I only became interested in HTS a few weeks ago. It’s clear that information on the Internet makes McFate look like a weirdo, but even her available academic material is entirely unimpressive. I can’t imagine anyone believing that highly-educated individuals could be convinced by such material. I can only believe the real aim of this Anthropology-War PR is not to construct a persuasive argument or even to use Anthropological methods to aid the military.

I support but do not have high hopes for Prudence’s and LL Wynn’s reframing gestures. Understanding and advocacy are distinct projects, although they may be defined as inseparable according to some systems of ethics. Prudence’s point about ideological zero-sum games points to one problem here; it’s been a subtext. How much has advocacy shaped understanding? This is a Bourdieuian mirror trap.

Rex has accurately described existential position-taking in information-poor environments and Dee has responded somewhat ingenuously by assuming he means he’s made up his mind. Perhaps, but IF persuasion is to occur without charismatic conversion, evidence will have to be presented and parsed according to shared and convincing conventions. Dee has done nothing but say you’re wrong, trust me. Good luck with that.

This problem is always in principle reciprocal, but the burden is not. So while Dee has done little but persistently assert a contrary position, she occupies a status quo and so can allow brute facts to stand behind her. This is what the propaganda strategies described above by Hal boil down to. So information may or may not exist; McFate may or may not be providing it in uncitable venues (the fact that she exclusively chooses such venues is of course part of the problem). Dee’s leverage here is the ordinary charisma of discursive courtesy backed up by an agenda that requires no more than the maintenance of things as they are. Her position is consistent with the pragmatic mission closure that any effective institution will tend to develop, for exactly the same reasons that the Brady Campaign doesn’t want gun nuts on their board. When it’s time to do some work it’s not the time to keep debating basic principles with knuckleheads. You delegate a flack to wave a hand in their faces and you get on with it.

The lack of substantive facts on the other ‘side’ is much more damaging. If you want things to change and you’ve got neither facts nor charisma working for you you’re really screwed, a classic recipe for impotent snarling. Asking Dee for facts is worth a try, but c’mon. Tabloid chasing the traces of McFate’s complicated little life may tell us a bit about how she became creepy, but it does little beyond a staffing microanalysis to unpack the big brute facts of policy-making and the division of labor in modern formally-organized militaries marginally sensitive to demagogic pressures. Basically not liking the military is pretty thin as interpretive schemata go, but it does seem to effectively intercept any of the sort of eager curiosity that normally informs the substantive fieldwork that yields robust and persuasive analysis in ordinary anthropological practice.

LL Wynn makes a good point about demons. All of the stuff about professional ethics and theories makes sense within a truth-generating regime that divides motives and methods into sacred and profane. McFate is an agent of pollution, check. That’s how people organize their worldviews and emotional responses, so no surprises there. When do anthropologists catch themselves at it? Having done so, what would a reflective practice that wasn’t just guilty navel-gazing look like? Burkeian existentialism, perhaps, or Prudence Plan B….

This is not true. We also know from two independent people that Montgomery infiltrated the pro-gun control group, the Brady Campaign, while working for her dishonest mother-in-law.

“Around 2003, Montgomery volunteered at the Brady Campaign, according to Becca Knox, the group’s research director. Occasionally, Montgomery would also sit in for her mother-in-law at Washington strategy meetings attended by officials of the gun control movement, according to the Violence Policy Center’s Kristen Rand.”

The article does not just claim Montgomery McFate was an analyst for “a hell of a creepy mother-in-law,” it claims she spied on American citizens for her “hell of a creepy mother-in-law”.

You don’t believe it? Contact Becca Knox and Kristen Rand, and while you are at it, ask Montgomery McFate what her personal views on gun control are.

LL Wynn, do you believe that Montgomery McFate joined this group because she personally wants increased limits on access to guns? This wouldn’t fit with the rest of her career or her marriage to the “musical mercenary.”

It seems to me that people are jumping to a lot of conclusions based on that MoJo article. All we know from that article is that McFate has a hell of creepy mother-in-law (you can’t choose your mother-in-law, or your own mother, for that matter) who claimed at some point that her daughter-in-law was working for her as an analyst. But from what I recall reading the article, there was no independent source aside from the clearly not honest or reliable Mary Lou Sapone/McFate to corroborate whether Montgomery actually ever did any work for her. If she really did work as a corporate spy before turning her hand to the military, then that would certainly be interesting information to pair together and analyze as evidence of what anthropology means to her. But is there any proof? Mary (comment 2, this post) says that MM had a company that did “corporate intelligence” — does anyone know any more about that? It might or might not have anything to do with the kind of corporate espionage her m-i-l did.

And whoever Dee is (Oneman, what make you think s/he’s not an anthropologist? McFate is an anthropologist, after all), s/he’s obviously not a Mother Jones investigative journalist nor is s/he Montgomery McFate and so it’s not her responsibility to provide info about MM’s relationship with her mother-in-law. S/he says that s/he admires MM, but mostly it seems like s/he’s just cautioning people against being too simplistic in the way that they jump to conclusions. To me, as someone who neither knows nor admires MM, that doesn’t seem like such a radical proposal. It sounds rather anthropological, really.

Anthropology is a discipline that is more interested than most in deities and demons, and watching these comments and debates play out, I find it fascinating to watch the process by which anthropologists paint Montgomery McFate as a kind of demon, or some minor goddess of destruction in the disciplinary pantheon. And then poor Dee as MM’s handmaiden becomes imbued with magical PR skills just because s/he can maintain a courteous tone during debates.

(A) Maintaining a principled commitment to stripping false pretenses of civility away from the “deeper” reality of zero sum ideological battles; approaching unaligned voices as covert pawns in the hidden machinations of your enemy; converting your institutional media of collective discussion into ad hoc tribunals for the exposure of diabolical conspiracies, in which all allegations of individual guilt are considered factual until conclusively disproven.

Or

(B) Holding yourself to practical standards that exemplify your own highest ethical and epistemological ideals; welcoming all voices into a community of discourse based on common commitment to the progressive potentials of human intellectual endeavor; building institutions of civic discourse in which rigorous adherence to highest standards of logic and evidence ensure that conclusions are reached possessed of factual integrity robust enough to provide clear compass for the efficacious realization of our common ideals under actual historical circumstances.

Boy, that would be a tough choice, huh?

McFate has a lawyer’s talent for identifying slipping signifiers; she’s simply playing upon anthropologists’ tendency to conflate ethnography and anthropology, or at least to treat fieldwork as the discipline’s sine quo non. I don’t say this to defend her work but rather to suggest that it is something more anthropologists should reflect upon. One of the later chapters of Schneider on Schneider has a provocative discussion of the issue.

“Dee” clearly isn’t Dr. Montgomery McFate, Ph.D. “Dee” is someone who has been to PR school, Dr. Montgomery McFate, Ph.D. can’t keep her cool like our pro “Dee” can. “Dee” knows what every public relations textbook says in the chapter on lying or what to do when you’re caught red handed (usually these these chapters are called things like “When Disasters Strike”): keep smiling and keep talking. These texts recommend that when asked direct questions whose answers would be damning, just keep smiling and acting like you are saying something germane but just say a bunch of words and keep smiling as if you are telling the truth. That is all “Dee” ever does here. When asked direct questions “Dee” just fills the screen with nonsense and platitudes and never answers questions, just like in the textbooks. When they ask you hard questions, lie and say that question has already been answered. Watch “Thank You For Smoking” and you’ll get the picture.

I hope Oneman and Rex didn’t misunderstand Dr. Montgomery McFate, Ph.D’s role as a spy in using subterfuge and a covert mission name “Montgomery Sapone” to infiltrate and damage the Brady Campaign. The Mother Jones article isn’t some trashy story about someone’s mother in law, it is a story about about an anthropologist spying on American citizens engaging in political dissent. McFate disgusts me for doing this and no amount of professional spin control from all the “Dee’s” in the world can protect McFate from serious questions about this spying, her war profiteering, Human Terrain’s no bid contracts, plagiarism, unethical design of Human Terrain, and whatever else some other journalist turns up in the public record. She has no answers to these questions and she appears cowardly when she hides like this. I hope to catch the train up to her talk at Dartmouth and think I can make it, but if I don’t see her there, I will confront her at the AAA meetings or SFAA meetings if she has the nerve to show her face around real anthropologists.

Well, it’s not fun to see Dee become totally unhinged (before you took up the mantle of McFatism, had you even *heard* of anthropology?) but it does make any further commenting a little futile. So, I’m out. But thanks to the rest of you for joining in — I share some of Rex’s original unease about this story (and had the same “oh, mother-in-*law*…!” moment while I was looking up the earlier Chronicle piece) — there’s a real seedy side to it all, and a real weird take on morality at work in that story, and in McFate’s work.

The thing that’s bothered me most about HTS and McFate’s public pronouncements is the evacuation of theory and meaning from anthropology. In McFate’s hands, anthropology is just a set of methodologies (which is why HTS doesn’t distinguish much between the disciplines — it’s just fieldwork, and soc has a pretty good claim to that too, now. The only ethnography methods class at New School was taught by Terry Williams, a soc.) So it doesn’t matter if you know Arabic, Pashtun, or Glubbdubdribian, or if the sum total of your local knowledge is “don’t show people the soles of your feet”. Because it’s the methodology, stupid.

In the MoJo story, we see McFate as analyst — it’s just research, right? The *content* of that research doesn’t matter. The ethical principles many of us are arguing for are irrelevant to McFate — as her feeble definition of “consent” in her debate with Price etc. showed.

Anyway, I’ve met anthros in the military who are doing smart stuff, and I respect that. I’ve met plenty of ex-military anthros as well who have smart ideas about how anthro could fruitfully contribute to more successful interactions on the ground. I’ve taught military folks, many preparing to go back to Iraq in 6 months, 9months, who were desperate for some of the perspective anthropology provides (it’s for them that I usually spend a couple classes of my Intro just talking about Islam, even though the department no longer includes a case study of a Muslim community in its required readings).

And then there’s HTS, shrouded in secrecy and shame. They’re not doing anything wrong, of course, they just can’t tell you anything about it. Trust them.

Well, if anyone is in the area, she’ll be speaking to the department of public policy at Dartmouth College next month:

Montgomery McFate
Senior Social Scientist, Human Terrain System, US Army
“Using Social Science Research in Conflict Situations: The Human Terrain System in Afghanistan and Iraq”
Thursday, September 25, 2008
4:30 PM – 3 Rockefeller Hall
A Nelson A. Rockefeller Centennial Series Lecture