BBC picks up HTS
The US Army continues to promote the Human Terrain System heavily in the international media:
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The face of evil?
http://marcusgriffin.com/
The face of evil?
http://marcusgriffin.com/
I wish his blog had more depth to it though.
Just visited Dr. Griffith’s blog. Sort of boring, and the audience is not so much average American news hunters and gatherers or fellow academics as it seems to be publishers for his manuscript he’s already writing about his time in Iraq “There I was, an Anthropologist in Iraq”. I’m sure he’ll get a major publishing house to buy the rights and make a lot more than a tenure track salary would ever provide. It will appeal to the same folks who swooned over “BlackHawk Down.” He’s marketing himself, and even has a section of his blog called “Shop”. I’ll take four lineages, and make ‘em segmented, Marcus, and throw in a few tribal leaders’ kinship charts in, too.
Man, this is sad.
Laurie Laurie, so judgmental, so skeptical, so cynical. but funny.
Anyway, Griffin states that the blog is intended primarily for his students. Make your own judgments.
But back to details. From his blog:
“I am tentatively thinking that a lack of communal social space is likely a hardship for urban Iraqis. The poorer neighborhoods that have closely spaced housing compounds and no courtyards may be experiencing greater anomie because the rubble and debris on top of and around their dwellings compound their lack of communal space. This is probably acutely so now that Ramadan has started. Where can people possibly gather after dark to socialize, eat, and consider their faith after a day of fasting? Trash may be removed from primary streets but that does not alleviate the social anxiety caused lack of functional space for group interaction within their own living areas. Bulk removal operations should be seriously considered to create usable social space denied residents as a result of kinetic operations. The use of space for communal social activity needs further investigation.”
Ah, the sweet words of Evil Griffin. lol
Also from Griffin’s blog from last August:
” Might unprofessional behavior on the part of contractors feed resentment by Iraqis against Coalition Forces trying to bring stability to the country? I’ve heard soldiers call contractors some pretty negative things and I am beginning to understand their frustration and resentment. Contractors may at times be compounding problems in an exponentially complex environment.”
Laurie is indulging in unsupported ad-hominem.
Some have called for an outsider’s anthropological examination of the US’s inclination to war. Fine. Good, in fact!
But would these anthropologists, especially the ones belonging to the AAA, please submit to the same?
Im against everything, what in the world does that last comment mean?
Marcus seems like a nice guy, but his writing comes across so naive and clueless. It worries me a bit that these things are taken as anthropological solutions. The unreflexive irony of flying around in a Blackhawk gunship pondering the architectural anomie of residents below is hard to believe. A garbage collection service would help them no end I’m sure – make them feel better about living in a war zone. A bit of town planning, develop some communal places – perhaps where residents can gather to discuss religion … and be more effectively blown up en-masse by insurgents and bomber pilots. Yes Marcus, a return to normal civic functioning would do wonders for Baghdad!
But, anomie? Durkheim? Argh, I can see it now – massive Tiananmen-sized squares with statues of our Dear Leader shaking hands with Uncle Sam, vast apartment blocs of sustainable housing, closed-circuit monitoring built in, Green Panopticons with mini-date palm oases. “Please pick up battle-litter, spent cartridges, bodies after all kinetic operations” signs posted on street corners…
Does Marcus even know Arabic? From his website I gather he’s a southeast Asia specialist. But I guess you are not going to be hearing much of the local tongue while flying in a noisy helicopter way above the city.
As for his observations of living patterns, the socializing goes on in the house, in the “diwaan” in the evenings and late into the nights. Family and friends gather (if they dare venture out into the mean streets of occupied Baghdad) and talk politics and tell some hilarious jokes. Baghdadis are pretty hilarious.
Stupendous insights though about the “problematic” nature of the corporate warriors and the US troops’ less than warm attitudes towards them.
I don’t want to be too hard on Marcus. So I apologize for previous ad hominem comments that he is marketing himself. But when you’ve studied/lived in the Middle East for more than half your adult life, it’s pretty hilarious to see people who’ve been “on the ground” in places like Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine presenting themselves, (or being presented by the media and book publishers) as though they were seasoned experts. I don’t know what luck the HTTs have had with recruiting anthropologists who know Arabic. I think they’ll find it hard for two reasons: 1) anyone who knows the language well enough does so because they’ve lived in an Arab country for awhile and thus are likely to be more sympathetic to the occupy-ees than the occupier and 2) They’d know too much and not be as malleable as ethnographers with little knowledge of the political history and of the modern Middle East. Last fall, I was approached by the HTT recruiters. They were very nice people and by and large I think that they had good intentions. As I mentioned last week, though, anthropology is not the answer to the debacle in Iraq, impeachment of the Bush administration is. As a journalist/activist I’ve decried the use of embedded journalists, and think that embedding ethnographers is an equally troubling prospect, and not only because of the AAA Ethics Code dimension or well-grounded fears that this new use of anthropology/ists on the battle field will further taint our profession as handmaidens to political or intelligence agencies. What I learned early on while doing my first field research holds true: we are humans first and anthropologists second, and good data comes out of good conversations and communications, which can only emerge from good relationships. The pictures of Dr. Griffiths in his Army helmut and goggles made me think “What Iraqi is going to sit down and have a glass of tea and some sammak mazghouf (THE culinary speciality of Baghdad, grilled fish) with a guy who looks like that. He’s now representing the military, not consulting for them, at least from the perspective of the people who can’t hang out on the street corner and weave together the fabric of a post-Saddam civil society because of bombings, IEDs, insurgents v. counterinsurgents and those wild west Blackwater blokes. Back in August 2003, I was supposed to go work for UN Habitat on an urban and municipal governance revitalization program for Iraqi cities. I got to Beirut for the orientation and then the next day turned on BBC and saw that the UN HQ in Iraq had been blown up. The problem then as now is that there is no governance system or rule of law in Iraq. That’s not just the fault of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (makes it sound like a franchise, no?), or the various militias, but also Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul (Jerry) Bremer. All the anthropological theory and methodology in the world cannot undo the damage this lot did. I wish Marcus well, but this whole HTT thing is, in my estimation, doomed from the get go on a lot of different levels.
I think that I will withdraw from participating in this forum.
I was raised in a household where a ethical and moral beliefs were rammed down my throat with exactly the kind of passionate certitude I see in this forum.
As I grew up I learned to recognize such certitude for the tyranny it is. I reject it whenever I see it. I favor a discourse based on careful reasoning and careful attention to facts. Passion motivates, but only by removing the capacity to doubt one’s own convictions.
I was initially attracted to anthropology because it opened my eyes to the world, because it showed me that simple answers rarely suffice. And I have learned much that is valuable.
But I have also learned much about the discipline of anthropology itself. While anthropology has the seed of great potential, I see an anthropology that is choking on itself, an anthropology that has insulated itself from the rest of academia, an anthropology that has unashamedly aligned itself with a particular politics, an anthropology that rewards rhetoric over reason, an anthropology that is both ineffectual and self-important at the same time.
I’m not sure I can learn anything from you anymore. I might be wrong, but I’d rather not waste my time finding out. I may sound bitter, and I suppose I have bitterness inside of me, but I would rather call it regret for having lost something dear to me. I am not angry at you, no more than I am angry at all well meaning fools, and I am certainly one of those too, perhaps more foolish than many, though less foolish than some.
long live the revolution
so long.