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!

With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents

But it isn’t just the humanities. Anthropology is hurting as well.

These are uncertain days at Florida State University’s anthropology department.

University officials have told Glen Doran, chairman of the department, to not accept any new graduate students for the 2009-10 school year.

This has prompted rumors that the anthropology department – it has 120 undergraduate students, 35 active grad students and another 30 in various stages of finishing their degrees – may be on the chopping block when FSU is forced to make painful cuts following the upcoming legislative session.

I was sympathetic to this story, and even joined the Facebook group they set up to defend the department, but I was very concerned by this quote:

Anthropology plays a vital role in today’s geopolitical world, Ward said. The military recruited anthropologists to help it better understand and communicate with people in Afghanistan, she noted.

If we are going to have to start advertising HTS as a justification for Anthropology’s continued existence, maybe we should join the French and eliminate the discipline altogether.

The need for HTS as a capability was recognized in Phase 4 of Iraq and Afghanistan, when the military identified their lack of socio-cultural knowledge as an operational gap.  Building HTS during the war was expensive and difficult because we were reacting to a crisis rather than planning ‘left of boom’.  Had this capability been developed and implemented during a Phase 0 pre-conflict phase, policy decision-makers and planners in the Pentagon would have had a much richer and more granular baseline knowledge of the societies in which operations were to be conducted, which would have allowed them to develop more effective policies and strategies.  Even more important, these senior officials would have potentially had the opportunity to use this knowledge to deter conflict in the first place.

If HTS wisdom had been incorporated during the ‘Phase 0 pre-conflict phase,’ perhaps the conflicts could have been avoided.  Is McFate here saying that more ethnographic knowledge would have stopped the wars?

The biggest issue at the AAA was the continued saga of the HTS program. At this point with one of its members “allegedly murdering one of the men who allegedly lit another HTS member on fire”:http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/human-terrain-team-member-who-murdered-afghan-now-in-custody-stantons-sixth-article-on-the-human-terrain-system/ and another who is creepy enough to “infiltrate anti-gun activist groups she describes as ‘targets”:http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/mary-mcfate-sapone-gun-lobby-nra-spy-3.html but unable to make a AAA panel to address her professional association publicly, the HTS program remains hugely relevant as a major issue in social science ethics but also increasingly obviously an ethical no-brainer. More interesting in terms of actual professional ethics were some other panels at the AAA which engaged other issues such as teaching at military-run universities and academies. Inside Higher Ed has a “wrap up on the panels on engagement withe military which pretty much sums it all up”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/24/anthro. There was also a panel on collaboration and opposition to the military 35 years ago which nicely framed and historicized many of these issues — anyone who was at any of these panels please leave your thoughts/comments/descriptions of these panels in the comments section.

We also had other special events, including a distinguished lecture by Johnetta Cole on race in the 2008 election. My overall winner for the “They scheduled me for 8 am Sunday and gave THESE people prime ime” panel award goes to “Hair, Pubic and Beyond” which may have been a perfectly legitimate panel but whose title ranks up there with the orgasm-themed panel of a few years ago. This panel was also my personal runner-up for the “this was either a really cool or an incredibly silly panel” panel award, which I give to “storage: critical ethnographies of containment and transmission” which went on Saturday morning.

What else to say about the AAA? The luxurious environs of O’Farrell Street allowed all participants to have the San Francisco experience — at one point I over head one man standing with a group of people hanging around on the corner who said “no man, I’ll tell you why I STOPPED TAKING it. I was being followed by GODZILLA!” Ah, ‘Frisco’.

What are the other highlights/low points of the AAAs that people remember?

The following is the caption for this photo as it appears on the Defend America military blog:

A soldier from 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) teaches tactical hand signals to Nigerian soldiers from the 322nd Parachute Regiment during exercise Flintlock 2007 in Maradi, Niger, April 4, 2007. The closed-fist signal means “stop.” U.S. Army photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Larson.

Although I had not previously seen a picture of this gesture, I had come across it in my previous investigations into issues of cultural miscommunication and translation in the war in Iraq. It is an example which was often used in news stories about the confusion that could occur at checkpoints, since the Iraqi gesture for stop is with the had open, as in the U.S. Here is a blog post, from a soldier recounting a joke told during a briefing session:

The training opportunities thus far have been sparse, but comical. An Irish sergeant from the Brit Army briefed our unit on IEDs–still the number one killer of coalition troops in theater–as well as various checkpoint protocols:

“The insurgents, they’re sayin’ they blow themselves up fer seventy virgins, aye? Well we in the British Army have a policy to deal with this problem: We send them straight to Allah and keep the virgins for ourselves!”

“The British use this hand signal [closed fist] ‘Stop!’ to control traffic at checkpoints. The Iraqis, they use a similar one, [open hand] ‘Oogaf!’ And then there’s you Americans: [points weapon] ‘Freeze motherfucker!’”

But this is no joking manner. Although I believe the number of Iraqis killed at checkpoints has declined, especially (I suspect) as the US forces turn over such operations to Iraqi forces, many, many Iraqis have been killed at checkpoints over the course of the occupation. According to McClatchy from 2006 to 2007 there was an average of one incident (resulting in injury or death) per day. The headline reads: “US troops shot 429 Iraqi civilians at checkpoints.”

Here is what that article says about hand signals:

U.S. soldiers traditionally have used hand signals or signs to tell civilians to stop. If that doesn’t work, they fire warning shots. If the vehicles still are moving too close, they’re authorized to kill.

It doesn’t however, discuss the exact nature of the hand signals used.

If all this seems like an argument for the importance of employing anthropologists in the military – it isn’t. In fact, I was inspired to write this post by my friend Scott Sommers who recently spent some time reading up on McFate and found an article (PDF) she had written in Joint Forces Quarterly. What’s particularly interesting about this article (as pointed out by Scott) is that she seemingly gets the hand gesture story wrong. Here is what she says:

One Marine explained the American gesture for stop (arm straight, palm out) meant welcome in Iraq, while the American gesture for go actually meant stop to Iraqis (arm straight, palm down). As can be easily imagined, this misunderstanding resulted in deadly consequences at roadblocks.

As Scott found, this version of the story was repeated in an article about human terrain teams from the Boston Globe, complete with this picture (from a US Marine publication):

The US forces’ superficial understanding of local tribal customs and ancient ethnic and sectarian rivalries has hampered their efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. An outstretched arm, palm facing forward, for example, means “stop” in most Western cultures, but in Iraq it’s considered a sign of welcome. Confusion over the signal has had deadly consequences, leading US troops to open fire at Iraqi civilians who didn’t stop at checkpoints.

As far as I can tell the Boston Globe has this wrong, as does McFate. There is confusion over hand signals, to be sure, but it isn’t because the military are using an outstretched arm with the palm facing forward, but are using a unique military gesture which even most Americans would not understand.

In my post on “the myth of cultural miscommunication” I argued that many of these problems were “common sense” and didn’t require the intervention of cultural experts to intervene. In a comment on that post Carl Dyke wrote:

I’m inclined to agree with you, Kerim, but when you talk about common sense in an anthropological setting I get confused. Common to whom, under what circumstances, according to which rituals, restrictions and agendas?

I teach soldiers who have been or soon will be deployed. Like all of my students some of them tumble quickly to the value of taking the perspective of the other, while some are more rule or authority oriented. They seem to have different ‘common senses’ depending on how and where they were raised, where they are in their emotional-cognitive development, their sense of identity and purpose, their levels of stress, and so on.

Conflictual situations are notoriously poor ones for optimizing reciprocity of communication, as the post on the myth of Mars and Venus also shows. Short of a desirable but currently unlikely elimination of all conflict, what sorts of practical steps would in your view improve understanding under these difficult circumstances? Is there a specific way of understanding ‘common sense’ that gets us further there?

At the time I replied that I was “not talking about the common sense of individual soldiers, but of the military as an institution.” Since then I felt that Carl’s question deserved a better answer, and I’ve written this post partially as an effort to do just that.

If we take the McFate account at its word, then we really do have a cultural confusion which could be avoided with the help of cultural experts like McFate. But it doesn’t seem that this is the case. Scott also found this letter written to the Sandbox military blog in which a Company Commander finds that a new soldier does not understand the standard gesture for “stop”:

Now seeing this vehicle drive down the street I wanted to confirm that it was ready for combat. I held up my fist to communicate I wanted him to immediately stop. The Soldier however, interpreted my clenched fist more along the lines of the Mod Squad’s “solid” than as a command. The Soldier returned my “salute” with a wide smile on his face.

As you can see from this example, the strange and exotic culture that needs explanation is not that of the Iraqis, but the US military who have dealt with the problem of cultural miscommunication by creating a universal hand gesture which nobody understands.

In my previous post I used the term “common sense” but I think that oversimplified the matter. Deborah Cameron’s point is that men use miscommunication as a tactic to avoid doing what they want to do. The “Mars and Venus” books are aimed at helping women adjust to this fact by teaching women to better communicate their needs to men. Instead, Cameron argues, men shouldn’t be left off the hook so easily. The problem isn’t that miscommunication is a common-sensical problem – it isn’t. In fact there is a large body of linguistic anthropology literature on the subject, starting with John Gumperz’s excellent work on “crosstalk.” The problem is that this literature all too often overlooks the issue of power as it applies to such misunderstandings.

Similarly, we have a situation here where the US military uses an incomprehensible hand gesture and Iraqis are shot for failing to comprehend. The solution, we are told, is to teach our soldiers to better understand Iraqi culture, when it seems it might be our own military culture which needs to be able to adjust in order to adapt to local conditions.

But it is a “common sense” example in other ways, in that it seems the problem of hand gestures is well known – its just the details which are not. If McFate and company are wrong on the details, then they aren’t doing much good. The soldiers writing letters and blogs seem to understand the problem just fine (without expert advice) and the military needs to figure out how to listen to them. Or even better yet, leave it to the Iraqis to sort out for themselves.

On the other hand, I fully approve of using video games to teach the military about Iraqi hand gestures.

Its for this reason that I wanted to spotlight the “American Psychological Association’s decision”:http://www.apa.org/governance/resolutions/work-settings.html (“full text here”:http://www.apa.org/governance/resolutions/work-settings.html) which states that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law or the US Constitution, unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights. This follows on from a resolution last year in which the APA declared that it was unethical for its members to involve themselves in “degrading or inhumane treatment of research subjects”:http://www.apa.org/releases/faqinterrogation.html.

Now, you might think that it does not take a lot of moral courage for the APA to declare torture like waterboarding to be unethical… except for the fact that there are lots of extremely powerful people in the world who don’t even consider it torture. One might also argue that there is a big difference between the APA’s position and the AAA’s, since the work being done by HTS teams does not directly involve torture. But of course the APA position is much broader than a non-controversial opposition to torture — it covers all forms of degrading and inhumane treatment. It indicates that professional associations are willing to take a stand for ethical treatment of human subjects. In regards to HTS, it focuses attention on the need (which we’ve mentioned many times before) for some transparency on HTS’s part so that we can have some sense of what they are doing, and whether it has negative impacts on informants — something that is harder to track but nonetheless just as serious. Weeks and weeks ago a commenter mentioned that HTS would be making some publications available someday. I had no idea whether they actually knew anyone in the organization but… as of yet we still have nothing. Which is not exactly inspiring.

In the 1990s—while working within the gun control community as McFate—Sapone formed her own intelligence-gathering business. And she enlisted family members for its operations. “In our business, it’s my daughter-in-law, Montgomery Sapone [who] does all the analytic reports, forecasting, and white papers,” Sapone wrote to a client in an August 1999 email obtained by Mother Jones. “She produces a very professional product.” Sapone continued, “We are warning our clients that activist groups are moving towards ballot initiatives…And it’s easy for groups like Greenpeace to emotionally shape a looming crisis in a 10 second TV spot 2 days before a referenda election. My daughter Shelley specializes in that aspect of our business. We are doing a lot of work now to help clients in the 2000 election.”

A resume that Montgomery Sapone used around 1999 describes her role within Mary Lou’s business: “Collect and analyze intelligence on European activities of major international environmental organization for a company specializing in domestic and internal opposition research, special investigations, issues management and threat assessment. Write weekly intelligence update on European animal rights and eco-terrorist activity. Assist in confidential litigation support research.” Sapone’s son Sean, a Brown- and Harvard-educated paratrooper who served with the 82nd Airborne Division, was managing director of this firm, which at one point was called Strategic Solutions Group LLC and maintained an office in Washington, DC. According to a Strategic Solutions Group invoice sent to BBI in November 2000, Montgomery Sapone—a Harvard law school grad and Yale-trained anthropologist—once billed the security firm $400 for four hours of her time, which included a “visit to target’s office.”…

These days, Sean and Montgomery Sapone are better known as Sean and Montgomery McFate, a successful Washington couple whose current bios make no mention of any past intelligence-gathering or opposition-research work… Montgomery has made a name for herself as one of the primary architects of the US military’s human terrain program, which teams social scientists with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan to help soldiers better understand the local culture. (The controversial program has been sharply criticized by the American Anthropological Association, which fears it may cross an ethical line, and has been described by detractors as “mercenary anthropology.”) Now a top Pentagon adviser, Montgomery also contributed to the Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual drafted under the guidance of General David Petraeus.

What are we to make of this article? It seems to blatantly contradict “this earlier SF Chronicle article”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/04/29/CMGHQP19VD1.DTL which describes her as “a punk rock wild child of dyed-in-the-wool hippies” who “was born on Jan. 8, 1966 in Waldo Point, a Sausalito backwater of houseboats and hippies” to a woman named Frances Pointer?

One paints McFate as a sinister insider, the other as someone whose hippy credentials lend validity to her attempt to ‘change the military from the inside’. It seems to me that there are three options here:

1. Mother Jones has got it wrong.
2. The Chron has got it wrong.
3. There is some complicated double game being played here.

Anyone have any idea how to reconcile these different reports? I’d much rather chalk it up to 1 or 2 than 3.

UPDATE:
Or there is 4) Rex has got it wrong, which appears to be the right answer — see my comment below.

Strong forwarded this email yesterday on an AAA to discuss ethical and intellectual standards for Project Minerva. Imagining the variety of perspectives and disagreements (and as Culture Matters points out, people may be calling in from different time zones around the world), a conference call seems like a pretty difficult medium to handle so many people waiting to speak. Should the moderator allow for questions that is.

Anthropologists Critique Pentagon’s ‘Minerva’
Conference Call July 31, 2-3 pm

For Immediate Release:
July 16, 2008

Anthropologists have a long and, at times, troubled history of working with the military during times of conflict—from World War II to the present-day war on terror.

Recent controversies surrounding the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System, a $40 million program that embeds cultural advisors in combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, have spilled over into new anxieties surrounding the Pentagon’s ‘Minerva’ program, a Defense Department
initiative to fund social science and humanities research in Pentagon-designated national security-related areas, including terrorism, religious fundamentalism and Chinese military and
technology.

Following a speech on April 14 by Defense Secretary Robert M Gates announcing his vision for Minerva, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued a letter from its president to address some concerns about the program. The letter called for a redirection of program management to external organizations that have extensive experience in peer-review and are familiar with the ethical standards and concerns of the anthropology discipline.

“Rigorous, balanced and objective peer review is the bedrock of successful and productive programs that sponsor academic research. Agencies such as NSF, NIH and NEH have decades of experience in building an infrastructure of respected peer reviewers who referee individual grant proposals and give their time to sit on panels,” President Low stated in the letter to key White House and congressional leaders.

On June 30, the National Science Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Defense Department, sealing the deal that the two agencies will cooperate on the management of Minerva for the next three years, with the possibility of an extended contract.

According to the MOU, research proposals will be evaluated by the NSF’s standard merit-review panels, but Pentagon officials will have decision-making power in deciding who sits on the panels. Research will not be classified and researchers are free to publish their
results.

Despite the AAA’s enthusiastic support for NSF involvement with Minerva, there remain concerns within the discipline that research will only be funded when it supports the Pentagon’s agenda. Other critics of the program, including the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, have raised concerns that the program would discourage research in other important areas and undermine the role of the university as a place for independent discussion and critique of
the military.

AAA President Setha Low will be discussing Minerva and the AAA’s reaction to the program during a conference call on Thursday, July 31 from 2-3 pm.

Following discussion on Minerva, the July 31 conference call will feature a discussion on the global food crisis with anthropologist Sol Katz, co-chair of the AAA Task Force on World Food Problems.

For more information or to sign up for the call, contact Jennifer Steffensen at 703-528-1902 x 3039 or jsteffensen {at} aaanet(.)org.

Useful Links:

DoD Broad Agency Announcement:
http://www.arl.army.mil/www/DownloadedInternetPages/CurrentPages/DoingBusinesswithARL/research/08-R-0007.pdf

Letter from AAA President Setha M Low:
http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/upload/Minerva-Letter.pdf

Statement by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists:
http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/concernsaboutdod%27sminervaproject

NSF Press Release:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111829&govDel=USNSF_51

AAA President Setha M Low’s Web page:
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Psychology/faculty/slow.htm

Founded in 1902, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) is the
world’s largest professional organization of scholars and
practitioners in the field of anthropology. With over 10,000 members,
the Arlington, Virginia-based association includes archaeologists,
cultural anthropologists, biological (or physical) anthropologists,
linguists and applied anthropologists in universities and colleges,
research institutions, government agencies, museums, corporations and
non-profits throughout the world. AAA publishes 19 peer-reviewed
scholarly journals and conducts the largest annual meeting of
anthropologists in the world. For more information on the American
Anthropological Association, please visit http://www.aaanet.org.

The video shows what happens when coalition forces attempt to speak to a Pashtun elder. The elder tries to use a story about how it is impossible to stop ants from eating the wheat in order to explain why the community can’t help them, but the translator is either incapable or unwilling to translate the elder’s words. Instead he makes up something completely different which only serves to upset the soldiers and make them angry at the elder for not cooperating.

Now, it is true that an expert who had a deep understanding of Pashtun oral traditions would do a better job of translating between the old man and the forces. But so would a simple literal translation. The elder’s words are not particularly difficult to understand given the reporter’s subtitles, but the soldiers don’t hear that version. (I don’t know if the reporter told them how bad their translator is.)

I’m now reading Deborah Cameron’s The Myth of Mars and Venus, about which I will write more later, but one point she makes is that much of the literature on miscommunication between men and women lets men off the hook for their inability to understand women’s speech, even though the actual linguistic evidence implies that men use the same linguistic strategies (such as indirect requests) when it is convenient to do so. The point being that such miscommunication is treated as a cultural problem when it is really a problem of unequal power relations. The same woman who fetches her husband’s ketchup when he asks “Is there any ketchup?” will treat a similar question from her daughter as a factual query, replying: “Yes, dear, its in the cupboard.” Cameron argues that treating such communication problems as a matter of intercultural miscommunication (as Deborah Tannen does), obscures the real problems.

I feel the same way about the use of anthropology in the military. Treating the military’s lack of respect for local cultural knowledge as a cultural problem which can be solved by hiring anthropologists ignores the very real ways in which the military itself operates as a system for producing knowledge about the world, and the role of local knowledge in that system. It may be a useful PR to convey the impression that we are winning the intellectual arms race, but when I see video footage like this I find it very difficult to believe that the military is an institution capable of taking local knowledge seriously in any systematic way.

(Note that similar stories about inadequate translation have been circulating since the very beginning of the war. Also, I should make clear that Cameron takes Gumperz research on crosstalk seriously, even if she questions its applicability to gender relations. Thanks to Craig Campbell for the link!)

Page two after the jump…

The Bush administration is just trying to buy more time, says John Kelly, chair of the University of Chicago’s high-ranked anthropology department and joint organiser of a conference on anthropology and global counterinsurgency held there last month….  The conference also dissected the Counterinsurgency Manual, a military document that became a US bestseller. The manual implies “an endless future of counterinsurgency interventions,” Kelly notes. “It contains no section on withdrawal.”