The article disappeared pretty quick (the link above is to the Google cache), so either someone at the magazine had a lucid moment or they don’t know how to work their Internet thingies, but either way, it’s out there and it bears the imprimateur of a pretty mainstream magazine.

Here’s the gist: During interviews for a longitudinal study of American adolescent health called Add Health, researchers assign a score for how attractive their subjects are, using a scale of 1-5. Kanazawa takes those objective-because-it’s-a-number-yo! figures and averages them by race, does a little factor analysis, and concludes that black women are objectively less attractive than all other women.  And after discarding a few factors like the “fact” that black women are fat and stupid (which, he points out, doesn’t seem to hurt black men much, who are seen as the most attractive of men), Kanazawa concludes it must be because black women are so testosteroney.

We will NOT be seeing Mr. Kanazawa on Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? 

Missing in Kanazawa’s analysis is any consideration of cultural conditioning both his researchers and his subjects have received in a society where for four centuries black women have been consistently branded as chattel and animals and where the peril of sexual relations with them has been a constant drumbeat. For 200 of those years, the offspring of black women were legally slaves. Black men have also been denigrated, of course, but in a society that highlights power, strength, and the capacity for violence as key elements of masculinity, the same racist tendencies that reduce black men to their physical presence works in their favor where raw attractiveness is concerned.

This is easy stuff. Even if there is a biological component, you can’t derive it from Kanazawa’s write-up because he hasn’t done the science – he has selected a hypothesis that fits what he wants to say and put it forth as fact. In the absence of the consideration of alternative hypotheses, there’s no there there.

But you don’t expect to see science from someone who claims to be an evolutionary psychologist and unwittingly undermines a central premise of his own discipline! Oh, right – he accidentally throws a key theory, that the absence of genetic mutations is a factor in attractiveness, under the bus in his rush to be all racist and stuff.

…Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races.  And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health).  But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

This is a big deal in evolutionary psychology, that genetic health = attractiveness. Never mind that nearly everyone procreates except the most egregious outliers, which kind of undermines the selective pressure that attractiveness is supposed to provide (if ugly people procreate, then their ostensibly unhealthy genes stay in the gene pool). But even leaving that aside, there’s the problem of, if high levels of genetic mutations are so unattractive, why are black men rates so attractive?

I’ve already given one explanation: on a purely physical basis, the raw sexuality we’ve saddled cultural understandings of black maleness with is fairly compelling. But in the absence of a cultural explanation – which is to say, in Kanazawa’s worldview – the only explanation must be that the accumulation of mutations has nothing to do with attractiveness, and that therefore genetic health has nothing to do with attractiveness, and that therefore the factors that influence mate choice are not related to genetic health, and that therefore they must be non-biological factors – which is to say, cultural standards! (Man, Kanazawa, you got yourself coming and going with this one!)

PZ Meyers has more on this piece at Pharyngula, digging further into the basic problems inherent in research based on researchers ogling teenagers and assigning them attractiveness scores, but Meyers sticks largely to the biology. Kanazawa’s problem isn’t (just) that he’s a poor biologist, but that he’s a racist who has applied his meager intellect uncritically to a pile of suspect data in order to support his own prejudices. I’ve yet to come across an evolutionary psychological explanation that doesn’t have a corresponding – and often more plausible – cultural explanation; while the cultural explanation might not ultimately be right, if you’re going to build a science on the primacy of the biological over the cultural, you’re going to have to at least consider the cultural as an alternative hypothesis!

HB 2281:

Prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that:

Promote the overthrow of the United States government.

Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.

Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.

Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

This is not a new development — I first wrote about this on Savage Minds almost a year ago, although I figured it was the kind of right-wing looniness that makes great theater but never gets through the legislative process.

Arizona clearly has a hard-on for its Hispanic population, citizens and non-citizens alike, and this law combined with its other recent laws targeting Hispanics certainly makes White Arizona’s intentions against Hispanic Arizona crystal clear. The specific target of HB 2281, as I noted last year, is a set of programs offered in Tucson high schools that teach the history of La Raza, but the wider importance is a sort of forced and simple-minded assimilationism that lacks even the nuance of early- and mid-20th century “melting pot” models. Arizona is going on record saying there is one way of life, and one way only, that can be called “American”, and that way involves whiteness, English-speaking, and a subscription to the kind of bogus faux-historical mythical charter that makes up high school US history curricula nation-wide (and which, thanks to near-neighbor Texas, is about to get boguser).

But here’s the rub: what happens when the Texas curriculum — which, if allowed to stand, will shape history textbooks, and thus history curricula, throughout the nation — comes into conflict with Arizona’s HB 2281? Texas’ standards — and I’d venture the standards Arizona’s legislature wants to see imposed state-wide — are explicitly designed to promote resentment towards non-white and poor people (q.v. the exclusion of labor union history, the downplaying of the anti-slavery and ethnic civil rights movements, the excision of folks like Cesar Chavez as “irrelevant”) and, even more clearly, are designed to promote ethnic solidarity. In fact, HB 2281 itself is designed to promote ethnic solidarity, and quite openly so — the fact that Arizona’s legislators don’t recognize their own whiteness as an ethnicity, and their assimilationism as a way of advocating white ethnic solidarity, does not make it not so.

There’s plenty of case law, including Brown v. Board itself, that demonstrates that exclusion leads to stigmatization and therefore is not allowable in public education. Arizona may get rid of the ethnic studies classes it’s white, conservative leaders despise so much, but it’s white history, white literature, and white social studies classes — which is to say, virtually the entire curriculum outside of ethnic studies courses — is clearly illegal under the tenets of the new law.

And in fact, since the law’s main goal seems to be to eliminate courses whose enrollment is restricted by ethnic requirements, all those ethnic studies programs need to do is demonstrate that their courses are open to all. The state would have a hard time showing that any of them violate the principles listed above — teaching about Mexican history and the history of Mexicans in the US is not the same as teaching Hispanic kids to overthrow the government or hate white people. It would be easier, I think, for a Hispanic or African-American to prove that the traditional US history, literature, or civics class — especially one using materials shaped by Texas’ guidelines — violates those restrictions than for a white conservative to demonstrate the same for an ethnic studies class.

This is the blind spot in today’s resurgent assimilationism. Because American whiteness is seen (especially by white people) as a lack of race or ethnicity, and because American white supremacy works well to make itself invisible (again, especially to white folks) and thus “natural” and “normal”, white conservatives are unable to reflexively consider their own chauvinism, even as they target the supposed chauvinism of any other group that dares to claim a different identity. In fact, the same principle is at work in the labeling of same-sex marriage rights as “special privileges” when clearly it is straight people who enjoy a privilege denied to non-straight people.

There’s a good chance all this is moot, that HB 2281 will be overthrown in court or rescinded by a future, less loony state legislature, but I’d love to see activists grab onto this law and the leverage it gives to challenge the teaching of white supremacy, Christian ideology, and English Firstism in Arizona schools and, by extension, throughout the US educational system before HB 2281 goes away.

[Comments closed 5-10-10 due to off-topic posts and flaming.]

How can we explain this epidemic of food allergies? The radical shift from hunting and gathering finally catching up with us? Radical advances in medical technology that allow us to identify conditions that went unnoticed a generation ago? A build-up of environmental toxins in common foods? Interaction of foods with strange new food-like products like high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavors?

Or maybe we’re imagining the whole thing.

That’s the conclusion suggested by a recent study in the UK that found that only 2% of people who claimed to suffer from food allergies were actually allergic. The rest are suffering from something else, namely, the belief that they suffer from food allergies.

Now, I don’t know much about medicine and physiology, but I do know a thing or two about belief, and when millions of people believe something that isn’t empirically verifiable (1 in 5 Britons, according to the article above), we’ve got some ‘splaining to do.

Now, my first reaction is what I think many food allergy sufferers will share: that the study is flawed, not in its procedure, but in its very medical-ness. That is, there’s a strain of anti-modernism in the recent explosion of food allergy awareness that simply doesn’t trust the mainstream medical industry to  recognize and treat food allergies. So when you get a bunch of mainstream medical researchers to study the issue, it’s no surprise that they don’t find anything.

I doubt that’s true, but here’s the thing: the belief that it’s true is part and parcel of the food allergy… can I call it a “movement”? In their rejection of modern medical knowledge and modern food processing technologies, as well as their yearning for a more “natural” diet and a greater connection to their bodily functions, food allergy advocates (if not food allergy sufferers) certainly have at least some of the hallmarks of a social movement. And they’ve certainly created social change, as well – modern supermarket shelves are packed with (ironically) high-tech allergen-free foods: gluten-free beer, bread made of spelt, soy milk and ice cream, and so on.

But leave aside the political aspects of today’s food allergies; what intrigues me is the almost religious asceticism imposed by many food allergies. A vast number of foods are made containing wheat, for instance, so the wheat allergy sufferer is constrained to a diet that eliminates a great many common foods – much like a Jew during Passover, when most wheat-containing foods must be avoided as “leavened”.

The author of the Telegraph piece above notes the similarities between food allergies and food taboos, drawing on Mary Douglas’ understanding of the way boundaries create meaning and order:

[W]hat we eat not only defines us as people but also helps us to feel control and mastery over an otherwise chaotic and random world. She argued that by ordering foods into those we can consume and those that we can’t, we create meaning, and the boundaries provide order in our lives.

As a set of dietary restrictions, rather than a medical phenomenon, it seems reasonable to see food allergies – along with vegetarianism/veganism, the Slow Food movement, the “buy local” movement, and the $30 billion-plus diet market (in the US) – as an attempt to wrest back control over an aspect of our lives that we are increasingly and maybe irretrievable disconnected with. Few of us have any connection with the food cycle except as consumers at the end of a very long and complicated food production cycle. Food allergies allow us to assert control – on pain of death – over what we ingest, and demands an attentiveness – again, on pain of death – to what’s in the foods that we buy.

But this fussiness is part of a larger yearning for control altogether, which is where the anti-modernism comes in. Food has long been not only a means of forging and asserting cultural identity but of resisting the onslaught of a homogenizing, enervating modernity that threatens to dissolve not just cultural identities but individual identities. From the health spa/retreats of the Kellogg brothers and their peers (that gave us corn flakes and granola) to the popularity of Sweet-n-Low in the ‘50s and ‘60s to the communes of the hippie era to the herbal remedies of today, food has been seen as a way to “get back” to a more “natural” way of life – as opposed to the high-stress,  low-community, detached and distracted way of life that is modernity.

None of this is to suggest that there are not very real food allergies – it’s hard to argue with anaphylactic shock. Nor, more importantly, is it to say that the 98% of food allergy sufferers in the study with no medically detectable food allergies do not, in a very real way, suffer. The bodily manifestations of the most obviously social disorders can still drastically limit a person’s quality of life.

What it does suggest is that treatment of food allergies needs to go much further than antihistamines and food avoidance to encompass the cultural psychological. If control is a central issue – as it is already recognized to be in anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders, which strike bright, ambitious young women with overbearing parents hardest precisely because they are the least in control of their lives and the most aware of it – then a) developing non-food strategies for regaining control, and b) developing a realistic relationship with the demands and pressures of daily life are also important to individual adjustment.

On a social level, food allergies and other dietary restrictions join a range of other control-seeking phenomena – pop psychology, personal productivity, conspiracy theorism, and religious fundamentalism, all of which attempt to throw a lasso around the neck of our stampeding lives. As a critique of modernity, there’s nothing original here; Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life addressed similar concerns about the loss of autonomy in 1903, and Emile Durkheim addressed similar concerns a decade earlier, noting the anomie inherent in industrial/commercial society in The Division of Labor in Society.

But over a century of social critique has done little to alleviate the real suffering of real people. The question is, do we have the resources and will to take on these challenges at a social level today? Or are food allergies, in fact, an adequate collective response to dehumanizing social conditions? Do food allergies, like, say, spirit possession on Chinese factory floors, provide the relief people need to cope with the impacts of modernity, even as they suffer?

Why Janice Harper? Largely, I think, because she is a woman who happened to believe in real gender equality in an especially backward university setting. But, Lesley Sharp also implicitly predicted what would happen when she wrote, in her review, that “Harper pulls no punches.” The critical research that Janice has done on unpopular subjects is the hallmark of her intellectual integrity, of what we need most from academics.

Read the whole thing at The Porcupine – and while you’re there, check out the rest of the material on offer from Eric and his stable of radical-leaning writers.

I don’t really know enough to evaluate all the elements of the plan — from a cursory glance, it looks like it will be a helpful in certain areas, overall doing little but doing little harm, as well. It’s not the kind of massive educational reform we need at the community college level (and even more at the university level, and still more at the K-12 level), but I see little reason to be against it.

Except for this: David Brooks supports it. And David Brooks’ track record is perfect: he’s never been right about anything. I mean, he gets details right here and there — there is a president named “Obama”, there are community colleges, students do indeed exist — but not always (e.g. the famous “you can’t get a meal over $20 in this small town” deal, to which the town’s residents replied “well, you could try one of the restaurants”) and on the Big Picture he is just stunningly, spectacularly… off. Now wrong, per se, just off.

Don’t get me wrong — I like David Brooks. He makes me laugh. He has never had a conversation with a working class person that hasn’t made him an expert on all things working class (which is probably why he has limited his interaction with real working class people to just one or two — he doesn’t need any more!). He writes with verve and style and a kind of friendly helpfulness that I find endearing. Just because the man’s wrong about everything doesn’t mean he’s not likable.

Here’s the nugget of Brook’s argument:

Nor is increased student aid fundamentally important. I’ve had this discussion with my liberal friends a thousand times, and I have come to accept that they will never wrap their minds around the truth: lack of student aid is not the major reason students drop out of college. They drop out because they are academically unprepared or emotionally disengaged or because they lack self-discipline or because bad things are happening at home.

Affordability is way down the list. You can increase student aid a ton and you still won’t have a huge effect on college completion.

Now there are a couple of uncharacteristically correct observations here. Poor academic preparation, emotional disengagement, lack of self-discipline, and difficult home lives are all factors in poor community college outcomes. But he’s wrong, dead wrong, in assuming these things have nothing to do with student aid and affordability — or in seeing Obama’s plan as somehow alleviating any of them. And he’s also wrong in looking to college completion rates as an indicator of community college success or failure.

Taking this point by point, then:

• Academic preparation: It’s no good presenting students’ lack of academic preparation as a failure of the community college. Making up for lack of academic preparation is part of the community college mission. And it’s part of that mission because of massive failures in the K-12 education system. Accomplishing this mission is hard because remedial education is one of the first cuts community colleges make in the face of inadequate budgets.
• Emotional disengagement: It’s rare to find students who are deeply invested in education as education because of the economic realities that drive them into the community college. While community colleges serve many diverse communities, the largest are the young, working- and lower-middle-class students for whom education is not a “ticket out” but a requirement to achieve the cultural capital they need just to stay in place. In the choice between college — with all its opportunity costs — and joblessness, students choose college, but its lesser-than-two-evilism is hardly emotionally compelling.
• Lack of self-discipline: This is a problem community colleges share with their peers at the university, but it’s effect is vastly amplified by the economic situation most community college students live in. The vast majority of my university students are full-time students; only a handful work full-time or even part-time. In contrast, from 60 to 100 percent of my community college students hold down full-time jobs. The inability to manage their time, maintain their focus, and prioritize their educations that university students compensate for by pulling all-nighters and the occasional guilt-driven week-long “buckle down” session leaves community college students falling further and further behind with no way to catch up.
• Difficult home lives: Again, in contrast to many university students, community college students have home lives. Some live with (and take care of) their parents and siblings; others live with their spouses and children. Some endure abusive relationships, others have been on the run from gangs — gangs either they or their siblings have had past dealing with — for years. Many dropped out of school to support their families before gaining their GEDs and enrolling at the community college. In They are, by and large, poor. And that means they often lack the economic resources to cope with the demands of community college — the cost of classes, books, supplies (like PCs) — and also lack the social resources to cope with job challenges like shifting schedules and family challenges like sick children.

All of these problems then are, if not caused directly by economic hardship, at least exacerbated by them. Although community college is, relative even to public universities, fairly cheap, relative to the incomes of poor students it is expensive.Three-credit classes at my community college run $160-200(summer courses and distance-ed courses have a premium), putting a full-time semester in the range of $1000; add books and supplies for another $500, and you’re looking at a few thousand dollars a year to take classes tucked around a difficult work-and-commute schedule and potentially a difficult family schedule. Measuring student outcomes better — which Brooks advocates — is not going to solve that.

If I had infinite power over the reform of higher education in our country, I’d look to the British system, whereby students receive government grants to cover not only tuition and books but living expenses, too. And I’d make sure that every community college established a high bar for entry into 100-level courses and offered sufficient remediation — also funded — to achieve it. (That’s a stop-gap measure, though — I’d be chatting with my infinitely-empowered colleague in K-12 about making sure students don’t graduate high school unprepared in the first place!)

Pipe dreams aside, though, the bottom line for poor students is that education is not a luxury, it’s an expensive necessity just to maintain their already-low standards of living. Making community colleges into better vocational-training institutions — that is what all the talk about “partnership with businesses” is all about — only reinforces that, which means it does nothing to address the lack of emotional attachment and self-discipline that concerns Brooks, nor the outside pressures that make education a low-priority for many community college students.

Which is also why the emphasis on completion rates is misguided. First of all, not all community college students are degree-bound. In my six years as a community college professor, my best students have been olders tudents who are taking a class or two for their own interest, to further job-related skills in hopes of a promotion or transfer, to make up for opportunities missed when younger, and so on. Many of them have no interest in a degree, which frees them up to engage the educational process itself. Mind you, many of them are as unprepared for college-level work as their 18-year-old peers — and are often less prepared, having received poor educations to begin with and now being 10, 20, or more years removed from their last classroom experience. The advantage they have is that they are generally more financially secure than their younger counterparts, and better able to balance their coursework against their other obligations. Plus, they have a kind of confidence thatcomes of not necessarily having succeeded but of having at least supported themselves as adults, an prospect that my younger students often find terrifying — and with good reason, as they see their friends, families, and peers ground further into poverty around them.

Focusing on graduation rates does nothing to address the challenges that face community college students — it’s a measure that encapsulates nothing of what makes my non-degree students perform better than my degree-seeking ones. I teach at one of the nation’s largest community colleges, where we have one of the lowest completion rates (the national avergae is around 50%; ours is in the low single-digits). We have fine modern facilities, more than adequate computer resources, campuses placed conveniently around the Las Vegas valley, and motivated, creative instructors.

Yet, every semester I see 1/3 to 1/2 of my students disappear over the course of the semester. And I’m not alone, judging from the gradual emptying out of parking lots that overflowed at the beginning of the semester. In contrast, I rarely lose even one or two students from my university courses — even when I teach the exact same course. (For two years, I taught “Gender, Race, and Class” at both schools, using the same books, same syllabus, same assignments, and of course same me — a pretty good control situation for a postmodernist like myself!) The difference is not in the schools (or not primarily in the schools), it’s in the students and the environment they live in — an environment that’s overwhelmingly friendlier to white, middle-class students than to poorer students and students of color.

So, I’m sorry Mr. Brooks, but affordability and lack of student aid are, indeed, central factors in the failures of community colleges. Improving educational resources is great, but if it doesn’t address the financial reality of poor students’ lives, I wouldn’t expect much of an improvement, however you measure outcomes. Obama’s plan might well do some good — it’s part of a larger plan that does address college affordability — but on its own, it’s more likely to provide benefits for businesses and college administrations than for community college students — students who, ultimately, deserve a lot better than just job training. They deserve an education!

Image via Wikipedia

Legislation that will end ethnic studies programs in Arizona high schools looks set to be signed into law by the state’s governor. Promoted by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, the law will deprive public schools that do not eliminate ethnic studies courses of 10% of their state funding.

The target of the bill appears to be Tucson Unified School District, whose Raza Studies program serves some 1,200 Latino students. Interestingly, students involved in this program show a marked improvement over the state average on the state’s standardized testing (which goes well with other evidence that students involved in bilingual education, as well as students given access to electives like art, photography, and creative writing perform better on standardized tests – they tend to be more focused on and more engaged with school overall than students who are deprived of these “optional” courses).

Exempted from the law are Native American-focused courses that are protected by federal law, and English Language Learner courses.

Attacks on courses that teach parts of American history that deviate from the traditional, conservative narrative of America’s greatness are not new, of course. When then-chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney commissioned a panel to develop national history standards in the early 1990’s, she was shocked by the results. In a piece published in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The End of History”, she railed against “an academic establishment that revels in the kind of politicized history that characterizes much of the National Standards” – history that includes Native Americans and the Underground Railroad as part of the American story, as well as the embarrassments of McCarthyism (this was a time when conservatives were still embarrassed about McCarthy) and the Ku Klux Klan. (So infuriated was Cheney by the standards that in 2004 she had a pamphlet for parents called “Helping Your Child Learn History” pulped and re-printed because it included references to the standard!)

At risk for conservatives like Cheney is not history, per se. After all, the Massacre at Sand Creek happened, the Constitution really did set black people’s worth at 3/5 that of white people’s, and police and militia really did attack the children of striking workers in Lawrence, MA, as they approached the train station en route to lodging away from the hunger and violence of the strike. In a place like Tucson, which was after all part of Mexico until the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, the history of “la Raza” is particularly relevant.

What is at risk is the notion that American history should not be just (or even in many cases) the facts of our past but should be a story that edifies national citizenship. In her response to the National History Standards, published as American Memory, Cheney wrote that:

Knowledge of the ideas that have molded us and the ideals that have mattered to us functions as a kind of civic glue. Our history and literature give us symbols to share; they help us all, no matter how diverse our backgrounds, feel part of a common undertaking (Quoted in Symcox, Linda, [2002] Whose History?  P. 85).

In other words, there is a narrative of history that Americans should share, and this narrative is one that celebrates the triumphs and high values of our nation while downplaying the embarrassments and shortcomings.

In Arizona, and in the Southwest in general, this narrative takes on special importance as an assimilative tool, because for the most part, it is not the history of the people who live there. Latino children in traditional US history classes get the dubious pleasure of sitting through months of a history that, unless by some miracle the teacher manages to get up to the 1960s  and the agricultural worker strikes led by Cesar Chavez, is unlikely to contain a Latino name except as enemies. This narrative that largely excludes the Latino experience form American history defines our history largely as the history of white folks, predominantly male. (It is probably not coincidental that more-assimilated Hispanics in the US tend to identify themselves as “white” on the Census, while less-assimilated Hispanics tend to identify racially as “other”.)

Ethnic Studies (along with Women’s Studies, another pet peeve of Arizona’s education superintendent) challenges this narrative, which is why it is a favorite target of conservatives. We saw, for example, how the Ward Churchill affair quickly and easily spilled over into a condemnation of the entire field of Ethnic Studies. (Consider Don Feder’s contribution at Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com, in which he places the term “ethnic studies” in shudder-quotes in the first line, to suggest that it’s not a “real” academic discipline.) In the wake of 9/11, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni rushed into print a pamphlet called “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It” [links to PDF file] which complained that after 9/11,

…instead of ensuring that students understand the unique contributions of America and Western civilization—the civilization under attack—universities are rushing to add courses on Islamic and Asian cultures (Martin, Jerry and Anne D. Neal [2002] P. 6).

(I quote from the 2002 version; an earlier version published in 2001 included the names of the academics and students in the Appendix who had dared to utter statements in the wake of the attacks that ACTA deemed “anti-American”; it was taken down from ACTA’s website and replaced with a version that identified speakers only by social role.)

Of course, with it’s anglo-centrism and privileging of the doings of white elites, American history as preferred by Cheney and her ACTA cohorts, and by Feder and Horowitz, and so many others is as much an “ethnic study” as Tucson’s La Raza program. It will be interesting to see what happens when some smart activist gets it into his or her head to challenge the inclusion of traditional US history in the Arizona high school curriculum. The law in question prohibits the teaching of classes that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals“ – by the same standards that would forbid the teaching of Latino history and culture, the teaching of Anglo history and culture is also prohibited by this law.

(The issue of treatment “as individuals” is a complex and troubling one, but one which I don’t understand well enough to comment on – I think the argument is that treating students as “Latinos” somehow deprives them of their individuality. Again, by that standard, treating them as “Americans” would also be prohibited, but I feel like there’s something deeper and more disturbing at work in this language.)

Meanwhile, though, students in Arizona will be deprived of history in exchange for a fairy-tale version of history that pretends to be their story. If successful, I would expect to see similar laws passing in any state that offers programs like Tucson’s La Raza program – and state legislators being who they are, attempts to impose similar restrictions on public universities and colleges as well.

Image by Libertinus via Flickr

For the past several years, my research has led me further and further into the world of counterinsurgency, military anthropology, human terrain, and other aspects of a military regime of knowledge. What concerns me, most of all, is the way that knowledge generated by social scientists can be used (and, if the past is any indication, will be used) to the disadvantage of the people on, from, and with whom anthropologists and other social scientists generate that knowledge.

This issue is hardly limited to anthropologists, though we have traditionally held a kind of loose monopoly on the world’s most vulnerable peoples. Nowadays, social scientists of every stripe traipse through the same terrain anthropologists once considered their own – and we, of course, have no problem returning the favor.

So when a friend forwarded me a story about geographers in Oaxaca mapping the “cultural terrain”, my disciplinary ears perked up. At issue are many of the same issues at play in debates over anthropologists’ and others’ involvement with HTS in Iraq and Afghanistan, although in many ways I find the situation I’m about to describe more frightening still, as it presages wars or conflicts as yet unfought – even counterinsurgencies to insurgencies yet to surge.

México Indigena and Mexican Indigenes

From 2005-2007, a team of geographers led by Jerome Dobson and Peter Herlihy of the University of Kansas worked with local trainees to map land ownership and claims on collective lands in indigenous communities in Oaxaca and San Luis Potosi. Called “México Indigena” and partially funded by the US Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), the project was a pilot program for the American Geographic Society’s Bowman Expeditions, which intends to create maps of the “cultural terrain” of poor and indigenous communities throughout the world.

Dobson’s project seems on its surface like a straightforward exercise in cultural geography. Working with a local university, México Indigena trained members of local communities to collect GIS data throughout their communities, with particular emphasis on defining privately- and communally-held lands. This data is useful for communities wishing to document their holdings, as well as to researchers interested in studying the impact of Mexico’s PROCEDE program, which shifts public and communal lands into private hands. México Indigena is committed to producing “open source” data that can be used freely by the communities they study (a concept worth revisiting, as “open source” neatly cuts across both the Open Source software movement on one hand and the Open Source intelligence movement on the other).

What makes México Indigena troubling is the involvement of FMSO. Headquartered at the Leavenworth Army Base, FMSO is explicitly concerned with counterinsurgency and “asymmetric” warfare. According to its website, its mission is to provide analysis and data on “emerging and asymmetric threats, regional military and security developments, and other issues that define evolving operational environments around the world”. There is some question about FMSO’s relationship with the Army’s Human Terrain Studies (HTS) program—the relationship is close enough that several sources have claimed HTS is part of FMSO (e.g. Mychalejko 2009), where the program apparently originated before being transferred to another office of the Army.

Whatever the relationship, FMSO is directly involved in the development of human terrain as a military paradigm. Which is why Dobson approached FMSO’s IberoAmerican researcher, Lt. Col. Geoffrey B. Demarest, requesting a half-million dollars in funding for México Indigena —part of a hoped-for $125 million for Bowman Expeditions’ proposed worldwide human terrain mapping. In his proposal, Dobson justified his project by explicitly citing their usefulness for state ends, particularly military action:

The greatest shortfall in foreign intelligence facing the nation is precisely the kind of understanding that geographers gain through field experience, and there’s no reason that it has to be classified information… The best and cheapest way the government could get most of this intelligence would be to fund AGS to run a foreign fieldwork grant program covering every nation on earth (Dobson, in Mychalejko and Ryan 2009).

For Lt. Col. Demarest, this kind of research is highly desirable. Demarest is the author of several papers and a book, Geoproperty: Foreign Affairs, National Security, and Property Rights (1998), on the importance of private property as part of a democratic system and privatization as a tool for incorporating communities into the global market and for defending national security, with a special focus on Latin America. The gist of Demarest’s work is that:

[I]nformal property ownership in either rural or urban settings is the breeding ground for criminal or insurrectionary activity…. He specifically cites concerns about the criminality of large areas of the dispossessed, as they become separately governed autonomous zones….

Demarest asserts that the privatization of property is the key to stability, prosperity, progress, and security in Latin America, and that formal land titling leads to effective government control [and] existing property of real value must be made secure… through a phenomenon he describes as the “architecture of control” (Sedillo 2009).

As if that weren’t troubling enough—and somewhat at odds with the stated goals of Dobson and Herlihy, to explore the implications of privatization in indigenous communities—there is the question of FMSO’s official interest in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. What is the operational function of this kind of data, and why would the US Army pay so richly for it?

Pre-emptive counterinsurgency

FMSO’s interest in Oaxaca makes more sense in the context of the Merida Initiative, or as critics call it, “Plan Mexico”, after its similarities with the US government’s disastrous Plan Colombia. Merida is a program of long-term military support for Mexico to help stem the production and transfer of illegal drugs in and through Mexico.

Overlapping as it did with the 2006 uprising and seizure of the city of Oaxaca by the Oaxacan People’s Popular Assembly (APPO) and its seven-month occupation as the Oaxaca Commune, the collection of human terrain data on behalf of the US Army has particularly sinister overtones. Demarest’s two interests—democratization through privatization and suppression of insurgency through culturally-informed military action—seem to come together all too nicely in Oaxaca, which is why I’ve started to think of this as a program of pre-emptive counterinsurgency, combining two of the darkest aspects of the Bush-era military: pre-emptive warfare and human terrain-based counterinsurgency.

México Indigena raises hard questions about the relationship between the military and the social sciences, and about the uses of cultural knowledge. Communities in Oaxaca have complained that the project’s members never made clear that their research was funded by the US military, which has raised concerns over what local activists have termed “geopiracy”—given Demarest’s thoughts on communal property, the idea that the collection of GIS data in this region, collated with communal property holdings, could be used to sustain a large-scale appropriation of land by the Mexican state and apportionment to private interests—likely corporate interests—does not seem so far-fetched.

Neither does the fear that this data would be used as part of counterinsurgency efforts to undermine local radical leadership and prevent the kind of wide-scale organizing Mexico has fought in neighboring Chiapas. Under the guise of the War on Drugs, local political opponents of the Mexican state could well find themselves branded “insurgents” and targeted by a military force—one the Mexican government has not been at all averse to using in place of regular police—informed by up-to-date GIS data. The rising drug production and trafficking in Oaxaca, as well as the recent drug-related violence across the US-Mexico border, make this all the more troubling – especially when coupled with the notion that communal and informal land tenure fosters “criminal and insurrectionary” behavior.

Dobson’s argument that the data collected is available to everyone, including the local communities, rings somewhat hollow, especially the use of the phrase “open source” to describe the project. As an advocate of scientific transparency and open access to cultural data, I find myself highly conflicted by the use of the phrase “open source” to describe research funded by the FMSO, which houses the Army’s Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) training program. According to FMSO’s training document (http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/OSINT-Training.pdf),

In addition to offering alternative sources to validate or challenge classified sources, OSINT can provide essential foundation knowledge for operational and decision-making requirements. This can include historical background, political developments, socioeconomic and demographic context, cultural insight, geographic, and technical and critical infrastructure data. OSINT can be used to monitor foreign events and perspectives. OSINT is also particularly useful for independent application in the training environment, to include “red cell” studies and threat analysis. OSINT proffers the widest dissemination capability of any intelligence discipline while generating the least political risk, benefiting inter-agency and international cooperative efforts.

Taking sides

Of course, many will say that if this information is available, there’s nothing that will stop the military from using it, and I agree with that. What concerns me here is not the military using this information so much as the military commissioning and funding the collection of this information—and future plans to collect much, much more. Already Bowman Expeditions have begun a similar mapping program in the Antilles, with a third project planned (and possibly already underway) in Colombia (Dobson 2009). We have to ask not only what this data will be used for—a consideration that does not seem to have been impressed nearly adequately enough on the people of Oaxaca—but how those goals shape the data, both in what is recorded and what is not.

More importantly, we have to ask about the moral and practical effects of social scientists actively working to provide information intended to better equip the US military for warfare in the regions they study. While I have been somewhat skeptical of arguments about “blowback” endangering anthropologists in the field, programs like México Indigena make it quite hard to dismiss the likelihood that future American researchers will be taken for agents of the US military. More importantly, in equipping governments not only for war against our research subjects but to conduct assimilative projects aimed to “democratize” indigenous peoples by targeting communal landownership and other collective behaviors, we violate a primary ethical tenet, to do what is in our power to assure that our research does not harm the people we have studied.

As an internal disciplinary matter, there is already an uproar among geographers and an investigation into the matter of compliance with a code of ethics that’s not to different from anthropologists’. Like us, geographers worry about informed consent – and reports of information about US Army funding being withheld from Oaxacan communities suggest that the “informed” part my have been paid less than it’s due in this case. But whatever move(s) geographers take or don’t take, this use of social science, whatever its disciplinary origins, raises a lot of uncomfortable questions for all of us.

Among them – first among them, I would think – is how complicit social scientists want to be if and when this kind of data is applied in a military setting, whether by our own military in the context of a counterinsurgency or the great American umbrella of the War on Drugs (apparently due for rebranding by the Obama administration), or by other governments in partnership with ours? This is not a question of personal moral choice – how can it be? It’s also not a question of “defrocking” social scientists “gone bad” – this is a question of overall disciplinary direction and, ultimately, of our commitment not just to our own research but to the people who make it possible. Where – and how – do we draw the line where that commitment becomes irrelevant?

Work Cited

Dobson, Jerome. 2009. AGS Bowman Expeditions. American Geographical Society Website. URL: http://www.amergeog.org/bowman-expeditions.htm (last accessed 4/19/09).

Mychalejko,Cyril and Ramor Ryan. 2009. U.S. Military Funded Mapping Project in Oaxaca: Geographers used to gather intelligence? Z Magazine 22(4). URL: http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/21044 (last accessed 4/19/09).

Sedillo, Simon. 2009. The Demarest Factor: The Ethics of U.S. Department of Defense Funding got Academic Research in Mexico. El Enemigo Común (website). URL: http://elenemigocomun.net/2255 (last accessed 4/19/09).

Image via Wikipedia

The library at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln has posted a collection of digitized government comics and related material. There are about 180 freely-downloadable PDFs available, on topics ranging from health and human services to military training and recruitment.

Among my favorite is a 1951 AIr Force publication explaining psychological warfare entitled “Bullets? Or Words?” and illustrated by Milton Caniff, a comic-strip artist who gave us the syndicated comic strips “Terry and the Pirates” and “Steve Canyon”.

In fashioning new psychological weapons, it is necessary to base them on sound scientific principles and an understanding of psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology and other allied fields of knowledge.

Indeed.

I’m also a fan of "Bert the Turtle Says Duck and Cover", which offers immensely useful and reassuring advice on what to do in case of a nuclear bomb explosion. “There is always something to shelter you – indoors, a schol desk, a chair, a table.” Funny how they left out lead-lined iceboxes, but perhaps the authors felt that went without saying.

Related material includes briefs for the artists and authors, as well as government reports on the impact of comics, such as the US Senate’s 1955 “Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency: Interim Report”. If you remember your history (or have read Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay) you’ll remember that the mid-‘50s saw a witch-hunt launched against comic book publishers and authors every bit as intense as the one launched against Hollywood, with comic books accused of promoting delinquent and violent behavior as well as homosexuality and anti-Americanism.

Although my interest is more sparked by the Cold War-era material, the collection dates up to the last decade, offering an interesting lens through which to view the last 6 decades or so of US culture and of the US government’s relations with its subjects.

Image by monsieur paradis via Flickr

The University of Chicago has posted some of the audio from the “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency” conference held there last spring (2008). Some of the speakers are not included, whether because they opted out or there were copyright issues or what, I don’t know. But among the speakers included are:

• David Price’s great plenary keynote, “Soft Power, Hard Power and the Anthropological “Leveraging” of Cultural “Assets”: Distilling the Theory, Politics and Ethics of Anthropological Counterinsurgency”
• Jeremy Walton’s discussion of Turkish pulp fiction and action flicks, “Inclement Storms, Hungry Wolves: Consuming the War on Terror in Contemporary Turkey”
• Hugh Gusterson on the Pentagon’s penchant for simplistic, technologized solutions to human problems – with a discussion of the Phrase-a-lator, a handheld device that translates spoken Arabic to English (apparently the fish-in0the-ear scenario isn’t panning out) – in “The Cultural Turn in the War on Terror”
• Roberto Gonzalez on the theoretical implications of the concept of Human Terrain, “’Human Terrain’ and Indirect Rule: Theoretical, Practical, and Ethical Concerns
• My own historical contextualization of the failures of anthropological counterinsurgency and the incompatabilities between anthropology and military action, “The Uses of Anthropology in the Insurgent Age”
• And lots more great stuff!

The full-length papers will be collected in the University of Chicago Press’ forthcoming book Anthropology and Counterinsurgency, due out in February 2010 (to the best of my knowledge).

The more recent conference “Reconsidering American Power” was also recorded, and I hope that audio will be available from that quicker than the year it took to get audio up from last year’s conference. I’ll let you know when that’s available.

First, Roberto Gonzalez sent me this link to a BBC Radio 4 show on the embedding of anthropologists in military units in Iraq and Afghanistan. The show features Gonzalez, Michael Gilsenan, Hugh Gusterson, Montgomery McFate, Marcus Griffin, and others. Listen quickly, as it appears to only be posted until the end of April.

Next up, Laura Nader speaks about her recent book (with Ugo Mattei) Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal. Any opportunity to hear Nader bring her tremendous mind to bear on the issues that define our lives is not to be missed!

Finally, from the Wired Danger Room comes this odd report about the military’s efforts to reproduce anthropological analysis using computer modeling. Now, I’ve been pretty dismissive of the military’s ability to grapple with the implications of anthropology – there is, I firmly believe (and find borne out over and over in the historical record) a fundamental disconnect between the logic of military action and the logic of anthropological practice. But even I’m a little shocked (and a little amused…) by the justification given for looking into the use of computerized behavioral modeling:

More intriguing about this proposal, however, is the reasoning for why virtual anthros may be better than the real thing: “Today in DoD, this analysis is conducted by anthropological experts, known to carry their own bias, which often leads to faulty recommendations and inaccurate behavioral forecasting.”

Let me know how that works out for ya, guys.

I’ll be presenting a paper during Friday’s panel session, “Uses and Abuses of Social Sciences: Disciplines of and for What?” Entitled “Are We Ready Yet for Action Anthropology?”, my paper is intended to counter arguments that anthropologists’ refusal to cooperate with military and intelligence efforts like HTS, PRISP, and the Minerva Consortium necessarily condemns anthropology to irrelevance. My hope is that by examining the model of action anthropology, which has gained little traction in academic anthropology in the 50 years since Sol Tax and his students proposed it, a way of meaningfully engaging contemporary issues might emerge that avoids the troubling issues raised by direct subordination to military and intelligence agencies.

Other participants include David Price, Catherine Lutz, Hugh Gusterson, Jeff Bennett, Robert Vitalis, Matthew Sparke, Sean Mitchell, Kevin Caffrey, Amahl Bishara, Rochelle Davis, Roberto Gonzalez, Keith Brown, Chris Nelson, and a variety of U of Chicago folks from anthropology and the other social sciences, including honorary Savage Mindster Marshall Sahlins. (Note: I’m listed as “editor” of Savage Minds, a title I neither asked for nor knew was being ascribed to me! I’m also listed as an “independent researcher”, despite my 6 years affiliation with the College of Southern Nevada…)

On a related note, the paper I presented last year will be out early 2010 from University of Chicago Press in a collected volume of essays from the conference. (Can we talk some time about academic publishers demanding all copyrights? For free?) As far as I know, the book will be titled following the conference, that is Anthropology and Counterinsurgency. Look for it in an academic bookstore near you!

OK, maybe it’s not that exciting. What’s really happening is that professors and teachers are getting fed up with the limitations and corporate-overlordness of commercial learning software like Blackboard and WebCampus — and in a web 2.0 world, there are plenty of options for the fed up. With a click of the mouse and a sweep of the browser, it’s easy as Pi to cobble together your own online learning system — one with far more to offer both students and faculty than the tools schools are laying out big bucks for.

The Chronicle brought the… movement? news? thingy? … to mainstream attention, but their contribution is just a fillip on the work of professors and teachers all over the nation who have been thinking long and hard about how to bring learning to the web — and in doing so, to their students.

Let me say right here, for the record, I don’t buy all this “digital generation” nonsense. We’ve got a way to go before that happens. When I no longer have to teach my students how to Google unfamiliar terms or how to add an attachment to an email, then I might well believe that they are comfortably native in the online world; for now, the most I can say is that what I see as an important set of tools, they seem to see as a big box of toys, toys they’re happy to play with as long as it’s the same toy everyone else has.

But that doesn’t mean the Internet isn’t important — in fact, I think it makes it more incumbent on us, as educators, to show the amazing power of the Internet for more than just gossiping about your friends and breaking up with your lovers.

So What IS It?!

OK, edupunk. Basically, what you’ve got is a nascent movement by educators inspired by the DIY-ness of punk music (and fashion, design, writing, etc.) to step outside the walled garden provided by their institutions. Some are turning to wikis, others to blogging, still others to user-generated content, Google maps, and all manner of mashups. The occasionally savage Michael Wesch is a good example, though I don’t know if he considers himself “edupunk” — but it’s nt particularly punk to worry about labels, so who cares?

Edupunk is also a political statement. Scratch that — it’s a collection of political statements, and sometimes isn’t a political statement at all. Stephen Downes sums it up nicely:

Edupunk, it seems, takes old-school Progressive educational tactics–hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests–and makes them relevant to today’s digital age, sometimes by forgoing digital technologies entirely.

My own entry into edupunk (though I didn’t think of it as such at the time, and if you don’t count Savage Minds, which seems animated by the same principles even if it’s not explicitly an instructional tool) came about last summer when I decided to implement blogging in my “Gender, Race, and Class” course. For years, I’d been requiring a weekly response paper, an ungraded assignment that asked students to record their thoughts on the readings. This has been by far my most successful assignment — I could easily forego tests and essays, if not for the fact that a class of ungraded assignments probably wouldn’t give much incentive to master the material. But it galled me that the conversation these papers represented was just between each individual student and myself. I wanted their fellow students to benefit from their wide range of experience, thinking, and opinion.

So what’s a professor to do? As any patient IT department employee will tell you, “WebCampus (or Blackboard) offers a variety of interactive features including bulletin boards to facilitate virtual conversations in the blah blah blah. ” I’m sure they offer a really swell product, but a) the commercial classroom management systems offer a standard that students will never use again after their graduation, and b) they exist behind the university’s paywall. If my students have something to say, they might as well be saying it to the world, not just to the students in their class whose registration bill is current.

As far as I’m concerned, teaching students to engage with the world around them is crucial, both morally and pedagogically. (And, you’ll say, “politically”. So be it.) WebCampus and Blackboard don’t offer that; they offer a way to standardize education and, by extension, students.

So I built a blog. On Drupal, if you must know. And I required students to post their responses for the world to see, and to comment on each other’s posts. That second requirement is, of course, my hat-tip to totalitarianist authority; I knew that organic conversation was unlikely to develop — because they’re not “digital natives”!

That summer session went great, and the blog played a big role in that. In the fall, I tried again, this time with two classes, one blog. It didn’t work as well. I couldn’t stay on top of it, posts got shorter and shorter and less and less thoughtful, interaction was forced, there were too many students talking at once. I’ll need to rethink it before I try again — but it was definitely worth the effort.

What’s the point?

A lot of professors are fed up. They’re fed up with the commodification of education, they’re fed up with being straight-jacketed in their teaching because the school paid good money for an expensive system and they’d damn well better use it, they’re fed up by the increasing emphasis on education as workplace training instead of citizen (or even human) training, and they’re fed up with the apparent inability of administrators to do anything with a positive educational effect.

And, frankly, we’re fed up with failing. No matter what grade you teach, whether that’s 3rd grade or upper-division uni, you’re getting classes, semester after semester, that are unprepared for grade-appropriate education. It’s a tough thing to decide how many of your students you’re never going to reach; a lot of us will try anything in the hopes that we can reduce that number to zero. Blogging, twittering, mashing up data, wiki-ing, and other web-enabled activities allow us to offer the kind of hands-on work that we know can have an effect — much more, anyway, than assigning a multiple-choice quiz through Blackboard!

I’m only skimming the surface here. bavatuesdays is doing a good job of keeping up to date on edupunk’s emergence (the link is to all posts tagged “edupunk”; pay special attention to The Glass Bees); a new Wikipedia entry will likely evolve as more is known about this newly discovered “tribe” of educators; and Leslie Madsen-Brooks offers a good overview of the meanings attached to “edupunk” so far at Blogher.

Update (4/18): I’ve just heard from the conference organizers that Honorary Savage Mind-at-Large Marshall Sahlins will be chairing the last session (my session). He was an early invite, but it had looked like he wasn’t going to make it to the conference.

At first blush, it seems Gates — a former university president — has learned some of the lessons of the past that led to the meltdown of the Cold War military-academic partnership in the Vietnam years. Most notably, he has come down against secret research, and claims to encourage critical responses to Department of Defense programs and practices.

“Let me be clear that the key principle of all components of the Minerva Consortia will be complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity. There will be no room for ’sensitive but unclassified,’ or other such restrictions in this project,” Gates said. “We are interested in furthering our knowledge of these issues and in soliciting diverse points of view — regardless of whether those views are critical of the department’s efforts. Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand — or even seek to understand — the countries or cultures we were dealing with.”

University presidents are, of course, thrilled at the prospect, dreaming of university coffers flush with DoD funds once again. But academic researchers, particularly anthropologists, should be very nervous about Gates’ plans. This kind of direct involvement in the funding and direction of academic research, even without the veil of secrecy that military-academic partnerships have often had in the past, threatens to powerfully influence the shape of our discipline — even for people who reject military funding.

Here’s why: Given today’s funding landscape for social scientific research, Gate’s Minerva Consortium will easily become one of the largest, if not the largest, source of research funding. Other sources of funding will likely continue to exist, and if you’re interested in studying alcoholism on Indian reservations or detailing the performance of gender in Midwestern drag shows, not much will change.

But you’re department will be increasingly filled with researchers whose interests at the very least coincide with , and are more likely shaped by, the military’s concerns. You’ll be competing with these darlings of the administration — beloved for the funding the bring into the school –  for university resources, tenure, and students.

Gates practically says as much. His goal is not to further the overall body of knowledge within academic disciplines, but to increase the military’s stock of knowledge about “the countries or cultures we [are] dealing with.” And by “dealing with”, he doesn’t mean tourism.

To that end, Gates has already proposed 4 areas his Minerva would encourage:

• Chinese military and technology studies,
• Iraqi and terrorist perspectives,
• Religious studies (which he describes as “religious issues… addressed in a strategic context”), and
• “New disciplines” paralleling the game theory and Kremlinology studies of the Cold War era.

There’s nothing innately disturbing about any of these areas (though I wonder what the big-name Kremlinologists are doing these days?) — until they become the centers of gravity of the social sciences. And until their utilitarian focus — “what can we offer that the military can use?” — begins shaping research methodologies, publishing strategies, and pedagogies.

The research plan offered by Gates amounts to little more than Counter-Insurgency 501. It’s goal is not anthropology’s goal, which as I understand it is the increase in humanity’s knowledge of the nature of humanity. Instead, it offers an increase in knowledge of a tiny corner of human nature, and promises to make that fraction central to academic social science.

More importantly, it treats humans — their lives, their culture, their behavior — as means to an end. This is not knowledge for knowledge’s sake, not by a long stretch. It’s not knowledge for the betterment of humanity. It’s not even knowledge for the satisfaction of human curiosity. It’s knowledge for the achievement of strategic goals — goals that are set and grow out of particular political interests, not the priorities of anthropology and the other social sciences. Goals that take a particular status quo — US imperialism, to put a blunt point on it — as desirable, necessary, and even natural.

Ethically, Minerva offers at best a Devil’s bargain — help us kill, and maybe we won’t kill quite as many. It’s implicit in Gates’ praise of HTS: “One commander in Afghanistan said last year that after working with a Human Terrain Team, the number of armed strikes he had to make declined more than 60 percent.” That’s great — but what of the other 40%? Is it ok to kill just 40% as many of the anthropologist’s subjects? And what of this scenario: emboldened by it’s superior knowledge of enemy “human terrain”, the military begins to take on new missions, new campaigns, even new wars, that it wouldn’t have given their previous lack of knowledge?

Like I said, university presidents, their sight hindered by the neon dollar signs flashing in their eyes, don’t share these concerns. But as anthropologists, we simply must. We are only just starting to understand the way that the Cold War, with its attendant military investment in the social sciences — shaped anthropology. Must we really repeat that experiment to see if the first time around wasn’t just a fluke?

For me, Savage Minds has always been a place to “mess around”, anthropologically speaking. A place to try out new ideas and thin hypotheses, a wall to throw stuff onto in order to see what sticks. A place where I could try my hand at the kind of argument Yehudi Cohen makes in Disappearance of the Incest Taboo (that’s an AnthroSource link, for those with access) and string together some ideas about the end of marriage, or muse about the moral underpinnings of anthropology. A place to incubate arguments and positions — and to receive feedback from my peers both inside and outside of the field.

It’s been invaluable to have this kind of forum, away from the main channel of academic thought — the journals and academic presses that are our disciplinary mainstream, even if many of them have lower readerships than Savage Minds. So valuable, in fact, that I felt it absolutely necessary to include Savage Minds in my “Acknowledgements” when I published Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Here’s what I wrote:

Over the years, two online communities have proven invaluable as both a source of new ideas and a place to rehearse my own fevered anthropological imaginings. To the members of ANTHRO-L (especially Ron Kephart, John McCreery, Richard Senghas, Jacob Lee, Richard Wilsnack, Anj Petto, Ray Scupin, Robert Lawless, Wade Tarzia, Lynn Manners, Martin Cohen, Bruce Josephson, Richley Crapo, Tom Kavanagh, Scott MacEachern, Mike Pavlik, Thomas Riley, and Phil Young) and my fellow Savage Minds, (Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Chris Kelty, Nancy LeClerc, Kathleen Lowery, Tak Watanabe, and newbies Thomas Erikson, Maia Green, and Thomas Strong) I offer both my gratitude and respect.

In the end, I’m not sure I could have written Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War without having had this forum to develop those ideas. The other Minds and the many people who comment here not only helped me to refine my thoughts on anthropology and its role(s) in society, but to rethink myself as an anthropologist.

By way of gratitude, then, I asked my publishers if I could offer at least a little something back to this community which has offered me so much. They responded enthusiastically, providing me with a discount code to offer Savage Minds readers. So here’s the deal:

1. Order Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War from U Mich Press.
2. At checkout, enter the coupon code: WAX08UMP
3. Enjoy a 20% savings!

With the coupon code, the US price is $26.00 instead of the usual $32.50. As far as I know, this offer is not limited to US buyers, but I’m pretty sure the price of international shipping will eat up any savings over buying the book at full price locally. The coupon code expires on May 30, 2008.

For more information about the book, check out the review by Penny Howard at the Socialist Review. More reviews and information about the book will be posted at my personal site on the book page as it becomes available.

And if you’re not interested, for whatever reason (maybe your mother was cruel to you as a child?), that’s cool, too — I offer you as a member of the Savage Minds community my thanks.

But really, buy the book. Buy the book or I shall plug at you a second time! Tphptptptptp!