This sounds to me like an “anthropologists’ burden” argument. A peaceful future should be imagined by Iraqi people themselves, not anthropologists from any other country. First of all, get out of other people’s country.

I am not so sure if one should only focus on if/how anthropological knowledge could be used for changing the policy or “enlightening” policy makers. Policies serve the INTEREST of certain groups of people who have all kinds of “knowledge” to justify their actions. Efficacy, first of all, means to digress a bit in your next lecture and spend 10 or 15 mins talking about anthropology and war, which I guess many SMers have already done. If one still believes “people” eventually still have a say in whatever political regime, producing discourses through the education system may be the first thing a social scientist should do. If you don’t do it, some SOB will do it, but probably in a way you don’t like.

I want to contribute an argument for the necessity of anthropological engagement. It is called “We are up shit creek and anthropology is a paddle.”

(Note: As a take on efficacy, this doesn’t add much to the above accounting, maybe its sort of an extension of McFate’s position to any sort of engagment within/beyond “the system.” I am posting here because this seems like the least dialogically hypersaturated thread of the moment. Which leads me to mention that it might be a nice gesture to the unwashed masses to someday set up a message board where unchaired adjuncts can address the bretheren from soapboxes of our own topicalization…)

Every participant in this discussion agrees that “political efforts should go into stopping and preventing anything like the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Describing what those efforts might be, and what place if any anthropology has in them is the point of contention. As we debate, it will help to remember the classical (Clauswitz) description of war itself is a series of political efforts to end a conflict in such a way as to prevent it from happening again. By this logic, a war stops when it finally achieves/degenerates into a relatively inert im/balance of power. One of most troublesome aspects of the current situation is that nobody has any idea of how to imagine a tolerable endpoint to what is happening in Iraq. Hence the US military’s pragmatic interest in talking to anthropologists: a group of people who occasionally claim to possess the power of accurately describing what peaceful societies are like, and why. As well, this current war is different from wars of the past. When a rigorous description of this difference is finally written, accuracy will require the use of contemporary anthropological discourse (e.g. neo-liberal transformations in the state effect, etc. etc). Creating such a description is a necessary prerequisite to creating social institutions and generating social forces adequate to achieve a lasting peace under the conditions that have led to this war. All of which is to say: we require an anthropological imagination to see a peaceful future.

Or so says the military. Some anthropologists call this a lie and claim the military’s only interest in anthropology is in using it as PR for the “man behind the curtain.” If the military is functioning as a PR firm for “the man” rather than trying to achieve the mission they were given by their elected civilian commanders, then it makes good sense to steer clear of the whole mess until somebody with their vested interests in the right place gets into power. But if the military is actually telling the truth when they say that the war is out of control, is not going to vanish when the American public “wakes up,” or when Bush leaves office, or when (if) the US submits to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, or even when the US military leaves Iraq, then maybe we should give some serious consideration to the idea that what is necessary to end this war is the creation of a viable end point.

As soon as we seriously consider crafting an anthropological description of this future peace, we immediately confront questions whose answers require a grounded ethnographic understanding of what the not-peace actually is. That is where Marcus Griffin and company come in. The value of his contribution is precisely that it is _not_ a traditional (salvage) ethnography describing what Iraq looked like before the invasion, but rather an accurate description of what is actually going on at the interactive front lines of various agencies mired in a situation of out-of-control violence. This kind of understanding is necessary. Policy making is counter-productive when done without solid understanding of how implementation plays out on the ground. Any realistic plan for creating peace, without regard to the role it proscribes for the American military vis-à-vis other agencies, must be made in dialogue with the people actually dealing with the current ground-level situation. No matter how we imagine the future peace, realizing it will begin in understanding the current war. As Gandhi said, “The means are the ends in their formative stages”; i.e. ethnographic engagement in the actually existing situation is a necessary part of the anthropological contribution to creation of “political efforts [adequate to] stopping and preventing anything like the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

I would like to suggest that we might get even further forward by interrogating the following issues: (1) the binary oppositions that underlie the Ecclesiastes and humanist objections and (2) the lack of attention to scale and to social position in, for example, Kerim’s sudden leap from an anthropologist, who may or may not be useful to the unit to which he is attached in Iraq or Afghanistan, to Colin Powell.

The Ecclesiastes objection turns on an overdrawn contrast between omnipotent social engineering and being totally helpless. Neither is remotely likely, and to frame the debate in this way, ignores the possibility that something useful might be done, with how to do it properly still very much open to debate. One can, for example, agree with Margaret Mead’s famous statement that every successful social movement in history has started with a handful of dedicated people and also observe that no example I can think of ever began–let alone finished–with a petition to a professional association. History is full of examples of successful mass movements. Perhaps, if we were serious, we could learn a bit from them.

The humanist objection turns on a similar overdrawn contrast, between something called “technical control” and a wisdom whose purity can only be preserved at the cost of remaining completely hands-off. As someone who has been involved in both business and practical politics for a number of years, I can testify that “technical control,” while frequently sought, is never achieved in any enterprise more complex than operating a simple machine. On the other hand, the sorts of knowledge and habits of mind that training as an anthropologist provides can be useful–just not in ways that this binary opposition comprehends. Thus, for example, symbolic anthropology did not teach me how to tell an art director how to do his job. It did equip me to explain persuasively what the art director is up to, a useful skill when your livelihood depends on selling advertising. It is, thus, not hard for me to imagine an anthropologist who has studied Afghan tribesmen performing a similar service for the commander of an infantry company trying to get a handle on the people whose cooperation is essential for getting his job done.

Our debates, however, far to often jump all over the place in terms of time, space and social position. The anthropologist who offers advice to the company commander or helps him communicate better with the tribesmen with whom he is forced to work or fight, as case may be, is suddenly taken metonymically as a symbol of the ability or lack thereof to influence national policy. She may, like Colin Powell, find herself in a predicament where her advice is ignored because those who receive it find other considerations more pressing. But what those considerations are and what alternatives are open to her are likely to be very different, indeed. To conflate these two cases on the grounds that the predicaments are superficially similar is to equate a whale and a fish on the grounds that both must swim in the sea.

Case-by-case, with attention to detail and context: It’s good business, good jurisprudence, good clinical practice–why not good anthropology, too?

Also I think you conflate efficacy in terms of producing knowledge which can lead to policy decisions with efficacy in terms of actually shaping the decisions made from those policies. I don’t think there is much disagreement among anthropologists that anthropological knowledge could be (indeed, should be) used to construct good public policy. The question is whether or not policy makers are able to use this knowledge in that way. This is different from your co-optation argument in that the anthropologists themselves don’t need to be co-opted for their knowledge to be misused, misunderstood, or simply ignored because it is inconvenient.

Lets look at Colin Powell. He was effective in convincing Bush to go into Afghanistan before Iraq, but then because he was co-opted into supporting the Iraq war he ultimately undermined the campaign in Afghanistan he helped launch. How effective was Powell?