Moving on to the heart of the matter: I am in that special stage of graduate school where I spend the majority of my time attempting to create the perfect little document that will help me get that BIG, IMPORTANT GRANT so that I can actually go into the field and move on with my research.  For some reason that perfect little document remains elusive.  It is more than likely my own fault, rather than some macro-structural issue. There is definitely a learning curve when it comes to making appeals to that complex funding machine that few people truly understand.  When it comes to getting that BIG, IMPORTANT GRANT, I happen to be zero for two at this point.  So if this were a baseball game, I would be in literal and metaphorical trouble.  But, I could always get inspiration from one of the all-time great hitters like Rod Carew, and pull off a clutch ninth inning hit.  That means money.  End of metaphor.

Anyway, I happen to find grant writing incredibly excruciating on numerous levels.  From what I hear around the halls of academia, I am definitely not alone.  On the flip side, I can’t imagine having to spend hours and hours reading one grant after another about the “complexities” or “nuances” of this or that particular social conundrum.  Imagine that!  The whole grant writing process is filled with real people–and that’s a good thing to keep in mind.  Let’s not dehumanize the process, folks.  We’re all just people, trying to find our way in this world.  Insert moody, yet pensive background music that makes us rethink our life priorities.

Enough pensiveness.  Let’s talk about the trials and travails of grant writing.  I’ll start, with some thoughts, questions, and observations that I have learned along the way.  Then hopefully some of your will chime in and give me your two or three cents about the matter.  Keep in mind the fact that I am not currently a grant writing MASTER, and realize that I am in the middle of working through all of this out too.  I may never figure it out!  If you are in the same fix, read along and join in.  If you are not quite at this stage and terrified of the whole process, read along and join in.  If you are in fact a grant writing master, read along and join in.  If you are currently sitting on piles of grant money that you don’t know what do to with…WHAT??!  HOW?!?  Just kidding.  Please read along, everyone, and let’s see if we can make that special place known as Grantlandia just a bit sunnier–or at least less horrifyingly stressful.

(in no particular order of importance)

1. Style.  I am finding the question of style to be a little difficult at times.  As you can see, I tend to be a little on the narrative side, but there just isn’t a lot of space to GET NARRATIVE.  So word choices need the Hemingway method, which is all about getting straight to the point.  Hemingway is probably too wordy, but you get the point.  Be concise.

2. Style, part II: On the other end of the spectrum, there is what I call the “citation dumping” issue.  This is where you make a claim and then proceed to fill the next six lines with citations, like this: (Anderson 1977, 2009, 2011a, 20011b, 2012; Parsons 1919; Boas 1899; Kroeber 1945; Mead 1921; Farmer 2004; Malinowski 1928; Davis 1990; 2002; Low 2005, 2009..and so on).  When is it enough?  When is it going completely overboard?  Does it depend on the actual grant in question?  Does it depend on the point being raised?  For me, this particular stylistic move is particularly unreadable, but I understand that it has a certain utility.  I’d be interested to see what some others have to say about this.

3. Preparation.  I read an essay by Michael Watts about writing grants called “The Holy Grail: In Pursuit of the PhD Proposal.”  Here is what he had to say: “One of the great curiosities of academia is that the art of writing a research proposal–arguably one of the most difficult and demanding tasks confronting any research student–is so weakly institutionalized.”  The essay is online here, along with some other great resources for proposal writing (thanks, UC Berkeley, for putting that online).  Considering the difficulty and importance of this process, it seems like grant writing should be more integrated into the whole grad school process.  Right?  So why isn’t this the case?  Or is it actually the case, just not everywhere?  Inquiring minds would like to know.

4. Eye strain.  It’s a good idea to look away from your computer screen every 20-30 minutes, at least for about 20 seconds.  This decreases the need to utilize this stuff.

5. Reality check: So what happens when students don’t get these grants?  Then what?  Should they sit around for years on end waiting until they do get one, or find some other way to get themselves into the field?  When is it time to either change the field site or the topic?  This is a big question, and a huge problem in the overall political economy of grad school these days.  If the money isn’t there–or the research just isn’t appealing to funding institutions–what should a grad student do?

6. The F-Word.  No, not that f-word.  I am talking about Foucault, and more generally about some of the issues with relying too heavily on THE BIG THINKERS THAT EVERYONE CITES YEAR AFTER YEAR.  I learned this lesson the hard way the first time around, and then got some strategic advice about using THE BIG THINKERS.  Use them wisely, and concisely.  Also, keep in mind the fact that reviewers come from different theoretical camps: don’t beat them over the head with your favorite BIG THINKER, because it might work against you.  This was some of the best advice I received: If the reviewer is already on board with your particular theoretical camp, then it doesn’t take much to let them know where you stand.  The strategy comes into play when you learn how to put just enough so that it works on all fronts.  I am still working on this, by the way.

7. Harry Wolcott said this: “For the most part, the research that gets attended to is research on topics that attracts money and status, political factors beyond the control researchers themselves.” (In The Art of Fieldwork, 2005: 135).  Do you agree or disagree with this statement?  Does it all come down to politics?  A bigger issue to keep in mind.

8. Remember the massive economic crisis of 2008?  Ya, that’s not over yet.  So this means that funding is pretty constrained these days.  Which makes it all the more imperative to really think about your budget.  You don’t want to be dismissed outright because you asked for 19 grand when you only *really* needed about three.  Be realistic.

9. Follow the grant directions closely.  Don’t get disqualified on a technicality.  Make sure that you actually answer the questions that the proposal guidelines ask, or that you have all of the required sections where they should be.

10. Question: What’s the difference between a grant proposal and the actual research on the ground?  What happens when all of those theories and methodological frameworks–written up for a grant competition to sound innovative and appealing–run into the messy realities of actual fieldwork?  This leads to another question: Is grant writing really a good way to conceptualize an actual research plan?  Is there a difference between creating a research plan and writing a competitive grant proposal?  Should there be a difference?

11. Rejection.  Look, don’t take it personally, and be sure to really look at what the reviewers said–even if you disagree with them.  You’re going to face the same process again, and will need to defend your stance.  Oftentimes, you get some pretty good ideas/feedback from those reviews,a and it can help you as you learn to navigate these kinds of processes.  Learn from the experience, and keep going forward.

12. If at all possible, find some time to take a break every now and again.  Grants matter, yes.  And they are incredibly stressful to prepare.  But, taking a short break can do wonders for mental clarity and creativity.  Go outside, look at some trees, stare at the ocean for a while–whatever.  It helps.

For just about as long as I’ve known him, Kerim has been working on PDBMS, about a stigmatized Indian tribal group who try to forge a future for themselves be performing street theater dramatizing their plight and other social justice issues. He’s been going on about the project for years, and most of the time I nodded my head politely and was like: yeah whatever street theater blah blah South Asia blah blah. I mean: some guy get a perfectly good Ph.D. from a respected university, moves to job in the ass-end of Taiwan, and then spends most of this time ranting on the Internet about Gramsci and editorials in the New York Times — and now he’s got some ‘documentary film’ he’s making. Really, what’s the chances of it being any good?

Except a few months ago I managed to get a sneak peak of the film and was pleasantly surprised that it is not just good, but actually very very good — which made me feel a lot better about asking my students to sit through the thing for extra credit. I repeat: it’s good. By any standards. To me the greatest part of the film is that it managed to convey on screen the immediacy and power of live theater, something that it is almost impossible to do. The ethics of the film making project are equally fascinating: it’s a film about Chharas not by them, except that they are performers so in a sense it is by them. It’s something less than ‘collaborative anthropology’ of the Lassiter mold, but also something more in its willingness to experiment with a form that goes beyond the usual cliches of sharing and caring with your host community.

Plus also there is a point at which someone puts a hand over the camera and you get to hear Kerim go all Michael Moore on people and demand in his New York accent “no you tell us why we have to stop filming.” So, you know, it has that going for it.

If you go to the movie home page and donate US$35 you can get to watch the film. But really, if you’ve ever appreciated all the work Kerim has done for Savage Minds, I think the donation site will accept way less than thirty five bucks. The money will be used to burnish up the final edit so that it can be shown in prime time at the Busan film festival.

As a policy we don’t make announcements of this sort on SM but I wanted to make an exception in this case so that Kerim can feel some of the SM love that he’s accrued over the past couple of years and his excellent film gets the support it deserves.

Social science research isn’t on the firmest ground in these days of economic malaise, but it’s not like this news is exactly exploding into the headlines across the nation.  Funding cuts, like the recent “trimming” of the Fulbright program,* seem to take place somewhat under the radar.   The same can be said of the recent debates about the value of social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences that took place about a month ago in a congressional hearing on June 2, 2011 (this link has PDFs of the introductory statements and the testimony of all the witnesses).  The social sciences face an uphill battle, in part, because some folks see them as mere “soft sciences” that do not merit public support.  The House panel subcommittee meeting was about assessing the relative merit of the social sciences and how federal funding should or should not be allocated to researchers.  Did you hear about this?  Well, I didn’t–at least not until just a few days ago.  Funny what can happen in the middle of the summer, isn’t it?  Anyway, here’s a recap of what went down according to a summary from the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA):

The goal of this hearing is not to question whether the social, behavioral, and economic sciences produce interesting and sound research, as I believe we all can agree that they do. I come from a social science background. I have a degree in political science and economics. Rather, the goal of our hearing is to look at the need for federal investments in these disciplines, how we determine what those needs are in the context of national priorities, and how we prioritize funding for those needs, not only within the social science disciplines, but also within all science disciplines, particularly when federal research dollars are scarce.

Brooks’ language sounds cool, rational, and impartial.  However, according to journalist Jeffrey Mervis:

Brooks may have been pulling his punches. In comments to ScienceInsider after the hearing, Brooks expressed serious doubts about the value of the social sciences. The freshman legislator said he “understands the value of basic research” because his constituents in and around Huntsville, Alabama, make up “one of, if not the most, highly educated districts in the sciences.” Brooks did say that “my priorities would be to protect basic research in the sciences as much as possible, even to the extent of cutting entitlements, in order to generate enough funding for basic research.” But his definition of the term “basic research” turns out to be synonymous with the so-called hard sciences, and to exclude the social sciences.

Gutman, for his part, argued in defense of NSF funding for social science research.  From the COSSA report: “[Gutman] provided many examples of how SBE research has served the nation including research on human actions and decision making, terrorism, artificial speech, matching markets and kidney transplants, spectrum auctions and the importance of protecting social networks in disaster situations.” Elfeinbein, who is a psychologist by training, also provided testimony about the value and applicability of of social science research.  She discussed the applicability of her own research for business, the military, medicine, and education.  When asked why SBE science is important for science in general, the Federal government, and the American taxpayer, Elfeinbein stated (from the PDF of her actual testimony):

The social and behavioral sciences in general are important because technology, health, industry, and politics are ultimately in the hands of people–who behave rationally and irrationally.  The learning and implementation of all other sciences depends on the human factor.

That is certainly a point that many anthropologists would agree with.  Up next was the anthropologist in the crowd, Peter Wood.  His position was that “the SBE sciences should not be x-ed out completely from the budget of the NSF or other federal agencies.” However, Wood did say that he thinks a small percentage of SBE funding goes to what he called “trivialities and politicized programs.” Wood laid out a “triage” approach to cutting the SBE NSF budget, which he explained in more detail a few days later in a post he wrote for the Chronicle of High Ed called “How to Save the Social Sciences.”  Wood’s first point was that there is plenty of funding sources that are non-governmental, so NSF funding isn’t all that necessary.  His second point: there are already too many SBE PhD’s, and the NSF is making the situation worse by continuing to fund them.  His third point of this triage is where things start getting a little dicey.  Wood advised the panel to:

Pay attention to the rise of anti-scientific ideologies within SBE disciplines. In my field of anthropology, for example, the recent controversy over the attempt by the Executive Board of American Anthropological Association to jettison “science” from the AAA’s mission statement is a pertinent example. Should NSF fund “social science” research in fields that reject the paradigm of scientific investigation?

Since “social, behavioral and economic sciences research does not fit the conditions that define it as a ‘public good,’” [...] it should receive no funding from the Federal government, particularly NSF. She indicated that Foundations were a source that SBE scientists could use and since Smith, Marx, and Keynes all conducted their research without government support, so could today’s economists and other social scientists.

On July 12, the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued a press release that speaks to these very issues:

More than 140 scientific societies and universities today sent a letter urging U.S. policymakers, in their need to cut spending, to avoid singling out specific programs—such as the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences—and to refrain from bypassing independent peer review.

The letter, routed to key lawmakers who are preparing to debate the Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill for fiscal year 2012, opposes any attempts to eliminate or substantially reduce funding for particular research programs. Defunding specific grants or entire scientific disciplines “sets a dangerous precedent that, in the end, will inhibit scientific progress and our international competitiveness,” the group warned.

While the Society for Anthropological Sciences is a part of the letter, the American Anthropological Association is curiously absent.  I’m not sure why.  Regardless, it would probably behoove the anthropological community to become a more active–and vocal–part of these discussions.  Silence, in this case, is certainly not golden.

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.

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).

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.

We use a simple WordPress installation to coordinate our research, and much of the discussion over the years has been about how to improve the specifically academic modes of interaction we are accustomed to (i.e. email and sharing documents for review and critique) to take advantage of new software tools and new kinds of research, much of which is frequently discussed here. Right now, I’m the main “technical” person, but I’m looking for people (especially graduate students) who might want to participate in this project and help make the tools more effective, figure out how to manage a collaboratory (i.e. herd cats), or contribute to these research projects or even start a new one. This potentially includes one or more paid positions, but that depends on how much work required or desired. If anyone is interested in participating at any level, please contact me (ckelty at rice dot edu)

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.

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

The problem I had with his post is the word “only.” Having relied heavily on internet fundraising to produce a documentary film I know how much work goes into getting just a few hundred donations. A recent Savage Minds poll, which involved nothing more than clicking a button, was only able to garner 400 clicks from our own true fans. Kevin Kelly later posted a letter from musician Robert Rich, making a similar point, saying that

In reality the life of a “microcelebrity” resembles more the fate of Sisyphus, whose boulder rolls back down the mountain every time he reaches the summit.

If it is that difficult for a musician or a filmmaker to secure the patronage of 1,000 true fans on the internet, what is the anthropologist to do? Is it possible to even talk about bypassing traditional research institutions and appealing directly to the internet to support our projects? I think so.

We may not be able to live off of it, but it seems to me that small scale research projects which have a strong element of public interest should be able to secure funding in this way. Just look at the success of DonorsChoose, a charity which funds projects proposed by elementary school teachers. Only projects which are able to reach their fundraising goals get funded. Otherwise you can reassign your money to another project.

Anastasia Hudgins, a lecturer and former classmate at Temple University’s department of anthropology is trying to do something similar for her summer research project. She and two undergraduate students are trying to raise $4,000 in the next two weeks to fund a research trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She wants to followup on earlier research with Cambodian sex workers, to see how they have been impacted by recent laws outlawing prostitution. Like DonorsChoose, you only pay if enough people agree to fund the project before the May 15th deadline.

My personal experience tells me that this is a lot of money to raise in a short amount of time, but I’m curious to see if this works – and if it doesn’t I get to keep my $20. I can envision a DonorsChoose like site dedicated to anthropological research, where people can request small grants to replace a broken camera, buy a plane ticket, hire a translator, etc. After all, if we don’t want to depend on the military to fund our research, we need to find something better!

But, as the New York Times notes, drawing upon Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments data, an increasing proportion of this is classified (hence the “black budget” moniker). Paglen’s research has delved into aspects of the research cultures associated with the highly secretive defense establishment via the use of graphic representations, especially patches (badges).

The patches analyzed in his new book titled I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World are worth examining, for they convey information about the practices associated with building research team cultures in a key segment of US federal government-sponsored R&D. They are also, if you watch the Colbert Report interview, seriously surreal. I must admit never having seen patches created by non-defense scientists.

The NY Times article also has a slideshow about the patches.

I’ll be sure to add patches to the budget of my next grant proposal! I’ve already picked out the patch for the Taiwan research team!

#1 on sociocultural anthropology and ethnographic sociology: I strongly recommend Rosalie Wax’s book Doing Fieldwork (U Chicago 1971, reissued around 1986, and still available on Amazon or your college library). It’s a memoir of fieldwork, and contains a wonderful capsule history that moves between conventional anthropological and sociological sources. Park is an important part of the story, but before that (among other folks) Beatrice and Stanley Webb were working in London, contemporary with Boas and part of Malinowski’s environment. Just in U.S. anthropology, it’s my sense that the various subfields and theoretical styles are unevenly aware of ethnographic sociology (that is, we’re not all equally ignorant!).

I agree that there is a lack of reference to qualitative sociology in the recent generation’s revaluation of work “at home”. But anthropologists have always worked at home; indeed, working at home is cheaper (it doesn’t necessitate securing a research fellowship or grant) and was therefore always common. What has happened over the past generation is that working at home has become not only expedient but also sexy. So one question is: what was the relationship between ethnographic sociology and the long tradition of home style anthropology? Lots of other questions certainly (e.g., for example, how is the anthropology/sociology relationship managed in joint departments?)!

#2 on multidisciplinary projects and IRBs: How IRBs handle multidisciplinary projects is an interesting question. I haven’t seen much commentary in the gargantuan IRB literature on this: so, any stories folks? Tom—do you want to describe the HIV study with respect to IRB approval?

In any case, I very much agree that it’s important to improve our understanding of disciplinary differences: much of my work has focused on this (as my own AE paper suggests). I’ve been particularly interested in the partial connections—the reticulum of similarities and differences—among closely related disciplines like those I sketched (e.g., p 483, 484-5, and esp. 485-6) in that essay.

For example, the IRB literature—definitely including that written by folks who are critical of IRB “mission creep”—is full of generalized references to the problems “qualitative” researchers face when their work is evaluated by IRBs. While it is true that there are significant differences between qualitative and quantitative researchers, this distinction doesn’t begin to address the problems of cross-disciplinary communication between researchers and IRBs (and among IRB members). Consider that thoroughly quantitative survey researchers and thoroughly qualitative, interpretive anthropologists both approach potential informants on the latter’s home ground (where consent forms aren’t the most effective ways to ensure informant consent, where informants have considerable power to stop participating); in contrast, oral historians and interpretive anthropologists—both qualitative—have very different conventions with respect to confidentiality!

#3 on inconsistencies and a sneaky plan to heighten the contradictions:  John McCreery raises an excellent question.  It would be nice if consistency ruled: all researchers should face the same constraints, but they don’t. The irony here is that consistency is one of the core values of bureaucratic ethics management.  Consistency is a recurrent refrain on many local IRBs (“…well, if we allow you guys to do away with written informed consent, then we’d have to allow everyone to…”) and it is a key theme at the national level as well.
 

Ironies aside, as I understand it, there’s an important, fatal flaw in your deliciously sneaky consistency argument:  market researchers don’t depend on federal funds to do their work.
 

Strictly speaking, IRB oversight is only required for institutions (like most universities and colleges) that accept federal research funds.  The federal human subject protections regulations (45 Code of Federal Regulations, Pt. 46) were nicknamed “the Common Rule” in 1991 when 17 federal agencies (like NIH) that fund human subjects research all signed on.  Rick Shweder’s contribution to our November 2006 American Ethnologist Forum explains that universities and other institutions that accept federal research funds cannot get those funds unless they sign an “assurance” with the relevant funding agencies, or a general Federal Wide Assurance (FWA): documents that obligate them to have one or more local IRBs to review their employees’ research proposals.    
 

Now, as Shweder’s article also explains, university and college IRBs only need to promise to review federally funded research.  However, it seems that most of our institutions have gone beyond this minimum requirement and have checked a box on the FWA form that obligates them to review all research, not just federally funded research!  (Folks all over the place are looking in to this situation at their institutions: I recommend that you make friends with someone in your institution’s counsel’s office and look in to it too!)  In any case, over the past five or six years of IRB “hypervigilance” (the situation that prompted the AE Forum) boards have been jittery and have tended to review all research regardless of how it is funded, regardless of whether their FWA obligates them to do so or not.    
 

Responding to John’s question about the existence of guidelines parallel to those on which IRBs are founded: I can think of one that, while still being at least partially academic, is interesting nonetheless.  Check out the National Academy of Sciences “On Being a Scientist” booklet (available online at http://bob.nap.edu/readingroom/books/obas/ ), which concerns science research ethics very generally.  This is another example of the inconsistencies mentioned above:  unlike the IRB oversight of research with human participants, these general (mostly non-human participant research) guidelines are completely voluntary even tho the research is very likely to be federally funded!
      
#4  on the roots of the IRB problems in disciplinary ‘cultures of research’:  Another terrific question!  My responses to other folks’ questions contain bits and pieces of an answer to this one (as does my AE Forum paper).  But a fuller response would be the paper I mention in my comment on #5 (below).  My contribution to the Cornell conference was a paper entitled “Comparative ‘Research’: A Modest Proposal Concerning the Regulatory Object” (which I’ll be ready to make available in a few weeks).  In my view, the problems go way, way beyond the IRB context and derive exactly from the “cultures of research” of which IRB members and the rest of us are part.  My own long-term research has been all about disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity—that is, engagements like those cross-disciplinary discussions concerning methodology you mention.  As I explained in my AE paper, IRB discourse is just one of my “fieldsites” (which include other places in which disciplinary practitioners bump up against one another, as well as fractious intra-disciplinary moments of ethical crisis).  But it’s a fieldsite in which everyone is implicated and consequently of great interest.  My AE paper unpacks the Common Rule “definition of research” a bit; and it also begins to address exactly the issues you identify concerning how ethnographic fieldwork is understood by folks from other disciplines (and vice versa).  Check it out.  
  
#5 on the relationship between IRB and intellectual property issues:  If Michael Brown is still out there, what do you think about the relationship between IRB surveillance and the management of intellectual property contradictions? 
 

Different institutional mechanisms are at play with respect to intellectual property and IRB controversies.  For one thing, the IRB system exists outside of (or prior to) legal mechanisms for dealing with accusations about misrepresentation (libel laws), privacy, and the like.  This is a huge issue: several of us refer to it in the AE Forum (and anyone interested in following this might also check out http://irbinfo.blogspot.com/ and follow references to Hamburger’s Supreme Court Review paper).  In a paper that I wrote for a Cornell Law School-hosted conference on “Bureaucracies of Virtue”, I suggested that we’d be better off (and our informants no worse off) if our work were held to account in the same ways that the work of journalists and other writers are.  As I understand the current situation, IRB reviews do not protect us or our institutions from lawsuits (that is, whether or not consent forms are involved, IRB reviews don’t prevent our interlocutors from suing us).  As things stand, many critics see IRB reviews as constituting censorship-like prior review (arguably a kind of “prior restraint”, something that the First Amendment protects against).                
 

The other significant thing is that the realities of funding at the NSF are never easily restricted by the actions of congress. Anyone who has applied for a large NSF grant in the social sciences in the last 4 years has encountered the “Human and Social Dynamics Program”–which is the NSF’s largest social science initiative ever, and explicitly promotes interdisciplinary work between scientists, engineers and social scientists. What this means to me is that a bill like S. 2802 probably provides the NSF with yet more incentive to create more programs like this, and to fund less “basic” research, especially in SBE, but probably across the board. This is, increasingly, what the NSF is expected to do: encourage scientists and engineers to move their science in the directions indicated by the taxpayers and their representatives. If there is no call, from any quarter of society besides that of the researchers, for continued research on neo-liberalism: THE AWAKENING, or on primate behavior under conditions of extreme scarcity of funding, or on anomalous Igbo fricatives, then the NSF has absolutely no mandate to fund it (I would note, however, that this is not what the NSF was originally designed to do, which was in fact to fund basic science and let corporate america sort it out later in “development”–but times have changed…). So, half empty glass = yes, NSF funding of anthropology is imperiled (has it ever not been?); meanwhile half full glass = those of you anthropologists willing to do interesting research on things that are prioritized by the NSF (like, for instance, “Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems” or “Human and Social Dynamics“) may well still find plenty of funding there.