(here is a micro-guest blog by “Jonathan Marks”:http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/, professor of anthropology at UNC, former presidents of the General Anthropology Division of the AAA and all-around eminent biological anthropologist. And in case you were wondering, yes his work is available “open access”:http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/pubs/main.html )
I’m resigned to having wasted another day of my sabbatical, so I suppose I can finish up by submitting something to a blog. I’ve read many of the posts here, or at least the ones that are signed (I’ve skipped the pseudonymous ones on general principles). I might add that I am a biological anthropologist, and by no means an ethnographer.
I agree with the general tenor of Marshall Sahlins’ letter, not least of all because after 20 or so years in anthropology I have come to the conclusion that he tends to be right about things, in much the same way that in my subfield David Pilbeam tends to be wrong about things. For my money, the use of anthropology to degrade or curtail people’s lives simply defeats the purpose of anthropology. As our Quaker founder, E. B. Tylor, wrote in opposition to the genocidal social Darwinists of his era, anthropology is a reformer’s science.
That said, I think Sahlins’ letter is perhaps too harsh on Roger Lancaster’s argument that military anthropologists make us look bad. If memory serves (and I am away from my office so I don’t have it handy) that is pretty much the argument made by Franz Boas made in his letter “Anthropologists as Spies” during World War I, for which he was censured by the AAA and only recently rehabilitated. The argument may not be the most important aspect of this debate, but is a valid one, IMHO. (I might add that I cast the lone dissenting vote against rehabilitating Boas, because I thought that act was corrupting the historical record.)
I listened to “the Diane Rehm show guest-hosted by Susan Page”:http://wamu.org/programs/dr/07/10/10.php over the internet yesterday, and found it to be spectacularly creepy. I was not impressed with either the sincerity or the truth-value of what I heard from the military anthropology side. Lt. Col Edward Villacres is first up, and he says around 3:50, that the role of anthropologists involves “the benefit of the brigade and enhancing their ability to make good decisions”. Around 5:30 he is asked “What kind of response have you gotten from the Iraqis with whom you’ve dealt?” He responds “The team does not interact with Iraqis on a really constant basis. We’re really a support team to the people who do interact. So we don’t have what you would call a direct interface with the Iraqis in the leadership positions. I attend meetings, and I try to help my commanders understand what it is they’re seeing, what possible next moves would be from observing what’s going on.” My free translation is that we don’t really want anthropology; we just want help in occupying the country.
Col. John Agoglia said the following, around 23:00 –
“The people out there … will talk to you. You don’t have to go out there and force them to talk to you. They want to know, What are you doing to take care of them. What are you doing to protect them and their children and make sure they’re fed. So it’s not a matter of having to force anybody to talk to you. It is a matter of understanding how do you interact with them in a way that gives them confidence that you are there to help them, you’re not there to harm them, and you’re not just some replacement for the repressive regimes that have been there before.”
My free translation is that anthropologists need to help us propagandize, and instead of helping the locals by keeping them away from the Blackwater mercenaries, we want anthropologists to act as shills for whatever embarrassing plot the military unveils next.
I’m not sure I can be fair to Montgomery McFate, who was the Maid of Honor at my wedding, and I will stand aside to let others crap on her. I will just note two apparent anomalies in her remarks. When the discussion turns to Anthropologist Tracy in Afghanistan, David Price raises the question of her transparency and whether she even gives the Afghans her full name. At 21:40 McFate says in mono-syllables, “Yes, she does”. At 35:38 David Rohde, who wrote the NYT piece, says, “I don’t think she gave her full name. I think she does identify herself as an anthropologist. I saw her briefly, but I don’t know what she does at all times. She personally actually chose to carry a weapon for security. That’s not a requirement for members of the teams, I’ve been told, and she wore a military uniform which would make her appear to be a soldier to the Afghans that she wasn’t actually speaking with.”
That last bit contradicts McFate’s statements at 19:15 and 48:00 that the locals can readily distinguish Army anthropologists from Army combatants. Rohde goes on at 36:30: “It’s the same problem with journalists. I mean even if we don’t wear uniforms we’re embedded with American military units. Afghans and Iraqis and others will assume that you’re a spy, that you’re somehow linked to the American military, and saying that you’re an anthropologist or a journalist is a cover.”
So, all told, I am not impressed with the introduction of anthropology here. It strikes me that Hugh Gusterson (I think it was he, maybe it was Roberto Gonzalez) got it right (in Anthropology Today?) when he said this was merely weaponizing anthropology. I also find it difficult to distinguish between those with possibly patriotic motives and those with possibly profiteering motives. I think there is a lot of disingenuity, not to mention double-speak. Maybe what we really need are linguistic anthropologists!
The other thing I worry about is whether the American soldiers are eating Iraqis, but I’ll defer that question until another time.
Jon Marks
Dept. of Anthropology
UNC-Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
Thank you for bringing this back from vague generalities to concrete details.
On principal, I am not convinced by grand proclamations like “Anthropological involvement with the military is always unethical.” But when you marshal verifiable facts about a particular instance into a coherent argument, my ears are open. And what you have written here has almost convinced me that HTS just might be bad news.
Sadly, Jon Marks won’t read this comment. On principal, since it’s written under a pseudonym. Maybe others can relay to Mr. Marks my gratitude. For myself, I believe that some conversations cannot be truly open without anonymity. And this is a conversation that needs to be open.
You worry about whether American soldiers are *eating* Iraqis? That’s very intriguing. I hope you will expand upon that soon.
I assumed, apparently mistakenly, that that comment would be transparently facetious, so in deference to L. L. Wynn’s request I will elaborate. In 1979, William Arens from Stony Brook wrote The Man-Eating Myth, which argued that (weak form) cannibalism is a powerful dehumanizing accusation and its prevalence ethnographically has been greatly overestimated, or that (strong form) in non-starvation or non-sociopathic contexts, cannibalism doesn’t exist. I think the strong version has been debunked, but the weak version is an important corrective to the uncritical acceptance of a symbolically powerful cultural narrative. In the early 1990s, geneticists proposed going out to the indigenous peoples of the world and bringing their blood back to Palo Alto to be studied, and wanted piles of federal money to do this, but not have to worry about the cultural or bioethical issues it raised. Nancy Scheper-Hughes wrote an article about the same time in Anthropology Today called “Theft of Life” in which she discussed the beliefs that diverse poor people around the world have, that rich Americans want to steal their body parts for nefarious magical purposes (and then she began studying the trans-national trade in body parts). In 1997, a paleontologist friend of mine and a couple of his graduate students were abducted at gunpoint from his site in Kenya by a local paramilitary group, who were stimulated by the belief that they were there to drink the blood of local babies. I don’t think he told them, “We’re paleontologists – it’s the geneticists that you want!” but I wouldn’t blame him if he had. In fact at the Musee de l’Homme a few years ago, part of the lovely human biology exhibit incorporated those ideas, referring to “Les Vampires de la Genetique”.
The geneticists finally got their project in 2005, but privately funded, and called The Genographic Project. They are now advertising that for $50k they will fly you on a private jet and analyze your DNA while you actually get to see poor people first-hand, whose DNA is already incorporated into their narrative of human migrations. I call this “hemo-tourism”.
Chimpanzees kill adults and infants, but only eat the infants. Go figure.
All:
I’m just glad Jonathan Marks has chosen to say something about military anthropologists, and has chosen to respond to the remarks. We need to hear more from him and people like him!
Anne Gilbert
John, your free translations make no sense. They’re so off the mark that I have a hard time taking your analysis seriously.
Why don’t you try again – this time, read the words and try to understand the intention behind them without seeing them through the lens of your opposition to the war in Iraq.
Just another little exercise in objectivity. Care to get a bit sweaty?
Quite honestly you should stay on sabbatical..you sound like a moron… you and all the other academic nudnicks who sit in the quiet comfort of your pompous ivory towers couldn’t shine my brother’s shoes or those of any of my former soldiers.
Try on the uniform for size..rather than constantly criticize those that are protecting your freedom of speech.
Dr. Agoglia wants to pull a few of Dr. Marks teeth. Nobody disses her brother like that. Nobody. McFate’s story doesn’t add up. No matter how many lies her brother and McFate are exposed as telling in a single broadcast, you are not allowed to point these out unless you have left the ivory tower and put on a uniform. Only those in uniform have earned the freedom to lie.
Dr Agoglia: Please clarify for us how fighting in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bears a relationship to freedom of speech.
Your comment leads me to highlight a second important issue: It is not clear if HTS “anthropologists” are US military personnel, or if they are US military contractors. Though this legal question is not completely clear, we certainly must not confuse critique or even condemnation of the HTS program (and critiques of individual HTS workers) with a condemnation of those who wear US uniforms AS US SERVICE MEN AND WOMEN. HTS workers seem to be civilians trained in anthropology or other social sciences who have freely chosen to enter a war zone for what must be substantial profit. They are qualified for these jobs because they are anthropologists, and we, their anthropological colleagues are qualified to critique them. One need not point out that a PhD in anthropology can only be earned in “the ivory tower,” if that’s what university anthropology departments are called now.
Clearly, HTS may involve substantial outside consultancy (or is McFate directly employed by the US govt?) and contract work (as HTS employees are apparently now recruited through BAE). The HTS “anthropologists” are not, and do not become, AS FAR AS WE CAN TELL, US service people. They remain distinct from the Army and Navy trained linguists, those trained through the US government intelligence community, etc. Again, the legal dynamics of these employment schemes are unclear. They are frequently compared to “embedded journalists,” yet the parallel is flawed. As far as I know, embedded journalists are not paid by the US govt (or subcontractors). Some transparency about the details of HTS worker employment might shed some light on the ethical issues at stake for anthropologists.
Anthropologists as military contractors would occupy a strange legal position, raising questions about employee rights and intellectual property. Are they serving in the military? Are they civilians? If wounded in the line of work are they eligible for vetrans’ benefits? Worker’s comp? Who can Dr. Griffin’s siblings sue were he to be killed in the line of research?
Is HTS workers’ research subject to IRB approval? Is it proprietary research, the results of which are the intellectual property of their employer, or can they publish? If they publish, will the decision of what results to publish be theirs alone, or will they be approved by the for-profit military contract agency they work for? The US military?