Sorry to be so out of it. Could you name some names please, and provide some examples of the knowledge being sold? Please tell me why I shouldn’t suspect that “applied anthropologist [sic] do not like having ethical limits placed on the selling of anthropological knowledge” is the same sort of gross stereotyping involved in, for example, “Blacks got rhythm” or “Catholics practice ritual cannibalism” (that body and blood business).

And there you go again, invoking “anthropological knowledge” in an argument with someone who says that he doesn’t know what you are talking about. It would help your case immensely if you could be more explicit here.

John

The problem is, you see, that I know of no compelling definition of anthropological knowledge except to say that it is knowledge that anthropologists claim to possess. What quality it is that separates this knowledge from the observations of sociologists, political scientists, historians, even journalists is remarkably hard to specify—and pondering this question diverts my attention from the heart of the matter, that the AAA as a body condemns torture, period.

Personally, I would be horrified to discover that my knowledge of special weaknesses on the part of people who shared their lives with me had been used against them. But that is, to me, simple human decency.

When I hear the words “anthropological knowledge,” I begin to think of things like anthropological explanations of, say, torture as a customary part of Iroqois warfare or classical Chinese jurisprudence or the role of pain in initiation ceremonies or spirit possession or the incidental effects of Dayak headhunting or Indian suttee. I may wonder what anthropologists, who routinely rationalize such facts when they can be attributed to “other” cultures are doing becoming so upset when they turn out to be part of our own.

Conversely, If I am told that, for example, Arab men are peculiarly embarassed by being stripped naked in public, a proposition acted upon in places like Abu Ghraib, I wonder what is particularly anthropological about that proposition—it being the sort of thing one hears in casual conversations where old hands gather all over the East.

As you can see, my mind begins to wander in all sorts of unfruitful directions. Perhaps you can straighten me out.

I must say, however, that the notion that we will now be one-up on psychologists because we say that we are more particular about the knowledge to which we (largely falsely I think) claim some exclusive ownership sounds more self-righteous than anything else. That, too, to me, weakens the force of the resolution.

For me an others, the statement that anthropology must not be used for ends such as torture is exactly why the AAA membership should vote on resolutions like this. We need to separate ourselves from organizations like the APA that will not condemn the use of their professional knowledge in torture. The reference to anthropological knowledge in the resolution shows why we as an organiation have a real professional interest in these matters.

Now if only I could figure out what “unequivocally” is supposed to mean …

These words are, in other words, a red herring. They dillute the force of “the American Anthropological Association unequivocally condemns the use physical and psychological torture” by introducing the dubious notion of specifically “anthropological” knowledge.

American Anthropological Association Statement on Torture

WHEREAS over the past 32 months, documentary and photographic evidence of widespread physical and psychological torture and abuse of prisoners in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Guantanamo Bay at the hands of U.S. Military and U.S. Intelligence personnel and subcontractors has appeared; and

WHEREAS at least 98 prisoners have died while in custody of U.S. Military and U.S. Intelligence personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 45 suspected or confirmed homicides; and

WHEREAS Moazzam Begg, Asef Iqbal, Shafik Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed, and others have alleged that they were tortured and abused by U.S. Military or U.S. Intelligence personnel while imprisoned in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and detention centers in the U.S.; and

WHEREAS the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has assembled an overseas network of secret prisons not accessible by the International Committee of the Red Cross or by other international bodies charged with monitoring compliance with the U.N. Convention Against Torture; and

WHEREAS U.S. Central Intelligence Agency personnel and subcontractors have used “waterboarding” (in which the prisoner is made to believe he is drowning) and other techniques violating the U.N. Convention Against Torture; and

WHEREAS the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has, since the early 1990s, been abducting foreign nationals for detention and interrogation as part of an “extraordinary rendition” program which violates the U.N. Convention Against Torture; and

WHEREAS the U.S. Government has, since 1988, attempted to substitute its own legal definition of torture excluding sensory deprivation, self-inflicted pain, disorientation, and other forms of severe psychological abuse; and

WHEREAS in September 2006 the U.S. Congress passed into law the Military Commissions Act, which includes provisions that would in many cases grant retroactive immunity for government officials who authorized or ordered illegal acts of torture or abuse;

Be it moved that the American Anthropological Association unequivocally condemns the use of anthropological knowledge as an element of physical and psychological torture; condemns the use of physical and psychological torture by U.S. Military and Intelligence personnel, subcontractors, and proxies; and urges the U.S. Congress and President George W. Bush to:

Comply fully with national and international anti-torture laws, including the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the 1996 U.S. War Crimes Act, and U.S. Criminal Code, Sections 2340-2340A; and

Ban all interrogation techniques—including physical and psychological torture—that violate the broad universal humanitarian standard outlined in the U.N. Convention Against Torture; and

Repudiate any attempts by any U.S. Government official to substitute any definition of torture for that broad universal humanitarian standard; and

Comply fully with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision of 2006, in which the majority opinion states that even during times of war, “the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law”; and

Repeal the 2006 U.S. Military Commissions Act; and

Terminate the “extraordinary rendition” program and halt the transfer of detainees to countries with a history of prisoner abuse and torture; and

Close all U.S. overseas prisons and release all prisoners being held without charge in U.S. prisons (including overseas prisons); and

Release the names of all prisoners being held in U.S. prisons (including all overseas prisons); and

Pay reparations to all victims who have suffered physical or psychological torture at the hands of U.S. Military and Intelligence personnel, subcontractors, and proxies; and

Grant the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international monitoring agencies full access to all U.S. overseas prisons; and

Prosecute all individuals—including current and former Bush administration officials—who have authorized or committed war crimes or who have violated laws prohibiting torture.

Prepared by:
Roberto J. González Kanhong Lin
Associate Professor Graduate Student
Department of Anthropology Department of Anthropology
San Jose State University American University
San Jose, CA 95192-0113 Washington, DC

American Anthropological Association Statement on the U.S. Occupation of Iraq

WHEREAS the U.S. Government led an invasion of Iraq in violation of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter in March 2003; and

WHEREAS over the past 32 months more than 2700 U.S. troops and an estimated 655,000 Iraqis (the vast majority civilians) have been killed in the subsequent violence; and

WHEREAS the U.S. military is holding in detention approximately 15,000 Iraqis without charge; and

WHEREAS U.S. military and intelligence personnel and U.S. Government subcontractors have tortured and abused detainees at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons in violation of the Geneva Conventions; and

WHEREAS much of Iraq’s historical, cultural, and archaological heritage was looted or destroyed following the U.S.-led invasion while occupying forces made no effort to protect it; and

WHEREAS the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority, under the leadership of Paul Bremer, created a set of edicts (codified into the Iraqi constitution in violation of international law) that has facilitated the plunder of Iraq’s national industries and natural resources by multinational corporations; and

WHEREAS the U.S. military presence in Iraq has undermined the political stability of that country and the Middle East region;

Be it moved that the American Anthropological Association condemns the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and urges the U.S. Congress and President George W. Bush to:

Immediately withdraw all U.S. military personnel, intelligence agents, and subcontrators from Iraq; and

Cease all U.S. military operations and vacate all U.S. military bases in Iraq; and

Make payments for the removal and cleanup of depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and other residual waste left from munitions; and

Prosecute all individuals who have committed war crimes against Iraqis; and

Fund the creation of a United Nations peacekeeping force to assume peacekeeping duties in Iraq.

Prepared by:
Roberto J. González Kanhong Lin
Associate Professor Graduate Student
Department of Anthropology Department of Anthropology
San Jose State University American University
San Jose, CA 95192-0113 Washington, DC

To run with your hypothetical example, I would not consider arming the opposite sides with knowledge to harm each other ‘empowerment.’ Supplying with knowledge to help settle their differences peacefully, that would be empowerment. And it would be a difficult task to not inadvertently supply potentially harmful knowledge.

This asks the question of how far anthropology has really come from the musings of travellers’ writings through its colonial institution to the present. Postmodernism and postcolonialism may have shaken the foundations of any implicit moral position, and the reaction to that for many has been a turn to Human Rights as solid ethical ground to stand on. I feel ambivalent about this, because I think that perhaps the liberal democratic project has shaped supposedly ‘universal’ human rights which are in fact reinforcing a neo-colonial world economy.

So what standpoint can you take? I find your use of the term ‘neutrality’ interesting. Is neutrality a different thing to objectivity? I guess you could say it is, if you are trying to distance yourself politically but still recognise your own subjectivity. But if you want to locate your standpoint in spatial terms, (even metaphorically) I think it would be impossible to “establish our voice as issuing from a space equidistant from everyone else in the room.” In a globalised world, and in fractal social realities where there potentially infinite actors, alliances and interests at work, how could you position yourself equidistant from all actors? Some if not most of the people you come into closest contact with will most likely be closer to you politically (unless you are very machiavellian). This probably means your informants, other anthropologists and the rest of the state and non-state structures which support your work, including actors who supply physical protection and actors who supply value for your work. These institutions might include universities and governments.

The only way to become equidistant would be to become objective (taking the view and being the voice from nowhere). Perhaps this suggests a spatial metaphor incorporating higher dimensions – communication as a hyperspace, influencing distant processes. But I feel that it is impossible to discard your own personal interests and the interests of groups of which you are a member from your ‘professional’ positioning. I have not found an adequate definition of politics, but I feel this is political.

I have just been reading Roger Keesing’s ‘Custom and Confrontation’ and I think he sums it up well. He says there is always a danger that local actions can be intepreted and generalised through the metareflection of historiography, and construed as being part of a larger process that we as Western theorists imagine as a larger process i.e. politics. For the local actor, the action has only local meanings of personal interest etc.

Therefore, we must ’situate events and motives in the historical contexts of their unfolding, and situate representations of them in the historical contexts of their telling.’ There are some contradictions in what I have just said, but i think the point is you have to reflect on your own conception of what is ‘political’ and where your political alliances lie. And anthropologists whose self-interests and group interests are being served by the professionalization and scientific status of the discipline will vote with the State, because that is the polity in which they feel they can have the most power.

(Note to anyone interested in reading the classic statement of this position: Weber’s essays on the difference between “Science and a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation” are both available at http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/weber/weber_texts.html).

John, thanks for the info and the heads up on the conference. I am living in the south and pretty busy this term, so I am afraid we will have to wait to bump into each other.

It has been a long time, but thanks to Google I have, I believe, found the book which inspired my comments, Elliot Friedson (1970) Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge, which appears to have been republished in 1988. (As I recall, I cited it in an article titled “The Parting of the Ways” published in 1976 in the Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. I it because, sociologically speaking, Daoism seemed to me to resemble medicine prior to the establishment of the modern apparatus of medical schools, licensing boards, etc., by which doctors became professionals on a par with clergymen and lawyers.) Google searches have also led to numerous more recent works by Friedson, whose Professional Dominance: The Social Structure of Medical Care (Paperback) was reissued in a new edition by Aldine in 2006. He is now, by all appearances, one of the founders and chief exponents of the sociology of medicine as a branch of the sociology of science, itself construed as a branch of the sociology of knowledge, a field to which I was introduced by reading Karl Mannheim and has captured my imagination ever since.

The wiki entry on sociology of knowledge currently reads as follows:

The term first came into widespread use in the 1920s, when a number of German-speaking sociologists wrote extensively on it, notably Max Scheler, and Karl Mannheim with Ideology and Utopia. With the dominance of functionalism through the middle years of the 20th century, the sociology of knowledge tended to remain on the periphery of mainstream sociological thought. It was largely reinvented and applied much more closely to everyday life in the 1960s, particularly by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and is still central for methods dealing with qualitative understanding of human society (compare socially constructed reality).
Although very influential within modern sociology, the sociology of knowledge can claim its most significant impact on science more generally through its contribution to debate and understanding of the nature of science itself, most notably through the work of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (see also: paradigm).

I also checked the wiki entry for Profession (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession), which seems consistent with the views I was sketching. Hope this is helpful.

P.S. My wife and I will be in Taipei, 12/13-12/17 for a conference at Academia Sinica. Any chance we might bump into each other?

P.P.S. If you don’t know them already, you will I believe find the Sociology of Medicine material very relevant, indeed, to your studies of police professionalization.

P.P.P.S. I am also somewhat confused about how professionalization as described in these sources applies (or fails to apply) to the AAA. I am fairly sure from what I do know about the organization that the notion that the AAA is in any position to apply serious sanctions to anyone whom some of us see as behaving in a professionally inappropriate manner is a pretty long stretch.

Achieving ‘legal status’ should not be an aim of anthropology, because surely it does not wnt to be held in the same stiff light as law and medicine. These are extremely powerful disciplines, perhaps the two most powerful, which may have solved a few of humanity’s problems and guarantee our liberal democratic existence, but they have cause a lot of problems along the way too. Professionalism invokes ‘power over’ which is not, I think, a principle of anthropology.

Which brings me to another point. There has been discussion about political neutrality and academic freedom (i.e. academic thinking and writing free from politics). Without being a postmodern fascist, it should be pretty easy for everyone to accept that they are always taking a political position. You can still aim for a general heuristic goal of ’scientific soundness’, while still accepting that your work has social and political implications. As both an integrative and decentralising political force, the work of anthropology at the margins should be seen seen as Positive Politics rather than pure academia or politically neutral. To invoke ‘activism’, its principles include empowerment and dialogue, which go a long way towards bringing meaningful peace and harmony to the world. By speaking to power and speaking to the margins, anthropologists can bring people together as (for want of a better term) inter-cultural negotiators.

Your right to academic freedom is shadowed by a responsibility to all the people that you write for and to. That could be the binding principle. That is also why a moral and political community exists within the discipline, and is kind of embodied in institutions like the AAA. But, the profession should never become powerful enough to start muzzling people. Anthropolgists should be taught to muzzle themselves, if it is necessary. I guess this means that there will always be rogues at all ends of spectrums, including those who will stand next to torturers. But it is important, morally, professionally and politically, that the collective voice of anthropology (like other famous voices for freedom) stand up against things like torture.

Anthropology is not marginal, it is perpetually liminal. Please keep it this way.