Jason Motlagh posted a nice short piece about anthropology and HTS at Time.com on Thursday. Motlagh points out some key issues at the heart of the HTS acrimony and makes note of both the AAA’s CEAUSSIC statement and the campaign by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA).
Despite the piece giving voice to many of us HTS critics’ greatest hits, there are a few more that I feel the need to shout out myself.
Motlagh writes:
Its backers contend that civilian specialists — particularly anthropologists — with in-depth field experience are best suited to “map” Afghanistan’s complex tribal structures and fault lines. […] The prospect of getting blacklisted in U.S. academia has sapped the pool of seasoned anthropologists. Today recruits are more and more likely to have a degree in political science, history or psychology. Some only have a bachelor’s degree.
Certainly some of the credit (or blame, depending on how you slice it) for the lack of anthropologists in these positions goes to the efforts of the NCA and the AAA, but I think the balance is due to the fact that well trained and experienced anthropologists know you can’t ‘map’ culture as if it were mountains: it’s neither static, bounded, nor quantifiable. As Hugh Gusterson points out in theHuman Terrain film, HTS is built on a faulty metaphor.
Because of a fundamental confusion about what anthropologists are and do, and the (understandably) instrumental and operational bent of the program, “in depth-field experience” was never HTS’s main hiring priority. Given a definition of anthropology as a methods suite for gathering information about some thing called culture, it’s technical ability, not experience, that matters most.
Among those speaking for HTS (perhaps from within it, but that’s not totally clear) Motlagh cites Brian Ericksen, “a burly former Army ranger with a political science degree who works with Marines in insurgency-wracked Helmand province.” Erickson dismisses critiques of HTS, saying “For me, the politically motivated criticism just isn’t valid.”
But the politically motivated participation in national military action is? Does Mr. Ericksen’s comment “when your country is at war … you support your armed forces in the vested interest of the country” imply that people should make such decisions on anything but political grounds (which, as I’m sure Mr. Ericksen knows, they actually do all the time)? In any case, dismissing criticism of HTS because it’s politically motivated is, frankly, kind of ridiculous. It’s political criticism of a political project unfolding in a political arena. Seems like solid ground to me.
And for those HTS proponents who dismiss critics by claiming all we do is say ‘nay’, I have something more substantial for you to chew on:
You want to give soldiers and marines some information on the social, cultural, and political worlds they are about to enter? Great idea. The soldiers I worked with at Walter Reed often wished they’d had more of it. But let’s be realistic. As a one former Marine who had served with a Civil Affairs unit in Fallujah told me “think of a soldier who gets as many hours of training on Iraqi culture as you can imagine, 40 hours, 60 hours, and then you send him over and after a month of living with the awareness that all the white guys are safe and all the brown guys might not be, what do you think? That training can’t hold.”
You want to have people in patrol units who have learned qualitative interview techniques and whose job it is to talk to people and get information about social structures in the local area? Terrific. I’m not sure why you can’t just have Civil Affairs folks doing that, but hey, why not make it its own MOS (Military Occupational Specialty)?
You want to have people devoted to providing officers in the field with contextual information about their AO (Area of Operations)? More power to you. Some version of this is already happening. If a National Guard medic I know prepared an in depth presentation on the dangers of Camel Spiders before deployment to Iraq, I’m not sure why other soldiers couldn’t do the same for other kinds of information within the existing practices of training and support. I’m sure the new crop of warrior scholars graduating from various military colleges is up to the task, don’t you?
Clearly, I think that a special, subcontracted HTS project unhelpful no matter who is staffing it. But if General Petraeus wants to have some ‘human terrain’ mapping, he should stop thinking that anthropologists are the folks for the job (or that such mapping is ‘ethnographic’) and start training his own cartographers. It would save everyone a lot of aggravation and ink, not to mention $150 million a year.
“it’s neither static, bounded, nor quantifiable. As Hugh Gusterson points out in theHuman Terrain film, HTS is built on a faulty metaphor.
Because of a fundamental confusion about what anthropologists are and do,”
Really, what is it that we do then? Other than the myriad journal articles on the nature or purpose, etc… of anthropology, what is an ethnography? It may be my simplistic understanding, but I think the definition of ethnography is a research strategy used in the social sciences, particularly in anthropology, employed for gathering empirical data on human societies/cultures. The rest of the comment is a semantic game. You can definitely draw up various aspects of cultures for use in helping people to understand what to expect when they get somewhere and why. You’re not going to do that with everything, but you can do it with most things we call culture, which is shared, patterns of behavior, symbols, belief, technologies, architectural techniques, and pretty much anything else that isn’t unique to only a few people, and isn’t biologically universal.
You can absolutely quantify aspect of culture as well, unless you assume that culture is something that only happens in people’s heads and isn’t displayed in behavior and environmental exploitation. Archaeologists do this as a matter of almost their total practice. That is kind of a definition of anthropology that would be useless to such an endeavor, but then it would be largely useless to anyone outside of academia as well.
“I’m not sure why you can’t just have Civil Affairs folks doing that, but hey, why not make it its own MOS (Military Occupational Specialty)?”
That’s not what Civil Affairs does. They are soldiers who have from 4 to 9 weeks of training in that specific job. They basically build schools, and hospitals, and pass out cash. It is actually Psychological Operations that would carry out such a mission, but if you spend any time looking at there official blog, you can see that they are having more than enough issues themselves: http://psyopregiment.blogspot.com/
The blog posts sound a lot like the musings of anthropology in complaining about others not realizing their relevance. 90% of both kinds of soldiers are found in the reserves, however and have faced massive attrition in the last 9 years. These are all simple facts that one can easily learn if they spent more than 5 minutes researching it. That isn’t their mission. That would be like asking a professor to teach all 4-fields on a graduate level.
“I’m not sure why other soldiers couldn’t do the same for other kinds of information within the existing practices of training and support. I’m sure the new crop of warrior scholars graduating from various military colleges is up to the task, don’t you?”
Do you realize that you are arguing that anthropologists should not be employed and should be viewed as irrelevant? Are you that self-loathing that you feel you could add nothing of merit to any organization? (these arguments could be made for any applied anthropologist; e.g. why doesn’t the MBA working at the company figure that out?).
True story. I know a guy that wrote a book about his experiences and grand view of his multiple tours to Afghanistan. He’s an enlisted soldier. The War College picked up his book and asked him to come and give a seminar to a group of generals. Before he went, he was cut off because someone felt that an enlisted soldier had no place briefing generals. This is the book: http://www.amazon.com/Villages-Moon-Psychological-Operations-Afghanistan/dp/1413757715
Do you really think that politics ends beyond the hallowed halls of academia?
HTS is looking for intelligence, not ethnography. But of course it sounds more suave to go around calling it ethnography or anthropology.
“But let’s be realistic. As a one former Marine who had served with a Civil Affairs unit in Fallujah told me ‘think of a soldier who gets as many hours of training on Iraqi culture as you can imagine, 40 hours, 60 hours, and then you send him over and after a month of living with the awareness that all the white guys are safe and all the brown guys might not be, what do you think? That training can’t hold.'”
Exactly. It seems like this kind of training would contradict many of the objectives and goals of military training. I’d be interested in seeing how the military talks about the histories and politics of the Middle East. That would be really fascinating to see first hand–I am always wondering how these two wars are justified.
Also, the complaint that anti-HTS folks are just being “political” is hilarious. How is the military in any way apolitical? How is going to war apolitical? It’s all political, despite the twisted ways in which certain people frame their motives.
War may be indeed be continuation of politics by other means but you should put your question regarding whether the U.S. military is apolitical in the context of how civilian control of the military works in the United States. The U.S. military is political in the sense that it carries out policy decisions, but it is apolitical in the sense that it does not get to formulate policy. I am not asking you to think of that fact as benign, just to take it into account in evaluating statements such as these.
I agree with this statement 100% (though some well trained and experienced anthropologists would not) but you can model social structure, which is what I suspect the real goal is in this case.
Testing
My response to the post had a lot of links in it, so it’s stuck in the spam filter awaiting moderation. Until then, I thought this would be an interesting site for some:
http://www.dliflc.edu/products.html
It seems like an interesting resource for undergrads.
Ryan and MTB, thanks for the comments!
On the question of politics and determinations of when something is or is not political:
Let’s keep in mind the various meanings of the term ‘political’.
On the one hand, it sometimes means ‘oriented toward the national policy arena.’ This is (more or less) the Clausewitzian notion that MTB points out.
On the other hand, it sometimes means ‘carrying ethical weight and having to do with social power.’ This is (more or less) the sense evoked by the feminist axiom ‘the personal is political.’
On the other, other hand (a potato this hot needs extra appendages), it sometimes means ‘pragmatically self serving and therefore narrowly and poorly considered.’ This is (more or less) what we might mean when we accuse some one of ‘playing departmental politics’, ‘internal politics’, or ‘party politics’.
There are lots of other things people can mean when they call something political, and none of these meanings are entirely separable from the others. Plus, what people mean, and what others think they mean are not always the same.
All of this is especially piqued when we’re talking about war in general and these wars in particular (witness all kinds of chatter about Gen. McChrysal, from right to left)
And then there is the fact that we need to consider what people are doing by saying what they say (this is where Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory are really good to think with).
I understand Mr. Ericksen’s comment as an attempt to dismiss criticism of HTS because he thinks it’s ‘pragmatically self serving and therefore narrowly and poorly considered.’ My comment
is an attempt to validate criticism by bringing in both of the other senses of ‘political’ above; mashing the hot potato, if you will.
So, I actually think Ryan’s rhetorical questions
are ones we should genuinely consider in a more pragmatic mode.
Guys who I did my fieldwork with often explicitly disavowed any political dimension to their work as soldiers and lives at war. Rather than suggest that they are wrong, or that this represents a distortion of reality, or an expression of false consciousness, I ask what such disavowals do.
MTB: I totally agree you can model social structures. The problem comes when people confuse the model for the real thing, which (like culture) is not “a thing” at all.
Zoe, you’ve basically argued against your own work, and that of any applied anthropologists by stating that the discipline is rather useless. For example:
“I’m not sure why you can’t just have Civil Affairs folks doing that, but hey, why not make it its own MOS (Military Occupational Specialty)?”
That’s not what Civil Affairs does. They are soldiers who have from 4 to 9 weeks of training in that specific job. They basically build schools, and hospitals, and pass out cash. It is actually Psychological Operations that would carry out such a mission, but again that is not their job either in a large sense.
Are you self-loathing and feel you could add nothing of merit to any organization? (these arguments could be made for any applied anthropologist; e.g. why doesn’t the MBA working at the company figure that out?). Why are you studying soldiers, why can’t they study themselves?
True story. I know a guy that wrote a book about his experiences and grand view of his multiple tours to Afghanistan. He’s an enlisted soldier. The War College picked up his book and asked him to come and give a seminar to a group of generals. Before he went, he was cut off because someone felt that an enlisted soldier had no place briefing generals.
“it’s neither static, bounded, nor quantifiable. As Hugh Gusterson points out in theHuman Terrain film, HTS is built on a faulty metaphor.
Because of a fundamental confusion about what anthropologists are and do,”
What is it that we do then? Other than the myriad journal articles on the nature or purpose, etc… of anthropology, what is an ethnography? The definition of ethnography is a research strategy used in the social sciences employed for gathering empirical data on human societies/cultures. The rest of the comment is a semantic game. You can definitely draw up various aspects of cultures for use in helping people to understand what to expect when they get somewhere and why. You’re not going to do that with everything, but you can do it with most things we call culture, which is shared patterns of behavior, symbols, belief, technologies, architectural techniques, and pretty much anything else that isn’t unique to only a few people, and isn’t biologically universal.
And, you can absolutely quantify aspect of culture as well, unless you assume that culture is something that only happens in people’s heads and isn’t displayed in behavior and environmental exploitation. Archaeologists do this as a matter of almost their total practice. That is kind of a definition of anthropology that would be useless to such an endeavor, but then it would be largely useless to anyone outside of academia as well. Practicing anthropologists aren’t often expert in specific fields. A business anthro can be thrown into any industry and figure it out in a relatively short time. Why would a military anthro be much different?
Soldiers are often apolitical when it comes to the missions they do, because their opinions are irrelevant. However, they have opinions. There’s a saying in the army, “A bitching soldier is a happy soldier.” Soldiers have a great deal of cognitive dissonance. It’s a basic rule of behavioral theory that one’s actions and beliefs can’t remain in opposition for very long. If someone is doing something they don’t believe in then they will either change their beliefs, or their behavior. When you can’t change your behavior you begin to rationalize what you do.
BTW, the HTS program fired a bunch of people in order to improve the quality of personnel and cut dead weight. Many of the people who have since complained about their experience on the teams were actually fired.
That certainly is in fact the dominant definition of culture—”a set of symbols in people’s heads,” as Regna Darnell puts it. Mental symbols can be made tangible (this is exactly why we have the term ‘material culture’) and enacted (‘motor habits’ as the Boasians said). You can count items of material culture as well as instances of motor habits but I don’t think that means they are quantifiable in the sense that you can perform meaningful statistical analysis with the counts. (One can of course perform spurious statistical analysis on that can be counted.)
I can dig up relevant citations if you are interested, but archaeological remains are not very useful for revealing culture (as per Darnell’s definition).
No, not really, because even if you accept that the study of culture does not matter outside of academia—and I for one do not—anthropology is also useful for the study of society. That is certainly the best justification for the existence of archaeology, in my opinion.
Rick says:
I’m not sure, Rick, how you got the impression that I’m an applied anthropologist. I’m not. I am, as I said in the post, a critic of the HTS program and of the kind of work that social scientists in it are doing, so I’m not sure why you seem to think ‘accusing’ me of arguing against the usefulness of anthro in such settings would be a zinger. It’s not. It’s my point.
If you think that being useless in the context of HTS means being useless in general (that’s the leap you make above), then I’m really sorry you have such an impoverished sense of usefulness, value, and anthropology. Must be hard for you.
I’m well aware that Civil Affairs folks don’t currently do what HTTs do. Again, as I said in the post, I’m suggesting that perhaps they could.
Here’s a thought: your disdain for what you call “semantic games” got in the way of you reading (or understanding) what I actually said in the post. I happen to think that the meaning of words matter and that what we do with them is complicated and worthy of careful consideration. I guess you don’t. That explains a lot.
It also explains why I’m not going to respond to much of what you’ve posted above: Because you aren’t actually paying attention to the conversation developing here, you’ve opted out of it, offering instead a monologue peppered with stale bate. No thanks. I’m full. You don’t care to actually read and consider what we’re saying here, so I won’t waste my time trying to explain it.
I will say that, despite what “a basic rule of behavioral theory” might say, there are many ways that soldiers deal with “cognitive dissonance” (when its there, that is) including changing “their behavior.” Here’s just one example.
Seeing and trying to understand and convey this wider array of experience is one of the things a richer anthropology lets us do. You’re welcome to try it any time.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if comments had a date/time stamp? I have no idea if it’s been two minutes or two days since the last post here…
I do think that critique of HTS is for the most part “political” – and not in any way except for the primary one: about the politics of the nation. Military anthropology of any sort has been beyond the pale for years, as I discovered when I did my dissertation, and as I’m sure you did, Zoe, when you were working on yours. There is a sense of contagion that exists around the military, something which I think goes back to the previously deplored and yet now accepted practice of becoming an activist for the people you study. If Ted Downing works with the Pehuenche and identifies with them so much he becomes a political activist for them, what happens when someone works with the Army?
Given the political climate right now, anthropology OF the military, especially working with subjects like injured veterans, is acceptable under this paradigm, since advocating for injured veterans is politically acceptable on the Left. But anthropology FOR the military means that you will be working with soldiers who are over there, engaging in the fighting, and what happens when you start to identify with them?
Of course all of these arguments elide the question of whether or not HTS is in any sense social science, which is not and should not be a political issue, no matter what definition of political you use. Working alongside some HTS members, I can say that it is most definitely not. Social science has research protocols, ethical standards, and either deductive or inductive reasoning (for anthropology the majority is inductive), while HTTs engage in “research on the fly” which has none of these.
Unfortunately, the Army has even less experience. Zoe, your argument that CA could do these things, and Rick, your argument that Psyop could/should/whatever are hauntingly similar to Connable’s argument’s, although he mentions a number of other supposedly “culturally trained” segments of the military. Of course, Connable ignores the fact that CA, Psyop, FAOs, etc. AREN’T capable of providing the cultural awareness and understanding which HTS tries to provide. I say tries to because there’s no guarantee that after trying and failing, through CA, Psyop, FAOs, etc. to achieve some amount of cultural understanding that the Army can use, that HTS will be any more successful. And if it’s not going to be successful, then we can get back to the political argument, since we as taxpayers should have the right to call into question the wasting of our money. Assuming we’re not Canadian.
Zoe, the link in your last post seems to be broken. I assume it’s a book from UC Press? Maybe if you gave us the title we can hunt it down even though it’s moved.
MTBradley,
“War may be indeed be continuation of politics by other means but you should put your question regarding whether the U.S. military is apolitical in the context of how civilian control of the military works in the United States. The U.S. military is political in the sense that it carries out policy decisions, but it is apolitical in the sense that it does not get to formulate policy.”
And this is part of the problem. This is how these things are perpetuated. I understand the fact that the military doesn’t formulate policy, and that soldiers are there to enact it. So separating these two facts allows for the continuation of certain policies, since the military “is just doing its job.” At some point I think it makes a lot of sense to pay attention to the larger politics that are involved here. What happens when the policies are wrong? What happens when going to war is the wrong choice? Who speaks up? What should people in the military do? What should the general public do?
I think that the disconnect between the policy makers and those who have to go out and enforce those policies is absolutely part of the problem.
“I am not asking you to think of that fact as benign, just to take it into account in evaluating statements such as these.”
Well, it’s clearly not benign–that’s pretty easy to figure out. And yes, I agree with you that this is incredibly important to take into account. So I understand your point about the position of people in the military. I think that’s an important part of this argument. At the same time, I think it makes sense to pay attention to how these positions and relationships can be used to further particular political agendas.
Rick,
“Soldiers are often apolitical when it comes to the missions they do, because their opinions are irrelevant.”
So they carry out political policies, but are ultimately apolitical because they don’t have a say in the matter? At what point does this become a problem? What happens when people are out there carrying out policies that they dont believe in?
I understand your point about the position that soldiers are in, but I am also wondering what you think about this disjuncture between the political and apolitical. On a larger scale, and despite the personal opinions/views of individual soldiers, the actions of the military are ALWAYS political.
“That certainly is in fact the dominant definition of culture—”a set of symbols in people’s heads,” as Regna Darnell puts it. Mental symbols can be made tangible (this is exactly why we have the term ‘material culture’) and enacted (‘motor habits’ as the Boasians said).”
Again, that’s a very limited ideational definition of culture, which I and many other anthropologists don’t agree with. I believe a proper definition of culture is an omnibus one. We are not all psychological or cognitive anths. We also need to move past the absolute Boasian relativists position that culture is the end result of completely unique historical processes. That research strategy made sense at the time of Boas for a myriad of reasons, but we are not longer in survival mode, or are trying to refute racist, eugenic global events.
We have since gained many decades of understanding the way the ecological and material world shapes the superstructure, but no one has ever been able to show concrete ways in which what’s in people’s heads is causal to the material world in a similar way (other than a feedback loop for example).
Quantification of aspects of culture is the only way to rationally explore the evolution of culture over time without being ethnocentric. As civilization developed about 5 things increased in quantifiable ways: inequality, divisions of labor, energy production in calories, etc… These can be measured, and to do otherwise is to make a qualitative statement like ‘this society is better at something’. By operationalizing the concept you avoid this.
For the HTS, one brilliant anthropologist was able to show quantitatively that commanders could correlate the quality, amount, and types of food available in local markets in Baghdad to the levels of violence in neighborhoods. He then developed an instrument and trained platoon officers to fill out in the markets in their areas to gather data in each market. By doing this they were able to see in quantitative terms which neighborhoods were most affected by government corruption, rectify the situation, and reduce violence in an area. He then set up an impromptu dig at a landfill to determine what kinds of things were being thrown away in which neighborhoods to add another empiric, confirmatory data set.
This is the exact type of thing the army is looking for.
I don’t disagree with you regarding some of the negatives arising from the way civilian control of the military works in the U.S. But it is better than the military/government relationship in 1978 Argentina, wouldn’t you agree? I would be very interested in learning more about how civilian control of the military works (and has worked in the past) in other nations. Surely there must be more than two choices.
With all respect, you’re not up to snuff here. Boas and the Boasians are far more than the evolutionary stage of the discipline discipline that they are presented as in History of Anthropology textbooks and courses (and they aren’t even that anymore than Malinowski was the first person to do participant observation). How does your contention that the Boasian concept of culture is the sole province of psychological and cognitive anthropologists contend with the fact that Haberlin, Lowie, Herskovits, Kroeber, and Sapir were all Boasians?
And just to be clear, my position is not that the study of culture should be the sole concern of anthropology and anthropologists.
Andrew: Thanks for the note about the link! It was supposed to be to Lutz and Gutmann’s book Breaking Ranks:Iraq Veterans Speak Out against the War which recently came out with UC Press.
I don’t quite agree with him, but Jeff McMahan, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, has an interesting take on the morality of killing in the context of war which addresses the relationship between laws of war and morality of war which I think would be relevant to these questions.
He suggests that a legal and politically justified war can still be immoral and can include acts of killing which are simultaneously legal and immoral, even if they might also be self defense.
You can check out his take, including a discussion about refusing potentially immoral and/or illegal orders, in this PhilosophyBites.com podcast.
“Quantification of aspects of culture is the only way to rationally explore the evolution of culture over time without being ethnocentric”
With all due respect, rick, this is an extremely ethnocentric or, possibly, “ethnomethodologic”, position. We can, by way of example, examine changes in social structures over time such as, for example, shifts between descent systems. We can examine conceptualizations of kinship obligations over time as well. we can examine both frequency distributions of narrative structures as well as changes in content over time. We are not limited to the rather crude Marxist derivatives as our only “rational” choices.
*****
“HTS is looking for intelligence, not ethnography. But of course it sounds more suave to go around calling it ethnography or anthropology.”
In general, Ryan, I would agree with you IFF we accept the definition of “intelligence” as a “perception of what is happening in an area we are interested in” or, if you prefer, we could use Bateson’s definition of information for “intelligence” – a difference that makes a difference.
The concept behind the HTS, and why it actually sold to DoD, is based in a military understanding of “intelligence”, not a civilian understanding of the term (i.e. “spying”). The HTS concept is not about spying or covert research; it is all about information that the military doesn’t know should make a difference. (Please note that I am talking about the concept behind, rather than the reality of, the program).
Since I’m the [only?] one who’s related HTS to business schools, and the reverse, this should be of interest. Comments by Henry Farrell, which to me is irony. On capitalism and “creativity”.
Follow the links
“We are not limited to the rather crude Marxist derivatives as our only “rational” choices.”
I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve so misunderstood what I’ve stated, that it’s unrecognizable.
““HTS is looking for intelligence, not ethnography. But of course it sounds more suave to go around calling it ethnography or anthropology.”
You’ve only stated this, because you don’t know what intelligence is. Intelligence is a specific thing which can be classified. HTS does not gather intelligence. 80% of what US intelligence services gather are from open sources like TV or newspapers. It would be like calling these sources intelligence.
Much of what people are talking about comes from an almost complete lack of knowledge and knee-jerk assumption, which is based more on Hollywood ideas of the military than any reality. For example, is this intelligence?
http://abcnews.go.com/PollingUnit/afghanistan-abc-news-national-survey-poll-show-support/story?id=9511961
One can also literally map an in a very interactive way using GIS. There are spatial attributes to culture that are best expressed using actual maps. More anthropologists need to learn this technology. A recent article on this tells us:
“Human terrain mapping allows analysts and commanders to visually understand the social dimension of their battle space, including religious boundaries, economic structures, community leadership and other sociological information.”
“And just to be clear, my position is not that the study of culture should be the sole concern of anthropology and anthropologists.”
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that culture is not just the superstructure, which seems to be the argument. There’s nothing wrong with cognitive or psychological anth, which I happen to like. The problem comes when it is assumed that what is in people’s heads equals culture, or that what’s in people’s heads cannot be traced to a proper and holistic understanding of material, political and economic realities. In this case that interpersonal human conflict, which is the greatest of all human phobias, can’t be traced to aspects of reality which can’t in some way be measured. My example of food security correlating to violence in Baghdad is a perfect example of that.
I can name a similar lineage of anthropologists which have done much more in explaining human behavior using much less: Steward, Rappaport, Netting, McCormick, Harris, Wolf.
That was pretty much Kroeber’s point of view but I side with Sapir on this one. But you frame the issue in a way which does not even make sense within their interchange.
Correlation is not causation, but whether it is or not in this particular case is immaterial because you don’t even need the culture concept to ask this question.
I don’t think the careers and work of these individuals support your argument particularly well. I like Steward well enough but the fact is this: when environmental constraints are as severe as they are in the Great Basin there just are not many options available. (Binford’s work in the Arctic runs into the same issue. What would Steward’s theory do with data from the Upper East Side? To anticipate the critique, Steward had very little to do with The people of Puerto Rico.) Rappaport was great—as Netting loved to say, “He weighed the potatoes.” But does weighing potatoes answer every question worth asking? Netting was Mintz’s student and thus something of a Boasian himself (via Al Lesser). Wolf came to actively work against the use of the culture concept.
Harris is the least felicitous counterexample of all. I mean, the guy’s work is all about the superstructure.
“interpersonal human conflict, which is the greatest of all human phobias”
ahaha, the irony. In the strife ridden context of Savage Minds’ comment section no less. Afghanistan was once a nice place too. On the other hand maybe you made a typo and instead of ‘phobias’ you meant ‘loves’. In which case History would not be against you.
Rick,
“You’ve only stated this, because you don’t know what intelligence is. Intelligence is a specific thing which can be classified. HTS does not gather intelligence.”
Ok. Intelligence is a specific thing which can be classified. That definition means almost nothing. So if HTS isn’t interested in intelligence, then what are they interested in? Are you telling me that they are interested in adding to our anthropological understanding of humanity? When I used the word “intelligence,” I was thinking of it as “information about an enemy or a potential enemy”.
But you’re telling me that HTS isn’t doing that, right? They just happen to be doing ethnography in war zones. Pretty coincidental.
“One can also literally map an in a very interactive way using GIS. There are spatial attributes to culture that are best expressed using actual maps. More anthropologists need to learn this technology.”
Why are the spatial attributes of culture “best expressed using actual maps”? Your claim sounds neat, but there is no reason why it actually makes any sense. Do all people have built-in GIS maps in their heads? You know GIS is great and all, but it’s just another way of representing and organizing data.
“Human terrain mapping allows analysts and commanders to visually understand the social dimension of their battle space, including religious boundaries, economic structures, community leadership and other sociological information.”
And this IS NOT military intelligence? This is ethnography?
““interpersonal human conflict, which is the greatest of all human phobias”
ahaha, the irony. In the strife ridden context of Savage Minds’ comment section no less. Afghanistan was once a nice place too. On the other hand maybe you made a typo and instead of ‘phobias’ you meant ‘loves’. In which case History would not be against you.”
I love it when people are smart asses with me, especially when they have probably not spent much time in the military, or confronting interpersonal human conflict first hand.
It takes a lot of training, and more than that, it takes a social construct of interpersonal ties in order to get a person to run toward the sound of gun fire while all others run away. People have to go through many stages of fear inoculation to even come to that point, along with intense bonding to others. It’s a push/pull dichotomy to get soldiers to fight, and it is within this process that PTSD can be understood.
I don’t want to get too far off the subject, but again, if I threw anyone reading this into a room and it was either you or another that was gonna be able to live, you’d feel fear that goes far beyond the fear that most people will experience in a lifetime. Get into a real fight and you’ll see what I mean. In trying to understand social processes, we too often remove the day to day behaviors and actions of people experiencing and manipulating phenomena. We somehow make these subjects abstract, and in doing so we can ignore that we are all perfectly capable of the kindest acts or mass murder. The only people that really want to kill others and enjoy it without fear a sociopaths, and it’s a rare disorder.
The root of getting thousands of people to get past this universal, and extreme fear is always going to be found beginning with the variations of infrastructural variables, developing negative or positive feedback loops. The key to to reducing violence then is to understand the processes involved, and to propose workarounds and solutions that people can actually do (not some pie in the sky, in a perfect world scenario).
Seth:
I take you to be suggesting an overlap between business and HTS (or perhaps a commonality to all forms of employment within ‘neo-liberal’ iterations of capitalism?) based on the magical reinvention of the (Bigger! Better! Faster!) wheel? I think that’s pretty keen.
It also weaves together our questions about when folks should be thinking about the political (and moral?) dimensions of their ‘jobs’ with our other questions about how we understand and evaluate anthropology in contrast to, or continuity with, other modes of attention.
Tim:
A great (and reflexive) point about our love, or at least compulsion to conflict.
But I wonder if it needs to be either/or? I’m thinking about Judith Butler’s point in Precarious Lifethat the ties that anchor us to each other make us both vulnerable to violence and open to desire and love.
That might sound esoteric, but it’s also the reason that empathy is something that lots of people (with divergent aims) identify as stoping people from being able to kill other people, why some military training is about avoiding an experience of empathy in the moment of potential killing, and why humanization of ‘the enemy’ can be an anti-war strategy.
ryan
“Are you telling me that they are interested in adding to our anthropological understanding of humanity? When I used the word “intelligence,” I was thinking of it as “information about an enemy or a potential enemy”. ”
Look, I don’t blame you for having trouble with this, because it is really one of those things that one’s needs to be trained in. Largely, this is nothing more than a misunderstanding from ignorance and media, mixed with a misunderstanding of the difference between academic and practicing anthropology.
In practicing anthropology the researcher is given his question, and he builds a research design around that question (s), which will give the client pertinent information that can be understood by the client, the various stakeholders, and which can be used to design a set of proposals by the researcher to either fix or improve the problems (often finding the real problems, and not the ones that the client thought they had). In consulting work that last part is called, “the wicked problem.”
There was a big problem of academics working with the military, and the academics not realizing that they are no longer academics, but practitioners with a client that demands usable results. This is a very new and strange situation for many academics, and it causes problems.
For the rest you need to us your imagination. I already gave a real example of exactly how this can be done. The mission most likely came down saying that sectarian violence in on the increase; figure out why, then propose solutions (usually non-lethal). That’s what the guy did. The idea to hire guys into the Iraqi brotherhood, and turn them against Al Qaeda in Iraq was also one of those ideas, which in the end basically ended the war. Intelligence is much more stale and factual, like So and So is a member of this group, he lives here, he’s there between this time and this, he knows this guy who did this, they have access to these weapons. That’s intell. Actually, intell is whatever an intell guy slaps a security clearance on. It’s hard to do that this open source info, but the work of HTS is.
I can’t say that there aren’t HTS members who don’t have a problem giving up names like that and helping special forces in targeting operations. That is on the conscious of that member, and it isn’t something that is required, and something I wouldn’t do if there. I spent time in army special ops, and I would never do something like that as a solider, because I can make the argument that such behavior isn’t damaging to the discipline, but to the mission overall. Those people don’t see the big picture.
“You know GIS is great and all, but it’s just another way of representing and organizing data. ”
This is a valid question. All I can say is try it out. See if you can do it in a more effective way for a lay audience. I’ve made maps of areas of Dallas with various overlays so you can see thematically coded variables like median household income, ethnicity, proximity, population, churches, drug houses, points of murder, points of assault, vacant lots, condemned buildings, etc…
I can put all of that in one or two maps on a single page and get across the data to another person in an easy and immediate way. Nothing is more powerful at doing something like that. You can also do geostatistics to determine the significant spatial relationships between different variables. All with a single program, and much of it with existing data. This helps you understand what is there, why is it there, and why does it matter. Just one tool in a big tool box. When someone tells me that it can’t be done, they are telling me that they don’t know how to do it.
“I love it when people are smart asses with me”
Yes, I know. That was my point. But I will stop being an enabler now.
If an anthropologist working in an academic setting does not publish, gets poor teaching evaluations, and fails to bring in grant money they will no longer be usable for the client.
That’s Weber’s ideal type bureaucracy. Anyone who has worked for the federal government knows it usually doesn’t work quite that smoothly.
“I’m sure the new crop of warrior scholars graduating from various military colleges is up to the task, don’t you?”
I’d thought warrior scholar was up there with warrior priest as a modern if not ancient oxymoron, but we’re in the age of scholar billionaires so since we’re going backwards, why not go all the way? Disinterested reason now equals self-interest, for the individual or his chosen cause. And scholars are now the equivalent of Mormon linguists.
“If the anthropocentric civilization of the Renaissance is headed, as it seems to be, for a Middle Ages in reverse…” My favorite quote from Irwin Panosky, written 55 years ago.
“Erickson dismisses critiques of HTS, saying “For me, the politically motivated criticism just isn’t valid.” But of course he doesn’t even know why the fuck he’s there other than to do his job, whatever that may be. As a soldier Erickson took an oath of loyalty to the US, I haven’t.
A military is run on an ethic of piety. “And is, then, all which is just pious? Or is that which is pious all just, but that which is just only in part and not all pious?”
Erickson has made his answer. Is it yours?
When a scholar picks up a gun he’s no longer a scholar, but of course sometimes it’s all hands on deck and that’s it. I have no problem with multiple roles in daily life, but I can’t think of anyone with a knowledge of the last 50 years of geopolitics who thinks either of the US wars are anything but disasters. I can’t think of anyone who is not a reflexive nationalist who defends them. The Afghanistan campaign had a chance but that was blown years ago.
I don’t defend the US, I defend democracy and law. But I’m a realist. Is Erickson? Have him defend his case
I see no evidence that the military know who or what they’re fighting. Our military is, in theory, non-political in native ground, but they’re anti-political at war, “Imperial Grunts” as the book calls them. Do I give my consent to anyone who operates as such, in my name? Do you?
Yes or no.
Zoe you’re offering vague defenses on HTS critics based on generic distinctions. If HTS asks anthropologists to instrumentalize their knowledge there are ways to do it. Political “science” is the model. The question however is whether this cause, under these circumstances, at this point in time, renders it necessary for scholars to become soldiers. Find me someone who’s not a knee-jerk nationalist with a Ph.D who makes that argument. I’ve met a lot of stupid college professors but you still won’t find that many. There’s a reason for that and Erickson is right, it’s political.
On the other subject my link was in re: HTS, MIT and Grant McCracken.
Same shit different day.
““I love it when people are smart asses with me”
Yes, I know. That was my point. But I will stop being an enabler now.”
I got into an argument with a cynical, conservative buddy of mine a few days ago. It was his argument that government just doesn’t work in the US and never has. He told me that there was too much government corruption, and events over the past few years proved that government didn’t work and therefore everyone should be on their own in the private market. Basically, his argument was that things are the way they are, because they are the way they are. I pointed this out to him. We are seeing the effects of a concerted 30 year effort to gut government and make it ineffective.
I made the same argument against what you said, but I wasn’t direct enough. The fact that there is war isn’t evidence that war is easy for people on the ground. War requires a vast and interconnected number of variables and structures. We can know these variables and structures, and we can measure them. In better understanding the various interrelationships of variables we can have a hand at reducing conflict.
For example, it was people on the ground in Afghanistan that bitched and complained that an information campaign to convince farmers to grow wheat and not poppies was more than pointless. The people at the pentagon wrongly assumed that they could change the infrastructure by trying to change the superstructure; i.e., somehow lifelong farmers didn’t realize that wheat was an alternative. After some research it was found that Hemp was a good alternative, perfectly suited to the geography, and reduced the farmers risk by only lowing their profits minimally. This in turn reduced the poppy trade to various Islamist groups.
“f an anthropologist working in an academic setting does not publish, gets poor teaching evaluations, and fails to bring in grant money they will no longer be usable for the client.”
Your right, but the client is the academy. It doesn’t matter what you research as long as it gets published. I can’t even imagine the pressure of a 6 year probation. I wanted to research this a bit, so I emailed and then talked to the head of HTS recruitment for BAE Systems on the phone. He confirmed that this was a big problem and that the hiring process didn’t properly screen for this in the beginning. He said that they have problems with a lot of the anthropologists, because they think they are just going to go out in the field and study things like they do in the academy. They don’t understand that they are required to produce focused data and help solve issues relevant to strategic mission goals. I.e., that they don’t know what it is to work for a client in an applied setting. There are only a handful of universities that even train people how to work outside of the academy.
There were similar complaints in practicing anthropology when business executives started hiring anthropologists, but not really knowing why they should. Then they complained that the information they were getting was useless to them. I see all of this going back to the old schism between academic and applied work.
This comparison was brilliantly worked out in Ethnography.com by Mark Dawson: http://www.ethnography.com/2009/08/the-development-anthropologists-working-with-the-military-parallels-the-evolution-of-design-anthropology-15-years-apart/
” That’s Weber’s ideal type bureaucracy. Anyone who has worked for the federal government knows it usually doesn’t work quite that smoothly.”
Your absolutely right, that is an idealized course of events I’ve given. But, like all fieldwork we adjust as it goes, and we do our best to maintain what is supposed to happen. I don’t know where we could work that isn’t mired in ego seeking ambition, political games, funding insecurity, lack of time, and the like. Has anyone in the history of bureaucracy ever worked on a team where everyone was competent, contributed equal work, and didn’t seek personal gain? What’s the alternative, roll over and let the Islamists subjugate us?
“I can’t think of anyone who is not a reflexive nationalist who defends them. The Afghanistan campaign had a chance but that was blown years ago.”
That’s mostly true. Actually, much of what you wrote in that post was mostly true. The answer to the question hasn’t been raised, because it’s not really known how political the military is outside of the military. The reason the war in Afghanistan is going the way it is, is because of the same reasons we can’t seem to get proper financial regulation or proper health care reform. There are just too many fingers in the pot, and way too many chiefs. I think this is what Seth is pointing out (am I right?).
Military officers basically fight over turf. The more men they control, the larger their budget, the wider their area of operations the more powerful they are, the more influence they have, and the more likely they will get promoted; again increasing all of the power they have.
Add to this multiple countries with different sets of priorities, Generals, politics, and the like and you get mired failure.
Also being a pragmatists, I see few options in how to react to this. The most common reaction is apathy and inaction, which is a pretty rational response to the situation. Or, you can look at the situation in the long term of history and see that things have been pretty much hopeless since the rise of civilization, and yet the concerted effort of a minority of people has improved things over historical time.
The other thing not brought up by anyone is the fact that while it’s not being done well, we are in a fight with a real enemy. They do exist and they are no less of a threat than Nazis, or Stalinists.
“The other thing not brought up by anyone is the fact that while it’s not being done well, we are in a fight with a real enemy. They do exist and they are no less of a threat than Nazis, or Stalinists.”
That last statement is just goofy. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia had enormous war machines and land bases, and human “resources” in the tens of millions. They were capable of unilaterally destroying opposing state regimes and substituting their own. You have to have swallowed an awful lot of Koolaid to believe this applies to Al Quaeda, or Islamic terrorist organizations in general.
An enemy? sure. But not even close to the kind of threat you’re portraying. World War II was multiples of the 9-11 attacks every single day.
“There are just too many fingers in the pot, and way too many chiefs. I think this is what Seth is pointing out ”
Rick, how many times do I have to repeat myself with you?
I’ll do it again
You want more?
Feb 2003: Afghanistan omitted from US aid budget
Oops.
The first problem was that Rumsfeld went in light and cheap. The second was that everyone got bored and went to Iraq which was run in the same way. And the third was that it was never about democracy or law or stability alone but stability that served US interests. Again, the same with Iraq.
The US is nothing if not consistent where it counts: Egypt
Rick do yourself a favor and quit while you’re behind,
Relatively polite comment in moderation.
But while I’m at it,
“Islamic terrorist organizations”
You mean Hamas?
What’s living without learning huh?
I don’t recall mentioning Hamas?
They’re a mixed bag; certainly not the irrational, effectively speechless demons they’re often portrayed to be, but they still seem to be facilitating or conducting some military/terrorist (take your pick) actions that are, in the most charitable reading possible, not getting them or their constituents anywhere. They’re not quite Sinn Fein.
In retrospect I’m glad I took the time to quibble.
Hamas is Sinn Fein.
Q: Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?
A: The IDF
On the women of Hamas
justworldnews.org/archives/004051.html
And of course Israel allowed Hamas to grow early on while expelling Mubarak Awad, a Christian pacifist.
Hamas are the elected leadership of the Palestinian people but the US backed a coup attempt.
vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
On Hamas’ government administration, more here:
justworldnews.org/archives/004061.html
You won’t hear this from partisans of HTS and COIN. They will go on about Hezbollah and the attack on the Marine barracks in 1983 while forgetting that the attack was a reprisal for US bombardment of Hezbollah positions.
foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/29/lesson_unlearned?page=0,0
That’s why we need honest scholars and honest reporters, not to be objective (since that’s impossible) but at least to keep a distance.
You’re glad you took the time to quibble, so you could branch off into a non-sequitur?
“An enemy? sure. But not even close to the kind of threat you’re portraying. World War II was multiples of the 9-11 attacks every single day.”
Of course, I meant in type not power. Mien Kampf is rather popular amongst Islamists. The army also messed up in the first Gulf War by using propaganda that compared Saddam with Hitler, because it was viewed widely as a compliment.
“They will go on about Hezbollah and the attack on the Marine barracks in 1983 while forgetting that the attack was a reprisal for US bombardment of Hezbollah positions.
foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/29/lesson_unlearned?page=0,0”
Seth, you are using Western leftist analysis to understand phenomena that simply cannot be understood using those concepts. These are people that want to destroy personal freedom, subjugate women, force religious practice; everything antithetical to our left. The reason this has happened is because these analysis are not fact based. Most people that carry out terrorist attacks have never been wronged by Western Imperialism, did not grow up in religious homes, are not poor, are highly educated, are married; i.e., they are not your proletariat. Google, “Understanding Terror Networks,” and look at the PDT of a power point on a fact based analysis.
Nir Rosen is a propaganda tool for Islamists. This is actually a stated and common technique used by them. They’ve effectively been able to capitalize upon leftist sympathies. I know you’re not going to believe it, but you can follow the links in your own time, and just know that it’s something you should explore. He is outright lying here:
“Restoring the caliphate isn’t really a motivation for most groups, not for the Taliban and not for al Qaeda, and definitely not for their recruits, who are usually responding to specific or general grievances.”
Who am I going to believe Rosen, or Al Qaeda when they tell me their goal is to fight for a global caliphate? You need to study the history of Islamic expansion. You also need to seek out less biased sources. The schisms in the Islamic world aren’t whether a global caliphate is or is not a goal, it is how to go about it. The fight is between revolutionaries like Iran and those for a status quo like Saudi Arabia.
Daniel Pipes, who has a PhD in Islamic history points this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7JqbFcQf6A
Rick you don’t know what you’re talking about. Your ignorance is almost shocking.
“The fight is between revolutionaries like Iran and those for a status quo like Saudi Arabia.”
Al Qaeda gets its funding from Saudi. I’ll take Iran any day. How many Jews are there in Riyadh?
guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/15/bae.armstrade
The CIA gave millions to Hekmatyar who threw acid in women’s faces, but you and Pipes get all hot and bothered about Hezbollah and Hamas. Next you’ll be telling us all Nasrallah is a Salafist, and Ian Paisley kisses the Pope’s ring.
Pipes is a racist and not too bright.
jewcy.com/post/daniel_pipes_hates_america
Nir Rosen is a good reporter of facts on the ground.
He defends himself well here @ Small Wars Journal.
How about Bernard Lewis, the other expert I’m sure you’re just waiting to quote?
The author is Max Rodenbeck nytimes.com/2010/06/27/books/review/Rodenbeck-t.html?ref=world
And Andrew, my point was again that Hamas is Sinn Fein, and many at the Pentagon are beginning to understand that.
foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/29/red_team?page=full
But Daniel Pipes wants you to buy it.
I’m not writing all this just because I’ve got nothing better to do, but because the questions around HTS are not or should not revolve around the instrumentalization of scholarship but about when and when not to allow it. A Ph.D. does not resolve you from the moral responsibility of choice.
And I still have one in moderation.
‘resolve’ should read ‘absolve’ of course,
Seeing as how I have a security clearance, and can look up a lot of this stuff I came across an interesting article that has since been uncovered by the media, and can therefore be posted here. It looks like anthropologists are studying rather popular anthropological things in Afghanistan: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/28/afghan-men-struggle-sexual-identity-study-finds/
“As if U.S. troops and diplomats didn’t have enough to worry about in trying to understand Afghan culture, a new report suggests an entire region in the country is coping with a sexual identity crisis.
An unclassified study from a military research unit in southern Afghanistan details how homosexual behavior is unusually common among men in the large ethnic group known as Pashtuns — though they seem to be in complete denial about it.”
Zoe, thanks for this. I think that the military-political distinction (or indistinction) points right to a rather sticky and, I think, overlooked bit of the HTS debate. Clausewitz defines war as the extension of politics with the addition of other means, on the one hand, and on the other, nothing but a duel on a larger scale. But as a good dialectician, he concludes that war is neither just one nor the other of these things. In the U.S. and any other country where there is civilian control of the military, the “extension of politics” side of things trumps. But even then, if you follow Clausewitz, the dual nature of war is not so much about identifying where politics begins and ends, but about negotiating this constitutive tension—or, as Zoe writes, by examining what people accomplish by making claims about this division. Inevitably, civilian policy concerns bear directly on military tactics and strategy, and military tactics and strategy have political consequences: everyone from soldiers to generals is constrained by international conventions governing the treatment of prisoners, the use of certain kinds of weapons, etc. The cover story of last week’s Army Times asks what changes Gen. Petraeus will make to allied forces’ rules of engagement in Afghanistan, since McChrystal was thought by many within the military to have been too restrained the use of force in the name of limiting civilian casualties and cultivating public support. In this model, questions of political ideology (don’t kill civilians), political expediency (don’t piss off the American public or look like a villain to the rest of the world), and military utility (use more force and kill more Taliban vs use less force and win over more Afghan civilians) are always already overlapping. The same logic applies to numerous other fronts—opponents of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell inside and outside of the military will tell you that it is bad for civil rights because it marginalizes LGBTQ people, but also that it is bad for the military because it excludes good servicemembers.
However, soldiers (and generals) are people who have political allegiances and opinions about things, but in their capacity as military professionals, they dwell at the (artificially?) apolitical pole of Clausewitz’s dialectic. That is, they don’t make policy—generals consult on it and troops’ safety and capacities are taken into account in it, but civilians decide on it. Soldiers—whether we like it or not, and maybe we don’t (maybe many soldiers don’t either)—carry out their missions in a space relatively free of the political constraints that, in peacetime civilian settings, prohibit the use of force and the taking of life. Soldiers have a professional obligation to, if necessary, kill people and make decisions about who can be killed. Whether or not this is a good thing is a separate discussion. But it is decidedly incompatible with your typical IRB.
I was actually responding to something much further up, but I think the link to HTS here actually speaks to Seth’s last point somewhat. So much of the HTS debate has focused on this question of the instrumentalization of “weaponization” of scholarship. And there are incredibly important arguments to be made—along the lines of Hugh Gusterson’s words quoted above, e.g., or the general thrust of Zoe’s argument—about the impoverishment of scholarship that comes with what we have seen of it operationalization in the case of HTS. But at the same time, on a more general level, the military instrumentalizes all kinds of knowledge, and indeed it seeks out civilian-trained experts—engineers, doctors, technicians, nurses, people who speak foreign languages—in order to instrumentalize their expertise on the battlefield. They do these things *in their capacities as soldiers* whose highest obligation is to the mission. No one, including the most die-hard HTS critic, wants American soldiers to be more ignorant of foreign cultural contexts or less equipped to interact with local civilian populations. But why not, as Zoe suggests, train soldiers to do this themselves and/or encourage patriotically-minded social scientists to enlist, where their expertise could be put to use *in their capacity as soldiers*. Just don’t call it anthropological scholarship.
also, Daniel Pipes? w the f?
“Seeing as how I have a security clearance, and can look up a lot of this stuff I came across an interesting article that has since been uncovered by the media… homosexual behavior is unusually common among men in the large ethnic group known as Catholic Priests — though they seem to be in complete denial about it.”
The only person who’s in denial here Rick is you.
Google “Pashtun sexuality”
Well said, Ken!
In fact, it seems to me that a refusal to negotiate those tensions is part of what allows some pro-HTSers to so glibly dismiss critique as nothing more than unnecessary ‘complexification.’
I have to say I think the anthropological critique of HTS continues to be incredibly wrong-headed. Saying HTS is “bad anthropology” or a “misuse” of ethnographic methods as defined by the discipline leads to two responses: (1) okay, anthropologists, advise us more as to how to do it better! or (2) oh, you prissy anthropologists with your ethical hang-ups. What matters is getting information to get the military mission accomplished in the most efficient way possible, picky-picky academic carping be damned.
By focusing obsessively on the “anthropology” part of the equation, anthropologists are missing the vastly more important policy/propaganda role of HTS. HTS is a Potemkin village. OF COURSE IT’S NOT DOING GOOD SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH. That’s not why it exists! It exists to advertise the idea that military policy cares *at all* about on the ground cultural and political realities in the Middle East. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha why do anthropologists buy this for a second?
Great, great, great information about the cultural and political realities of Iraq and Afghanistan is already widely available in any public library (or, for the modern lazy person, on the internet!). If the military and U.S. policy makers wanted to know more about it, they could read books already published by anthropologists, which OVERWHELMINGLY would deliver the message “everything you are doing is a terrible idea, morally and pragmatically, and is going to end in tears”.
This silly focus on how we shouldn’t allow the military to use our precious methods or access our precious information turns us into useful dupes. By protesting their Potemkin village, we give it a kind of concreteness it doesn’t deserve; and we are placed in the very stupid position of suggesting we would like to stand in the way of the military learning about the realities of the places where it goes to war. Military policy makers should learn more, lots more, they already can, they *don’t care to*. They only want to pretend they are investigating all sides of the on the ground reality, and HTS is a giant pantomime in the service of policy-makers pretending they give a crap. Protesting HTS on its face rather than diagnosing what it’s really all about (fakery) is depressingly misguided.
“if you follow Clausewitz”
“it seems to me that a refusal to negotiate those tensions is part of what allows some pro-HTSers to so glibly dismiss critique as nothing more than unnecessary ‘complexification.’”
No, it’s the fact that you can say pretty much the same thing about anything concerning the nature of power and politics. The statement is as vague and random as it is true, which seems to be the hallmark of obfuscationist anthropology. How in any way does this help to understand or make clear the issues you have with HTS? How are any of these arguments any different from arguments made against non-academic anthropology as a whole? How is a matter of anthropology with a big A?
What exactly is the argument; other than a personal feeling? Is is a stance against war? These wars? Working with the US to wage this strange new type of war? What? In order to have an argument that isn’t metaphysical, which I’m not going to have, you need to make a coherent argument. This has become like the abortion debate. Either you’re against it, or you enjoy killing babies.
“Military policy makers should learn more, lots more, they already can, they *don’t care to*.”
That’s a hell of an confident, absolute statement. What other complex, bureaucratic, and stratified groups are completely homogeneous? Is it just them? If you replaced the words, “military policy makers” in that sentence with any other group would any anthropologist agree and uncritically swallow it?
Some military policy makers absolutely do care, some absolutely don’t and there are a lot in the middle, probably like every other group of people in the world. Unless you’ve uncovered the secret documents with all the Pentagon staffs signatures stating otherwise.
Like all other people that hire anthropologists for a job they are looking for deliverables, which help better achieve specific goals. Many CEOs could probably care less exactly how communication isn’t working in their company, they want to know how to fix it. Some however do. In the end, it matters to the extent that they believe proposals are useful and worthwhile.