On the subject of power and common sense I don’t think I got my point said as well as the discussion deserves. As feminists keep telling us, people with power don’t bother to master subtleties of interaction because they have the leverage of command and final retaliation. Historically, conquering powers and military hegemons don’t typically waste more than a little effort on local relations. When push comes to shove it’s our way or the highway, the Romans, Mongols, Zulus and Nicaraguan death squads say. Mess with us beyond minor inconvenience and we raze your cities, or at least your Temple, kill your men and round up your women for domestic slavery. Get it?

The context in which the discussion in this thread makes sense is a very different one, and that’s already real interesting. The molecular construction of new common senses and consent regimes (e.g. checkpoint etiquettes) is a very different way to do power than naked force. There’s room in that process for quite a lot of effective feedback, although the tolerances are by no means infinite.

This is a historically amazing situation. What are the ways we can maneuver this toward better rather than worse interactions and outcomes? Expressions of outrage may be tactically useful from time to time, but since they depend on their targets basically agreeing on the moral framework of the situation (as Gandhi and King understood) a more pragmatic second phase is required. What would that look like?

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Here is the proper link:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0307/p01s04-woiq.html

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From an interview with Iraq veteran Jimmy Massey that speaks directly to this point
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/vet-n11.shtml
“When you put your hand up in the air with a closed fist, in the Marines it means you want them to stop,” he said. “But, as we later learned, it’s actually the international sign of solidarity. It has a totally different meaning for the Iraqis—to them it was a sign like hello. And that was just one example of how we were not trained properly to understand the cultural differences between us and them.”

From a post on the official US military blog The Sandbox entitled Hand and Arm signals describing the use of the closed fist to stop traffic
http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/2007/07/hand-and-arm-si.html
“A Soldier learns early in his or her career about hand and arm signals…One basic hand and arm signal is the clenched fist, held straight up…Now seeing this vehicle drive down the street I wanted to confirm that it was ready for combat. I held up my fist to communicate I wanted him to immediately stop….”

From the LA Times, Shots to the Heart of Iraq
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jul/25/world/fg-civilians25
“The military expects all vehicles to stay at least 100 yards from a convoy. When cars come too close, troops signal them to move back, sometimes by waving a little stop sign and sometimes by holding up a clenched fist.”

You might also want to check accounts of the murder of the Italian envoy by American soldiers. While the details have alluded me, there are reports that the shooting confusion over hand signals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/05/international/middleeast/05italy.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Here are some more relevant links
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/badvoodoo/etc/milblogs.ht
http://iraqthepurgatorium.blogspot.com/2008/03/escalation-of-force.html

The number of examples like this I can produce is endless. In fact, I found these quotes by typing Iraq + roadblock + “closed fist” into Google. A similar search with the term “open hand” produced nothing.

While I am not sure if US military personnel use an open hand to signal stop, I am quite certain there is continued use of the closed fist. If you find any evidence to contrary, please let me know.

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I remember a lot of coverage on the issue after an Italian intelligence agent was shot in 2005, and the Human Rights Watch put out a series of recommendations in a letter to Rumsfeld. I doubt many of these were taken up. There are lots of different types of checkpoint – permanent and temporary (so-called Mobile Checkpoints) and it is evidently the latter that are most dangerous. There are also daytime and night-time differences – in the latter spotlights are used. Typically Arabic and English warning signs are set out saying “Stop or you will be shot” – an issue with these is their visibility on crowded, messy Iraqi streets and the distance they are placed ahead of the checkpoint. There then may be a staggered checkpoint of Iraqi police followed by US troops. There is an article by Annia Ciezadlo in the Christian Science Monitor called “What Iraq’s checkpoints are like” which is revealing here. The Iraqi police often casually wave you through, so you speed up and suddenly see US troops pointing their guns. Drivers may assume that they are exempt from this second checkpoint because they were waved through the first level, others may panic and speed up. Ciezadlo argues that Iraqi drivers have a fear of ‘idling’ or driving slowly near government buildings and officials, which was engrained during Saddam’s reign. Warning shots may be fired, but these are often inaudible from inside a car (you can’t hear a bullet passing over head)… Not to mention the mindset of the soldiers, who may have been on patrol a day earlier, shooting at Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes – making the switch to assessing whether Iraqis wearing civilian clothes driving cars are ‘friendlies’ or not must be problematic.

If you do a Youtube search for “Iraq Checkpoint” you can see lots of evidence of variability in practice and the context in which checkpoints exist. Gestures are not really a feature – although there are a few ‘amusing’ examples to be seen. Anyway what is really needed is not Anthropologists happily applying their knowledge of cultural norms to volatile situations of individual variance, but something like workable Architectures of Control that shape behaviour in a careful way.

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I may have missed this (if so I apologize), but is there any systematic evidence that Western soldiers are using the raised-fist gesture with civilians? I only see the one n-th hand anecdote from the British soldier.

Not having deployed, I have no idea. Judging from anecdotal sources like the documentary “Off to War” (filmed in 2004), both “open hand” and “raised rifle” seem commonly used. (And equally problematic, but for the obvious reasons, not the more subtle “military culture” reason posited here.)

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Along those lines: common sense is tricky, as we’ve agreed, but here’s my version of it: If, in a war zone, I am driving toward a heavily-armed soldier of an occupying power from an alien culture, and he makes an imperative hand gesture of any kind, I stop. I wait for at least two imperative invitations to proceed. I do so very slowly. The lizard brain ‘understands’ the difference between slow and fast.

Nuances: I suspect the gesture for welcome is the open hand raised high, not the open hand thrust straight forward. And everyone knows that the high closed fist means “Black Power.” Any ambiguity in the presence of deadly fire would suggest caution, again. Good luck.

So yeah, I’m agreeing that letting the soldiers and the Iraqis work it out is probably the best we can do, and that it won’t be good enough to avoid the occasional deadly misunderstanding.

MTB, that’s a great analysis and thanks Kerim for adding Cameron’s acknowledgement that in many interactions, men assess their power negatively and communicate from the ‘one-down’.

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It’s striking how much it suggests the complete separation of the occupying forces from any local influence (like they didn’t have traffic police before the invasion?) – and as you say, the wasted understanding of the soldiers on the ground.

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I find it a bit problematic that Cameron seems to put all the agency in the hands of the more powerful party. That is, women’s indirect speech is no less transparent than women’s direct speech. In fact, what differentiates indirect from direct speech is how men act upon it.

If we are to take pragmatics seriously don’t we have to acknowledge that particular individuals and particular events are distinct? The hypothesis that many men adopt a strategy of feigning misunderstanding of speech that can be construed as indirect strikes me as realistic. But is the alternative hypothesis that many men lack a sufficient control of speech resources to, in rapid real time succession a) consciously differentiate direct & indirect speech b) decode the propositional content c) decide whether they want to comply with the request and d) perform a reply that realistically dissimulates their true understanding of the proposition any less realistic?

I guess what I really have a problem with is not the study of speech pragmatics but rather the way the analysis of fundamentally individual-level interactions gets tied to issues at the social and cultural levels.

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