I probably would have had to change my research topic if I hadn’t received a Fulbright dissertation grant to come to Taiwan. The Fulbright program was founded by Senator William Fulbright in 1946, and was initially paid for by selling off war surplus. This makes the current situation all the more depressing. The following chart shows where the current debt comes from.

As you can see, half the debt comes from a combination of Bush-era tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That means that the Fulbright program, originally paid for out of war surplus, is now being cancelled to pay for war debt.

As Maura Elizabeth Cunningham puts it in her post on the China Beat:

Programs like the Fulbright-Hays grants aren’t just about supporting individual scholars; they have a larger mission of promoting work that collectively helps all of us contextualize the world we live in and recognize how it has come to look the way it does. By not providing the funding necessary to support this year’s crop of applicants, the government is implying that such work isn’t important, that we can exist in a global community but don’t need to understand it.

Unlike HTS, the Fulbright program and NEH fund important research which I believe genuinely contributes to our understanding of the world. It is depressing to see our reckless involvement in two unfunded wars now threatening these programs.

In his seminal work Playing Indian, Philip Deloria describes the history of white performance in Indian disguise, exploring the role of the Indian in the American national imaginary. Mainstream American perceptions of Indians are defined by a dialectic of repulsion and desire. The Indian, he writes, is at once “Us” and “Not-Us.”

In this ambivalent relationship, Indians as savages serve as “oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national Self” (Deloria 1998:3). Yet just as frequently Indians were trotted out as symbols of freedom for they were in possession of “barbarian virtues,” to borrow a phrase from Matthew Frye Jacobson, that deserved to be emulated especially as an antidote to the supposed ills of modernity and city life with its changing gender norms.

This was a uniquely American nationalism: one that saw itself as civilized, yet not European, native born of a society rooted in ancient history and of the natural American landscape. This history shows that Indian play has always “[clung] tightly to the contours of power” (Deloria 1998:7) within U.S. national subjectivity. Indian play, Deloria argues, came to serve a function in the ongoing search for an authentic and meaningful social identity in the face of modernity’s uncertainties. This tradition of playing Indian in the U.S. has wrought a slue of stereotypes in U.S. popular culture including: the Indian as environmentalist, spiritual messenger or guide, team mascot, filmic protagonist, and tourist destination.

Turning now from Deloria’s critical analysis of practices American cultural and literary expression, we can see how Indian play has served a prominent role in helping Americans make sense of war. As a polysemous and highly flexible trope of the U.S. military, Indian imagery in representations of American military conflict constitutes a veritable genre unto itself. Broadly speaking it boils down to two general types that mirror Deloria’s dialectic of desire and repulsion: the Indian as martial ally and the Indian as worthy opponent.

To wit – the Indian is Us and Not-Us:
 
Osama Bin Laden, “Geronimo”

Geronimo, an Apache

An Apache


 
Making Bin Laden into an Indian elevates him. The Washington Post isolates Geronimo’s elusiveness, “[he] was rumored to be able to walk without leaving any tracks,” as the key trait that links him to Bin Laden. This is meant to illustrate some degree of respect the American military leaders have for their foe. It also serves to cast the United States in a better light. We are, after all, magnanimous in victory. By heaping praise upon one’s enemy, likening them to such a worthy opponent as Geronimo, the American military bestows prestige upon themselves. They won the fight by besting a legend.

A little excess social capital couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Playing Indian is a dynamic practice, changing with time as American anxieties change from one generation to the next. Giving Bin Laden the code name “Geronimo” rises out of the need to address the ambivalence Americans have over the value of the current war. By imbuing it with Indians the war is legitimated but it is also made comprehensible. The current war is made legible in terms of previous wars. In fact, the ideology of American/ Indian martial conflict and the contradictory imagery of Indians as Us and Not-Us plays itself out, over and over again, in every American military conflict. This is part of American culture and shows how we make war make sense.

A defining element of the War on Terror has been the theme of “civilization,” the role of the US military in combating “barbarians” and reform efforts to save foreign populations from their backwards cultures. For example when, in April 2004, four Blackwater private security contractors were lynched in Fallujah, Iraq, the following day Paul Bremer, then chief of the Coalition Occupation, addressed a cohort of Iraqi men and women graduating from the police academy. “The men and women who are standing before us today are the line between civilization and barbarism,” he said, “Yesterday’s events in Fallujah are a dramatic example of the ongoing struggle between human dignity and barbarism” (Updike 2004:20).

In June 2004 National Public Radio reporter Nancy Updike aired a collection of stories on the program This American Life centering on the lives of private contractors in Iraq. Most of Updike’s stories center on the aptly named security company Custer Battles, a group she worked with despite having been warned to stay away from. One of her key informants, Hank, admitted, “We got a bad reputation, probably as gunslingers,” (Updike 2004:9).

She shares a rumor that the Custer Battles team had engaged in a gunfight at their hotel, “and when the smoke cleared, it turned out they had been firing at each other the whole time” (Updike 2004:9). Hank clarified that something like that did happen, their hotel was hit by a rocket powered grenade and Custer Battles retaliated by expending 3000 rounds of ammunition out the hotel windows and into the surrounding neighborhood. With no clear consequences for private contractors acting recklessly because of their ambiguous legal status, Hank was prompted to address the issue from his own worldview.

People shooting people and not being held accountable for shooting people? Oh, I suppose there’s a lot of that going on. And I think in this brief period of time just like in the Wild West, you control your own company. You assert a little bit of control in your own little world. (Updike 2004:9).

Hank has found a way to make sense of the chaos of the situation by reckoning the current war through a common myth of the American past that is informed by the representation of war in popular culture.

We can learn more about this notion of the “wild west” by considering Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and its legacy in U.S. popular culture. In order to elevate the story of the American west into something on the scale of a Barthesian myth, Buffalo Bill Cody’s hero needed an enemy worth his mettle: the cowboy needed an Indian as his foil and Cody found his greatest financial success when he employed real Indians (including such luminaries as Sitting Bull and Black Elk) to play the part. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West made an enduring impact on popular memory and popular culture through its shaping of the Western genre as a nationalist narrative by which Americans could imagine their relationship to a world of non-American others.

Joy Kasson argues in her Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory and Popular History, that over its lifetime the Wild West show changed in relation to the development of modernity. Thus in the early days of the 1880s when the frontier was “open” and war with the tribes was raging,

Audiences understood that its spectacle was fiction but approved its claims to authenticity… Buffalo Bill’s frontier was contemporaneous but spatially distant; it existed right now on the Great Plains, and Buffalo Bill had just arrived to tell his audience all about it (Kasson 2000:221).

After the Massacre at Wounded Knee brought armed Indian resistance to an end and railroads expedited commerce and travel to the Pacific coast, it became increasingly difficult to maintain that the “wild west” still existed and whereas Buffalo Bill’s performances had once been imagined as coeval with its audience, his later days are best described as fomenting a nostalgic denial of coevalness. Kasson writes, “In the early days, the claim to ‘realism’ rested on physical remoteness, but after 1890, the Wild West made its best case for authenticity by invoking temporal remoteness” (Kasson 2000:222).

When Cody’s narratives shifted from reportage to historical reenactment he also began to imagine future wars as repetitions of the Indian wars. For example with the advent of the Spanish-American war, Cody proposed a unique strategy for dealing with the Spanish in a newspaper piece titled, “How I Could Drive the Spaniards from Cuba with 30,000 Indian Braves.” Indians, those malleable national symbols, were here fashioned into bellicose warriors, a stereotype his show had helped to create, in order to re-imagine the same as a secret weapon for the U.S. military. Kasson offers a compelling interpretation, “Cody projected the capture of Havana as if it were already an act in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West; he imagined war imitating the re-enactment of war and, in particular, modern war replaying the Indian wars” (Kasson 2000:249).

In the early twentieth century Buffalo Bill’s success gradually gave way to cinema and the birth of the genre of Western films. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick’s Celluloid Indians identifies an important filmic device of Westerns: our white hero is somehow able to out Indian the Indians, “becoming a superior form of native fighter and supplanting the ‘vanishing’ Indian” (1999:43). Beginning with the silent films themselves drawing on Buffalo Bill, Indians were represented as icons of conflict and violence.

Then during World War II, an interesting thing happened. Indians, who fifty years earlier were still at war with the U.S., were now enlisting in the military in droves and a complicated nationalist mythos emerged to claim these definitively American soldiers —think Ira Hayes and the Navajo codetalkers. In 1944 Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described the advantages of having Indians among the U.S. soldiers. Thanks to their “inherited talents,” Indians have,

…endurance, rhythm, a feeling for timing, co-ordination, sense perception, an uncanny ability to get over any sort of terrain at night, and, better than all else, an enthusiasm for fighting. He takes a rough job and makes a game of it. Rigors of combat hold no terrors for him; severe discipline and hard duties do not deter him (Finger 1991:108).

It would seem that Secretary Ickes had seen a great many Westerns because these qualities are more frequently displayed by fictional characters than real people. And this fictional role of Indians as fighters in the American national imaginary had consequences for soldiers who happened to be Indian.

In his oral history of Native American Vietnam veterans, Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls (1996), one of Tom Holm’s informants, a Creek and Cherokee man describes his experience:

I went into the army and to Vietnam because I’d seen the same John Wayne movies as everyone else and thought I was doing an honorable thing, that war was the ‘Indian way’… But when I got to Vietnam, I found that my job was to run missions into what everybody called ‘Indian country.’ That’s what they called enemy territory… I woke up one morning fairly early in my tour and realized that instead of being a warrior like Crazy Horse, I was a scout used by the army to track him down. I was on the wrong side of everything I want to believe I was about (Holm 1996:175).

Upon reflecting on his decision to go to war, this man points to his experience of seeing Indians represented in cinema as an important motivator. He and “everyone else” saw John Wayne in the Westerns. Popular culture helped him envision his enlistment in the tradition of Indian warriors, yet during the war he no longer thought of his participation so romantically.

Over the course of his research, Holm found that the vast majority of Indian vets believe that they were singled out for especially dangerous jobs because they were Indian. This included being assigned to the “point” position or being first in line as a platoon traversed the jungle. A Navajo vet explains:

[I was] stereotyped by the cowboys and Indian movies. Nicknamed ‘Chief’ right away. Non-Indians claimed Indians could see through trees and hear the unhearable. Bullshit, they even believed Indians could walk on water (Holm 1996:152).

Many Indian vets reported being exclusively committed to scouting activities called Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols or Lurps. These were teams of six men that would explore enemy areas and then report back by radio. In 1968 many of these Lurp teams were consolidated and assigned even more dangerous missions as “hunter-killer” teams that would dress as Vietnamese peasants and attempt to execute counter-guerilla operations. American Indians who could “pass” for Asian were frequently used on such missions.

These Indian experiences of war get re-inscribed into popular culture too, for example in the movie Predator (1987), staring Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Dutch” and featuring an Indian character named Billy, played by Sonny Landham. In Predator Dutch leads a team of six men into the Columbian jungle to disrupt Communist guerilla activity, naturally he has an Indian for a scout. Billy’s powers of observation are almost magical: he is able to count the number of Columbian guerillas by their boot prints. Billy walks point. He is first to find new clues and first to leave the group after receiving his orders. Frequently Billy will sense something, he will pause, and the music will tense. He carries a medicine bag around his neck and when he senses the Predator nearby we see him fondle that bag. Billy is a sign that the rest of the commando team reads, they can tell that he is “spooked” and acting “squirrelly” which sets them all on guard.

At the end of the movie Billy is the last fighting character to die before Dutch and the alien go one-on-one. Following Billy’s demise, at the movie’s climax Dutch is only able to defeat the monster by covering his body with mud, to protect against the alien’s infrared vision, and relying on a bow and arrow instead of his machine gun. Thus, with the death of the Indian, Dutch is able to become an Indian with a painted body and primitive weapon. By playing Indian, Dutch is able to become more Indian than Billy because he is able to defeat the alien, something the real Indian could not accomplish.

The myth of “the Indian” and the American frontier should inform our critique of the ongoing war on terror. And I’m not just talking about George W. Bush being called a “cowboy” – although Playing Cowboy opens up whole new fora of analysis to serve as a foil to Playing Indian.

During the Western Indian Wars, White-Indian conflict got represented in popular culture by means of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The Wild West show gave way to cinema, the Western genre, and modern forms of popular culture. The Western genre becomes very popular, such that during the Vietnam era, some Indians claim to have been motivated by the representations of Indians in the movies to join the military. While in Vietnam these Indian soldiers experience racism at the hands of non-Indians that, to their eyes, drew upon the Westerns. Then in the 1980s using generic tropes of the Western, Predator re-inscribes the Vietnam War experiences of Indians into popular culture. Now in Iraq and Afghanistan, we find that private security contractors and the US government are using tropes from the Western genre, that of gunslingers, the wildness of the “Wild” West, and indomitable foes such as Geronimo to make sense of and legitimate their experience of war. A war often rendered in terms of “civilization.”

Maybe Buffalo Bill Cody was onto something when he imagined war imitating the re-enactment of war because narrative devices originating in the Western Indian wars continue to be used in the construction of the meaning of war.
 
Bibliography

Deloria, Philip Joseph
1998 Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Finger, John R.
1991 Cherokee Americans : the eastern band of Cherokees in the twentieth century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Holm, Tom
1996 Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Kasson, Joy S.
2000 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West : Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History. New York: Hill and Wang.

Updike, Nancy
2004 “I’m From the Private Sector and I’m Here to Help” : Private contractors in Iraq. In This American Life: NPR.

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]

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.

Despite the piece giving voice to many of us HTS critics’ greatest hits, there are a few more that I feel the need to shout out myself.

Motlagh writes:

Its backers contend that civilian specialists — particularly anthropologists — with in-depth field experience are best suited to “map” Afghanistan’s complex tribal structures and fault lines. […] The prospect of getting blacklisted in U.S. academia has sapped the pool of seasoned anthropologists. Today recruits are more and more likely to have a degree in political science, history or psychology. Some only have a bachelor’s degree.

Certainly some of the credit (or blame, depending on how you slice it) for the lack of anthropologists in these positions goes to the efforts of the NCA and the AAA, but I think the balance is due to the fact that well trained and experienced anthropologists know you can’t ‘map’ culture as if it were mountains: it’s neither static, bounded, nor quantifiable. As Hugh Gusterson points out in theHuman Terrain film, HTS is built on a faulty metaphor.

Because of a fundamental confusion about what anthropologists are and do, and the (understandably) instrumental and operational bent of the program, “in depth-field experience” was never HTS’s main hiring priority. Given a definition of anthropology as a methods suite for gathering information about some thing called culture, it’s technical ability, not experience, that matters most.

Among those speaking for HTS (perhaps from within it, but that’s not totally clear) Motlagh cites Brian Ericksen, “a burly former Army ranger with a political science degree who works with Marines in insurgency-wracked Helmand province.” Erickson dismisses critiques of HTS, saying “For me, the politically motivated criticism just isn’t valid.”

But the politically motivated participation in national military action is? Does Mr. Ericksen’s comment “when your country is at war … you support your armed forces in the vested interest of the country” imply that people should make such decisions on anything but political grounds (which, as I’m sure Mr. Ericksen knows, they actually do all the time)? In any case, dismissing criticism of HTS because it’s politically motivated is, frankly, kind of ridiculous. It’s political criticism of a political project unfolding in a political arena. Seems like solid ground to me.

And for those HTS proponents who dismiss critics by claiming all we do is say ‘nay’, I have something more substantial for you to chew on:

You want to give soldiers and marines some information on the social, cultural, and political worlds they are about to enter? Great idea. The soldiers I worked with at Walter Reed often wished they’d had more of it.  But let’s be realistic. As a one former Marine who had served with a Civil Affairs unit in Fallujah told me “think of a soldier who gets as many hours of training on Iraqi culture as you can imagine, 40 hours, 60 hours, and then you send him over and after a month of living with the awareness that all the white guys are safe and all the brown guys might not be, what do you think? That training can’t hold.”

You want to have people in patrol units who have learned qualitative interview techniques and whose job it is to talk to people and get information about social structures in the local area? Terrific.  I’m not sure why you can’t just have Civil Affairs folks doing that, but hey, why not make it its own MOS (Military Occupational Specialty)?

You want to have people devoted to providing officers in the field with contextual information about their AO (Area of Operations)? More power to you. Some version of this is already happening. If a National Guard medic I know prepared an in depth presentation on the dangers of Camel Spiders before deployment to Iraq, I’m not sure why other soldiers couldn’t do the same for other kinds of information within the existing practices of training and support.  I’m sure the new crop of warrior scholars graduating from various military colleges is up to the task, don’t you?

Clearly, I think that a special, subcontracted HTS project unhelpful no matter who is staffing it. But if General Petraeus wants to have some ‘human terrain’ mapping, he should stop thinking that anthropologists are the folks for the job (or that such mapping is ‘ethnographic’) and start training his own cartographers. It would save everyone a lot of aggravation and ink, not to mention $150 million a year.

The House Armed Services Committee, in its version of the defense budget bill, says it “remains supportive” of HTS. But, as Spencer Ackerman points out, the committee says it will “limi[t] the obligation of funding”the project, until “the Army submits a required assessment of the program, provides revalidation of all existing operations requirements, and certifies Department‐level guidelines for the use of social scientists.”

Last year, the congressional defense committees asked for an “independent assessment” of HTS by March 1st, 2010, reviewing everything from “the adequacy of the management structure” to the “adequacy of human resourcing and recruiting efforts.” Apparently, that assessment hasn’t been delivered yet.

Read More at Zero Anthropology.

This is what NCA wrote on their website:

Congress is currently evaluating and considering the expansion of the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System (HTS) program, in which anthropologists have been recruited to assist with counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Please join us in expressing our firm opposition to the program and any expansion by agreeing to add your signature to the “Anthropologists’ Statement on the Human Terrain System Program.”

Modeled after a well-publicized 2008 statement written by economists to oppose the Bush administration’s first TARP program, this statement aims to clearly and concisely state the factual grounds for our opposition. Unlike our previous year-long effort to compile signatures for the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ “Pledge of Non- participation in Counterinsurgency,” we want to collect the signatures of as many professional anthropologists as possible as soon as possible so that our voice can be heard in the debate about HTS.

To add your name to the statement, please EMAIL your NAME, TITLE, and AFFILIATION to NOHUMANTERRAIN {at} GMAIL(.)COM. Include the subject line “Anthropologists’ Statement.” Please encourage other professional anthropologists to sign as well. Thank you very much for your support!

Read on for a draft of the letter:

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 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!