One of the issues that our debate about anthropologists at war swirls around issues of whether or not anthropology ought be put to use. But undergirding this are certain empirical claims regarding the efficacy of anthropology — that is, the assumptions that it can be put to work in Iraq and that it is useful. In this entry I’d like to summarize some of the common forms taken by arguments for and against claims of anthropological efficacy at war.
First there is the ‘Ecclesiastes’ objection: This is the claim that humans in general (including anthropologists) have very little power to change or shape their world. As Kohelet says in Ecclesiastes, “all is vanity and a striving after wind” — our actions have outcomes that we can not predict and side-effects we cannot control. This sort of generalized cynicism about human claims to efficacy does not seem particularly compelling to me, except as an antidote to an extremely overweening technocratic faith in social science as social engineering — and I am not sure a lot of people hold that view. Still, useful to note.
We might also present a humanist objection (for lack of a better label) that anthropology and the social sciences more generally are not (and some would add “unlike the natural sciences) technically useful — they provide wisdom, or critique, or some other sort of valued thing, but not technical control which can help in planning. Anthropologist often make these sorts of claims amongst themselves, but often also insist, especially to outsiders, that we have a valuable ‘applied’ or ‘public’ function. These arguments — mostly from the left — are hoisted on their own petard when anthropology is ‘applied’ by the right in the war in Iraq.
Of course, many would counter that applied anthropology in general is possible, but application is impossible in Iraq — that the conflict in Iraq renders any sort of meaningful fieldwork impossible, that data gathered is unreliable, and that it is simply impossible to do good work in Iraq. I personally find this objection extremely plausible.
There is a related, idiographic objection, which states that application is possible, but requires specialist knowledge of Iraq, not a generalized social science competence in anthropology.
Now there are also positions in favor of anthropology’s efficacy:
McFate’s position is that it is possible to anthropologize the Pentagon — that by working inside the system you can change it. In response to this people have given a co-optation argument: that anthropologists will be humored by the military and simply used for the information they provide. Both these positions seem to assume that application is possible, although I suppose the co-optation argument could claim that what information being co-opted was useless. The argument here is sociological — institutional reform is not possible given the structural situation of the reformer.
Griffin’s position is a slightly different one — that anthropology is efficacious, not in enlightening military minds, but simply in helping them achieve a goal which is not seen as needing remedy. “Anthropological research is used to better understand the population culturally, socially, and organizationally,” “Griffin writes”:http://marcusgriffin.com/blog/2007/10/why_is_the_use_of_anthropology.html and “this situational awareness leads to better decisions by soldiers on the street.” This is a slightly different argument than McFate’s, and is not really open to a charge of co-optation, since Griffin’s goal is, as it were, not to change the system but to abet it.
Both of these positions are open to a variation of co-optation argument which we might want to call the gone native objection. This argument would hold that Griffin and McFate have both been so heavily socialized into military culture that they have lost the reflexive capacity necessary to apply anthropology in Iraq — they have, in other words, drunk the kool-aid. Such an argument would seem to imply that application is possible, but McFate and Griffin in particular are unable to do so. This is, as it were, the psychological parallel to the co-optation argument.
The ‘gone native’ objection is distinct from disgust with McFate and Griffin. The former is an empirical judgment about their capacity as researchers (albeit a very personal one) whereas the other is a value judgment about how terrible it is for Griffin to learn to shoot guns or lift weights. I think it is important that assessments of McFate and Griffin’s mental state and their capacity to do their jobs are not ad hominem attacks, although I do think they are a little creepy, rely on evidence that most of us have no access to, and rankle my sense of a person’s right to privacy.
There is also another objection that could be raised against McFate and Griffin: that they are lousy anthropologists (or, to be more fair, ‘do lousy anthropology’). This would be the argument that application is possible, and that anthropologists in Iraq and bad it at — not because they have ‘gone native’ or field conditions are challenging, but simply because they are not very good at anthropology.
Making this sort of objection would require more knowledge of their work than most people who comment on this blog possess. Personally I think Grififin is more open to this criticism than McFate. In his blog, for instance, he gives as an example of anthropological insight the claim that if we “improve the quality of life of local residents by building their satisfaction with the Iraqi Government and they will likely be less willing to harbor insurgents.” This is value added? Of course one could counter in this case that Griffin’s blog is not reflective of his work as a scholar. One could also counter that the military is so clueless that in fact even lousy anthropology is of value to them. Of these two counter arguments I’m more sympathetic to the second than the first.
What is the point of parsing out all of these possible objections? It seems clear to me that argumentation about participating in the war in Iraq rest on empirical assumptions about the efficacy of anthropology.
Our deliberations will be improved if these assumptions are scrutinized. What we see here are a gamut of problems in assuming that anthropologists can be efficacious in Iraq which run from a very generalized skepticism about the utility of human knowledge in general to very particular judgments about the capacities of individual anthropologists. The more general one’s objections, the more superfluous individual judgments become: if you think it is impossible for anyone to do good work in Iraq, you do not have to plumb the depths of McFate’s psychology.
That said, it is also clear that there are important questions to ask about the careers and personalities of individual scholars, and that asking these questions does not constitute ad hominem attack. It is however, extremely personal. When anthropologists blog (as Griffin does, for instance), there is a certain amount of scrutiny that they must expect. But if we are to think seriously together about these issues we should do so respectfully even if we disagree strongly with the positions that our colleagues in the discipline take.
I’ve been arguing that they’ve been co-opted regardless of the efficacy of the anthropology that they are doing, and regardless of their personal goals. Put simply, the very presence of anthropologists in the war is a PR stunt to make it seem as if a change in strategy can win an unwinnable war. The efficacy of this campaign relies upon public conceptions of anthropology as effective but doesn’t require it to actually be effective. Not unlike homeopathic medicine.
Also I think you conflate efficacy in terms of producing knowledge which can lead to policy decisions with efficacy in terms of actually shaping the decisions made from those policies. I don’t think there is much disagreement among anthropologists that anthropological knowledge could be (indeed, should be) used to construct good public policy. The question is whether or not policy makers are able to use this knowledge in that way. This is different from your co-optation argument in that the anthropologists themselves don’t need to be co-opted for their knowledge to be misused, misunderstood, or simply ignored because it is inconvenient.
Lets look at Colin Powell. He was effective in convincing Bush to go into Afghanistan before Iraq, but then because he was co-opted into supporting the Iraq war he ultimately undermined the campaign in Afghanistan he helped launch. How effective was Powell?
Rex, thanks for laying out the issues and approaches so clearly. This, to me at least, marks a real step forward in our discussion.
I would like to suggest that we might get even further forward by interrogating the following issues: (1) the binary oppositions that underlie the Ecclesiastes and humanist objections and (2) the lack of attention to scale and to social position in, for example, Kerim’s sudden leap from an anthropologist, who may or may not be useful to the unit to which he is attached in Iraq or Afghanistan, to Colin Powell.
The Ecclesiastes objection turns on an overdrawn contrast between omnipotent social engineering and being totally helpless. Neither is remotely likely, and to frame the debate in this way, ignores the possibility that something useful might be done, with how to do it properly still very much open to debate. One can, for example, agree with Margaret Mead’s famous statement that every successful social movement in history has started with a handful of dedicated people and also observe that no example I can think of ever began–let alone finished–with a petition to a professional association. History is full of examples of successful mass movements. Perhaps, if we were serious, we could learn a bit from them.
The humanist objection turns on a similar overdrawn contrast, between something called “technical control” and a wisdom whose purity can only be preserved at the cost of remaining completely hands-off. As someone who has been involved in both business and practical politics for a number of years, I can testify that “technical control,” while frequently sought, is never achieved in any enterprise more complex than operating a simple machine. On the other hand, the sorts of knowledge and habits of mind that training as an anthropologist provides can be useful–just not in ways that this binary opposition comprehends. Thus, for example, symbolic anthropology did not teach me how to tell an art director how to do his job. It did equip me to explain persuasively what the art director is up to, a useful skill when your livelihood depends on selling advertising. It is, thus, not hard for me to imagine an anthropologist who has studied Afghan tribesmen performing a similar service for the commander of an infantry company trying to get a handle on the people whose cooperation is essential for getting his job done.
Our debates, however, far to often jump all over the place in terms of time, space and social position. The anthropologist who offers advice to the company commander or helps him communicate better with the tribesmen with whom he is forced to work or fight, as case may be, is suddenly taken metonymically as a symbol of the ability or lack thereof to influence national policy. She may, like Colin Powell, find herself in a predicament where her advice is ignored because those who receive it find other considerations more pressing. But what those considerations are and what alternatives are open to her are likely to be very different, indeed. To conflate these two cases on the grounds that the predicaments are superficially similar is to equate a whale and a fish on the grounds that both must swim in the sea.
Case-by-case, with attention to detail and context: It’s good business, good jurisprudence, good clinical practice–why not good anthropology, too?
Nice job Rex, Kerim, John, and everyone working to move the discussion forward!
I want to contribute an argument for the necessity of anthropological engagement. It is called “We are up shit creek and anthropology is a paddle.”
(Note: As a take on efficacy, this doesn’t add much to the above accounting, maybe its sort of an extension of McFate’s position to any sort of engagment within/beyond “the system.” I am posting here because this seems like the least dialogically hypersaturated thread of the moment. Which leads me to mention that it might be a nice gesture to the unwashed masses to someday set up a message board where unchaired adjuncts can address the bretheren from soapboxes of our own topicalization…)
Every participant in this discussion agrees that “political efforts should go into stopping and preventing anything like the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Describing what those efforts might be, and what place if any anthropology has in them is the point of contention. As we debate, it will help to remember the classical (Clauswitz) description of war itself is a series of political efforts to end a conflict in such a way as to prevent it from happening again. By this logic, a war stops when it finally achieves/degenerates into a relatively inert im/balance of power. One of most troublesome aspects of the current situation is that nobody has any idea of how to imagine a tolerable endpoint to what is happening in Iraq. Hence the US military’s pragmatic interest in talking to anthropologists: a group of people who occasionally claim to possess the power of accurately describing what peaceful societies are like, and why. As well, this current war is different from wars of the past. When a rigorous description of this difference is finally written, accuracy will require the use of contemporary anthropological discourse (e.g. neo-liberal transformations in the state effect, etc. etc). Creating such a description is a necessary prerequisite to creating social institutions and generating social forces adequate to achieve a lasting peace under the conditions that have led to this war. All of which is to say: we require an anthropological imagination to see a peaceful future.
Or so says the military. Some anthropologists call this a lie and claim the military’s only interest in anthropology is in using it as PR for the “man behind the curtain.” If the military is functioning as a PR firm for “the man” rather than trying to achieve the mission they were given by their elected civilian commanders, then it makes good sense to steer clear of the whole mess until somebody with their vested interests in the right place gets into power. But if the military is actually telling the truth when they say that the war is out of control, is not going to vanish when the American public “wakes up,” or when Bush leaves office, or when (if) the US submits to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, or even when the US military leaves Iraq, then maybe we should give some serious consideration to the idea that what is necessary to end this war is the creation of a viable end point.
As soon as we seriously consider crafting an anthropological description of this future peace, we immediately confront questions whose answers require a grounded ethnographic understanding of what the not-peace actually is. That is where Marcus Griffin and company come in. The value of his contribution is precisely that it is _not_ a traditional (salvage) ethnography describing what Iraq looked like before the invasion, but rather an accurate description of what is actually going on at the interactive front lines of various agencies mired in a situation of out-of-control violence. This kind of understanding is necessary. Policy making is counter-productive when done without solid understanding of how implementation plays out on the ground. Any realistic plan for creating peace, without regard to the role it proscribes for the American military vis-à-vis other agencies, must be made in dialogue with the people actually dealing with the current ground-level situation. No matter how we imagine the future peace, realizing it will begin in understanding the current war. As Gandhi said, “The means are the ends in their formative stages”; i.e. ethnographic engagement in the actually existing situation is a necessary part of the anthropological contribution to creation of “political efforts [adequate to] stopping and preventing anything like the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
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Jeff M. says: “All of which is to say: we require an anthropological imagination to see a peaceful future.”
This sounds to me like an “anthropologists’ burden” argument. A peaceful future should be imagined by Iraqi people themselves, not anthropologists from any other country. First of all, get out of other people’s country.
I am not so sure if one should only focus on if/how anthropological knowledge could be used for changing the policy or “enlightening” policy makers. Policies serve the INTEREST of certain groups of people who have all kinds of “knowledge” to justify their actions. Efficacy, first of all, means to digress a bit in your next lecture and spend 10 or 15 mins talking about anthropology and war, which I guess many SMers have already done. If one still believes “people” eventually still have a say in whatever political regime, producing discourses through the education system may be the first thing a social scientist should do. If you don’t do it, some SOB will do it, but probably in a way you don’t like.