http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml

Sorry about that.

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[60 Minutes]
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6430933n&tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel

One of the things that pervades the majority of these videos is a particular narrative of resistance. It is a resistance of Islam against the “West” which hates and is trying to destroy Islam.

This meta-narrative, which is no different or less obvious to a cultural anthropologist than the narratives of development, or neoliberalism, and can be analyzed through the videos. I’ve already talked in this thread about how to do that, and about the narrative itself.

You can also see that many of the non-Muslims who parrot this narrative, are the same people that parrot various radical left propaganda. Within the narrative terrorists are defended and the fact that they kill more Muslims than anyone is glossed over completely. You’ll notice that, as many other reliable sources state, most of the people that buy into the narrative are affluent and educated. While this is so, the narrative leaves one with the belief that those who carry out terrorist attacks are simply resisting, are freedom fighters, have been attacked directly, etc…

You’ll hear this narrative parroted verbatim at places like Zero Anthropology, and there will be Zero self reflection of the fact that they’ve simply been manipulated by propagandists.

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“The science of human pursuance and motivation is probably where much of my interest are.” Should read:

The science of human persuasion and motivation is probably where much of my interest are.

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I really want to read that one, because it’s got the latest about the HTS with AFRICOM. I really haven’t been liking the latest news about the HTS, and I’m been looking for non-biased sources.

Anyway, back to the subject, I have to say that I haven’t read the latest back-and-forth, but I wanted to add that there are pretty solid methods for analyzing propaganda, like Jihadi videos. The science of human pursuance and motivation is probably where much of my interest are. I think that we have to understand how it’s done to counter various damaging interests that seek to subvert some for their own benefit. That encompasses people to get others to blow themselves up, or the Tea Party movement, Wall Street interests, or whatever. There’s a deconstruction technique that the US army developed decades ago that I find helpful in reverse engineering propaganda; again, whether its online or on FOX news.

The method is called SCAME, which stands for: Source, Content, Author, Media, and Effect.

So, what is the source of the propaganda. This tells you a lot, even when you don’t know the source. Sometimes the source will be hidden, or attempt to make it looks like another source that it isn’t. For example, an add from the American’s for Rainbows and Puppys might really just be a front group for the Oil Industry. The font, the jargon, everything in it can be used as a clue to who it’s from if that it hidden. Also, follow the money.

Then Content. What’s actually in it? What are the themes? Are there claims that can’t be referenced? If the content truthful, misleading, a lie, or honest?

These first two things lead us to looking for who the Audience is. This is very important. A good example is advertising for children. The final audience for that is not the child, it is the parent. The target audience for propaganda is always a segmented group that can actually carry out what it is that the creator wants. The kids can’t buy shit, but they can nag their parents to buy it. In Vietnam the Russians created propaganda for G.I.s that asked them to call home and tell their friends and family to protest the war, and call congress, etc… the soldier wasn’t the target audience, their social networks were. The people that get Tea Party people to protest aren’t so interested in what the far right feels, they are after the minds of politicians.

Media: how is it produced, and sent out. What are the technical abilities, etc… This tells you a lot. Jihadis, for example, are probably the worlds most sophisticated propagandists for a non-business group. Their audience is almost always Muslims as well. They really suck at trying to persuade non-Muslims, and don’t often try. If the media uses pictures and not words, then perhaps it is for illiterate people.

Then Effect. What is the effect of the media campaign? This helps you to reverse engineer the SCAME method and check it. What are both the intended, unintended, expected, and observed effects?

I think we should all keep this method in mind whenever we watch the news, read a paper, whatever. This not only gives you insight into the cultural assumptions of the creator, but also insight into their assumptions about the assumptions of the audience.

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Talk about “framing” Wow.
http://www.meetingresistance.com/
http://conflictsforum.org/
And you do know[?] that Hamas is not Al Qaeda.
I’m sure Amira Hass could introduce you to a few people.

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The philosophers of science have every right to ponder these important issues and they are indeed important as we all have to take a step back and seriously examine what we are doing and why along with the repercussions of what we are doing. However here lays the distinction between academic and applied anthropology. In the study of peace and conflict as an applied anthropologist, for myself it is enough if samples of my research population tell me that my description of their point of view is accurate. If I have done that, then I feel that I have done half of my job and that my methodology is sound. The other half of the job is to effect a particular outcome.

I also might add, that I don’t agree that you should always carve something away from the rest of the world in order to understand it. Sometimes this works (and is necessary) but sometimes it doesn’t because you then miss other factors that influence what you are seeking to understand. In the case of Islamic Jihadists, isolating them does not work very well unless someone is looking at an extremely defined area of their cultures that is highly limited in scope. Offhand however I can’t think of any such thing when it comes to the culture of martyrdom found amongst Jihadists unless you were to only do a psychological profile of an average individual within such a culture. That, as I’m sure you agree, would result in grossly incomplete data and potentially misleading conclusions. Getting such information is also extremely difficult as it would require a long term case-study.

I also disagree that our focus of study determines what counts as a “legitimate” study of humanity or even for what counts as “human”. Perhaps to some academics this is true, but it is all worthless if they are concepts divorced from the day to day reality of people who may think our ideas to be insane and useless. For that reason I have always had a profound distaste for social theory that has no practical application in today’s world. They become more like articles of faith within a religion ironically. In other words they become other ways of “knowing” just as religion is another way of “knowing” about the universe just as the Western constructs of scientific theory and methods are another way of knowing.
With that said, IF the social theory way of “knowing” can be applied in a practical manner to solving issues of humanity, then to an applied anthropologist, those theories suddenly gain a lot of interest and usefulness.
How ethically such theories and methods are used (as in this case of studying terrorists) is a vastly different argument and an extremely complex one that I don’t think there will ever be agreement on.

What I tend to see most often from the academic side of anthropology is a more detached sympathy for resistance to power (and passionate criticism towards power) while ignoring the horrific brutality of that resistance and the middle ground people caught between resistance and occupation (an area of research that has not been well explored by social science).
Finally before even all of that, comes the argument over whether war is right or wrong. You could write volumes (and many have) on that topic alone along with whether this particular “war on terror” is right or wrong (or what distinct aspects of it are right or wrong). Those are issues that military theorists currently struggle with. We now are slowly seeing the fruits of those intellectual struggles (informed by social science) in the manner in which the conduct of war has changed in Afghanistan towards much more cultural sensitivity (although far from perfect) and towards conflict resolution.

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As to the (directly) above, I would agree that studying these videos as what they are (what Adam called “culturally situated texts”) would be very meaningful. I would go further and say it might be the only ethical way to study them.

I would also agree that theories are for understanding (though it kind of seems like you want your theories to be for “social engineering”).

BUT (and it is a big one) they also and inevitably have effects (yes, I’m talking about Foucault), one of which is to objectify the things they seek to understand, since before you can understand something you have to carve it off from the rest of the world (yes, I’m talking about Said). Some of us may be concerned to make these cuts at the joint (that’s Strathern again), making the objectified bits seem more ‘natural’. Others of us may seek to make more explicit the fact of this carving up (that’s basically everyone who’s written anything since about 1986 from Marcus and Fisher to Fassin and Rechtman).

If you want to say we study humanity instead of our particularly carved objects of inquiry, be my guest. That doesn’t address the fact that what counts as a legitimate focus for a study of ‘humanity’ (and even what counts human) is a function of our work on it, our particular carving.

Carving can create a thing of beauty, and that thing is always an object radically altered from its previous state as a tree or a stone or an unblemished piece of flesh. Carving can also be careless butchery, which is the result of hacking away at the world with our various cutting edges without paying careful attention to what happens when they meet the meat of the world.

This approach to knowledge and practices of knowing (yup, that’s epistemology) is incompatible with the idea of testable (if by that you mean verifiable and falsifiable) theories; it doesn’t allow for a neat separation of the theory, from its production, from its object, from its use. This is also incompatible with the idea that just because something has been well documented (within or outside academia) it exists as an empirical object in the world (which will bring us back to doh, as Julie Andrews J. Simpson might say).

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There are also other checks to accuracy in theory such as simply asking samples from your research population as to whether or not your theoretical model for them is accurate (assuming they can understand it). Another option is to test the theory if it is testable in a real world environment. If neither can be done, then you remain with the possibility that the theoretical model placed upon the Jihadist cultures (and yes they do exist and have been well documented outside of academia) does nothing but confuse and muddle an accurate framework for understanding their cultures. That was the primary reason why I heavily emphasized the importance of studying Islamic theology as it is the primary framework though which Jihadists see the world.

I’m not sure if you ignored my first post because of my lack of anthropological vernacular or theoretical rigor but I hope that you will read that post carefully as it may answer what you are asking only from a very different approach then what is routinely taught within anthropology.

As far as getting good data from the videos alone, that is only viable if you have other non-propaganda data on Jihadist cultures to compare it to. Otherwise it is propaganda (which can, in and of itself, tell you something) that will be filled with both accuracies and inaccuracies or that can be studied purely on it’s level of (or type of) effect on its target audience/s as propaganda. That would actually be a very meaningful way of studying such videos.

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I asked Varzi about jihadi videos: These strike me as a rich source of information about a culture that is otherwise inaccessible to anthropologists: jihadi martyrs.

What strikes me here is what sounds like a slip: the idea that these videos would show you the culture of jihadi martyrs.

I say it sounds like a slip, because the ideas that a) there is such a bounded thing as a ‘culture of jihadi martyrs’ and b) you could extract it from videos (produced under particular conditions for particular purposes and intended publics) seem incompatible with the idea that

Colonial documents, biographies, and census records need to be differentially theorized not as statements of fact or fiction but as culturally situated texts.

That is to say (with due respect to Gertzian metaphors), “a culture” is not the same thing as “culturally situated texts”.

I find that in these discussions it’s helpful to remember the keen observation of a very canny anthropologist friend: We always study our objects indirectly.

This is both because of the nature of our objects (they are theoretical objects, not material objects, even though they have material residues…think about ritual, for example) and the nature of our study (we speak from the spesific and address the general and ponder the relation between them… think about Marilyn Strathern, for example).

When I think about this, it makes me wonder if the relevant distinction isn’t one between classical and ‘PoMo’ (or whatever) models of ethnographic method, but rather between work that acknowledges this indirectness and work that obfuscates it?

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About your point on anthro. Islamic studies, don’t you think the same thing could be said about any study of the culture of religion. I mean, I’m a Buddhist, which means I’m kind of an atheist, and it’s all just ritual and metaphor to me. That’s a good post-modernist argument though, kind of like what Renato Rosaldo talked about with the feeling of the morning of a loved one. Very similar actually.
Something to think about.

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The other problem is that the tradition of serious “itijihad” (the process of re-interpretation of Islam to answer contemporary issues) ended in medival times for the most part and has stagnated every since. Hence the reason why how people do things in Islamic cultures often resembles how things were done hundreds of years ago. With that said, there is a strong movement that is beginning to do this seriously such as the Zaytuna Foundation, an American organization that has alot of respect even amongst many Arab Muslim scholars. Sadly these movements get very little attention in the media. Most Americans have probably never heard of Hamza Yussuf (one of Zaytuna’s founders and a top American Islamic scholar).

I do agree with you Rick, that most anthropologists do immerse themselves in their subject matter due to the nature of anthropology. However I have not seen alot of this when it comes to the issue of Islam. They might live with a Muslim family or in a Muslim community, but will they pray with them? Will they fast during Ramadan with them? Will they go and attend Jumah prayer with them and spend hours listening to lectures on Islam by Muslim scholars? If they do, then they must be embarassed to write about Islam’s spirituality and emotions I guess out of fear of not being taken seriously by fellow academics. Yet it’s those emotions that are core to the understanding of Muslims and all the differences between an average Muslim and a radicalized extremist Muslim.

That was basically my main point.

OH regarding the new breed of American terrorists. Yeah I remember reading about that lecture and totally agreed with that back then. I remember years ago meeting a white blonde haired USAF Muslim Chaplain who was arguing about Islamic theology with one of my Sufi friends and I could help but thinking, “wow, I could totally imagine that dude being a terrorist” as he was just really angry and demanding absolute respect and absolute adherence to his version of Islam (Salafism). Do you also remember after 9/11 that one militia group they found here in Texas with enough sodium cyanide to take out a small town? (And enough ammo and weapons for a small army).
This is a great website about that incident that was basically ignored by the mainstream American media:

http://www.thememoryhole.org/terror/tyler-terror.htm

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Anyway, where did I ever defend Bush policies here?

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