Well, thanks to Savage Minds for hosting my one month of posting, and for putting up with a lot of controversy and – er, heated discussion. I had a great time.
If I’ve ruffled some feathers, well – I’m sorry. Oh, not really. Maybe I’ve drawn some attention to the intensely complicated problem that interrogation and torture represent, and pushed people to think beyond Patai, Hersh and Lagouranis. There are so many dimensions to this problem, and even though I’ve only been digging into this for a few months now, I’ve come to believe that anthropology can have something unique and compelling to say about cultures-of-torture/culture-in-torture. Our perspectives can (and should) add nuance to the rapidly expanding body of rock-solid critique being done by psychologists, journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists. The starting material for developing that critique is just a mouse-click away (or several thousand, depending on how much time you want to spend on this). I expect there are SM readers who would be far better at doing this work than I am, and who could generate some stunning research.
Because I am not over my obsession with torture and interrogation, I was inspired to start my own blog to help me sort through my thoughts and, hopefully, to get feedback. I’m posting a couple of times a week – so far, it’s mostly overview and general thoughts about working with the torture documents – but I’ll start digging into specific topics in the coming weeks, and posting short essays about what I’ve learned about detention, torture, interrogation, prisoner abuse, and other such issues.
So long, and thanks for the soapbox. It’s been real.
I have just returned home from a conference at Lancaster University in the UK called “Melancholic States.” The conference was themed around recent attempts to think about contemporary cultural politics and struggles through an analysis of melancholia, drawing principally on Freud’s famous essay “On Mourning and Melancholia.” A number of scholars working in feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies have found Freud’s account—and its contemporary re-working by folks such as David Eng, Judith Butler, and Ranjana Khanna—of unresolved grief or misrecognized loss useful for thinking about the ‘psychic life’ of modern social orders, including those that have emerged through varieties of violence, such as the violence of colonial government or everyday racism, sexism, and homophobia. Anthropologists need to be aware of the work of these scholars, and others working in this mode, because all of them draw, episodically and selectively, on the work of anthropologists. Anthropologists should also be aware of this work because there are many rich ideas in it worth exploring, refining, and critiquing.
The conference was largely ruled by a ‘cultural studies’ ethos, which meant that many of the papers focused on readings of texts, images, or other cultural artifacts (such as memorials) without much rigorous empirical research. Nevertheless, I found myself learning a lot about current directions in cultural studies and different ways that ‘affect’ is being incorporated into contemporary cultural analysis in potentially productive ways. I hope to write a few more posts about some of the excellent papers I heard.
A highlight of the conference for me was a screening of a film called “Invisible” by the London film-maker Roz Mortimer. The film is an artistic meditation on global pollution, and its case is the discovery of high levels of potentially dangerous chemicals in the mother’s milk of Inuit who live in northern Canada. The film, which features stunning visuals of the frozen north, as well as extended scenes of seal slaughter and touching interviews with Inuit mothers, is not unprovocative. I was hypnotized by its visuals. Yet, in dramatizing its narrative, the film works with certain tropes of indigenous peoples, in particular their putative ‘remoteness’ and their concomitant ‘purity,’ that critiques of ethnographic pastoralism have long called into question. At the same time, however, the film reflexively positions these exoticisms through the visual device of long shots of medieval maps, which represented the barbarous ends of the earth as populated by monsters and other frightening figures. So if the film reproduces a story about the loss of a kind of noble ‘elementary’ or ‘primitive’ existence through the spread of global pollution, it does so by asking the viewer to be explicit about the assumptions of that story. I think the film is ambivalent in this regard and I haven’t completely made up my mind as to what it’s doing; I will be curious to see how it is received. The film is a fascinating text exhibiting many contemporary anxieties: the fear that globalization will result in the loss of cultural diversity, the fear that the environment has been permanently polluted, the fear of loss of biodiversity. The isomorphic equation between the loss of traditions and loss of ‘nature’ is a provocative and fascinating aspect of contemporary zeitgeist. Yet, Mortimer is clear that her intention is not to make an ethnographic film. Below I append its trailer.
No. Not the BBC show or the American spin-off, but a wonderful Flickr photo set, by Dutch photographer Jan Banning.
Bureaucracy is an everyday form of state power with which citizens are confronted everywhere. Jan Banning has done portraits of bureaucrats at all levels, from village clerks to governors. Although the bureaucrats pose, their desk is the real subject. Thát is the permanent expression of their status and power. The person behind it is interchangeable, during his working hours assuming the role of immigration officer or revenue agent. That is emphasized by the pose in which he is photographed: as an actor playing himself. THE OFFICE (India/Indonesia, 2004-2006) is a work in progress, eventually to include bureaucrats in ten countries. The series on Bihar, a state in the world’s largest democracy, India, is completed; the series on Indonesia has just begun. The photographs are accompanied by interviews by Will Tinnemans.
These photos reveal wonderful little details, like this one from Bihar which shows that the highest ranked civil servant has a towel on his chair, which is claimed to be a tradition inherited from the British.
The cover story of the the August number of the New Republic is a piece by Steven Pinker entitled Strangled By Roots: The Genealogy Craze in America. Pinker ought to be given credit as an academic who writes for a popular audience, and there is no doubt that his work is easy to read and always has a clear take away message. These days, though, he is venturing further and further afield from his area of expertise and one gets the feeling that he is suddenly encountering brand new intellectual territory. Those of us in the social sciences for whom this is well-worn ground are, of course, happy that he has finally gotten the memo, but disappointed that hasn’t read it very carefully.
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I was thinking about recent discussions on Savage Minds, from Laura’s posts on anthropology and torture, to the petition posted by Oneman when I heard this story on NPR’s On the Media. It discusses how music is being used in interrogations at Guantanamo.
The piece is relevant to Laura’s posts in that the use of music is based on the Army’s own cultural theories about Muslims:
the music that was picked was picked partially because it was aggressive and loud, and it was also meant to be insulting to a Muslim. A lot of very devout Muslims don’t believe they, you know, are allowed to listen to music at all, let alone sort of Western music.
The broadcast, together with a followup piece, also touched on how musicians have reacted to the use of their music in interrogations. This includes efforts to sue the US Government for royalty payments as a kind of protest. The different attitudes of the two bands discussed by David Peisner is interesting. The bassist for Drowning Pool said:
kids in America pay to listen to music. You know, if the worst thing that happens to these guys who are detained that, you know, that they get blasted with loud music for a few hours, I don’t see what the harm is, especially if we might be able to prevent a future terrorist attack.
While the members of Rage Against the Machine “sent letters to the State Department and the Armed Forces to try and stop this from happening.”
I wonder how current debates on this blog would be recast if discussed in terms of music. Would signing a petition against the use of music in interrogation somehow restrict the artistic freedom of musicians? Would failure to sign such a petition meant that artists whose work was used by the military were somehow complicit? Is the really interesting anthropological question the theory of culture in which loud music is considered fun for American youth but torture for Muslims? These are complex issues and I thought it might be interesting to look at them from another angle.
My recent comment on the AAA-Wiley deal (now on the website: here), and in particular the focus on the AAA’s lack of transparency, drew the attention of Dan Segal. Dr. Segal is the current secretary of the AAA and he has also been editor of Cultural Anthropology, president of The Society for Cultural Anthropology, an ex officio member of the AAA’s Exec council and a member of the AAA Commission on Governance among many other things. Which is to say, when Dan offers criticisms or advice regarding the AAA, I listen:
As to the specific case, I think you are absolutely right that the process of seeking and choosing among bidders for AAA’s publishing contract should have been announced as widely as possible in advance. What I am not sure of in this regard, and which I will try to research in spare moments, is whether there in fact were some public announcements to various constituencies, at some points, some of which you may have missed.
This uncertainty on my part speaks to a more general point. My view is that that the AAA professional staff and AAA elected officers are generally and deeply dedicated to transparency, and as such, they/we stream out an enormous amount of information—making the AAA genuinely more transparent than both of the other professional associations I know very well (the AHA and the APA, with the “P” being for “philosophers”). The problem is not that the AAA professional staff and AAA elected officers are stingy with information, but that there is so much that needs to be broadcast, with such differential interest on the part of so many differentiated constituencies in the AAA, that accomplishing transparency is very difficult. As long as you personalize this or attribute it to a lack of “effort,” you won’t see the systemic character of the problem—-or be able to help make it better.
In my experience, all of the principals involved do somersaults to get out info: AAA President Alan Goodman and AAA Executive Director Bill Davis are both unquestionably committed to transparency. The problem we officers and the professional staff face is knowing what to tell whom. The officers and professional staff send out much info to AAA constituencies that gets ignored or ends up being of no interest. And then other issues unexpectedly become of great interest—to some constituencies.
There are three structural problems or more precisely situations that need to be taken into account to understand this. One is that the AAA is a fantastically plural or lumpy organization, which means that different constituencies want different info—- and many people respond to flows of info they do not want by being less than attentive to subsequent flows. A second (and “merely” technical and financial) problem is that the AAA software for distributing information to specific groupings of persons (all editors or all presidents or all treasurers) is terrible—-and so too, the AAA website needs (and is in the midst of) a basic overhaul, with the goal of allowing it to work better as a source of info. Finally, a third problem (related to the first) is that the AAA Executive Board (EB) has much too little structural linkage to the Section Assembly and the Sections—-something that was done on purpose in the 1990s for the ideological purpose of supporting the “sacred bundle” (on this point, see the volume Sylvia and I edited). This fetish of the four-field model has structurally isolated the EB and thus done real harm. And that is why there has been a Governance Commission. Its proposals do connect the EB more to the Sections and will, therefore, contribute to a better context for transparency—- once the reforms are adopted.
All in all, there are real problems with transparency for the AAA. On the issue of the new publishing contract, for instance, I do not feel we on the EB did enough early enough to bring the journal editors into the conversation. But the reasons the AAA has recurring problems with transparency are systemic and structural—-rather than the ones your blog suggests.
Gulity as charged. I shouldn’t have stooped to cheap-shots and nonconstructive criticism of the AAA staff and their handling of the Agreement. It was a puerilty born of frustration, and frankly a bit of embarrassment, with the agreement and with the problems of transparency that are very real, if not easily solved. I also do not mean to suggest that anyone involved is opposed to transparency—I question no one’s motives here. I know that these issues are structural and systemic, and I do want to help solve them. Dan among many others have continuously encouraged me to join in the AAA at some level in order to do so. I may yet. But in all honesty, I do think that this forum and others like it can contribute, if only by trying to broaden the discussion, keep the AAA and EB honest, help circulate the information and debate, and try to create a sense that there is a public out there beyond the instrumental constituencies that the AAA serves. But I agree that personalizing the issue doesn’t help.
Indeed, I would agree wholeheartedly with Segal’s diagnosis of the problem. Let me condense it further: transparency is not simply a problem of communicating information, it is a problem of governance.(more…)
I was planning to use the same collection I’d used for last week’s post and blog about differences in the DoD and FBI approaches to interrogation at GTMO. However, at the risk of setting off another firestorm of criticism (or maybe I’m a masochist), I’m going to use this post to present my reading of Tony Lagouranis’ Fear Up Harsh, his first person account of his experience as an Army interrogator in Iraq. This seemed to be something that posters a couple of weeks ago were interested in, so I’ll share some excerpts from a review article that I’m polishing, in which I read Lagouranis against some of the official DoD investigation documents, such as the Fay-Jones Report. I’ve amended the language to sound more casual, I’ve kept the anthrospeak to a minimum – and please note that while this is way too long, it’s also drastically shortened, and is still choppy. Sorry.
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Keith Brown and Catherine Lutz’s review essay “Grunt Lit” urges anthropologists to pay attention to the voices of the subaltern, represented in the firsthand accounts of soldiers back from the battlefield. In Tony Lagouranis’ remarkable Fear Up Harsh, the obliquely bureaucratic prose of the thirteen investigations DoD has completed begins to make more sense, while the DoD findings help illuminate the institutional dynamics that shaped Lagouranis’ experience.
Lagouranis describes himself as a drifter with a passion for ancient languages. He signs up for service in Army intelligence in the summer 2001 with no expectation of going to war, yet “…I recognized that war was something I longed to see. If I wanted to be in places where I was not in control, what more could I ask for? The swirling chaos of a combat zone was a place stripped of all rationality” (12). This is prescient. Chaos emerges as a repeated theme in Lagouranis’ account, and as such it illustrates one of the key findings of several of the DoD investigations: a near total absence of coherent planning and preparation for interrogation operations in Iraq, setting the conditions for torture to emerge.
Lagouranis describes receiving anachronistic training, “designed for war with the Soviet Union, all based on the idea that we would be questioning uniformed POWs, maybe Russians or East Germans… Our courses in interrogation were based on doctrine established in the late 1940s” (35, 37). As Lagouranis was learning about interrogating East German POWs, DoD personnel were developing their own approaches to interrogation in the midst of confusing and contradictory policy directives. As the DoD’s Fay-Jones report pointed out, “By mid-October [2003], interrogation policy in Iraq had changed three times in less than thirty days” (42). In this atmosphere, it is perhaps not surprising that coercive approaches approved by the Secretary of Defense for use with “enemy combatants” at GTMO migrated to Iraq. As the Fay-Jones report notes, “these practices were accepted as [standard operating procedure] by newly arrived interrogators” (63).
Here again, Lagouranis’ account vividly illustrates what Fay-Jones hints at: a marketplace of techniques, in which experienced interrogators exchange ideas about how to “break” detainees as novices listen and learn. Faced with demands to get information about IEDs, from Arabic-speaking insurgents, Lagouranis learns that interrogators in Afghanistan “tried anything that had a chance of working – stress positions, dogs, sexual humiliation, and worse” (35). This hints at how knowledge flows laterally through the Army, across theaters and contexts, to be appropriated and put into practice. Interestingly, the military’s lack of preparedness for interrogation operations in the Middle East is mirrored in Lagouranis’ own inexperience. He describes one of his early interrogation performances: “Lots of yelling, lots of intimidation… My team was impressed and full of praise. All my novice skullduggery and liberal use of Fear Up Harsh had looked to them like magic. They were as green as I was and we didn’t see that I had performed a bad interrogation” (55).
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Lagouranis’ story also foregrounds issues that are largely absent from DoD accounts: for example, the existence and perptuation of racially charged constructions of an Arab Other, and the way that torture dehumanizes both prisoner and interrogator. It’s in his discussion of Othering that Lagouranis introduces us to Raphael Patai. He arrives at Abu Ghraib in early 2004, just as the Army is realizing something is terribly wrong. “Something very bad happened here,” a colonel tells a group of interrogators assembled for their introductory briefing, adding defensively, “We’re not doing anything wrong” (16). This is the rather unnerving introduction to what’s supposed to be an introductory briefing by an Army psychologist on Arab culture and psychology, largely informed by – you guessed it – The Arab Mind. As the psychologist presents bits and pieces of Patai’s ideas to his audience, Lagouranis learns that,
“Arabs, apparently, can’t create a timeline. The don’t think linearly or rationally. They have a different relationship with truth than we do… they think through association, not logic or reason…. Lying is not taboo or dishonorable to Arabs… so you can’t trap them in a contradiction or force them to admit they’re lying. They’ll consider you impolite and uncultured.”
The audience seems ready to accept simplistic stereotypes the trainer is feeding them. To Lagouranis’ dismay, his fellow novice interrogators were “nodding in understanding and agreement.” Later, he sees them referring to Patai “as a definitive guide, and interpreting its sweeping statements as practical advice,” though he does not elaborate as to what that means. (17-18). Interestingly, Lagouranis denies ever seeing sexual humiliation occurring, though he confesses that he probably would have joined in if he had.
There’s some irony in Lagouranis’ desire to be put in a situation over which he has no control, and the fact that he winds up doing interrogation in a war zone, where he is expected to take control of other human beings and extract information from them. Walking through Abu Ghraib, he realizes that he has never interacted “with anyone on such unequal footing, and here I held pretty much sovereign power over them.” At the same time, the setting exerts a tremendous power over Lagouranis: “Prison has, like the army, its own culture, structure, and mores… I watched other guards and interrogators, followed their cues, and retained a little envy over how easily they seemed to accept that some men are free while others are in cages” (30). He quickly learns the importance of burying empathy under a veneer of toughness. When he mentions that he sometimes feels sorry for the prisoners, two of his fellow interrogators round on him. “‘You have no business feeling that way’, Eliza told me. ‘You’re not their psychiatrist. You’re not their friend’” (42).
It isn’t long before Lagouranis begins to enjoy the power. Realizing that “torture victims… break on the fear of more and worse pain to come,” Lagouranis wants to “go further.” He shackles detainees and forces them to spend the night outside, kneeling, in the cold. He uses dogs to threaten and frighten detainees – playing on what his superiors tell him is a cultural “Arab fear of dogs” (108). In a shipping container outfitted with a strobe light and a boom box, he interrogates hooded detainees by screaming questions over the music. At one point, Lagouranis is so caught up in the interrogation that he imagines cutting off a detainee’s fingers (127).
It is about this time that the Senate hearings into Abu Ghraib begin, inspiring a crisis of conscience for Lagouranis, who realizes,“The mission was a failure. We were ruining the lives of thousands by the day. The institution was rife with incompetence, from top to bottom, and I couldn’t escape the fact that the incompetence I hated was my own as well” (149). Lagouranis develops a brief friendship with a prisoner, Hakeem, who shows him the “huge cultural chasm between Americans and Iraqis” (177). Reading Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” Lagouranis realizes how well the story sums up the American experience in Iraq: “It seemed to me like everything we were doing here went back to that perception of the “Arab mind,” and the notion that all they understand is force. Here, our display of force made us look weak” (178).
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Not surprisingly, Lagouranis has been torn apart by military personnel for his abuse allegations, particularly those involving Navy SEALS. However, after reading so many of the sworn statements of DoD personnel who’ve testified for the various investigations that DoD has conducted, I doubt that Lagouranis’ account is unique.
I am always suspect about NY Times reported “trends,” because I’ve found that if a trend is reported in the Times it is either confined to a handful of people in Brooklyn, or the trend was already over two years before the NY Times reporters found out about it. Nonetheless, I read with some interest about the latest trend: “marriage-minded men ... conspiring with photographers who … lurk in crowds, behind bushes and in the darkened recesses of restaurants to capture the delighted, unposed reaction of the fiancée-in-the-making” as they are proposed to.
This interests me because of the contrast with Taiwanese Bridal Photography 婚紗照, which I wrote a brief post last year when the phenomenon was covered in the Washington Post. In Bonnie Adrian’s book Framing the Bride, she talks about the importance of glamor in these photos. Taiwanese wedding photos are produced like a fashion shoot, with expensive lighting, numerous costume changes, etc. When they are printed they might even feature overlaid text, just as you would see in a glossy magazine.
This focus on elaborate glamor photography contrasts with what the increasing use of “photojournalistic realism” in American wedding photography pointed out by the Times. You can explore the differences on flickr: here is a search for photos in the “proposal” cluster, and here is a rather typical set of Taiwanese wedding photos (more here).
Former Savage Minds guest blogger, Michael Wesch was quoted in the NY Times for this article, where he comments about how students feel the need to post such photos on Facebook, because “It’s almost like if it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen.” Of course, the second the article came out, Mike couldn’t help but post it to his Facebook profile …
Apropos of the recent discussion of anthropology’s use in torture and other military action, I received notice this morning of an effort launched by several anthros (including David Price, Hugh Gusterson, and Catherine Lutz) to encourage the development of an ethical anthropology and to oppose anthro’s participation in counter-insurgency. Here’s the relevant part of the email:
The Department of Defense and allied agencies are mobilizing anthropologists for interventions in the Middle East and beyond. It is likely that larger, more permanent initiatives are in the works.
Over the last several weeks, we have created an ad hoc group, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, with the objective of promoting an ethical anthropology. Working together, we have drafted a pledge of non-participation in counter-insurgency, which we have organized as a petition (see attachment). We invite you to become a part of this effort by taking the following steps:
Download and print the attached pledge (in .pdf format) [. Ask your colleagues to sign the pledge, and promptly send it to us via regular mail. Our address is Network of Concerned Anthropologists, c/o Dept. of Anthropology, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 3G5, Fairfax, VA 22030 (USA). If it is more convenient, email a .pdf copy of collected signatures and send it to us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com.
Forward this message to your colleagues, and encourage them to sign.
Join our network by emailing us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com. Be sure to include your name, title, and affiliation. We will add you to our email list.
A Memorandum (dated Sept 14th) has been circulating announcing the AAA’s deal with Wiley. So far there has been no sign of its official appearance on the AAA website (or the Wiley one), but I’m sure that website is quite hard to update, so I have nothing but sympathy for the poor soul who has to use it as a forum for communicating information that the membership of the AAA might find crucial to their careers. I hope I don’t ruffle anyone’s feathers by posting bits and pieces of it here. As soon as I can link to the official site, I will do so.
It is basic boilerplate about the agreement. Here are some choice parts, with my commentary:
We are pleased to inform you that the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Wiley-Blackwell, the scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. have signed a contract for a five year publishing partnership to commence in 2008.
Mark your calendars in case things don’t work out, and hope the executive council is better a communicating the next change of press in 2013…
Under the agreement, Wiley-Blackwell will publish, distribute and promote AAA’s twenty-three anthropology journals and newsletters. Wiley-Blackwell will also host AnthroSource-the premier online portal to full-text anthropology articles serving the research and teaching needs of scholars and practitioners in the U.S. and around the world. The AAA Executive Board’s decision to partner with Wiley-Blackwell was the result of a year-long process, centering on a detailed
request for proposals, evaluation of publisher submissions, interviews, and reference checks with other scholarly societies. The request for proposals was developed with input from journal editors, authors and members who had communicated their concerns to AAA’s Executive Board, Committee on Scientific Communication, Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing, and staff over the past four years. The RFP was sent to nine publishers. Six responded with proposals, and five were interviewed.
Now was that so hard? Why did we, as members, have to wait until after it was over to learn that the AAA actually had a process for this, and may even have been consulting a few members here and there. Would it have killed them to say they were doing this in public?
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I recently read a piece at Gamasutra entitled The Academics Speak Out: Is There Life After Worlds of Warcraft. It features both wiley veterams such as Henry Jenkins and Edward Castronova and up-and-comers like Florence Chee and Jeff McNeill attempting to predict the future of MMOGs. Your mileage may vary on this piece—a lot of the answers are variations on “who knows?”—but I was struck that two of the five authors described gamers as being organized into “tribes”. Although Chee at least credits the idea of a “retribalization” of gamers to McLuhan, I was struck that this term was used, since it has such a long and troublesome genealogy in kinship studies.
What struck me as more sensible was Jenkins’s description of MMOG players as a “diasporic community”—a much more interesting image. We’ve known users of a computer network aren’t in the same place at the same time, but I never thought about comparing Warcraft with, say, Samoa, and my living room as, say, Auckland. But perhaps someone has already drawn out these metaphorical associations more clearly?
“It is easy – commonplace – for anthropologists to have an opinion on “the war” and to think that our opinions are worth hearing. But those opinions are more informed, nuanced, and will carry further if they are shaped by the close, yet open-minded, encounters with ground level realities, and practice, whose importance we, and our disciplinary forbears, have worked so hard to promote.” – p. 327 in Keith Brown and Catherine Lutz, “Grunt Lit: The participant observers of empire.” AE 34:2, 322-328.
For Brown and Lutz, the autobiographical accounts of soldiers provide a window into the messy and chaotic instantiation of empire in war, and are worth submitting to what Lutz calls “[the] discipline’s standard tropes of person-centered, contextualized understanding” (Lutz 2006 in AE, 33:4, p. 593). Along these lines, the interrogation records of the GWOT should be subject to the same ethnographic scrutiny. If nothing else, they reveal that (to paraphrase Clausewitz) interrogation is the extension of war by other means, as a complex ideological conflict is waged discursively in the context of the prison interrogation room.
To make this point, I’ll share a very abbreviated draft of article I’m writing, for which I draw on a subset of roughly 500 pages of documents dealing with FBI interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between February 2002 and July 2004. Within this collection, there are approximately fifty FBI “transcriptions” (which are perhaps better described as summaries of interviews, “interview” being FBI parlance for interrogation). Because many are heavily redacted, it can be hard to discern where one interview ends and another begins. Reading these is akin to listening to a radio broadcast between bursts of heavy static, or watching a movie interrupted by sporadic blackouts. Although the interview transcriptions do use proper names, identifying information is always redacted; and for convenience, I am following FBI convention in referring to the parties as “interviewers” and “detainees.” I use a bracketed ellipsis to denote redactions […], and I quotations to the official document number so that interested readers can look up the source material (e.g., 4042).
Redactions notwithstanding, this collection provides fascinating insight into the manifold ways in which “culture” makes its presence felt. As Robert Rubinstein points out in his forthcoming book, Peacekeeping Under Fire: Culture and Intervention (Paradigm 2008), culture operates at many levels in UN peacekeeping efforts. He identifies three interlocking cultural dynamics that shape the trajectory of these operations: interactions between peacekeepers and local populations; interactions between participating local and national bureaucracies; and in a meta-sense, as international perceptions of “peacekeeping” evolve politically and institutionally.
Similarly, cultural dynamics operate at multiple levels in interrogation. At its most basic, interrogation aims to get specific information for specific purpose: for example, to develop a criminal case, obtain a confession, or provide “actionable intelligence” that can be used in tactical decision-making. That interviewers are seeking such information is apparent when detainees are asked to explain their presence at an Al Qaeda training camp, or shown photos of other detainees and asked to identify co-conspirators (e.g., 3904). However, far more is going on in these FBI interviews than attempts to elicit specific facts from recalcitrant detainees. In the interrogation encounter, detainees and interviewers look at each other across the table and, with the help of a translator (who is always silent in the transcriptions), they dive into a discursive exchange that reaches far beyond the confines of the interrogation room.
For example, interviewer-detainee exchanges shed light on the dynamics of guard-prisoner interactions in detention operations at Guantánamo. Often, the detainees complain to the interviewers about mistreatment by military police: roughing up prisoners, insulting detainees, and disrespecting the Koran are all sore points among the detainee population. But the weak have weapons: in one interview, a detainee gives the interviewers advice for how guards should comport themselves in front of the detainees – and in doing so, hints at vibrant hidden transcript, in which the projection of state power, embodied in the masculine form of the military police guard, is undermined by a simple technology:
Detainees see the guards as babies, especially the “big American guards that fill the doorway.” This is because the guards are supposed to be strong, yet they walk around with a “camel” (a backpack water storage device with a drinking tube attached) on their back sucking on a tube of water all of the time. A strong man is able to go without water for long periods of time. (The detainee) suggested that the water be kept out of sight of the prisoners and have the guards walk to where the water is kept. (3913)
Secondly, the records illustrate how detainees under interrogation challenge the official transcript of GWOT internment with complex counter-narratives about such topics as the war in Afghanistan (e.g., 3906), jihad and September 11 (e.g., 3899, 4080, 3845, 3844, 3850), American imperialism and foreign policy (e.g., 3918-21, 3912, 3913, 3916, 3925, 3842, 3861, 4086), and the fact that the detention operation at Guantanamo violates legal rights guaranteed by the US Constitution (3924). Along the way, the detainees also share their views on Christianity (e.g., 3906), Israel and Judaism (e.g., 4026), popular culture and sexuality (e.g., 3921), proper treatment of the Koran (e.g., 4803, 4024) and privacy of the body and shame (e.g., 3836, 3854, 4061). Sadly, there are also numerous descriptions of physical abuse, mostly beatings, particularly when the detainees are initially arrested either by Northern Alliance (e.g., 3903) or US troops (e.g., 3892).
But just as the detainees challenge the official discourse of the GWOT, we can see the FBI interviewers developing their own counter-narratives of Islam for the purpose of convincing the detainees that they should share what they know about Al Qaeda, terrorism, 9/11, and the Taliban. The manipulation is psychological, playing heavily on old-fashioned self-interest, but is arguably cultural, too, insofar as the manipulation draws on a framework of religious beliefs. For example, in one transcription (4033-4034), the interviewing agents show the interviewee a movie and photographs of people dying in New York and Washington on 9/11. As they do so, they invoke a narrative of Islam that questions the theological basis for mass violence, then point out that the detainee had become involved with a group of people who “…(abused and maligned) the religion, and will feel God’s wrath and anger on judgment day. […] appeared visibly shaken by this realization.” The interviewer then offers the detainee a chance for absolution through cooperating with the FBI. He warns the detainee that his fellows are “out to save their own butt,” and tells him the window of opportunity is closing. The technique, it seems, is emotionally powerful, as illustrated in a surprisingly poignant closing paragraph:
“At the conclusion of the interview, the interview team wished […] luck and that God may accept his prayers. After exiting the room, the interview team witnessed […] with his head down on his hands on the table in front of him… […] was crying and sobbing with the tears falling down on the table when he lifted his head” (4033-4034).
Whether or not this individual eventually gave the FBI team what it wanted is not clear.
By now it should be apparent that interrogation does not necessarily involve the forcible elicitation of “facts”. In these transcriptions, interrogation is revealed as a complicated communicative exchange in which participants share, gather, construct, and deploy knowledge as they provoke and/or resist an alien Other. As Alfred McCoy points out (2006), FBI interrogation strategies strongly emphasize rapport-building over coercion; and we can see FBI agents putting this ethos into practice in the interrogations they conduct. The resulting knowledge that emerges in these exchanges is often profoundly cultural, but not necessarily anthropological. Moreover, the headers on these transcriptions indicate that they were shared among the agencies involved in Guantanamo (DHS, DoD, and FBI) and as such, are likely source material for interrogators and intelligence analysts constructing their own model of the Arab/Islamic Other.
This raises another question about culture; namely, the problem of institutional culture and interagency power struggles as three major government bureaucracies – the FBI, DHS and the Department of Defense – each implement their own strategies for eliciting information from detainees. In particular, DoD interviewers frequently take a much more forceful approach to interrogation, something that FBI agents – and indeed, many DoD personnel – find troubling. And that’s the teaser for my next post.
Is there an upsurge in pop culture representations of both anthropologists and anthropological topics taking place right now? A little ‘buzz’ around our discipline? Is anthropology hot—or not? Exhibit A: The Nanny Diaries. Scarlett Johansson plays a recent anthropology graduate who dreams of becoming an anthropologist (imagine!). Exhibit B: National Geographic’s Taboo, a program that promises to help us “understand seemingly shocking practices from around the world.” Exhibit C: “Meet the Natives,” a three-part documentary airing on British TV, about a group of Vanuatu men brought to the UK as “reverse anthropologists.” There is a lot to say individually about these different representations of anthropological themes in pop culture, and examples can be multiplied—I’m hoping SM’s enormous readership will provide further examples in comments. I think these ‘texts’ mostly play on the conceit of reflexive defamiliarization or ironic self-otherization. The putative “we” of the audience is invited to see itself as odd, as exotic, even as savage. This is perhaps merely a mainstreaming of a possibility inherent in the structure of anthropological knowledge, which has always promised to expose one’s own cultural conceits as arbitrary constructions. Yet, I suspect that many of these programs and pop culture texts thereby allow certain damaging stereotypes about other cultures to circulate by putting them in ironic quotation marks. I’m curious what people think about this stuff. Is there something a little different about newer iterations of pop culture “primitives” vis-a-vis older ones (e.g., the figure of the primitive in 20th century art)? What do you guys think? For discussion, Exhibit D: “Fierce People,” a new film:
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