In this installment of Illustrated Man, we turn our attention to Burma Chronicles, Delisle’s most recent foray into the graphic representation of a westerner’s encounter with an Asian culture. Why Burma Chronicles you ask? They shuttered our local Borders Books and I got it on clearance, that’s why. I for one am not thrilled at that company’s implosion (unlike some snarky others). Shit man! I live in a city of 180,000 and now we have one bookstore left, a Barnes and Nobles. Okay, two if you count the used store that specializes in romance novels.

Back to the comic. Guy’s wife, Nadege, is an admin for Medecins Sans Frontières, and she brings them to Rangoon while MSF attempts to reach a remote and stigmatized ethnic group who reside along the border with Thailand. While Nadege is away Guy spends a lot of time caring for their infant son Louis, socializing with the NGO crowd, trying to squeeze in a little work on the side, and making wry observations about everyday life under the military junta.

Delisle’s art is highly skilled and alternates between a deceptively simply cartoony style (usually reserved for facial expressions and people in motion) and awesomely detailed (used sparingly to depict architecture and military uniforms, for instance). In an interesting pseudo-anthropological move, Delisle inserts occasional self-reflections on his artistic process, as when his ink supplies run out and he has to venture into the city markets or when a local artist warns him to change materials during the monsoon season and, after ignoring him, he concludes the story with intentionally smudged and runny pictures.

The author mixes up his narrative techniques too. Some vignettes are propelled mostly by dialogue among characters, while some others consist entirely of boxed narration. There are even a few wordless strips. This combined with the artistic variation helps to keep the reader engaged in the book, which is far from being a profound exegesis on Burmese history and culture. It’s light reading, but thoughtful.

There are a lot of warm, fatherly moments interspersed among the observations of a foreign culture and critiques of the military regime. Delisle pushes his son’s stroller through the streets and is everywhere stopped by locals fascinated to see an occidental baby. Then one day when the milk was gone Guy creamed his coffee from the baby’s bottle. Guy really gets to see how the other half lives when he and Louis join a play group for children of UN diplomats. In particular he has his eyes set on landing a membership at the swank and members only Australian club which features squash courts, a pool, swings for the kids, and steaks on the barbie.

The house is huge. I’m the only dad in the group. The group of moms are on one side… the nannies and babies on the other.

GUY: I draw comics.
EXPAT: Ah lovely… what a nice hobby.
GUY: It’s not a hobby. It’s what I do for a living. How about you? What do you do?
EXPAT: We work at the UN.
GUY: “We”?
EXPAT: My husband.
GUY: Ah, I see. And does anybody here have a husband at the Australian Embassy?

Life under the authoritarian military regime in Burma necessitates dealing with any of a number of apparent absurdities like reading censored magazines with the pages missing. The censors must abide by government mandated quotas and have been known to order the presses to run extra copies of the censored pages so they can seize them. On another occasion Deslisle offers to help MSF troubleshoot an email problem, which keep getting bounced back from the office in France. To meet with Burmese IT he has to wait in a fenced yard until he is allowed to enter a “fortress” by escort only. Next we learn that the Burmese drive on the right (a symbolic rejection of their British colonial past) but economic sanctions have limited the availability of cars. The result is that most cars have their steering wheel on the right as well, making it nearly impossible to pass!

Most of the Burmese people Delisle meets are poor and some are almost totally destitute. When his work as animator and cartoonist necessitates the purchase of a PC, Guy must use several huge stacks of cash so devalued is the currency. The bill denominations oddly enough come in 15, 45, and 90, apparently for some numerological reason by decree of the military.

There is also a sense of wonder at the difference Delisle perceives in Burmese culture, often represented in humorous shorts. In one he comes home with Louis from a UN play group to find a fat monk sitting on his porch but his doorman is gone. He knows that monks are not allowed to accept alms after noon, but he pays him anyway. Then moments too late his guard shows up furious, bad monks are to be chased away with a stick! He clucks his tongue. Helping them is bad luck.

Rangoon enjoys an annual water festival, which grew out a tradition of washing away the misdeeds of the past year at the peak of the hot season before the rains come. Today it has become a four day long citywide water gun fight with hoses spraying from the tops of buildings. The festivities are enjoyed by all as this is one of the few times a year when the junta allowed the Burmese people to gather in groups. “In principle you’re not supposed to spray monks and cops,” but he does manage to shoot a police officer from behind anyway. “Ooh! That felt great.”

A pervasive dissonance or irony runs through Burma Chronicles, which arises between the warmth of the Burmese people and the atrociously repressive political system they live with on an everyday basis. Guy has a political conscience, but also leads a privileged life by Burmese standards. In one short he conducts a death bed interview with a very sick and elderly local artist (who apologizes profusely for the state of his country) and the strip concludes with a game of ball between his doorman and little boy. In another a bomb goes off in the central market, 11 dead and 160 injured. Instead of going shopping that day he and his friends go to the Australian club instead.

I am completely infatuated with Burma Chronicles and will pursue Delisle’s other books. This is like the kind of comic book I envision myself making. Who hasn’t come back from the field with a dozen or more stories told and retold at cocktail parties? I probably have close to a hundred pages of these “tales from the field” already typed and even more that went nowhere. As I stated above, Delisle’s art in this book is deceptively simple, I hope others read it and are inspired to share some of their tall tales. After all, look at how much XKCD has accomplished with just stick figures!

Charming and lightweight, this book is imminently re-readable and thought provoking. Comic fans who haven’t explored Guy Delisle’s oeuvre will be delighted by the discovery and those who work with NGOs will no doubt have a chuckle too.

I tend to be very skeptical of such efforts, but I think anyone who sees the film will understand how important the library is to the community – and we wanted to have some kind of mechanism in place so that when the film cames out people could support the library. But we’ve also learned that it is important not to go too fast or try to do too much. For this reason, I really liked Timothy Burke’s piece on the 3 Cups scandal:

If I gave you an unlimited line of credit and carte blanche to run everything your way, do you think you could make a single secondary school work? I mean, really work so it was beyond reproach, was by almost any measure superior in outcomes and character and ethos to any alternative? Now what if I took away from you the choice of where your school was located and restricted you to pupils who lived within 30 miles of your school? Now what if I required you to obey all relevant national and local laws addressing education? Still confident? Now what if I made you operate within a budgetary limit that was generous by local and national standards but not unlimited? Getting harder yet? Now what if I put your school in a location with very little infrastructure and serious structural poverty?

The point here is that when one crucial task like that is hard enough, we should be deliriously happy to see a person dedicate their life and money and effort to make that task work. One. When we keep our checkbooks closed and our frowny-faces on because that’s not enough, not nearly enough, we create a situation where development messianism is inevitable. We invite not mission creep but mission gallop: make a hundred schools! change gender ideology! eliminate poverty! Under the circumstances, looking back, you have to ask how that was ever creditable, why anyone cheered and hoped and wrote checks.

But enough about saving the world. You’ve all waited patiently for some juicy postcolonial critique and I don’t intend to disappoint you. The best place to start is Aaron Bady’s excellent round up of online commentary on the subject.

One of the pieces listed there is Nosheen Ali’s article [PDF] (originally linked to by Carole McGranahan on Twitter) published in Third World Quarterly before the recent scandal broke. The article challenges the narrative of fear and danger which pervades the book:

The most troubling irony is that the focal region of Mortenson’s work—the Shia region of Baltistan with its Tibetan-Buddhist heritage—has nothing to do with the war on terror, yet is primarily viewed through this lens in TCT. While it has madrassas affiliated with different interpretations of Islam, the Northern Areas more generally is not a terrain teeming with fundamentalist madrassas and Taliban on the loose—the definitive image of the region in TCT, especially on its back cover, in its introduction and in its general publicity. Hence, despite the now characteristic token statements like ‘not every madrassa was a hotbed of extremism’, the subtext of TCT remains rooted in a narrative of fear and danger.

She also challenges the “taken-for-granted assumption that an American individual can casually talk about ‘changing the culture’ in places where culture and life itself has already been radically transformed through US support of the military and the militant.” Both important points to make.

A more subtle argument was also made by Manan Ahmed about the role of “expertise” in pursuing the War on Terror—an issue which touches on some of the debates we’ve had here about HTS:

In July 2010, The New York Times reported on the popularity of Greg Mortenson’s 2006 memoir Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations … One School at a Time among the US Military high-command. The report described General McChrystal and Admiral McMullen using the text as a guide to their civilian strategy in Pakistan. Mortenson’s book quickly became required reading in military academies (the report hinted at the role played by the wives of senior military brass in promoting the title) and Mortenson has since spoken to the US Congress and testified in front of committees. Mortenson himself, though a selfless worker for the most disenfranchised of Pakistan’s northwestern citizens, possesses no deep knowledge of the region’s past or present and is avowedly “non-political” in his local role. Still, his personal story, his experiences and the work of his charity are now widely considered to be a blueprint for US strategy in the Af-Pak region.

Both Stewart and Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire – the “non-expert” insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an “expert”.

The HTS argument would be that what we need is simply better experts, ones who actually know something about the local culture (although from what I’ve read about HTS it seems that this is not always the case). Ahmed challenges the Niall Fergusonesque notion that we simply need to learn better ways of managing empire:

There is no better way to do empire. The condition of asserting political and military will over a distant population is one that cannot sustain itself in any modern, liberal society. The efforts to understand, will inevitably lead to the understanding that the people of Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq desire the power to make their own decisions – without the imposition of governments or militaries sanctioned and placed from afar.

I started by discussing how I liked the development model used by Room To Read. It involves treating local organizations as full partners in the development process. Just as thinking through power relationships is an essential part of effective anthropological collaboration, I think it is an equally essential part of development work. The problem with the approach taken by the US military and 3 Cups is that it wants us to think about culture without thinking about power, and I don’t think that can ever work.

One of the amazing things about the work of each of these artists is how resonant it is with what we do as anthropologists. Like ethnography, their images are not simply about ‘documentation.’ They are about conveying something of lived experience that allows us, provokes us, to ask questions about how some particular lives come to look they way they do. They invite us to linger on the lives of soldiers long enough to think about how they are, and also are not, like others.

It strikes me that in our disciplinary conversations about what various modes of anthropological engagement might look like, we often fail to recognize the possibilities of such resonances. These possibilities are especially promising when the lives we explore are characterized, in one way or another, by war. Here, issues of politics and ethics lie both close to the surface and close to the bone. Tim Hetherington’s work was powerful proof of these possibilities.

For example, he said many times that he hoped Restrepo, his thoroughly ethnographic Afghanistan war documentary, co-directed with Sebastian Junger, would offer a new and more productive starting place for thinking about the war and US military intervention.

As Tim put it in an excellent interview at Guernica where he responds to Leftist criticism of the film:

While moral outrage may motivate me, I think demanding moral outrage is actually counter-productive because people tend to switch off. […] Sure, the face of the U.S. soldier is the “easiest entrée into the Afghan war zone” but it has allowed me to touch many people at home with rare close-up footage of injured and dead Afghan civilians (as well as a young U.S. soldier having a breakdown following the death of his best friend). Perhaps these moments represent the true face of war rather than the facts and figures of political analyses or the black and white newsprint of leaked documents.

In a more personal mode, Tim offered the experimental film Diary, which reflects something of the compulsions, rhythms, and senses of his movement into and out of ‘zones of killing’, as he suggested we might think of such spaces. Here too, we can find resonances with anthropological explorations of the particular vertiginous experiences of being in and out and in such spaces of violence, and of the uneven geographies of deadly violence.

News continues to unfold about the incident in Libya that may have also killed photographer Chris Hondros, and that seriously injured photographers Guy Martin, Michael Christopher, among others. And as we continue to hear more of Tim Hetherington’s death, and more remembrances of his life and work, I’ll also be thinking about what his work, and the work of other artists and journalists, has to offer us anthropologists; the places where our various projects meet, and the possibilities for thinking and acting that might begin from there.

Breaking Ranks recounts, largely through interview excerpts, the stories of six Iraq War veterans who became involved with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and other military anti-war organizations and participated in the larger GI Rights Oral History Project. It takes us from their decisions to join the military, through combat, anti-war epiphanies, homecomings, and involvement in anti-war activism.

The patchwork composition of the book reflects the veterans’ attempts to piece together a narrative of their lives defined by the watershed of their experiences in Iraq. While book’s overall structure parses these experiences into a general arc of life—from enlistment, to the shock and fog of war, to political awakening, to struggles with trauma, to activism—it doesn’t smooth over the rough edges of these experiences or impose too clear an order on the muddle of reflexive memories that the soldiers offer.

As the authors note in the introduction, the book is an account of how these six people (five men and one woman; three soldiers, one sailor, one Marine, and one National Guardsman) found their way to a public, anti-war position and of “the striking and original ideas each developed to understand the war and what it meant. Their critiques are not simple matches to those of the civilian antiwar movement or to our own as authors” (8). Thus Breaking Ranks suggest that while it is possible to speak of a single anti-war movement, that singularity subsumes a multiplicity of different meanings and the ones we hear here are not always foregrounded.

Gutmann and Lutz’ Zinn-ian project of documenting the grassroots critiques so often written out of American History is well complemented by their anthropological attention to the little details of daily life (in the military, at war, and after) that aggregate into feelings of frustration and individual acts of political resistance, suggesting the complex and divergent paths through which soldiers come to, as they say, “speak out”.

Thought the text of the book is devoted to six stories, it is also peppered with facts and events that position these very diverse lives within a single post 9/11 historical moment which is also linked, by both the authors and the subjects, to the American legacies of the Vietnam War and its contemporary anti-war motifs.

In their curation of the stories, Gutmann and Lutz also demonstrate the ways that war insinuates itself into civilian life in America, making military service seem like the best possible option for many Americans whose lives are made hard or unstable by the exigencies of family expectations, national pride, poverty, and youth. The Introduction and endnotes are also full of data and resources for further reading about the ‘dark side’ (as Alex Gibney might say) of America’s war in Iraq.

Lately, ‘the good war’ in Afghanistan is consuming more and more of America’s attention and resources and, in the months since Breaking Ranks was released this summer, American combat operations in Iraq have been declared over (again) and the ‘draw-down’ of combat troops and ‘civilian surge’ there have begun. In this context, we can read in Breaking Ranks deeper questions about the different justifications for American military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq at the level of individual experience and public discourse alike, as well as about the fundamental nature of wars in which nation-states confront non-state entities through the sanctioned, violent acts of their citizens. As our attention, and perhaps attitudes, to America’s two main post-9/11 military operations seems to be shifting, Braking Ranks can help readers think about how things have (and haven’t) changed in military life and policy at home and down range.

In addition to being a powerful documentary record and conversation starter about the Iraq War, Breaking Ranks strikes me as an important, accessible, and eminently teachable book that speaks of the conflicted experiences of soldiers in war, the political failings of America’s doctrine of pre-emptive war, and the contingent evolution of personal conflict into political action. It would be well suited to undergraduate classes on war, trauma, social movements, public or activist anthropology, and—given its format—methods courses that discuss life-story interviews and practices of ethnographic writing.

[A bit of full disclosure: Royalties from Breaking Ranks are being donated to IVAW; an organization with which I did some fieldwork in 2008 and which I've personally supported]

Via the PostSecret website, it is unclear whether the poster intentionally picked a photo of Sikhs or if this was unintentional irony. Not that the sentiment would have been any less offensive if the person wearing a turban was actually a Muslim. It certainly didn’t matter to the families of victims of post 9-11 hate crimes whether the victim was Muslim or not. I bring this up because William Dalrymple has an op-ed in the NY Times about the proposed Islamic center planned for lower Manhattan (for those living under a rock, see William Saletan’s piece in Slate for a good roundup of the issues surrounding the center):

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion. Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors. Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith.

Dalrymple’s main point is that the Sufis behind the Cordoba Initiative are themselves “infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate[s]” in the eyes of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. We’ve been here before:

In 2006, the investigative reporter Jeff Stein concluded a series of interviews with senior US counterterrorism officials by asking the same simple question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia?” He was startled by the responses. “One’s in one location, another’s in another location,” said Congressman Terry Everett, a member of the House intelligence committee, before conceding: “No, to be honest with you, I don’t know.” When Stein asked Congressman Silvestre Reyes, chair of the House intelligence committee, whether al-Qaeda was Sunni or Shia, he answered: “Predominantly – probably Shia.”

Clearly the United States would be better off if our leaders, journalists, and citizens knew a little more about Islam. But there are also some lessons here about the semiotics of racism which I would like to think offer some insights beyond the 24 hour news cycle.

A Liverpool working-class accent will strike a Chicagoan primarily as being British, a Glaswegian as being English, an English southerner as being northern, an English northerner as being Liverpudlian, and a Liverpudlian as being working class. The closer we get to home, the more refined are our perceptions.

The above quote is taken from a discussion in Asif Agha’s masterful book Language and Social Relations. Agha’s focus here is on the limits of of performativity. By pointing out that the hearer’s own prior socialization provides an important context for the successful performance of identity, Agha sets the stage for one of the book’s central themes: that identity is not only mediated by discourse, but also requires a process of negotiation between speaker and hearer—and that this process of negotiation can be transformative, changing the possible range of identity positions available to both parties as well as society at large.

I quite like Agha’s argument, and in chapter after chapter he makes a convincing case for it. Particularly interesting is his discussion of kinship terms, in which he shows how a mother might refer to her in-laws using terms which, taken literally, would place her in the role of her own child vis-a-vis her relatives, but are nonetheless lexically differentiated from the terms a child might use. In doing so she claims her rights as the mother of the child without reducing herself to the status of a child.

While the discussion of a Liverpool working-class accent shows that Agha is aware of the limits to such performativity, I would have liked to see more discussion about situations where one party refuses to negotiate. Agha’s approach to limits implies that performativity might fail because of one party’s lack of socialization, but what about if one party has a will to ignorance? I think such willful ignorance is behind much American confusion with regard to Muslims, and so I’m not sure how much use historical, ethnographic, or journalistic accounts of the various divisions within Islam can help.

It seems to me that part of the problem derives from the very idea of a “just war.” As Judith Butler argues, such a concept requires the “division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war.” For some section of humanity to remain “ungrievable” requires a willful ignorance which refuses to engage in the kind of dialog which would allow for negotiated meanings to emerge. Thus, Islamophobia is in some ways a prerequisite for waging a global war on Terror, even as our leaders insist otherwise.

Even without the headline it is a deliberately provocative photograph and one that will surely sell a lot of magazines. Contextualized by its headline the cover is pure propaganda. It makes plain the strange ideology of America’s foreign wars: We are at war with (fill in the blank) for their own good. What happens if we leave Afghanistan? Women will have their noses cut off, willy-nilly. You don’t want that do you? Presumably if we leave Afghanistan then Afghani civilians will no longer be accidently killed or mutilated by drone attacks either… those survivors didn’t get a Time-Life photographer though.

Both are acts of violence, Aisha’s disfigurement at the hands of the Taliban and civilizan casualties at the hands of the American military. But the former graces the cover of a major, mainstream media publication because it resonates powerfully with American traditions of belief about “other” people. The Taliban are barbarians and their violent behavior is symptomatic of their temporal displacement, they are literally living in the past rebelling against modernity. And so it is the duty of Civilization to intervene and save them from themselves by making them more like us. By force if necessary.

In conference papers I have argued that the genesis of this ideology is to be found in the formative conflict of the American nation, the Eastern and Western Indian Wars. Throughout the nineteenth century in political, academic, and journalistic circles American violence against Indians was seldom justified in crude materialist concerns like the acquisition of land. Instead experts created a panopoly of deficiencies inherent in the tribes’ supposed savagery that needed only to be replaced by the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism for them all to become productive members of society. “Kill the Indian and save the man,” was one such rallying cry that Americans should keep the “promise” made to all Indians — to save their souls, teach them English, and make them modern. To make them into versions of us.

Two forms of violence, one is disturbing and senseless, the other distressing but necessary. Two forms of violence, the former justifying the later. What are the means by which American people distinguish between the two? What accounts for the absence of Afghani civilian casualties on the cover of Time? For anthropologist Gabriele Marranci the legitimization of Civilization’s violence can be understood through culture, especially Christian eschatology.

In the West, anthropologically, suffering from acts of war or terrorism (terms which, in today’s Afghanistan, are often used to include national resistance, secular insurgency and territorial disputes) seems to be classified into two distinct categories. On the one hand, the western-induced suffering is perceived as ‘ethnical’ and ‘lawful’, superior and enlightened, an act of ‘love’, a bitter medicine for the salvation of the ‘ignorant’ (understood as ‘not knowing’), the ‘sinner’ through the redemption of blood, and as death with a view to societal resurrection and rebirth. On the other hand, however, there is a perception of a need for punishment of the barbaric actions of the ignorant, of the infliction of evil for the evil committed by people who are somehow disgusting for rejecting the ‘Truth’.

That is, violence and suffering are not condemned for the effect they have on human beings, but are condemned and rejected only if they are not the ‘right’ violence, ‘salvific’ in nature and ‘just’ in cause – in other words, a transubstantiational violence. Hence, destruction and suffering, in this case, is a part of redemption, while the Taliban’s violence is merely destructive.

In this light the old theoretical tools of anthropology — myth, ritual, sacrifice, the gift — all seem fresh and relevant again in the context of international violence and geopolitics. Baudrillard’s hyperreality could be useful too as the circulation of signifiers, let loose from their signifieds, flows permiscuously from Central Asia through the great nodes of global capitalism and on into the blogosphere.

So readers, what is your interpretation of the Time Magazine cover? I’m not asking about the content of the article, but the image and it’s headline. Does it suggest to you a realism that offers a way of understanding living Afghani people? Does it offer any insight into the nearly decade long war that has cost so much in American life and treasure? Or does it, as I argue, stand as evidence of an American epistemology of the Other, showing how Americans arrange what it is that they think they know about the people of the world?

There is much think and say about this event and these documents. Apropos recent conversations at SM, I’d like to point out that there are probably better places to say some of these things.

One thing that strikes me as relevant for comment here is the way that ‘facticity’ and authority based in being there are at the heart of some discussions.

Take for example this interview from NPR’s All Things Considered between co-host Robert Segal and Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange.

Here are the most relevant bits:

Julian Assange: The full story is only going to emerge over the coming weeks as that material is correlated to the witnesses who are on the ground, both the US soldiers and Afghanis

Robert Segal: [Challenging Assange’s comparison of The Afghan War Diaries to the Pentagon Papers] These are raw reports that are not confirmed and edited

JA: This material has its strength in that it is not an analysis, not written at the higher levels so it can be publicly massaged, it is in fact the raw facts of the war

RS: Some people would dispute your use of the word ‘facts,’ or indeed there might be something oxymoronic in ‘raw facts’

JA: The majority of reports are immediate reporting from the field from US military operations

What I see emerging here is an interesting conversation about textual authority, and one that resonates with our own disciplinary claims to authority based on ethnographic experience (see Clifford, Marcus, Gupta and Ferguson, etc. for some classic wailing on that old chestnut).

Assange begins by saying that these raw facts will only be fully cooked into a truthy pie once they are compared to the testimony of “witnesses who are on the ground.” And yet, when Segal notes the criticism that these raw facts are, in fact, too raw to be facts—that they need a little correlation before they can be safely consumed—Assange suggests that it is their very rawness that makes them good: Instead of truthy pie, he changes his order to sashimi.

The thing is, be they raw or cooked, pie or sashimi, these documents are not unadulterated. They are not like snapshots of the war, with all the claims to verisimilitude that visual medium implies (it’s worth mentioning that this connection between verisimilitude and the visual is also one way that witnessing stakes its authoritative claims). So, they are not like photographs. They are documents written within the generic constraints of military field reporting for a particular intended audience of surveilling authorities as official archival records.

Drop weapons are a concrete example of the things that are written out of these kinds of documents. Drop weapons are enemy weapons (like AK 47s) that US forces carry with them so that if they accidentally kill a civilian, they can ‘drop’ them by the body and have documentable proof that the civilian was actually an insurgent.

Drop weapons are useful because they alibi omissions (of the killing of civilians) from the After Action Report (AAR) which is part of the official record. But they are also useful because they enable the inscription of other things (the killing of insurgents) in the official record.

For a different and very interesting example directly from the Wikileaks docs, check out this corrective by Noah Shachtman, one of those on the ground witnesses.

The point is, however we choose to digest these documents, we need to consider them within the institutional and social context of their production, and whatever they are, they are not a diary.

At the end of July this year, media outlets all over the country picked up a story from Colorado Springs, home to the U.S. Army’s Ft. Carson, about a spate of violent crimes committed by soldiers. Most of the soldiers were from a single infantry battalion that had served two arduous tours in Iraq and had seen some of the bloodiest (for U.S. forces) fighting of the war—in Ramadi in 2004 and Baghdad in 2006. Between these two tours, the 3,700-person brigade to which the battalion was attached sustained over half of all the casualties of all units at Ft. Carson. The crimes include ten arrests for murder or manslaughter, along with kidnapping, rape and other violent crimes. There were also suicide attempts, some of them successful. Many of the soldiers who were charged had engaged in excessive or indiscriminate violence against civilians in Iraq and also demonstrated dire combat stress reactions both in Iraq and at home. But the stories gathered by Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Dave Phillips suggests that the unit commanders were interested neither in punishing the soldiers nor in helping them. They were indifferent or even hostile to parents, wives, and girlfriends and to soldiers themselves who sought assistance. So they languished without help, self-medicated with drugs and alcohol, and went on to commit more violent acts, Phillips writes.

The story is familiar: young men are trained to kill, sent to war, produce and are exposed to brutal levels of violence for long periods, and then return home traumatically altered by that training, action and exposure with only a neglectful and ill-prepared institution to turn to for help. The news stories focus on the excessive, random and sometimes intimate nature of the violence: a gun held to a girlfriend’s head, a drug dealer repeatedly tased and then shot, an anonymous passerby run over with a car and then stabbed to death. They link the violence it directly back to excessive, shocking and randomly targeted behavior in Iraq: soldiers killing Iraqi livestock, shooting unprovoked and indiscriminately at civilians, and equipping themselves with non-regulation tasers and hollow-point ammunition. And ultimately the stories root the violence in the trauma glossed as the “horror” and “hell” of war, trauma that left these particular soldiers unable to return to “normal” life back at home. And they criticize the Army for its mercenary neglect of troubled soldiers, for the blind eye it turned to the people in Iraq and in the U.S. who were harmed by them, and for its internal culture that stigmatizes as weak soldiers who seek help for combat trauma.

This is not a criticism of the journalism that broke the story. Phillips’ article [audio] is a striking piece of writing: nuanced, provocative, exhaustively reported, and over 15,000 words long. It captures the chains of tribulation that make up each individual case, highlighting the way that soldiers were caught in the cumulative effects of battlefield violence on the one hand, and an institutional indifference and instrumentality on the other. But as the story re-ran in capsule form on NPR, the New York Times, CNN, etc., and 15,00 words shrank to a few hundred, and the editing collapses Phillips’ breadth and depth, perhaps inevitably, into stereotype—or so it sounded to my cynical ear. In the headlines and ledes and pull quotes, but also more diffusely, in the cultural logic in which the stories are embedded, the soldiers appear as both horrific monsters and pitiable victims—“crazy vets,” as a friend of mine, an Iraq vet and a veterans advocate, likes to say. The emphasis on the concentration of the crimes within a particular unit groups the individual perpetrators into a single class of actors—Amy Goodman, for instance, reported that the battalion had a murder rate 114 times that of the city of Colorado Springs. My own quantitative chops are a little shaky, but since murder rates typically involve incredibly steep ratios—single- or double-digit quantities per 100,000—a figure like that does far more to shock than it does to inform. More to the point, it (inadvertently) casts the taint of murder over the entire unit, and arguably, over all combat vets. A similar and much more involved quantification of soldiers connected to violent crimes in the New York Times’ January 2008 series “War Torn” attracted bitter criticism from veterans’ groups for precisely this reason.

The dilemma of the “crazy vet” stereotype is this: even as it can be deployed to draw critical attention to the dire structural conditions and damaging and unfair stigma faced by traumatized soldiers, its elaborate and horrifying imagery cannot help but confirm stereotype and increase stigma. Again, this is not to pick on the journalists and commentators doing the crucial work of bringing the difficult circumstances of soldiers to public attention. For indeed, soldiers and their advocates also invoke the “crazy vet” stereotype among themselves all the time. A Veterans Affairs service officer I knew emphasized the urgent need for PTSD screening, treatment resources and disability compensation via the image of “PFC Joe Snuffy going postal in Wal Mart.” Soldiers would joke about pulling out their “Crazy Card” or “TBI [Traumatic Brain Injury] Card” as an excuse or explanation for odd or erratic behavior—mouthing off too much, getting lost or distracted, or falling into black moods. Such antisocial actions are all symptoms of TBI; these soldiers were not exploiting their diagnosis, I think, but rather ironizing and acting back on the inhuman instrumentality to which they felt their condition had been reduced.

And sometimes, and more poignantly, they would cut right to the heart of their own sense of psychic injury. “I am a totally different person,” one acquaintance told me. What soldiers “like him” wanted, said—those with physical injuries or PTSD or TBI, or suffering more diffuse, less official forms of bodily and mental wear and tear—all they wanted was to get the care they felt they needed and then be left to themselves. “Guarantee you, dude, that’s exactly what we want. Let me go raise my children. I’m gonna go and I’m not gonna bother you anymore, just leave me the fuck alone.” In these kinds of statements, talk of being “messed up” performs work with its wry and macho tone, claiming ownership of the feeling of being damaged on its own terms rather than submitting to the role of monster or victim.

The crazy vet stereotype is both pernicious and culturally productive, a highly effective vehicle for anxieties about the contamination by violence of those whose job it is to officially produce it, as if killing and dying are a contagion contracted on a foreign battlefield that threatens the nominally non-violent homefront and its “civilized” social life (see, e.g., Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites or Catherine Lutz’s discussion of the figure of the soldier in Homefront). Americans in particular, I think, are accustomed to thinking of war and the wounds it produces as a literally foreign entity. Thus the language of the “hell” and “horror” when war “comes home”—a place where hell and horror presumably don’t belong. This sense of the foreign or the exceptional is reinforced by sensational media accounts of damaged soldiers. And this is a second paradoxical quality of the “crazy vet.” Even as the stereotype pathologizes all soldiers, it focuses attention on a very narrow range of extreme behaviors, making it actually harder to see the broad and far subtler range of burdens that war—waged in Americans’ name, whether we like it or not—inevitably lays on those whose job it is to produce it. Regardless of one’s perspective on this war or war in general, the “crazy vet” can both confirm our worst fears about war and justify our outrage about it without prompting us to face these more everyday violences. So in the end, the critical use of the “crazy vet” may be as a sign that there is no separating out “normal” social life from the illegitimate excesses of the legitimate violence that sustains it, and that all efforts to sort out that violence are caught up in that tension.

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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 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!

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.