http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/returning-tribal-remains.html

My post on it is here: http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/10/08/a-lawful-reckoning/

Given Adam Fish’s background, I’d be curious to hear his response. Even better, perhaps the upcoming 20th anniversary of NAGPRA will occasion a post from him on it.

Like I said before, if this did actually happen, and that’s a big if, it wouldn’t have been done by anyone in psychological operations. A similar event happened a few years ago in Afghanistan when some Al Qaeda fighters were killed, and their buddies were hiding caves nearby. The closest village refused to take the bodies for burial, because more Afghans really don’t like Arab fighters. After a few days, the bodies had to be either buried or burned. The US soldiers decided to burn the bodies. Unfortunately, there was a psyop team there, who though it would be a good idea to taunt their buddies by calling them cowards and lady boys who wouldn’t fight them or honor their comrades, while the bodies burned. An Australian reporter recorded it and put it on the news. With just that, all psychological operations were shut down in Afghanistan for two months and a full investigation was done. The story was reported in a way that assumed that they bodies were burned by the psyopers for that purpose, which wasn’t true.

I was a psychological operator when I was in the army, and these stories were a part of our folklore. This story and many others were told and retold in order to teach young psyopers what not to do. Another, much more famous example, are the “Death Cards” used by the cavalry in Vietnam. These cards were meaningless to the Vietcong, and something we in the community would call, “psyop by good idea.” That is, psyop or a message that is developed not from a very careful analysis of one’s target audience, and the use of culturally relevant and credible themes and symbols, but made up by some officer somewhere who thinks something would be cool. I think you are referring to this kind of psyop, which usually isn’t successful even by accident. You get something similar in advertising agencies with “creatives” who design ad campaigns that win awards for creativity, but still get canceled, because they don’t have any affect on sales.

On a side note, my experience as a tactical psyop team chief, gave me some insight into some of the issues and complaints about the HTS, and practicing anthropologists in general. Psyop teams are just 3 men, and typically support about 800 soldiers. They are independent special ops soldiers who don’t fall into a clear chain of command (their command is usually a few hundred miles away and they just report in by radio or email). They are also not given any actually power, even though they report almost directly to the Pentagon and can pretty much go anywhere, and do anything they want personally. That means they have to persuade the very people they are working for into even listening to them, or allowing them to even operate in an area. Whether a commander is persuaded to do something, or not, psyopers have zero command authority. That means, if a commander wants to do something like that, this psyop team can’t stop him. Like HTS teams, however, we would report to that commander’s boss’s boss. A couple of years ago a special forces A team was turned in by a psyop team for abusing civilians.

My point is that one of the first things a psyoper learns is that the first, and most important thing they do when they get somewhere, is to “psyop the supported unit first.” That is build rapport with them, and gain their trust. Get them to like you and respect your team. You learn what kind of commander runs things by chatting up his staff before ever meeting him and changing your appearance to match his expectations (do I look like an infantry soldier, or grow a beard and look like a special operations soldier). If you don’t do these things then nothing you want done will get done. I don’t think HTS teams are taught this, and the team leaders (former special forces officers), never had to learn. This is probably why they end up pissed off, because they aren’t being taken seriously and spending their time in the mess hall.
The same can be said for anthropologists working outside the academy in general. Too often an anthropologist naively thinks that a company or government agency should stop what it’s doing and listen to everything they have to say. They don’t realize that their job is to conduct at least a cursory ethnographic study of their employers as much as the people their employers what them to study.

I’ll second that.

Why female anthropologists? The same ebbing and flowing of names of male anthropologists certainly takes place over time.

If Barbara wasn’t reading Mead in grad school thirty years ago, then when did that practice die out? I did read Goodall in grad school nine years ago but does that make me an outlier among young graduates or is more common to site her now than in the past? I just would be curious to see that done.

Maybe the Huks fled in fear because they thought the Americans would puncture their necks and take their blood too. It seems like it has the potential to be a Lacanian “successful miscommunication”. We hear this all the time through governmental spokespeople that we are “sending a message” to whatever ally or foe. It’s even in domestic politics, the voters are “sending a message” to the party in power, the political parties are “sending a message” to their base or “independents’ and so on. What does that mean? And when results are achieved, how can we know that they are for the reasons we believe?

I wonder if the problem of visibility is more complex. Mead was a prominent part of a movement to separate biology and culture in the 1920s and 30s, and to the extent that we take that separation for granted in cultural anthropology her impact continues. We simply erase the traces of history in such taken-for-granted concepts. And don’t tell Duke that psychological anthropology is dead – Mead’s work has evolved into a rich set of subfields, including cultural psychology and many aspects of cognitive anthropology.

Your mention of Benedict is telling, though many readers will take it as non sequitur. Our habit of prestige citation leads us to ignore older work by anthropologists who seem out of date, but who often made the same point we now reference through a more cutting-edge anthropologist (or political scientist).

I didn’t read Margaret Mead in graduate school, but I didn’t read Jane Goodall either. But 30 years later I also realize that what I did read was a highly selected thin slice of anthropology designed to promote a form of anthropology that was hot at the time. Many of the people we did not read turned out to be interesting and important.

From what I understand that was the British who did that, but then I’ve heard a few different versions of the story. It’s like an urban legend that gets passed down in some circles of the military. I personally doubt the US military has never done anything like that. If you study the history of what was called psywar at the time, there was just no one doing anything like that at a strategic level. You can do that here: http://www.psywarrior.com/
If anything like that did happen, it would have been the illegal actions of a single commander. It should also be noted that the author of that article is a famous “UFOologist,” and “cryptozoologist.”

Over at Zero Anthropology, Max Forte is rummaging through the detritus of popular culture looking for references to Margaret Mead.

Though some would have you believe that every time you go to a natural history museum Herbert Spencer kills a kitten, her former place of employment isn’t a bad place to rummage.

If ethnographies had sexier book covers we’d sell a lot more copies.

I know the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people when they see a title from 1929 like The Sexual Life of Savages is, “Wow, what a racist.” The first thing that comes to my mind is, “Wow, what an entrepreneur.”