state.) There are places where that difference would matter enormously, of course–the contemporary Middle East, for example. But anyone there who is anxious about the possibility that the CIA might be interested in their activities would be a fool to assume that any American anthropologist, however well-meaning or detailed in their profession of ethnographic ethics, is not a CIA agent. Not merely because they might be, but because an anthropologist publishes in the public domain their research: what they know is, by the very ethics Oneman is describing, necessarily to become known to others. This is kind of what’s working in the hoary old joke about the anthropologist who returns to his fieldsite a decade after publishing a monograph on it, consults the local elders and asks nervously if they read the book, to which the elders reply, “Oh, my yes, and it was very good. If we’d known you would write such a good book, we would have told you the truth the first time you were here.” The intrusion of the CIA into fieldwork only accentuates or shifts slightly the uneven playing field that ethnography necessarily involves; in a few places, more dramatically so because of the current state of geopolitics.

That’s all one concern, and it’s what Oneman was talking about in responding to Montgomery McFate. This is different. There’s an ethic to pedagogy too: you cannot dictate what others will do with the knowledge you offer. You can only offer it with the ethics you value embedded within it, and hope that the ethics are integral enough to what you know that the two cannot be separated. Pedagogy in this respect parallels publication: in both cases you make choices about what to say and not say, put into the public or hold to yourself, argue and concede. Once you’ve made those choices, trying to micromanage the uses to which others put what you’ve said or done after they’re beyond your presence is an authoritarian aspiration. In a course, if you want, you can come back at someone who seems to you to misunderstand or misuse what you’re offering to the class. After the course–or as a preemptive strike–you’ve got no say in practical terms, and in ethical terms, you shouldn’t even aspire to. That’s the meaning of “public”, and it’s the meaning of teaching as well.

By: tigerbear

tigerbear — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 11:23:15 +0000

Just to clarify, 2nd sentence third paragraph should be taken to imply that we do anthropology because it happens to be the sort of scholarship we are interested in.

By: tigerbear

tigerbear — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 06:40:31 +0000

I find the discussion in this thread very disturbing. The shock people seem to be having that anthropologists should be unhappy about becoming outsourced CIA labour (don’t question it, you “authoritarian”) seems nothing short of bizarre.
I have fundamental disagreements with this program. Anthropology as a whole is a difficult and dangerous enough discipline as it is, and accusations of spying are prevailent in the field. Now, they’d actually have more basis in fact. I think this is dangerous for anthropologists in general, regardless of the parochial national benefits Patrick thinks it would provide, and Timothy Burke’s inability to see any difference between the production of a CIA agent and a bad historical novelist.
Second, anthropology is disinterested scholarship. I consider that we study anthropology because it happens to interest us. I don’t agree that there are any morals attached to it, but I have no idea what is attached to (in practice, secretly) CIA-funded anthropology.
Fundamentally, then, I think this is destructive to anthropology as independent inquiry

By: Kerim

Kerim — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 20:33:48 +0000

maniaku: Sure, undregrads do fieldwork all the time. For instance, one class I knew of last semester (not mine) had students doing research among the Indonesian immigrant population in Philadelphia – for a class on human rights. Now I can easily imagine a situation where the population in question was itself directly involved with CIA activity in some way. (Some Hmong immigrants in Philly actually worked for the CIA themselves – during the Vietnam war.) While all of a student’s funding sources wouldn’t normally need to be disclosed – if something like this came out after the fact it could create serious problems for the relationship between the university and the community.