Guardian reports on HTS

There is a short piece today in the Guardian about HTS, Minerva, global counterinsurgency, etc., tied to the Michael Bhatia story.  The story also reports on the recent conference hosted by the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago that Oneman attended.  While the story mentions a host of characters we have seen quoted in the press before on this issue, including Fosher, Sahlins, McFate, et al, it also quotes John Kelly, who I haven’t yet seen discussing this issue in the press.

The Bush administration is just trying to buy more time, says John Kelly, chair of the University of Chicago’s high-ranked anthropology department and joint organiser of a conference on anthropology and global counterinsurgency held there last month….  The conference also dissected the Counterinsurgency Manual, a military document that became a US bestseller. The manual implies “an endless future of counterinsurgency interventions,” Kelly notes. “It contains no section on withdrawal.”

Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.