The ‘PR’ Argument

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”:http://www.jonronson.com/goats_04.html. 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”:http://home.comcast.net/~antaylor1/armylist.html) 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”:http://www.knox.army.mil/asl/list_philo.htm). 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.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

15 thoughts on “The ‘PR’ Argument

  1. 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.

    There are two problems with the way you have phrased this.

    First, it is important not to treat the military as a monolithic institution. There have always been members of the military who advocated strategies of state-building and counter-insurgency as opposed to brute-force military tactics. These views were silenced during the early years of the war. Now they are being given air as part of an extensive PR campaign by General Petraeus to win back public support (and continued financing) for a failed war. So while some members of the military (including Patraeus whose written books on this stuff) support these tactics in general, the important question is why they are given voice now. The timing is important here.

    The other problem with your account of cynicism is that the cynicism I impute to the generals isn’t directed towards the effectiveness of these tactics in general, but to their usefulness at this point in the war. I argued that while the military may believe that cultural understanding could help us win wars in general, from what I’ve read most of them believe that continued US involvement in Iraq is a bad thing – no matter what tactics we use.

    If you go back to my post you’ll see I specifically differentiate between Afghanistan and Iraq. I think this kind of anthropological specificity has been lacking in our discussions of this topic. As I argued in that post, it is one thing to talk about anthropology in the military as a general phenomenon, it is quite another to talk about it in the context of the War in Iraq.

  2. Clearly we need both ethnography and analysis. That’s why I tried to offer some basic analysis of the structure of these arguments — I agree with the author who wrote “I do think we must be careful about exactly which discussion we are having”.

    I agree that it is important not to look at the army as a monolithic entity, since all institutions are complex, contain numerous competing factions, and so forth. At the same time, some entities are more monolithic than others and the Military — which does, after all, have a chain of command — is one which is pretty good at becoming an agentive ‘collective subject.’

    It sounds to me like you are making(in the Iraqi case) a ‘strong PR’ argument which is tied to an argument about efficacy — to wit, those in the military who believed anthropology is efficacious have always been peripheral, but they are now being used by those in charge as part of a larger PR strategy. Your third paragraph seems to suggest that you believe that military planners involved in Iraq do not believe that anthropology is efficacious in any sense other than PR.

    I really do think that phrasing things this way ‘adds value’ to our ongoing conversation. It allows us to separate issues of PR, efficacy, personal ethical commitment, and the definition of professional identity as an ‘anthropologist’, all of which appeared in your earlier posting. Separating them allows us to consider each of them in turn, which I think is important because they all deserve to be talked about. For instance, I think your question about what gets to be called ‘anthropology’ runs through a lot of our discussion on plagiarism (is it wrong for McFate to do it) and IRB (do applied anthropologists have to get through one) and deserves its own discussion.

  3. I think we agree on the basics, but I still worry about how you’ve framed the “Strong PR” argument. I don’t want to concede to making this particular argument – even in the case of Iraq. That’s because I believe the HTS people when they say that the soldiers they work with really appreciate their advice. I believe this to be true. (And I’m willing to put off discussing whether or not this is true because its “anthropology” or not.)

    At the same time you are correct to state that I am arguing the military planners are being cynical in their deployment of HTS within Iraq. As I understand your argument, the “Strong PR” view cannot hold both things to be true, and yet the “Weak PR” view also seems incapable of holding both things to be true. It is for this reason that I don’t like the analytical framework, since I think it is simultaneously true that soldiers find HTS useful and like it while the military planners are quite cynical about how they are deploying it.

    I think we should also begin to inquire about the scope of HTS. How many anthropologists are involved? How many are in the field? They sell this as just a “trial” so I assume that only a few people are actually doing this. In that case it can’t be having too much of a tactical impact at this point. There are stories of individual soldiers who were effectively running nation-building and “winning hearts and minds” campaigns over fairly large territories. I imagine these individual officers and soldiers had more of an impact than HTS has had, and yet the stories of these soldiers was largely silenced (and their activities frequently shut down) while HTS has been actively promoted.

  4. Rex’s conservatism and denial has painted him into a corner, and this is his weak effort to get out of the corner. Doesn’t work. He’s using strawmen to try distance himself now from Shweder, now that Sahlin’s has laid it all out so well.

    Rex, can you find anyone who has ever claimed that the only reason the military is hiring anthropologists is for PR purposes? Who has ever claimed this “strong” argument? Please show us this work?

    I just relooked at Price’s piece and there is nothing suggesting this. Price is arguing about the use of the Manual here at home, especially Chicago’s role in republishing it. Instead Price write’s that “The military and intelligence community loves McFate and her programs not because her thinking is innovative — but because, beyond information on specific manners and customs of lands they are occupying, the simplistic views of culture she provides tell them what they already know.” This isn’t a PR argument.

  5. Price does clearly connect the positioning of the manual in U.S. public discourse to an attempt ideologically to re-frame the war, a re-framing coeval with the Surge(tm). I don’t think we know enough about HTS yet to say ultimately what motivates all of this, and what those funding HTS really think about it. However, we _do_ know via multiple prominent media appearances that HTS is being positioned as a hopeful new direction for counterinsurgency. So I don’t think we can disallow this as part of the discussion.

    But let us treat the actants symmetrically. The military recruits anthropologists. Do anthropologists also recruit the military? Whose interests are being translated into the other’s? Who’s zoomin’ who? McFate & Co are creating lucrative markets for anthropological product. Is the military only creating PR for itself? Is McFate not also concerned with her own PR? Is this too cynical? Let me quote on the the HTS’s most public participants, “Dr. Griffin”:http://marcusgriffin.com/blog/2007/10/:

    bq. Currently thoughts are mostly about the HTS program and its doctrine in relationship to anthropologists objections to participation. I tend to view the loud objections to be politically motivated: a fight over the nature of anthropology in the next decade or two. For three decades, research monies for field research have become more and more scarce. This is certainly true of federal funding. For example, since the Agta enjoyed Michael Jackson’s music so much in the early 1990s, I used to daydream of getting a philanthropic grant from him. Research dollars were and remain tight. As a result, many anthropologists spent less time in the field and increasingly turned to what people say and write and less time on what people do. In short, fieldwork became less participatory, less observational, and more focused on rhetoric and the rationales and symbolic meanings people espoused guided their behavior. Anthropology became more and more strongly interpretivist. Which if fine to a degree and I’ve always argued the more perspectives in anthropology the better despite others insisting that my use of post-positivism and critical realism was colonialist.

    bq. Today, research with the military opens up a wide vista of field based research opportunity that involves funding and support infrastructure nearly unimaginable twenty years ago. In addition to that, the military is willing to pay base salaries nearly double what universities pay faculty, which removes the self-righteous cloak of poverty for the sake of learning.

  6. Two points:
    1) PR
    I think it might be useful to differentiate between the uses of ‘anthropological knowledge’ potentially being deployed on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan, those potentially being deployed in the back-rooms of high-level strategists, and the finally, the kind of anthropological knowledge/work being paraded before the American public in the public presentation of the work of HTS.

    Clearly, it would be a mistake to believe that “Tracy” appeared in the NYT because of radical American freedom of the press. Clearly the decision to publicize HTS in this way was at least partially determined (or permitted) by (some part of) the military.

    Similarly, the HTS manual’s publication as a very tasty-looking book/commodity (it looks like something one would buy in Urban Outfitters, does it not?) might suggest that this document addresses the American public, a public that includes the ‘grunt’ and the potential recruit.In addressing this public, it would not be surprising if part of the message (intended or otherwise) is “we’ve got smart people fixing this mess.” (A message perhaps intended as much for the young people in uniform who are growing more and more skeptical, too) It is also hard to argue that this is not the message being presented to American public in various press-conferences and the unavoidable talking points and press-releases.

    More troubling, the combination of Urban Outfitters packaging and University of Chicago stamp of intellectualness seems to target this book to (among other demographics) a very specific set of readers: young war supporters with a dose of intellectual snobbism. That is, it might speak volumes to potential future McFates: “come and join the smart, “zen like,” NewSmallWars(tm) gang.”

    This is not to say that there might not be some serious social scientific thinking at some point in the chain of command. In fact, arguing that a PR function is at play is an assertion that there IS some serious social science (or at least marketing, but what’s the real difference anymore?) thinking going on at some level. There would have to be, and it would be some pretty smart thinking, too.

    However, what I and perhaps others find dubious is the idea that serious social science thinking and research is being applied by HTS workers in such a way that it provides useful information to the average soldier on the ground.

    Sadly, this Counterinsurgency Manual shows all the signs of being rapidly produced as a branding device and tool of PR. It is, as Price points out, not very representative of new, or innovative, or area-specific scholarship. It seems to have been rapidly tossed together. It also, as I pointed out, shows some textual evidence of being substantially lifted not from the “greats,” but from fairly random websites in which the “greats” are “embedded.”

    Any military document that is available to the general public (and thus, to ‘the terrorists’ as well) should be understood to have been made public INTENTIONALLY, unless proven to have been leaked. This is especially important in the current climate of classification. Or, better, the climate of strategic declassification, a la Valerie Plume.

    2) so-called lack of respect for service men and women
    Rex, I must call you out on your calling me out. I hate to do that, but I kind of must, seeing as what you’ve said would really bother my grandfather, among other people.

    To recall a WWII Army doctor’s reflections on the war in the Pacific–no matter how scathing they might be–and to quote him, is hardly disrespectful of the individual people in the military. Doing so in no way involves treating “the natives” like they are dumb. MASH wasn’t about how the individual soldiers were stupid or worthy of scorn, either.

    The phrase “Military intelligence: contradiction in terms,” much like the acronym “FUBAR” (F*^ked Up Beyond Recognition) come from the speech–and the experience–of American military personnel during wartime. I heard the first, over and over, as a commentary on how the war in the Pacific was run. That is, it’s a critique from within the system.

    Please, let’s not continue to support the idea that showing any criticism of military policy or even the results of military policy means that one does not “support the troops.” It’s an old chestnut, and it’s always been a rotten one. It stank worst after Vietnam.

    More than that, we should categorically reject the idea that criticizing highly paid outside contractors is a sign of lack of support for the individual young men and women who signed on to defend their country, to get the benefits of the GI Bill, or because they felt it was the right thing to do, for whatever other reason. As Strong points out, Griffin himself says he is involved in HTS (in part) because it’s a “great funding opportunity.” Recruiters for HTS like to point out that they can arrange adjuncting positions for HTS at DC area universities. Such HTS workers are (to use what must be the best phrase I have ever coined) truly “professors of fortune.” (Royalties negotiable)

    The US Government could be spending its $300k+ per head per year to train area specialists the way they used to (and still do, actually), in the various linguistics/translation training schools. This would provide the added benefit of providing people who can talk to people on the ground. The casualization of this labor takes military-benefits bearing jobs from kids who would otherwise have them, and who might do them better, frankly. Instead of sending kids to school, they buy pre-made PhDs. And, if they hire them through contract agencies, they buy ready-made temps. The readymades they have bought don’t seem to be keeping quality very high, from what I can see.

  7. Abbie, your comment on my work is amazingly misguided.

    1) I have no idea if anyone has ever held a ‘strong’ version of the PR argument. Nowhere in my blog entry do I claim that _anyone_ holds it. I merely lay it out as one sort of claim that one could make about the war. The purpose of the post was to provide an analysis of the logic and coherence of certain kinds of claims that could be made.

    2) If you honestly think I once was close to Schweder’s position and am now distancing myself from it because of Sahlins’s post, then you are deeply, deeply confused not only about what I believe, but my personal relationship with these two authors.

  8. Kerim,

    I think we also agree — and in the course of this discussion we have gotten clearer about how and why we agree. I don’t think casting debate in terms of a ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ PR argument has the drawbacks that you claim, however. You could certainly hold that military officers believe anthropology to be useful PR and that enlisted men believe it to be efficacious. In fact I think the value of trying to fit one’s position into the ideal type that I articulated is that it also prompts us to complete the equation and ask if planner think it is efficacious and soldiers ‘on the ground’ think it is PR.

    I do, however, think you have pointed out one thing about my argument — that these ideal types of arguments can be deployed in multiple contexts to clarify our judgments of different actors. That is not something I thought of, but I do think it moves the conversation along — which is really the goal. I don’t want to fetishize this forms of enquiry if its not useful.

  9. Peanut has transformed my argument about the intelligence of the military (in the sense of both the organization and its component actors) into the argument that s/he shows “lack of respect for service men and women”. I suppose this makes my entry easier for Peanut to understand, because it allows him/her to assimilate it to a familiar “you must support the troops” argument, and then defend him/herself from that argument. However I am not making a “you must support the troops” argument, and I never even used the word “respect” in this blog entry.

    What I claim in this blog entry is that

    1) the military has incredible logistical capacities to project power abroad (but not omnipotence). Part of this capacity comes from am amazing amount of intelligence (but not omniscience). I’ll leave the details of Peanut’s grandfather’s socialization to role in the military to Peanut’s own imagination, but obviously our prosecution of the war in the Pacific is evidence in support of, rather than in opposition to, my claim.

    2) Many people in the military are active thinkers — intellectuals, even — who are widely read and thoughtful about what they do. When attempting to understand their motivation to hire anthropologists, I argued, we should take into account the possibility that they may actually be interested in learning something from them.

    I hope it’s clear now that I do not hold the position that Peanut claims.

  10. Reading over this post & the ensuing discussion, it strikes me that it might be useful to add a third “substantive PR” argument, i.e. the formation of an Iraqi public around a common interest in peacefully governing itself is a description (rose-tinted, to be sure) of a substantive endpoint to the war.

    (This would dovetail nicely with the old argument that Al Qaeda itself is best understood as a PR firm dedicated to brand destruction of Western-modern-occidentalist-secular-infidelity).

  11. Suppose up til now we had what Lincoln had from 1861 to 1863 – not failure, not success.

    Suppose we now have our Grant? Suppose the Iraqi people want our help for another few years until they can help themselves?

    Then what?

    Wouldn’t a self governing Iraq be a great thing amidst all those ME kingdoms and dictatorships? Why wouldn’t honorable anthros work towards such a goal?

    Why would any lovers of humanity want to be the Copperheads of this war?

  12. “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.”

    I think the jokes show the rich textures of critical engagement, thought, and disaffection which have always been part of people in the military’s own experience of the utility of “military intelligence.” Which is to say, it is a commentary on the usefulness of “Intel,” military knowledge about what’s going on on the ground.

    I draw your attention to the first and last sentences of your passage above, from which I drew a substantial part of my interpretation of your interpretation of this joke. I’d also ask you to read the levity back into my comments.

    Thanks! Keep up the great blogging!

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