This article was making the rounds a couple of days ago so I thought I would repost it here:

The Art of War

I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise.’

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I’d like to join the chorus of anthropology blogs congratulating the American Museum of Natural History in New York for publishing their collected papers, going back a hundred years, online for free, open-access.

(via. Museum Anthropology and Anthropologi.info)

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One of the arguments that many have made about anthropology at war is the ‘PR’ argument, which is (correct me if I’m wrong): the US military is hiring anthropologists because employing them lends the army an air of legitimacy. It 1) makes anthropologists at war advocates for the military by a) putting them on the payroll and b) socializing them to like the military and 2) it lends legitimacy to the war in Iraq by portraying it as a conflict in which a) technical expertise in social science is being used and in which b) legitimate academics are taking part.

I can’t think of anyone who would disagree with the PR argument—it is undoubtedly the case (for me at least) that the military hopes to create advocates for and lend legitimacy to the war in Iraq. But there are different ‘strengths’ of the PR argument, some of which are more plausible to me than others.

A ‘strong’ PR argument would hold that anthropologists are only hired by the military to create advocates and lend legitimacy, and that the military does not think that they are efficacious in pursuing military ends. A ‘weak’ PR argument might be that the military has hired anthropologists for many reasons, some but not all of which include creating advocates and lending legitimacy. I think some of the other Minds tend towards a strong view, while I am in favor of a weaker one. Please note here that one can believe that the military is wrong about the efficacy of anthropologists and still hold a weak PR argument. One could simply argue that the military is incorrect in its assessment that anthropologists are efficacious.

I personally believe that the military does believe in the efficacy of anthropologists in Iraq. These are, after all, the Men Who Stare At Goats. I credit them with considerable curiosity, respect for people who portray themselves as technical experts, and a lot of money to experiment with. And of course, clearly anyone who believes that applied anthropology could be efficacious in general will not be surprised to find that some within the military share this opinion. Thirdly, the documents I’ve looked at—enabling the kill chain and all that—seem to suggest that this is more than ‘just’ a PR operation.

In general, I think we should remember the old anthropological saw that “no matter how primitive and barbaric they seems to you, they still have ‘a culture’”. Anthropologists like to use this is a lefty-populist way, but it is still true when applied to ‘unpopular’ groups like the military. Joking that ‘military intelligence’ is an oxymoron trivialize the power and knowledge that our military is bringing to bear on Iraq—a power which, if not as shocking and awe-full as some had hoped, should not be dismissed lightly. These jokes also serve to misrepresent the intellectual sophistication of many in the military. For centuries officers have circulated reading lists (here is Shinseki’s) and the military continues to offer lots of lists, courses, and so forth to people (here is one on philosophy of war and strategic thought). As someone who often reads business books to keep up to date with what his ‘natives’ (mining and hydrocarbon executives) are reading, I recognize these as non- (peri-?) academic but genuinely intellectual attempts to reflect on what armies do. I have spent a lot of time—particularly after 9/11—browsing through these lists and reading selectively from them. Part of being an anthropologist, after all, is learning to take everyone seriously. And come on: who wouldn’t benefit from reading some Clausewitz?

So: Hamfisted? Yes. Taking order from an idiot? Definitely. Stupid? I don’t think so. And for this reason I think a ‘weak’ PR argument is more realistic that a ‘strong’ one.

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Following on Strong’s investigations into the suspect ethical issues surrounding the human subjects protection, a new article by David Price posted at Counterpunch adds fuel to our ever growing bonfire of the venalities here at Savage Minds. Price’s jauntily written expose reveals the extensive plagiarism of the Petraus’ Counterinsurgency Manual.

The piece has a rather long list of compared passages that demonstrate more or less word for word cutting and pasting of a sort that makes even my most dim-witted undergraduate plagiarists look crafty. The implication drawn by Price is that McFate and Kilcullen are also at fault given their contributions, as well as the University of Chicago Press whose rapid publication of the Counter-Insurgency manual as a kind of coffee-table-cum-9/11 report offering was accomplished in about 6 months, a “blitzkrieg requiring a serious focus of will.”

A feature of the article that bears more discussion here, is the way in which Price points to the Counter-insurgency manual as a piece of PR designed to calm growing domestic concern about the disastrous course of the Iraq war. To my mind, if it is true that all this focus on anthropology is primarily a PR game, then the accusations of unethical research and scholarship hold less weight. If it is PR, then it seems we should not be taking it seriously, and holding it to standards designed for real scholarly research seems pedantic. However if the accusations of unethical research practices and scholarship are to stick, than are we not being asked to give the whole HTS circus more credit than it deserves? How can we have this cake and eat it too, wonders me.

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Our detractors would say that we here at Savage Minds could have written this book, so maybe there is no need for us to read it…

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Today in The New York Times:

...I think it is a mistake to support a profession-wide military boycott or a public counter-counterinsurgency loyalty oath. And I think it would be unwise for the American Anthropological Association to do so at this time.

The real issue for academic anthropologists is not whether the military should know more rather than less about other ways of life — of course it should know more. The real issue is how our profession is going to begin to play a far more significant educational role in the formulation of foreign policy, in the hope that anthropologists won’t have to answer some patriotic call late in a sad day to become an armed angel riding the shoulder of a misguided American warrior.

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I’ve been having a difficult time talking about the role of anthropology in war because two sides of my anthropological brain are fighting with each other. On the one hand I have the Parsonian side attempting to articulate the universal norms which aught to govern the behavior of anthropologists. On the other side I have the Gramscian side looking at the specifics of this administration and this war, refusing to get dragged into universalizing discourses that deflect attention from the current political realities.

On the Parsonian side I’ve been following with interest recent discussions about IRB and our ethical obligations as anthropologists, etc. In this vein I understand exactly when Rex says things like “as a Christian” even though he isn’t one. These arguments are useful because they get at the heart of what it means to behave properly as a human, as well as the necessity (or lack thereof) of institutional norms to govern such behavior within our discipline. In this vein it seems that the ultimate question about the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) isn’t whether it is a good thing or not, but whether they should be able to use the term anthropologists to describe what they do, and conversely, whether those who wish to call themselves anthropologists should be allowed to do what they do.

The Gramscian side, however, rebells against attempts to discuss this in terms of narrow institutional norms. This isn’t just any war, and we aren’t just any people. We come to this discussion already dripping with the sediment of history. Rex isn’t any more Christian than George Bush is Muslim and these differences do matter for how we understand our current predicament.

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Because it is Friday, here are updates for our planned production of Annee Sociologique, the movie:

First, after Laura’s wonderful post, it is clear that we will have to cast Malkovitch as Durkheim.

As for Gabriel Tarde, I think we have two options—if we are going for farcical mwahahaha laughter, then Sascha Baron Cohen is a must, but I must admit that I think for smoldering intensity you couldn’t do better than Rufus Sewell.

The other big issue, for me, is Marcel Mauss. We want the sauve cosmopolitan with a touch of childish innocence and major writer’s block. I personally think Jude Law would be great, but then again, I think Jude Law would be great reading the phone book. Mohawk has suggest the Fiennes brothers for Durkheim/Mauss but I think it would be hard to beat Malkovitch, frankly. Sascha Baron Cohen would also be great, but only if he was willing to sign up for a ‘serious’ role. My final choice would have to be ROBERT DOWNEY JUNIOR. Zomg have you SEEN the Iron Man teaser trailer? RDJ and Malkovitch ftw!!!

We also have votes to have Wolverine play Bougle and a vote for Daniel Craig, who I definitely think should get in there somewhere. I also like the idea of having a few ‘teaser’ cameos for the sequel like having Orlando Bloom play a young Louis Dumont.

The issue of directing has come up. I must admit that I think Tarantino deserves a pass, and although I’m sure Shekhar Kapur is interested I think the rest of the world finally shares my negative opinion of his work. I guess its too late to suggest Robert Altman? If so, could someone get Ang Lee on the phone?

Keep the ideas coming folks.

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Much of the recent discussion on this blog has focused on the role that anthropologists play in the military, and particularly the war in Iraq. On the whole the comments share two features: first, they consider anthropological work in Iraq to be wrong and, second, they consider it to be a violation of anthropological ethics. What I am wondering about here is the connection between these two claims.

Anthropologists are, after all, not only anthropologists. Many (if not most of us on this blog) are also citizens of the United States and all of us (I hope) are also human beings attempting to live moral lives. Each of these three roles—anthropologist, citizen, person—require related but different kinds of moral deliberation. As a Christian I may be disgusted by the decadent life-style of my neighbors. As a citizen, I may consider it a civic virture to support their freedom to act barbarically. As an archaeologist I am indifferent.

This is a difficult—and probably hopelessly problematic—distinction to maintain, but I do want to prop it up long enough to use it to make a few points about opposition to anthropology in Iraq. Namely, it seems to me that many of the arguments that we have heard here touch not on the morality of anthropological practice, but on much broader moral issues, what I have called the “human” level of morality. Many of the people on this blog seem opposed to anthropology at war because they feel it is a ‘bad’ war (as opposed to WWII, which was a ‘good’ one), because it is deeply unjust, and perpetuates human suffering. I am sure there are other reasons we could give that fall more in the ‘citizen’ category: that it is against our national interest to persecute the war as we have, and that it is part of a wider upswelling of anglo-protestant nativism that is corrosive of our civic culture and against the enlightened ideals of our founders.

You may or may not agree with these charges, but the important thing to note is that there is nothing particularly anthropological about them. This is not to trivialize these sorts of arguments—if anything I think the spheres of the human and the citizen are vastly more important than our often narrow professional ethics. I, for instance, would oppose the war in Iraq and the anthropologists aiding and abetting it whether I was an anthropologist, a sociologist, or a salsa instructor. But it is to say that if argument about anthropology at war is to proceed in forums like this blog, the AAA meetings, and so forth, we should try to focus on what sort of specific anthropological issues are raised. (more…)

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I’ve been somewhat absently following the story of U. of Michigan Press’ reconsideration of its relationship with UK-based Pluto Press, since my forthcoming book Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War is being released on Pluto Press and the loss of an American distributor would limit its availability in the country that it most directly deals with.  So it’s with some relief that I see that Michigan has decided to continue its relationship with Pluto Press. 

The issue was set off by

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The latest issue of the anthropology blog carnival, Four Stone Hearth, is now up. Check it out!

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Inside Higher Ed is running a piece asking Are IRBs needed in war zones? which draws heavily from Strong’s important post on Human Terrain’s apparent lack of IRB oversight.

As Strong notes, the issues raised by IRB clearance in Iraq raise include not only the role of IRB in research, but the relationship between academic anthropology and ‘applied work’ in the context of the changing labor market for Ph.D.s. Indeed, one of the first comments on the IHE article questions whether IRBs are necessary at all, and Marcus Griffin is quoted in the article as saying that “there isn’t sufficient work accomplished from which to form a position regarding ethics”.

Let’s take some of these issues in order: first is the basic question of whether IRBs are needed at all. This is an important debate, I suppose, especially given the fact that it might now be used to ally a ‘pure ivory’ view of academic freedom (associated with left-liberal cloistered intellectuals) as well as the most ‘applied’ version of anthropology—the kind that goes to war (often associated with right-wing, anti-oversight positions).

But regardless of how that particular alignment of interests pans out the fact is that, for better or worse, we now have IRB procedures. And as far as I can tell DoD and University procedures require that people undertake them. If we agree that they require an IRB then things really look bleak for anthropologists at war trying to take the moral high ground who have not been through them. Griffin’s attempt to split the difference by arguing that “it’s too soon” to tell what the ethics of anthropology at war are is, in my opinion, unsuccessful in this regard.

He has a point that many of the questions about anthropology at war are difficult to answer because we don’t have enough data—is anthropology efficacious, for instance (something I have considered at length elsewhere answers hinge not only on his conduct, but the larger sociological currents in which he is caught up—a ‘successful’ resolution to the war in Iraq will make everyone look good, for instance. But this is a separate (albeit related) question from the morality of participation in the war. Is Griffin claiming that he does not yet know whether he is doing the right thing? If so (and it might be the quote is misleading) this represents back-peddling from his previous position, which was to stand up and be counted in favor of the morality of anthropology at war, even if such a position was unpopular. His university’s own unwillingness to address the issue publicly does not inspire confidence either.

And all of these issues are separate from the real issue raised by the article—if IRBs exist and if they are necessary for researchers like Griffin then the question becomes inescapable: have these people been through an IRB or not? I have never met a soldier who liked regulations—not my students at Pearl Harbor, not my friends retired from the service, not my buddy who has done two tours in Iraq. But all of them still follow the rules. Indeed, the military socializes people to cope with all the regulations by complaining about them. We all take shortcuts, expedite processes, and file for exemptions from time to time. But this is very different from leaving for the field without having obtained basic human rights clearance. Especially when the field is Iraq. This is a criticism that cannot be dismissed as leftist folly by anyone who take their duty seriously.

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I am delighted to have just recently discovered that the Australian National University’s Resource Management in the Asia Pacific program has started a new RMAP blog. I have tremendous respect for the people at RMAP—and their research is absolutely central to my own project. Most particularly, their post on social mapping and Human Terrain Systems points out something I have long thought (and worried) about but have not said explicitly: that social mapping projects that grow up around mining projects are similar to the programs now being developed by the military in Afghanistan.

In both cases large bureaucratically organized institutions plant themselves in fluid contexts, which often results in a solidification of previous kinships practices. Thus, for instance, the Culture and Conflict Studies department at the Naval Postgraduate School. And sure enough, the CCS has tribal genealogies that look remarkably similar to the genealogical reports that are often created in the wake of mining and hydrocarbon projects in Papua New Guinea.

We also have sites like Iraqht which posts links to articles on tribal warfare (hosted by Small Wars Journal, the site on track to become the ‘Gene Expression’ of 2008!) which are similar in genre to the social mapping reports that deal with all the time in my research.

In my dissertation I focused on company-community relations. For the books I am expanding to a trichotomy of state, community, and company. Perhaps I should rebrand myself to include the military as well?

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A report from The Stanford Daily:

Nine months after the University decided to combine the Anthropological Sciences and Cultural and Social Anthropology Departments, some professors continue to voice concerns about the administration’s handling of the merger…

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If we were to do a three hour long high-concept historical costume drama of the Annee Sociologique (“the power… the passion… a generation—destroyed by the war”) who would you cast for each of the rolls? Please try keep all the actors as beautiful as possible.

My vote is Heath Ledger as Robert Hertz, but that’s really as far as I’ve got.

Possible slots include:
Durkheim
Mauss
Hertz
Halbwachs
Simiand
Bougle
Tarde
Hubert
Special extra walk-on rolls for Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre could also be arranged…

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