I don’ t buy that very common argument. Early anthropology was a product of its time, and it was also the first to counter that time. Remember Boas was the first to critically examine the race concept, and became a real power in introducing the notion of relativism in phenotypes, and social traits.
Malinowski, helped people see the relative connections between what “savages” did on a small group of islands far off somewhere and what the British elite did there at home.

It’s been that way ever since. Concepts in other disciplines are just now catching up to things that we were saying 20 to 30 years ago, and they are still more simplistic that 20-30 years ago.

By the way, you might be interested in this post.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/08/9259_beware_of_montgomery_mcfate_sapone_flier_spotted_in_dc.html

Yup it sure did give birth to anthropology, and thats what HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of anthropologists have been trying to undo! That’s the WHOLE POINT actually. Early anthropology was racist, demeaning, and contributed to horrible misrepresentations of people around the world – which eventually led to its downfall and decline. Well, that might be too simple, but its part of it.

The only saving grace of anthropology has been this reflexive turn which looked at itself and said “oh my !@#!@#! god we are some nasty ass, closed minded bastards”.

@RML -> Research can work towards solving “real world” problems by asking “real world” questions. Another name for this is “collaborative ethnography”, where the researcher works on questions raised by others. And all research is based on “real world” findings, its just the questions they ask that come from the clouds.

Having said this, the person calling themselves Dee began posting on June 27 – that’s 2 months ago. In her first comment, she states that examples of how HTS had saved lives would be forthcoming – “There are some very impressive examples of ethnographic engagement (that I and others will be happy to share in due course) that have almost certainly saved lives on all sides.” The only examples of the program available here are from Newsweek links provided by Maximilian Forte and they don’t present a very attractive picture. I genuinely was interested in the promise.

Strangely, Dee has stopped posting without producing any real evidence of the program’s efficacy. And up until the last post on June 29, she appeared increasingly agitated that statements about the program’s efficacy were immediately accepted as fact and name-calling of its detractors hadn’t seemed at all convincing to other commenters. In comments, she was dragged into a mudslinging match that was unprofessional, unconvincing, and easily avoided. Adding to the mystery, she vanished completely following the accusation by Maximilian that Dee is a pseudonym for HTS anthropologist Dr. Montgomery McFate.

I don’t know if Dee represents HTS in any formal capacity, although her first post sure has that feeling. So it seems strange to me that someone acting in such a capacity would use a pseudonym with no links to a webpage or e-mail, promise evidence that would never appear, call others names, and then just as suddenly disappear. I personally have lots of room to be convinced this is an effective program, but unless something mores gets said about HTS, I can only conclude it’s a joke.

Is doing research so much more fun than applying the found knowledge in the “real” world?

Getting back to the original post, I agree with Oneman that, as a tool of the military, an anthropologist will have trouble producing real anthropological evidence. In the Human Terrain System, I would say that even the name itself shows that the military project is chiefly concerned with objectifying and then stepping on humans and societies. That might have counted for anthropology a hundred years ago but not in this day and age. Further, I feel that the anthropologists are being treated like some kind of armored vehicle to keep the troops safe and clean away from the necessity of interacting or empathizing with the “Human Terrain.” The video seems to make this clear.

Still, although I’m not an anthropologist myself, I feel that participation in these types of programs would be very useful if the anthropologist were free to study the ENTIRE “human terrain” – not just those at the sharp end of the empire, but also the soldiers, the command structure, the unequal power relations (internal and external), the unique language of war and so forth. In other words, the anthropology of war. Can anthropology in the military become an anthropology of the military? Isn’t that what we’re doing right now with this three minute video ethnography?

The military itself wouldn’t be interested in this type of work but maybe it could be done if the anthropologists were able to maintain their identity as academics. Researchers could demand access to the military and the ability to mine it for anthropological facts as the price of service. It’s probably naive to think that but worth thinking about.

Looking over at the press, journalists are often critical of embedding reporters but many agree that it gives them access to news that they might not otherwise have. As long as embedded journalism is not seen as the end all a be all, it has it’s place.

Again, as an outsider, I know anthropology as being famous for explaining (without objectifying) many aspects of culture and society but I don’t know of an anthropology of how societies engage in and interact through war. I’m sure that those types of studies exist there is quite a bit of room for more. Seems like that kind of research should be about as important as studies of gift giving or kinship. I would love to see reams of data by trained anthropologists on the culture of the military itself.

No but seriously, it is one thing to post anonymously but quite another to pretend to be someone else to make yourself look good. I don’t think you need a fancy university degree to think that’s a little creepy.

Although I think it’s important for HTS and other military-sponsored anthropological work to be open to examination by non-affiliated anthropologists and other experts as a corrective to what I’m going to all “theater blindness” for no good reason, I actually shudder to think of the implications of an open-access, publicly available database of HTS’ and others’ raw ethnographic data.

First of all, I don’t think any actual ethnographic data collection is taking place in HTS. I don’t have a ton of evidence or that hunch, of course; just mainstream media reports (though given that the media seems to have been spoonfed their stories from the military, I’d imagine if there was anything positive about HTS’s work, it’d have ended up in those pieces!) and Marcus Griffin’s blog, while it was up. FOr several months I read Griffin’s posts hoping to find some evidence that he was actually doing some sort of anthropological work, and saw little to none.

Second of all, as I’ve said repeatedly, I don’t believe that the conditions under which military anthros work is conducive to the production of adequate anthropological evidence. I’ve heard McFate talking about informed consent in HTS, and I don’t think they’re coming anywhere near the notion of consent that anthros mean when they talk about it — and consent is still far below the conditions under which valuable anthropological exchange can occur!

Meanwhile, outside of HTS, the big push for anthropological involvement in the military has boiled down to things like “don’t show Arabs the bottoms of your feet” and “Muslims don’t like dogs”. The Marines even have wallet cards they distribute to soldiers with such useful nuggets of wisdom for easy reference. Since this push originates in the same drive (and people) that the push for HTS derives from, I have to wonder if anthropology (or “social science”, since it seems the vast majority of HTS workers are not anthros) is being used in any way other than in name only. The veiled threat — if HTS doesn’t do its job, more people will be killed — is enough to convince me that rapport is not really in the cards here.

And since Max Forte is a’visitin’, I’ll also repeat something I said on his blog (or on one of the blogs he linked to in his “Men in Tights” post). The problem with McFate’s blogging, and her husband’s opera fetish, is that both of them are actively involved in efforts which kill people. Making light of that — or talking about music and humor as a “release” from battlefield stresses — minimizes that reality.

I know, I know: HTS saves lives! (After all, once the military killed or imprisoned all the troublemakers and brought in HTS, kills dropped as much as 60%!) The military fights wars so we can have peace, we all know that. Still, bad taste is bad taste, and killing people is in incredibly bad taste no matter how funny your blog posts are.

Dee? You still there?

Where is the website where I can go and read all the Human Terrain Reports? I want to see where different Iraqi villagers fit in the “kill chain.”

And I’m personally interested, because an Egyptian Arabic-language weekly has asked me to write an article about the US military’s use of social scientists in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I’d like to be able to provide information on when the HTS data will be openly accessible in that article.

Of course, I can’t just report that it’s in the works based on an anonymous blog comment, so is there anyone I can talk to for some more concrete info? If you have anyone you can suggest I can get in touch with, I’d be grateful. You can either post it here or e-mail me directly: llwynn {at} scmp.mq.edu(.)au.

thanks
Lisa

I should clarify that I’m not talking about the common sense of individual soldiers, but of the military as an institution. Here too, however, we can see that their common sense is not that of anthropologists … which is my point. HTS isn’t going to change that, except in a few isolated cases. (I was specifically referring to the need for capable translators.)

An interesting question is whether institutions are capable of learning in a way which is not reducible to the trajectories of individuals through that institution. It seems that a lot of soldiers in Vietnam, including Powell, did learn a lot about how to fight an insurgency. Yet, it seems the military itself had to re-learn these lessons in Iraq. I would be very surprised if the next war is very different.

metafactory,

An interesting reading of the video. I suppose its possible, but it seems to me that Sgt. Adams’ frustration is from the sense that there is no communication at all between him and the elder, and that he would welcome genuine dialog if he knew that’s what he was getting.

A conjecture here: a translator learns what to translate and how to translate situationally. If this video is any indication of the kind of people the translator works with, I suspect he has learned that they are not interested in anything other than short comprehensible statements. I suspect translating a story about ants and wheat would just piss-off sgt. Adams, who apparently isn’t smart enough or well enough trained to either realize that he’s not getting a good translation or to understand that the motivations of Pashtun farmers may not be the same as his own. I would suggest the problem is less with the translator and more with the culture of information gathering.

This video certainly works as an excellent justification for HTS. As mainstream journalism, it falls into the dominant ideology of the righteousness of the war and offers us some basic infotainment on the challenges of ‘getting the job done.’ But it is also not hard to read it against the grain and see that the Western forces may not be able to win this one after all (or at least not in the way they’ve been going about it).

I teach soldiers who have been or soon will be deployed. Like all of my students some of them tumble quickly to the value of taking the perspective of the other, while some are more rule or authority oriented. They seem to have different ‘common senses’ depending on how and where they were raised, where they are in their emotional-cognitive development, their sense of identity and purpose, their levels of stress, and so on.

Conflictual situations are notoriously poor ones for optimizing reciprocity of communication, as the post on the myth of Mars and Venus also shows. Short of a desirable but currently unlikely elimination of all conflict, what sorts of practical steps would in your view improve understanding under these difficult circumstances? Is there a specific way of understanding ‘common sense’ that gets us further there?