Comments on: Marshall Sahlins on anthropologists in Iraq

By: 2007 Highlights | Savage Minds

2007 Highlights | Savage Minds — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:18:53 +0000

[...] Human Terrain System (HTS) project. By far the highest traffic post of the year was the letter we posted by Marshall Sahlins on the subject. Equally noteworthy, Strong’s post on “Human Terrain [...]

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By: buddh•ism ad•junkt › IRBs and Anthropological Research in War Zones

buddh•ism ad•junkt › IRBs and Anthropological Research in War Zones — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:12:53 +0000

[...] Marshall Sahlins’ excellent and plaintive appeal that we oppose anthropologists in the war because it is wrong (rather than because it might damage our profession and our ability to make a few bucks) was perhaps the first extremely public salvo in the most recent skirmish, but it won’t be the last, and I hope that everyone involved even tangentially in any of these communities takes a moment or two to read up on the issue. [...]

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By: Raphael PAREJO-COUDERT

Raphael PAREJO-COUDERT — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:33:10 +0000

Dear Marshall:

Simply, thank you to open this important debat.

French anthropologist, as many other ones, have been chocked by these revealations from US and United Kingdom Press.

Best regards.

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By: peanut

peanut — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:03:25 +0000

Re: visa issues, alien exclusion, and “chill”

A new piece in the New York Times discusses Tariq Ramadan’s exclusion from the United States. Read more about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/us/22bar.html?ex=1350792000&en=a6ad967b1d9e839c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Please note that Tariq Ramadan is Swiss professor of philosophy, and his exclusion prevented him from taking a professorship he had been offered at Notre Dame University in Indiana.

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By: peanut

peanut — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:59:44 +0000

Re: visa issues

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By: Kerim

Kerim — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:08:02 +0000

Grizzly,

Great point about Ashraf Ghani! I’d forgotten that he was an anthropologist.

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By: Laurie King-Irani

Laurie King-Irani — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:28:51 +0000

If you are outside of academe, if you have not taken graduate classes on social theory, you are not going to read more than a paragraph of Judith Butler’s writing. Do I admire her for being a genius, and more to the point, a genius who takes the political risks of speaking out about things that too many are scared to broach? You bet. But the point was that if we want to communicate with non-anthropologists, non-academics, the prose of a Mamdani is preferable, and it is not so hard to write about serious, complicated, dire issues from critical perspectives in a way that someone with a BA or a high school diploma can understand.

And if memory serves me, Judith and Homi B have been “roasted” in the academic world in a good natured way for the opacity of their texts.

Wow, there are a lot of really sensitive people on Savage Minds. Debate and expression of opinion can get a little rough, you know. I am sure I have not intentionally insulted anyone or slighted them in my posts. We are talking about taking our knowledge “to the streets” and enriching and revitalizing citizen discourse. And if you think getting folks in a Union local or a church basement or an NAACP meeting to plough through some of the writing we in academe churn out, let me tell you, it’s not going to happen.

My point was that different audiences require different registers of discourse. This is not a snobbish or elitist statement. If anything, I recoil from academic elitism. Tribally speaking (okay, this is satire, folks, don’t get upset), I come from a long line of blunt-talking Irish smart asses who enjoy satire. And I’m proud of it.

That being said, if I have offended, I am sorry, but consider the gist of my points about effective, clear, and engaging communication with people who are being snookered into thinking that anthropology’s main utility is in fighting the war on terror. We can problematize this discourse in the general public, we can encourage people to question underlying assumptions and the interests and contexts in which they are embedded. And we can do it without having to distribute decoder rings to audiences outside of the academy. I think it’s called being a public intellectual. Entering the fray of public debate runs the risk that one’s feathers will be ruffled occasionally. Personally, I find this bracing and fun.

If we could cross Steven Colbert and Judith Butler, another world would be possible….

Cheers

Laurie

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By: Grizzly

Grizzly — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:13:10 +0000

Why is it always necessary to slag off Judy Butler when complementing someone else’s prose, Laurie? That was a gratuitous dis, especially when Butler has made important public “critiques”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020401/butler about the legal tactics the Bush regime.

Peanut: I was thinking of smarter countries like Sweden or Japan, maybe even Canada. But even academics from rich, non-suspect (read: non-Muslim) countries are having a tough time getting into the US these days, so you’re right. But then, the US scholars who do get read and who do critique, end up getting bitched about by the likes of Laurie. Go figure.

Let’s speculate for a second or two and work through some of the mixed metaphors of this thread. For example, who is the man behind _Iraqi’s are from Mars’s_ curtain? Is it the same emperor Peanut refers to? I mean, no the emperor is definitely _not_ wearing any “clothes”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvvPzVdP-DM . His naked idiocy is out there for all to see. So maybe Bush isn’t the emperor, nor the man behind the curtain. Maybe Bush is the curtain itself. That is, the distraction. From what does he distract? Vested interests? Oil money? Is that what we’re saying?

If the emperor has no clothes, what is _wrong_ with Americans that they neverthless can’t see it? Are we talking about repression? I mean, the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, and _neither is anyone else!_ What else would explain the lack of a widespread movement to impeach Bush and reform their government? Like, do Americans want to repress the ugliness of what their country is doing or the ugly principles (such as profit) that their country is really all about? I mean, do they fail to notice themselves driving their Expeditions across Lake Washington everyday to their nice jobs at Microsoft? Can they not see themselves buying gigantomobiles known as RVs in order to take their 1000-dollar pure bread pets to agility meets that they record digitally and replay later watch on their new flat screens?

I am inclined to think this is all some kind of clusterfuck involving both cognitive rot wrought by a TV-and-Prozac-adled culture that would rather worry about Britney Spears’s brazilian than about things like the soldiers coming home with their faces melted off AND involving some reactionary psychic defensive formation that acts to repress their own guilt in creating this mess through the act of voting for a monkey (or passively allowing him to be annointed president).

So we still need an account of why Mamdani or others are neither heard nor consequential in US public discourse. I mean, McFate thinks that Afghans are “smart” because, as IAFM points out, they can visibly distinguish arm badges on soldiers. Has it never occurred to her that Afghan anthropologists might have actually TAUGHT:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashraf_Ghani in prestigious US anthropology programs? Laurie King-Irani and others elsewhere on this website are right to point out the complete absurdity and the base racism that seems to characterize the way in which McFate et al imagine the Muslim other. I reiterate the idea that the primitive, tribal, and irrational culture that needs decoding is the one emanating from the so called ‘homeland’ crossing from ‘sea to shining sea.’

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By: Anthropologists apparently not marching off to war any time soon « Kings of War

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 03:43:26 +0000

[...] Anthropologists apparently not marching off to war any time soon Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Marshall Sahlins on anthropologi… [...]

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By: tip of the tongue

tip of the tongue — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:31:48 +0000

quote
where the citizens do not have a vested interest in American hegemony
/quote

Of course. But they probably have a vested interest AGAINST US hegemony. How much better is that?

People here are still refusing to talk about concrete examples, btw, of how anthropologists are hurting folks in the middle east by participating in HTS.

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By: Laurie King-Irani

Laurie King-Irani — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:23:49 +0000

Peanut said:
“And the scholars that haven’t been harassed, excluded, denied tenure, etc (this is well documented people, I’m not making it up), OFTEN DON’T GET READ. How many people have read Mahmood Mamdani’s very relevant, very well written, very interesting book? (King-Irani has, who else?) You know, Mamdani has an endowed chair in anthropology and political science at Columbia, and was the director of CODESRIA, and presented at the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize Symposium.”

Mamdani’s book is fabulous, and better yet: a joy to read. He did not go to the Judith Butler school of expository writing. His work is wide ranging and makes connections that we rarely see in academic writing or the media: Rwanda, Military discources, US media representations of Muslims and Islam, the link between what the CIA did in Afghanistan and what the 19 9-11 hijackers did in NYC.

As for the banning and silencing of people in academe, it really exists and it really dampens public debate and discourse, and thus, harms the practice of effective citizenship. For those of you who don’t know about it, check out Daniel Pipes’ McCarthy-esque CampusWatch.org, where, I guess I should be proud to say, I have my own web page.

We have a Task Force for Middle East Anthropology to counter this sort of dangerous nonsense, and last fall we produced “Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibility after 9/11: A Handbook for Scholars and Teachers”, which in the long run should do a hell of a lot more than a petition to save the discipline from doom.
You can download the Handbook for free at this URL:

http://www.meanthro.org/handbook.htm

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By: Laurie King-Irani

Laurie King-Irani — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:57:53 +0000

Speaking from the middle-aged Left, I don’t think the discipline is doomed, or the country, either, when I see lively, engaged, and smart discussions and comments like the ones here on Savage Minds. We are not going to change things by signing petitions. That’s not how things work and anthropologists who don’t grasp this have got to do some ethnography of their own country and it’s political system. But it does not take money alone to reach the political elite. Good old fashioned street-level organizing is all that is needed, and if anthropologists or other scholars are to be lauded for coming out of the ivory tower, it should be for that: engaging with the various and growing groups and organizations in the US who know something is very rotten in the heart of our own society and its bloody footprint in the wider world. Maybe at the upcoming AAA’s we should talk about starting our own HTTs to understand and address the problems and assumptions that lead Americans to let a leadersheep like the one we have now put tens of millions of people at risk, desecrate the constitution, and drive the nation into debt.

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By: peanut

peanut — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:24:45 +0000

Grizzly, you know, maybe some anthropological research would be helpful here in the US. Though I am not certain that we want to suggest that there are “good” cultures and “bad” or “problematic” cultures. It is just SO culture-and-personality studies, which is very Margaret Mead/Ruth Benedict. And we know they were on War Dept payroll when they cranked those puppies out, right? Anyway, even if culture-and-personality isn’t itself part of the psy-ops built by anthropologists to shore up American hegemony, it’s out of fashion, theoretically speaking.
But, you make a good point. Maybe “we Americans” need teams of anthropological researchers to come. But not from “smarter countries.” Maybe just from countries where the citizens do not have a vested interest in American hegemony. But then, as “Iraqis are from Mars?” points out, those scholars exist, many of them are extremely intelligent, I’m sure some of them wouldn’t mind studying Americans through the quality optic of rigorous ethnographic study, and many of them CANNOT GET VISAS.
But, who is going to fund and/or give research clearance to that anthropology graduate student from, I don’t know, Makerere University in Kampala. Not only is it REAL HARD for 25 year-old grad students from Uganda to not only show up in the US with a massive check from the Ugandan equivilant of Fulbright (because there isn’t one: Fulbright is a gift from the Cold War) and apply for a research visa (it’s hard enough to get a visa to study at an American grad school), full professors who are famous public intellectuals in other parts of the world have a hard time, too. Sometimes it’s Campus Watch that gets them. Sometimes their visa gets revoked. And God help the Muslim (this is not a CULTURE people, it’s a GIANT WORLD RELIGION), who writes as an openly practicing Muslim! Look at Tariq Ramadan. But then he’s aprofessor of religious studies.
And the scholars that haven’t been harassed, excluded, denied tenure, etc (this is well documented people, I’m not making it up), OFTEN DON’T GET READ. How many people have read Mahmood Mamdani’s very relevant, very well written, very interesting book? (King-Irani has, who else?) You know, Mamdani has an endowed chair in anthropology and political science at Columbia, and was the director of CODESRIA, and presented at the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize Symposium.

This leads to the ONE quibble I have with “Iraqis are from Mars?” comment: THERE IS NO CURTAIN, THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES.

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By: tip of the tongue

tip of the tongue — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 05:59:28 +0000

[quote]
… displacing both blame and responsibility for a solution onto the Other.
[/quote]

I am in agreement with your main point. The US has not, but needs to, engage in a self-critical examination. Especially its leadership (or leadersheep as the case may be).

But your statement above is a bit one sided. After all, anthropologists are not being called in because the “natives” don’t get it, but because the Americans don’t get it. The examples given in the news are things like, soldiers wanting to dig wells to help make friends with a community and an anthropologists telling these soldiers that doing so might cause conflicts within that community. That is hardly a displacement of blame on the other.

Any specific examples of anthropological activities in HTS that qualify as displacing the blame and responsibility on the other? Can we get this discussion down into something more concrete?

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By: Grizzly

Grizzly — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 05:25:04 +0000

bq. What HTS can do is distract people from the man behind the curtain. But then, Americans don’t like to look at him anyway. We continue to allow ourselves to be distracted from the atrocities committed in our name, and with our money.

Yet, this suggests to me that the problem _is_ culture, but it is just that the problematic culture is American and that it is the _Americans_ (not the Muslims or whoever) with the cultural blinders on, and that it is the Americans who exhibit odd irrationalities that require explaining. Like their continuing refusal to acknowledge the fact that if there were nothing underneath Iraq and its neighbors except for sand, _none_ of this would be happening. We need teams of anthropologists from smarter countries to come to America and research the problem of how your average American can so easily be duped.

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