Still, reporters don’t always know the maxims, so they overlook such an easy way of improving the quality of their work…

Oh, stop yer whining! Matt interviewed me for nearly an hour for the story and didn’t use ANYTHING!

“To provide a window on how anthropological research, and that of other social and behavioural sciences, is being appropriated in war, this issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY features articles dealing with their use in two areas of warfare, namely interrogation and counterinsurgency.”

Arguments like “anthropologists shouldn’t support torture” are, I presume, underpinned by moral claims like “torture is bad.” That’s fair. But that also applies to non-anthropologists. If its wrong for McFate to assist in a counter-insurgency because she’s supporting torture (if in fact this is the case), then it would therefore be wrong of her to do this regardless of her status as an anthropologist. And it would likewise be wrong for other people, say, soldiers, to do the same. So to the extent that someone’s position is “McFate shouldn’t work for the military because she’s supporting torture and torture is morally wrong,” then the logical consequence of that position is “Nobody at all should work for the military because they’d be supporting torture and torture is morally wrong.”

If the ethical obligation to not join the military is created by issues of subject consent to anthropological research, it would be interesting to consider whether consent is or is not being obtained for this research- and whether comparable, or even less pleasant, things are being done to Iraqis without their consent. If so, the consent argument would imply that these things are also wrong, and that whoever is doing them should stop.

If I may make my own anthropological claim, it would seem that what is going on in this thread is less an attempt at hashing out an anthropologists ethical obligations than an attempt at crafting and maintaining a taboo- a place where the thoughts of decent persons shall not tread.

I definitely agree with your description of ethical complexity and power issues involved in all anthropological resaerch. But I think that the difference between military and civilian anthropology is one of type, and not degree. The power relations that McFate is negotiating are between people who are heavily armed, and she is not trying to study a given people for its own sake (something that is, indeed, much more problematic than that), she is trying to impose a political system on them. That process is happening in a way that has killed, injured and displaced several million Iraqis. What her ultimate impact will be on that violence is hard to say. The fact that she is furthering violence and domination through her work is hard to avoid.

Yes, we enter into the lives of our informants and have an impact on them, all human interaction involves power and some degree of manipulation. Sure. But any manipulation that I am likely to be doing will probably not involve directing large numbers of people with guns to infiltrate a given community in order to impose a political order on them.

I’ve had people manipulate me through using their status as a researcher, and I’ve had people manipulate me by putting a gun to my head. They are two very different things. I think that issues of power in anthropological work are of a different type, not degree, when they start involving blowing things up and killing people.

McFate is, through her work, doing just that. She is arguing that insurgent groups be disrupted through disrupting their ties to social organizations that sustain them. How do you expect that to be accomplished?

I’m not saying that it isn’t necessary to be aware of ethical issues in everyday research situations. It is. But I think that it’s a stretch to suggest that these ethical issues overlap with military anthropology.

And you’re right, “anthropology” doesn’t need to be protected from anyone. “Medicine” doesn’t have to be protected from malpractice, patients do. Anthropology won’t be harmed by McFate’s in quite the same way that individual Iraqis will, and that’s who I’m worried for.

I mentioned doctors participating in torture because it is a clear violation of medical ethics. If someone who is not a doctor assists torture, it may be morally wrong, but it is not a violation of medical ethics. I wasn’t suggesting that McFate is involved in torture, or any war crimes – I think that its reasonable to give her the benefit of the doubt on that. I was suggesting that, just as doctors in the army are still bound by the ethics of their profession, so too should anthropologists.

Either you believe that there are ethical standards to which anthropologists should be held, or you don’t. If you do, than McFate, as an anthropologist, should be judged by them. A non-anthropologists cannot be judged by them. If someone who isn’t an anthropologist goes around disrupting other people’s communities in the service of a foreign occupation, I can say a lot of negative things about them. “That’s something that you, as an anthropologist, should be doing” is not one of them.

I don’t think that its wrong for anyone to join the army. I don’t recall ever saying that. I do think that the current use that the army is being put to in Iraq is bad for both the army and Iraq.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2376853648734316012&hl=en

Although I have qualms about the effect government support of the type that Geertz’s early work had on the development of the discipline as a whole, this conversation is not about funding, it’s about anthropological research from within the military apparatus. Geertz’s program was funded by military/intelligence sources, but Geertz did not answer to his funders—he published widely and his work is only answerable to the anthropological community. If Geertz is to be believed, he did not really understand the extent to which the government was involved in backing his work (and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that about the same time questions about such backing became really prominent in the discipline, Geertz’s work shifted to the kind of stuff that has no immediate military/intelligence application). This is not at all the kind of arrangement that McFate is advocating, with anthropologists working directly within and under the military. Again, it’s telling that we have simply no idea what kind of anthropology McFate does—while we have a quite thorough anthropological literature from Geertz.

The origins of C&S are less an exception than a certain kind of rule. Geertz’ early work can be considered another example. From his reminiscence in 2002 Annual Review of Anthropology: “The Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which I mentioned earlier as part of the cluster of social science holding-companies emerging in post-war Cambridge, was set up in 1952 as a combination intelligence gathering and policy planning organization dedicated to providing political and economic advice both to the rapidly expanding U.S. foreign aid program and to those it was ostensibly aiding—the “developing,” “under-developed,” or, for the less sanguine, “backward” countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At first, the Center, something of an anomaly in an engineering school not much given at that time to social studies of any sort, was hardly more than a secretary, a suite of offices, a name, a large amount of money, and a national agenda. In an effort simply to get it up and running, Kluckhohn, who, still moving in mysterious ways, had again been somehow involved in its formation, proposed that a team of doctoral candidates from Harvard social science departments be formed and sent to Indonesia under its auspices to carry out field research in cooperation with students from that country’s new, European-style universities.”That this was the way it was done everywhere “areas” were “studied,” and that Geertz’ term “intelligence gathering” can accurately be read as a reference to the state security apparatus, is documented by Bruce Cumings in his “Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations, and Area Studies During and after the Cold War,” (2002, in Miyoshi & Harootunian, Learning Places).

Government money can’t keep its genies entirely in their bottles, apparently. Either that, or maybe they actually do want to encourage discussion …

McFate’s work isn’t evaluated as anthropology because it isn’t available as anthropology. Her published material is all advocacy, with no ethnographic or otherwise anthropological data cited. I’m sure she has material that is not publicly available that makes use of her training, but none of us have access to that material.

Which is kinda my point..

Of course, if you are working on this dissertation at an American university, you have a Human Subjects Board that addresses itself to these sorts of ethical problems. However, this institution will give you no help when you find yourself in the jaws of a real ethical challenge. The institution is not intended to be a resource for helping you deal with ethical complexity. It is designed to protect the university from exposure to legal actions that might arise from your activities. If you confront real ethical complexity, you will discover that dealing with the Human Subjects Committee will increase rather than decrease the difficulty of your situation.

Why are we talking about applying the same type of institutional ass-covering logic to the infinitely more acute (and historically consequential) ethical problems involved in doing anthropology under contemporary conditions, where the prevention of harm is increasingly losing its status as a hegemonic principle? I find it simply weird to hear people advocating that “Anthropology” needs to be protected from association with people who apply its methodologies and theories to a certain kind of subject-matter, or towards the pursuit of a certain kind of practical goal.

By the way, models of medical ethics based on “no-harm justification” can be inadequate and counterproductive when crudely applied to social work conducted in contexts of value pluralism, i.e. where there is no singular definition of harm which could serve as the analogue to “sickness.” David Thacher (U Mich. Public Administration) has an excellent series of articles documenting real problems that have arisen from this kind of thinking, including “Policing is not Treatment: Alternatives to the Medical Model of Police Research” (2001, Journal of Crime and Delinquency).

Just stating “our profession has ethical obligations and she has to follow them” doesn’t get anywhere. That’s just reasserting the conclusion, and frankly, seems like a word game about her job title. Surely her ethical obligations regarding warfare stem from something other than the title on her business card.

Also, you keep using the torture issue as if it strengthens your argument, or perhaps adds more moral weight to your position. It doesn’t. This argument actually undermines you. The issue is, “What moral principle is it that makes an anthropologist’s use of anthropological techniques and knowledge in the service of warfare impermissable yet which does not render impermissible any other person’s use of their respective means and knowledge in the service of that same war? And if no such difference exists, are you willing to admit that your argument is not really about anthropologist as anthropologists, but rather a general critique of anyone at all joining the military?”

Using torture as your watchword undermines the idea that a difference exists between an anthropologist joining the military in order to act as a military anthropologist versus a young man joining the military to act as a soldier. Presumably you feel that it is impermissible for both the anthropologist and the young soldier to abet torture. You are therefore pointing out a similarity, not a difference.

If you really think its wrong for anyone to join the army, I want you to bite the bullet and say so.

As I said above, it is possible that a super-anthro exists out there that could work under the umbrella of the military and produce useful, meaningful, important work—possible, but unlikely. It’s true, I’m only saying that because nobody ever has, but that’s good enough, I think.

Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Far more widely read, discussed, critiqued than 99.9% of anthropological publications. Hugely influential on decades of research, in other fields as well as anthropology. Still cited in, get this, Japanese textbooks, where extracts (in Japanese translation) are still part of the high school curriculum.

One could, I suppose, argue that Benedict was only a civilian contractor, but….

She is arguing that what she is doing is anthropology. Why shouldn’t it be evaluated as such?

This is the crux of the matter, and it is something that everyone seems to be ignoring in order to score really dull and obvious political and ‘ethical’ points (i.e. Harm is Bad).

She clearly isn’t doing Anthropology in the sense that Oneman and others mean it – she won’t contribute to the disciplinary literature or add anything to the academy. But then neither will ‘anthropologists’ working for advertising agencies, or McDonalds. Their work is also secret and proprietary, and is also about the manipulation of subject populations. The military and corporations are starting to use anthropological types of thinking, practice, and research more and more – but that doesn’t make them Anthropologists. Torturers are not Dentists or Psychologists just because they work on the teeth and the mind. If you define Anthropology as a collection of ethical practitioners serving informant communities (and uh, their own career paths) then McFate can’t be one, but if you define it as a collection of methods, frameworks and ways of thinking then the whole debate is just posturing. Some people see themselves as outside society as social critics, others see themselves as working within society according to pre-existing structures. Each will use what they know, and what they have learned at University, differently.