Breaking News:
Al Qaeda in Iraq has responded to the US military’s Human Terrain System (HTS) program by implementing its own army of cultural experts in what they call the Imperial Terrain System or ITS. Since the logistics of fighting an armed insurgency make it impossible for the Iraqis to directly question the Americans about their culture, they have instead hired critics trained in post-colonial critique. Omar Ali, the director of this new program has explained that the insurgent forces find it useful to understand Said’s theory of orientalism. In a recent interview with Al Jazeera he said:
They used to try to explain to the Americans that they were Sunnis not Shi’ites, but after discussing Said they know better. As one soldier put it too me: “I understand now, they just see us as the mirror image of the West, not for who we really are.”
Asked about his opinion of the HTS program and whether better local knowledge would improve the efficacy of the US forces in Iraq, Ali responded that the US Army was still using outdated colonial era theories in a postcolonial context:
The general aim of HTS is to indicate through the power of discourse who matters most and who is subordinate. These discursive practices still carry traces of colonial textualization of the Other.
While Ali claimed not to be worried that the Iraqi’s would lose this intellectual arms race, closely placed sources indicate that the insurgency has contacted sympathizers in Italy, asking them to send copies of Homo Sacer. HTS’s Montgomery McFate responded by saying that war isn’t a matter of being able to rattle off the names of the latest theories, but of knowing what works: “If The Arab Mind helps the soldiers win the war, who cares if its orientalist?”
(via Foreign Policy Watch)
During WWII, many European and American physicists censored their own work so that the Germans wouldn’t get wind of the emerging developments in nuclear physics. I wonder if we should be buying up copies of dangerous texts like _The Prison Notebooks_ or subaltern critiques of the colonial nation-state, to keep them out of the hands of Al Qaeda sympathizers. What if terrorists start launching passages from _Nickel and Dimed_ at underpaid soldiers working in the company of overcompensated civilian contractors? We need to be preemptive – anthropologists should be thinking carefully about – oh, God – _what Al Qaeda could do with Jean Baudrillard_.
Let’s all pray they don’t get hold of _Writing Culture_.
The theories of Edward Said circulate widely in Saudi Arabia; “orientalist” is “mustashriq.” I heard people use it who had no training in the social sciences and who scarcely knew who Said was, but could very effectively reproduce the main arguments of Orientalism.