The day after Trump won the election, I went into my class as usual. I was setting up the smart podium, when a student in the first row turned back to another student to chat. I couldn’t overhear everything that went on between the two of them, but I did hear the student in the first row loudly exclaim “Well if you don’t like it; you can go to Canada.” Even though it was before class time, I gave this student the side-eye, wagged my finger at them and said “we don’t use that kind of language in this classroom. We’re going to practice being polite to each other in here!” The student apologized to me and class began. I don’t know if they apologized to the other student. This was the first day after the election and I wish I could say that this was the last time I heard exclusionary language in my classes. But I wasn’t surprised; throughout that semester I had been teaching to red ‘Make American Great Again’ hats.

I teach at a rural university in Minnesota where I am the only anthropologist on campus. It is not as much cache as it sounds. I teach large service courses where students in my classes are there only for the liberal education credits they receive. Most neither know nor care what anthropology is, and if anything, are prepared for college only as a hostile climate that may challenge their faith, their belief in creationism, their comfort with their ideas and self image. I wish I could say that this is a Trump-era problem, but the fact is that my classes at this university have always been this way. Barring a few welcome exceptions, students are not interested in learning anything that challenges their worldview, and certainly not from a foreign woman with an accent, who isn’t even Christian.
Post-election, when it feels like the entire climate in the country has shifted to resemble one I normally face in my classroom, I’m contemplating how we, as anthropology professors can continue to teach. Whom do we teach now, and to what purpose?

Teaching things students care about
My first proposition is that we understand why our students are in our class. This isn’t anything new or anything we don’t already do. However, I propose a more realistic organization of our syllabi (at least for introductory, service courses) to acknowledge that our students may not necessarily be in our classes for edification. It is time to not take this personally (easier said than done, I confess). If we are the evils in their path to a “practical” degree that will get them a job, what can we teach them that they care about?
I most often teach introductory classes in cultural anthropology and it is here that I am most successfully able to argue that anthropology offers insight into their lives. I set out to explain what anthropology is and how it may help them understand some things about their own lives I teach about social stratification and talk about race and ethnicity. It is usually a big revelation to the students that race is in fact not a biological categorization of people but a social one. Discussions on economic inequality are also rewarding. It is easy to frame student concerns about finding jobs after graduation into a discussion on Marx, analysis of capitalism and outsourcing. We discuss global competition, sectors of job growth in the US economy, the percentage of the population with degrees required to acquire jobs in these growth sectors. It gives student a clear, practical insight into what they are doing in college and the nature of the economy that they will participate in after graduation. Teaching about the Kula ring also goes much easier once we have established that members of any particular society will work hard to participate in the various forms of economic transaction of that society.
It is of course ridiculous to imagine that the entire anthropology curriculum be based on students’ grudging interests. However, for the students who take only one anthropology class in their lives, this may contribute to the continued relevance of anthropology to their lives.

Hold Trump accountable
In the weeks leading up to the election, I tried to avoid discussions on Trump’s campaign. I was not always successful in doing this, and so I tried to discuss the campaign promises of both Clinton and Trump in light of what these would mean for the students. I wanted to be respectful of my students’ choices and so whenever I discussed any of these issues, I reframed them into anthropologically accessible terms. I discussed the building of the wall as an issue of nationalism and how national culture is framed in election campaigns. This allowed us to understand what makes up culture and values. The campaign rhetoric made for lively discussions on linguistics, analyzing the formation of meaning via symbols and syntax.

I assigned students to read part of Rousseau’s Social Contract theory to outline how in a democracy freedom is limited through the notion of rights and duties and that freedom is only freedom if there is a system in place that protects it. As anthropology professors I would suggest that our job is to help our students understand how their political action or inaction will impact their own life, and to extend the definition of personal freedom as being entangled in the larger concepts of political freedom. After the election, I propose that we continue in the same vein. That we reframe national politics in terms of rhetoric and symbolic action, and discuss the impact of each political action as it related to student experience. We can train our students to differentiate between words and their impact – to tackle the question of whether Trump is not racist because he tweets that he isn’t; or analyze his actions as he fills his cabinet with white supremacists.
I propose that we teach every single person in our classrooms, be they Trump supporters or not, to understand freedom as a cherished political principle that requires care and effort on our parts to maintain. That we teach our students about civic society, about their own rights and their responsibility in maintaining this right to freedom. That we teach them about racism, misogyny and nativism and how these might get in the way of their own rights being respected. That we teach them about the world around them, and we teach them to navigate in this world. Most importantly, as Trump begins his term, we help students analyze the impact of his governance and how to hold him accountable for his actions.

Center minority viewpoints
It is easy to assume that my work everyday is full of hostility. The truth, however, is that my classes are also full of people who seek me out in corridors, after classes, in office hours and in student evaluations to mention how much they appreciate a professor who speaks about the reality of racism in this country, who assumes that we are all good people and calls on our good selves to support minorities, one who makes injustice visible and points out that the voice of the minorities must also be made central. It is these students who sought me out after the election to express their disappointment, to discuss how they could argue with their aunts, their parents, their community that even though Trump has promised a thousand and one things to make their lives better, it is unlikely that he is going to live up to his promise. And so I struggle with these students to find the words that will help them carry on.
My plan is quite simple – that we simply ask students to think of how they would want to be treated and help them figure out what the humanitarian cost of their wishes would be. While discussing how nation states creates communities oriented in both time and space, my students observed that a certain cadre of conservative politics harked back to “the way things were” in the 1950s. We watched documentaries to understand the schism between White America and minorities at that time, understood how government assistance programs overwhelmingly supported white people’s aspirations for a middle class life and how legalized segregation negatively impacted the lives of minorities. “So they want to go back to a time when the blacks knew their place”, one of my students observed, “but that is so racist”. My observation has been that even the most conservative of students will shy away from ideas that are blatantly racist in their impact today. Be it peer pressure or a real change in values, I find that even the conservative student of today is unwilling to engage in actions that are openly discriminatory.

For the most part then, I suggest that as anthropologists we use our agency to talk about the negative impact of actions and to break through the barrier of unawareness that allows students to remain conservative supporters. The answer may well lie in the history of anthropology itself. Anthropology as a discipline has always tried to give voice to minority viewpoints and the others of history. One of the most effective ways to be anthropology professors in the Time of Trump may be to simply continue teaching the discipline.

Teaching everyone in the class, not simply students we agree with.
Professors all over the country have lamented the election results, expressed shock and dismay and even shed tears in classrooms. At a board meeting in the recent American Anthropological Association’s annual conference, I listened to one anthropology professor who taught in a situation similar to mine express how she was in tears in the classroom the day after the election. She lamented that anthropology journals were not more accessible to students and that even though we had a lot to offer our students, our jargon prevented students from learning anything. Here I part ways with her. I have sympathy for her dashed hopes, but I strongly disagree with her actions – both in shedding tears in the classroom and in arguing that anthropology is inaccessible to our students. It is our job as professors to make the subject accessible to our students, no matter what level of preparation they have. It will take time, it will take effort; but it is important to work with our students and help them undertake the task of understanding difficult texts.
We cannot be successful as faculty if our language is inaccessible, our thoughts inscrutable and our principles unassailable. I propose with teach with care, with kindness and invite students to participate in exploring the values of diversity and respect that are central to anthropology.

Respect our students’ democratic choices
It is also our job as anthropology professors to respect the choices that students make. And so while the election results are indeed filling us with anxiety about the future, it is important to keep our tears away from the classroom.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, my classroom took on an odd sort of dynamic. Students who had voted for Trump (some of these students had self-disclosed) and students who were minorities all displayed signs of anxiety and doubled down on their opinion. I’ve discovered through intense class discussion that much of this behavior comes from imagined opposition to their viewpoints. And here, as professors we can demonstrate support for our students’ choices, regardless of whom they voted for.
Verbal reassurance is meaningless in the face of partisan reaction to students’ opinions and so I have been trying to reframe classes as simply issue-based. One of the modules in my class covered globalization and food. We watched Michael Pollan’s “The omnivore’s dilemma” to understand food supply chains in the US. As a class, this led to several interesting discussions on how we choose to eat and what we expect to be available to us as food. Students on both sides of the aisle devised strategies to eat local and to reduce the carbon footprint of our food. In the end, I think students surprised themselves by discovering how much common ground they had when the discussion was issue-based rather than framed by their identity as a Trump voter or hater. My job was to simply figure out a way in which students could realize their common interests.

In the end, I propose a simple solution – that we continue to teach. That we continue to teach every single person in our classroom, to the best of our ability. That we display the same duty of care to each of our students, no matter what their religious or political or social persuasion. That we hold ourselves accountable for the education we provide, and for making anthropology relevant to the lives of our students.

Rucha Ambikar is assistant professor of sociology at Bemidji State University. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Her current research interests include race, pedagogy and identity.

I taught a class on the 2016 U.S. presidential election (syllabus here) to a group of undergrads at MIT with diverse political commitments, social sensibilities, and with different levels of exposure to anthropology. I faced two challenges. One was getting my students to think anthropologically about electoral politics and democracy more broadly. I mean moving away from analyses that mimic prevalent political punditry (do elections work?), to a comparative mode of analysis attentive to how different groups of people experience, understand and perform free, fair, legitimate elections. The second challenge was to build a common ground to listen to each other in an emotionally charged political environment. I found that in cultivating an anthropological perspective we built a common place to question the assumptions shaping our political preferences, and to discuss the implications of those preferences.

I made an effort to cultivate in my students what Clifford (1988:19) calls an “ethnographic attitude,”  one that sees “culture and its norms—beauty, truth, reality—as artificial arrangements susceptible to detached analysis and comparison with other possible dispositions.” This “relativistic” approach (and I mean it facetiously) was fruitful to study electoral campaigning in its own terms. As charismatic assemblages—of experts, supporters, techniques, political ideals, political networks and media infrastructures—working in concerted action toward electing a candidate (Nielsen 2012; Stromer-Galley 2014). We saw that these assemblages deploy strict top-down management tactics to fuel and spread a collective enthusiasm for a political cause, and produce dominant storylines that ultimately become the bases for political judgment and policy design (Laclau 2008). 2016 provided abundant case studies, like Brexit or the Colombian Peace Referendum.

I organized the class syllabus with a comparative perspective in mind, and informed by my own work in Colombia.  I study the rise of an American-style of political management. As a Colombian, studying American electoral management practices in my home country, I have seen that the American style of campaigning—which is candidate-centered, dependent on vertical information practices and based on popular participation—looks a lot like what has been called populism in the global south. I purposefully organized the readings to compare ideas and practices of political authority and democratic consensus in time and with other contexts, and especially in light of shifting media infrastructures.

Schudson’s (1998) The Good Citizen, and Lakoff’s (1996) Moral Politics were great resources to outline a tension that runs deep in American political history between consensus and political authority, between an expectation of egalitarianism and a representation system organized around social deference.  Schudson especially helped us understand that this system relies heavily on political communication, on arguments and persuasion, and gave us an overview of the historical processes, of technological and institutional shifts leading to our media-intensive, celebrity-centered political culture.

We focused on the emergence of professional political campaigning and the public relations industry in the 1920s, what’s commonly known as “modern campaigning.” Here, we examined the rise of the citizen/consumer and the marriage of advertisement, demography, and electoral campaigning through a mix of ethnographic and political communication works. Lempert and Silverstein’s (2012) Creatures of Politics and Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram’s (2016) recent article “The Hands of Donald Trump” were great resources to study candidate branding and political spectacle. Rasmus Nielsen (2012) Ground Wars, Sasha Issenberg’s (2012) Victory Lab, and Stromer-Galley’s Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age were useful texts to study political communication techniques (for example like micro-targeting or controlled interactivity), the types of relations they prefigure, and their relationship to dominant social structures. We learned, for example, that campaigns select canvassers based on ideas of race and class, limiting the opportunities for participation for volunteers (an expression of institutionalized racism).

We read ethnographic works about elections in other contexts, and social theory texts to question the colonial history of democracy, and its “provincialization.” Texts like Kim Coles (2007), Democratic Designs, Mukulika Banerjee’s (2008) “Democracy, Sacred and Everyday”, Jeffrey Witsoe’s (2013) Democracy Against Development, Julia Paley’s (2004) “Accountable Democracy,” and Pierre Bourdieu’s (2004) “The Mystery of the Ministry” sparked productive discussions about the social relations produced and reproduced through electoral campaigning. Through these discussions, we questioned Donald Trump not only as a product of socioeconomic trends and racial histories, but also as a catalyzer of new political narratives and institutional conditions.

I found that discussing ethnographic assignments in class and comparing findings helped us talk about our political stakes openly, and think together about the implication of our preferences. From the outset, I voiced freely my rejection of Trump (as a hispanic immigrant, recent citizen, and as a woman). But, I also openly recognized that mine was a preference among many and that in class we’d peer into the assumptions informing our preferences.

I assigned a semester long mini-ethnography. Students had to choose a site exclusively activated during elections. Some students chose digital sites, some chose comedy shows, others chose to go to political rallies. Students often shared their findings coded in an emotional register, expressing feelings of excitement/identification or discomfort/rejection. We studied that emotional responses to politics reflect ideals of political virtue and fairness that take different shapes depending on the ideological camp that’s making the claim to virtue (thank you, George Lakoff!). Fighting against relativism, we compared notes. And we questioned each other. For example, can we simultaneously have policies that are good for business and that threaten our environmental systems? Are the social effects of economic policies ‘trade-offs’? Who’s trading and at what expense? How are technocrats more right about policy than someone who feels its effects?

Regardless of political leaning, the day after Trump won, in class we sat with our emotions and listened to our arguments. If elections are “rituals of renewal,” of giving birth to a common political imagination, what do current political polarization and social tensions say about the kind of “renewal” we’re witnessing? We thought it might be time to devise new ways of connecting politically. We don’t have a definite answer. But the classroom, and I mean the open, face-to-face, know-your-peers type of classroom, may be instrumental in this endeavor.

Acknowledgements: Special thanks to my students, Alex, Charles, Gustavo, Noa, Piper, Sarah and Sean, for the thoughtful discussions and generous exchanges.

Lots of us who teach in the U.S. (and, doubtless, in other places) have been asking dazed questions about how, and if, we should hold classes, what can we do with and for our students, and what responsibilities we have to teach to this event that so many of us are experiencing (in variously positioned and intersecting ways) as a disaster?

This morning, in my Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology Class, I devoted the class to reflecting (with some tears) on the climate of permissible violence targeted at those bodies the Trump campaign singled out for hate and disregard during the election, hearing from students about their concerns, and thinking about what resources different students have to safely respond and to enact civic engagement and community care. Then I gave them a mini-teach in about #cripthevote and the way the block granting of Medicaid and repeal of the ACA could literally kill people.

For those of us who teach, #teachingthedisaster will depend on who our students are, what kind of expertise we can bring to lectern/table/office hour/quad, as well as our own institutional, geographical, and sociopolitical location.

Yesterday, I reached out to colleagues to begin soliciting resources that might help each of us figure out our own approach. I’m grateful for the many rapid responses I got, both for their content and also because they manifested a heartening sense of action, which I think we all need right now. Thanks to everyone who emailed and tweeted their contributions. Below is a roughly organized (and by no means complete) collection, one to which I hope you will add.

Please share your own post-Trump teaching resources (how to teach, as well as what to teach) on twitter at #teachingthedisaster or add them to the comments section to this post.

In addition to work in my own classes, I’m also organizing a teach-in for on inauguration day, Friday January 20th. I’d urge those of you in a position to do so to do the same at your intuitions. Let’s make inauguration day a national higher ed day of action. (I know that should have ended with an exclamation point, but it will take me a few more days to muster the energy)

Why to Teach

• Marshall Sahlin’s reflections from the height of the Iraq war on Teach Ins in The Old Stoned Age
• “The Trump Effect” in schools.
• Seth Holmes reflections on Discussing the Suffering Slot with Migrant Farm Workers reminds us that injustice requires for concepts, as well as for action.
• Paul Stoller argues that, in the face of the failure of forms of quantitative knowledge, “Now is the time for ethnographers to step up.”

How to Teach

• There is a world of teaching literature on the subject of “difficult dialogues.” Here is a helpful primer from Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching.
• Though it’s geared toward k-12 education, Tolerance.Org offers helpful general classroom strategies on teaching the days after the election.
• The African American Intellectual History Society created as set of assignments to go with the Trump 2.0 Syllabus (see below). Some of the most adaptable to Anthropology include:
  • Ask students to select a Trump property (current or former) and write a paper on its history of labor/client/neighborhood relations, from development to operation/sale [David Huyssen]Ask students to construct an idea/intellectual map using one Trump’s speeches, tracing where ideas come from historically and noting connection to other primary/secondary sources assigned in the course. [Brian Goldstein]Analyzing one of Trump’s interviews, ask students to highlight the overlapping dimensions of racism, sexism, and xenophobia. [Jeff Helgeson]
• Disability activist and organizer Stacey Milbern posted a few tools for Social Justice Groups/Classrooms this week, including:

Pass out pen and paper to everyone. Invite people to write a letter about this moment. Ask people to not personalize the letters or provide identifying information, but write them for anyone who may be hurting in this moment. Invite people to bring the letter to you (or a co-facilitator) if they’d like. Redistribute the letters anonymously and give time for people to read them. Invite people to read the letter they received to the group if they’d like to share.

What to Teach

On Blackness and Anti-Black Racism

•  Trump 2.0 Syllabus. This may be the best single resource I’ve come across. Created by N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain and others at PublicBooks.Org, it is a historical, cultural, and political contextualization of the rise of Trump. The 15 units (each with accompanying Trump epitaph) include secondary sources plus a selection of primary and multimedia sources.
• The Black Lives Matter Syllabus, created by Frank Roberts at NYU. This syllabus focuses specifically on the BLM movement. Like the Trump 2.0 syllabus, it includes lots of primary sources as well as assignments.
• #Blacklivesmattersyllabus project from Anthropoliteia, edited by Sameena Mulla. Less specifically about the BLM movement itself, this series offers readings and assignments as well as pedagogical reflections from anthologists working on and teaching about blackness in the contemporary US.
• Ta-Nehisi Cotes. Both his “Case for Reparations” and Between the World and Me have been cropping up on anthro syllabi on a range of topics, including my own, to foster thinking about race and history in the US and the related the workings of embodiment and dispossession.

US-Mexico:

• Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason De Leon focuses on the way the necroviolence of the US border policy takes hold of the bodies of those who policy compels to come north across the Sonoran desert. It just won the AAA’s Marget Mead Award.
• Seth Holmes‘ Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farm Workers in the United States  also focuses on bodies, but here, they are the bodies of undocumented migrant agricultural workers whose suffering and precarity is essential to the US economic and gustatory status quo.

Disability: 

• #Cripthevote. If you’re on twitter, this hashtag, created by Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project with Andrew Pulrang, and Gregg Beratan,  is an amazing archive of disabled and ally voices.
• #Cripthevote: What’s the Crisis of Liberalism Got to Do with It is Faye Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp’s contribution to the CA Crisis of Liberalism Hotspot (see below), describing the role of disability engagement in the 2016 election.
• Ari Ne’man, co-founder of the Autistic Self-Advocasy Network and member of the National Council on Disability (for as long as it exists…), just wrote a perfect primer about how the repeal of the ACA and proposed block granting of Medicaid will endanger and kill disabled people. This is a must teach.
• Liz Lewis’ blog Disability Fieldnotes is a great resource both for reflective thinking about what an anthropology of disability in the U.S. might do, and also for insight, facts and figures.

How Could This Happen?

• Sarah Kendzior predicted Trump’s triumph last May, giving an account of his exploitation of American pain.
• Paul Stoller offers this on culture as an explanatory force. Though I  bristle at his mobilization of a simplified culture concept in this piece, it might serve one well in the class room with a little deconstruction.
• Lilith Mahmod’s Crisis of Liberalism piece We Have Never Been Liberal, explores the way liberalism contains the conditions of possibility for fascism, both in Europe and the U.S.

The Crisis of Liberalism

• Cultural Anthropology’s Crisis of Liberalism Hotspot  is hot off the press. This collection of short essays from Ulf Hannez, Andrea Mulebach, Doug Holmes and others (including SM’s own Alex Golub), has arrived just in time to help us think critically and comparatively about “our present and recent seasons of political discontent.”
  

The following people contributed resources for this list: Vincanne Adams, Lindsay Bell, Dominic Boyer, Christopher Chan, Seth Holmes, Cymene Howe, Kevin Karpiak, Ashley Lebner, Ken MacLeish, Carol Mcgranahan, Andrea Mulebach, and Jenny Shaw.

One summer night James and I stand smoking near McGinty’s small patio that spreads across the sidewalk, his two prosthetic legs protruding from his khaki-colored cargo shorts. They catch the eye of a middle-aged man, slightly drunk and ambling along with a few friends. He stops and turns to us, ribbing James by asking, “What happened to your feet?” James replies with one word and a slightly smug smile: “Bomb.” The man, still standing there in front of us, unignorably close although he ignores me entirely, nods slowly with sincerity and says, “I believe it. Thanks, thank you for what you do.” Then he moves along and rejoins his waiting friends.

We go back to our cigarettes and conversation, but whatever ease or unselfconsciousness or ordinary sense of being in common James might have had upstairs at McGinty’s has been perforated by that sentiment and its implicit fictions. An encounter that begins with a recognition of the glinting traces of horrible violence and pain, traces that James makes more present with his one chosen word, bomb, are unspoken and perhaps unspeakable within this frame of gratitude. Instead they are spoken as a conspicuous vagueness: “Thanks, thank you for what you do.”

Like countless other exchanges, this is simultaneously an encounter with an actual soldier and with the figure of the soldier and his generic heroism rooted in generically worthy experiences full of acts of violence about which one need not think too hard. In such a passing encounter it is hard to see much specificity in the recognition implied by “Thank you for what you do.” When he is interpolated as a figure with only generic content, the acts of violence that involve James become inscrutable, even though it is the specific presence of his absent legs that provoked this man’s sentiment. This paradox of such grateful encounters is part of what makes them so uncomfortable. And although James becomes habituated to their ubiquity, there remains something troubling about being nominated as a willing sacrificial victim on behalf of the nation and being thanked for it.

The exchanges involved in these grateful encounters are hopelessly lopsided. In place of the social logics of exchange that can make or thicken social selves, there is a flattened figure, an unpayable debt of gratitude that hasn’t been incurred, and an expression of sentiments that have little to do with the unspoken and unqueried tasks of war or acts of violence that had seemed more like the workplace injuries of a life-or-death job than patriotic sacrifices.

Peter was a good-looking nineteen-year-old, though he occasionally insisted he had lost too much weight since it had happened. So he ate a lot, mostly cereal. He was eating a bowl of cereal at the counter in the Fisher House kitchen when the man from the VA walked in with suited entourage in tow. Until then it had been a pretty boring day. Peter and I had been killing time in the kitchen, chatting with Alec. The unique topography of Alec’s leg was on display within the cage of its ExFix; its shades of pink and red and the tell-tale grid pattern of a skin graft, like someone squeezing it too tight with a hairnet, evidenced not only injury but multiple surgeries and lingering infection. Peter’s wrist was still bandaged from the surgery to set its broken bones. His leg was still healing from amputation surgery, so he wasn’t yet using his prosthetic.

The man from the VA and his entourage were led into the kitchen by the Fisher House manager, who was giving them the standard tour. As usual, she stopped and opened the gleaming, stainless-steel refrigerator doors, explaining the system by which we differentiated the donated food from the food individual families bought for themselves. The group nodded a tad too earnestly in appreciation. The man from the VA came over to the counter where Peter, Alec, and I sat. He asked Peter if he could ask him some questions. Peter agreed. Even though Peter hadn’t been at Walter Reed long, he recognized this as an ordinary task, taking a break from his cereal so that some guy in a suit could ask him questions in front of a group of onlookers.

The man briefly introduced himself, saying that he was from a large Midwestern VA hospital, and then quickly asked, “Where you from, and where were you hurt?” Peter replied, “Iraq.” The rest of the group, now clearly constituting an audience, stood back by the refrigerator and watched. The man tried to elicit some elaboration: “And?” There was a silence that details of Peter’s injury or recovery were expected to fill. Instead Peter raised the remaining stump of his leg—his residual limb—and pointed to it with his milky spoon, giving a quick definitive nod of his head and saying nothing. The man from the VA tried again, asking, “But how are you doing?” Peter’s response was as sarcastic as it was brief: “I’m fine.”

The man from the VA finally seemed to take the hint. He tried to close the awkward interaction, smiling politely and saying, “Well, you’re fighting for our freedom, so thank you for your service.” But before he could move on to Alec, Peter jumped in: “And your job.” He said, “If we didn’t get blown up, you wouldn’t have a job.” A nervous laughter rippled through the group of onlookers in the pause that followed. The man from the VA replied, “Well, yes, we prefer if you didn’t get blown up.” He quickly turned to Alec, shaking his hand, asking him the same questions, and listening to his more accommodating answers. “I’m not actually a soldier,” Alec joked. “I just followed the free food in here.”

While visits from celebrities and VIPs were ubiquitous at Walter Reed, such blatant calling out of the problem of gratitude and imputation of sacrifice was by no means typical. In this context, behaving like Peter wasn’t just rude; it could get him labeled as crazy, as unable to deal with his PTSD, as ungrateful or unpatriotic, which was perhaps worse since, although soldiers disavowed any special patriotism, to be labeled by others as unpatriotic called into question one’s loyalty and devotion to one’s fellow soldiers, not just the country, and that cut soldiers to the quick. Behaving as Peter did would also wear on a soldier’s connections to the vast network of resources—from free dinners to free laptops to free houses—which folks like the man from the VA were part of.

While it is exceptional, this interaction encapsulates the tropes and traps of sacrifice and gratitude within which Peter and his comrades were entangled. And though the man from the VA didn’t explicitly refer to Peter’s “sacrifice,” the frame of sacrifice is so ubiquitous as to make service virtually synonymous with sacrifice at Walter Reed. The very present absence of Peter’s leg, the small American flags stuck in his wheelchair (part of what he referred to as his “crazy vet” look), the man from the VA who made this pilgrimage to see and touch and thank the soldiers who have given or lost or had taken from them bits of their bodies, minds, and selves—all of this is articulated in claims about soldiers as sacrificial victims.

In this context sacrifice is tangled up with relations of debt, but it is the debtors, that is, the volunteers, visitors, and war and troop boosters, who insist on this debt. It is they who insist that they owe things to soldiers. It is they who claim that soldiers have sacrificed on their behalf, and they do their best to pay the unpayable debt of sacrifice. The soldier is rendered a sacrificial victim not because of some essential quality he has or because of the circumstances through which his body has been dismembered. He is rendered sacrificial because others claim his pain, his death, his loss in their own name. He is their sacrificial victim; there is little he can do to be otherwise.

Yet, in making that claim, the grateful elide that same violence, the same pain and death and loss, on which is it based. Gratitude sanitizes the gory implications of sacrifice, leaving in its stead a clean picture of patriotism. The visceral pinkness of raw flesh is displaced by the glossy thickness of blue blood. During the encounter with the man from the VA, the gesture of Peter’s amputated leg is not enough to make this absurdity clear. When his gesture is met with thanks for his service on behalf of the ideal of freedom, Peter insists on reinserting his suffering into the exchange in a way that breaches the safe, hygienic frames of both abstract patriotic gratitude (“You’re fighting for our freedom, so thank you for your service”) and the depoliticizing frame of employment (“If we didn’t get blown up, you wouldn’t have a job”). Soldiers’ work is violent and deadly. In gratitude, civilians shake hands, make signs, and knit blankets; they give away laptops and build houses; they arrange dinners and trips to Disneyland. Their insistence on soldiers’ extraordinariness ironically ignores those violent extras that always append soldiers’ ordinaries. To Peter, in that moment in the Fisher House kitchen, it seems ridiculous, so into the generalizing expression of gratitude he inserts the ugly facts of his particular body in pain.

You can read the book’s introduction here.

On the Particularity of the Empathetic Subject

It is great that the particularity of the empathetic subject emerged as an important strand in the comments thread of Dr.LB’s second empathy post (e.g. here). Twist this strand around her anchor point of the particular contemporary understanding of empathy as a good and, let’s say, personable, orientation to others, and we can see how empathy emerges as a capacity for recognition of human identity in which the apparently (but not actually) universal value of human life is ground.  Didier Fassin has done a lot of work to describe the often insidious and sometimes deadly effects of this affective politics (which claims it is nothing of the sort).  Check out his book Humanitarian Reason, to think about the shadow sides of empathy, even, or exactly when and where it finds the kinds of people who are its proper subjects.

On the Specific Objects of Empathetic Regard

What about the objects of empathetic regard? It is so interesting that, on the one hand, the genealogy of Einfühlung that Dr.LB offers is grounded in a proper human subject regarding things, like mountains, or even not-quite-things, like optical illusions, and projecting into them (i.e. imbuing them with) some lively human sensations. And, on the other hand, empathy as a contemporary politicomoral imperative is supposed to be about humans, that is, about other living beings enough like ‘you’ that ‘you’ can ‘put yourself in their shoes’.

I mean us to take ‘shoes’ here as a marker of human specificity, and also to immediately note that we regularly extend this shoe wearing specificity to other companion species (like horses, and occasionally dogs), who are exemplary as both objects and subjects of empathy (this mutual capacity for empathetic regard being part of the logic that renders horses and dogs exemplary therapy animals for soldiers and veterans with PTSD).

What’s more, we also regularly extend this specificity to non-shoe wearing animals, like orcas and great apes, when we render them objects and properly perceptive subjects of empathy–and therefore human-like–so as to argue for their humane treatment or their human rights.

The ability to render other species human-like relies on a recognition of an already existing commensurability between ‘exceptional’ (sacred?) fully human beings and other (killable?) kinds; an instance of what Mel Chen calls “is-and-is-not” politics (as in, a human being is-and-is-not an animal, so an animial-can-and-can-not be a human being). Here, again, we might find Fassin, and the insidious problem of grounding of rights in lowest common denominators of life itself, such as the capacity to feel, fear, and suffer traumatically from pain.

(Or was that Animacy?)

While I have been talking about humanness here, I have actually been leading us (barefoot?) down the primrose path toward Mel Chen’s iteration of animacy, a cline of liveness, sensibility, and (linguistic) agentivity, which articulates bio and necropoitical arrangements of proper lives and deaths.

Empathy fits nicely into the normative articulation of animacy that puts a category of (able-bodied, normatively conscious and sensate, masculinized, capital unconstrained, racially and sexually unmarked) human at the top, and some thing like a stone at the bottom (speaking of stones, we could anachronistically read Elizabeth Povinelli’s 1995 article “Do Rocks Listen?” as about what happens ‘when animacies meet’).

Coming back to where I started this point (about the proper objects of empathy), thinking in terms of bio/necropolitics and animacy is a helpful way to consider what/how empathy does to a horse, a dog, an orca, a great ape, as well as to a mountain. After all, though feeling empathy for a mountain might sound a little strange these days (perhaps anti-fracking activists would protest?), Eduardo Kohn and Bhrigupati Singh have each recently made me feel otherwise with regard to forests (Singh foreshadowed the forestry of his forthcoming book at the Undeadening Death panel in Chicago, suggesting that as the life of, and in, an Indian forest dies into silence, no one may be compelled to make a sound).  And I leave that there before I digress to here.

Final, disgusting thoughts, anyone?

One more thing to throw up. There is a whole burgeoning field of “disgustology” within psychology that seems, in my glancing contact with it, to suggest that disgust is the opposite of empathy (in the positive and neurologized senses), and that if we can make one individual person (like a securely middle class commuter) regard one Other individual person (like someone on the subway who looks dirty and smells of urine) with empathy, we can make that person overcome their disgust, feel empathy for (but not with) the Other (here the ’empathy’ becomes ‘recognition predicated on common human-not-animal identity’), and work our way out of empathy deficit (I heard one researcher present a mechanism for producing this effective affective shift: Make ads with pictures of homeless people eating sandwiches, or perhaps other barely ‘humanizing’ things).

So, thanks to Dr.LibertyBell, and all the SMers who continue to chime in on her empathy posts. Here’s to a 2014 full of generative and companionate thinking!

Everyone agrees that this will not end Assad’s hold on the country, it will not improve the lot of Syrians, and “it doesn’t, obviously end the death of innocent civilians inside of Syria.”

None of this is their intention. Their intention is to spank Assad using a spectacular and display of tactically useless military violence that risks Syrian lives and protects American ones, all while pretending such violence somehow does not constitute “involvement in the civil war in Syria, [which] would not help the situation on the ground.”

John Kerry’s statement on Friday built the case for bombing Syria based largely on allaying American (and Australian and French) fear about how history would judge them for “turning a blind eye” to “the indiscriminate, inconceivable horror” of this violation of “international norms.”  A selfish fear based on a false dichotomy between “doing nothing” and thereby “creat[ing] impunity” and exercising military violence now, the only “something” that it thinks will count.

If only the risk was merely one of ‘too little too late’.

The bombs (well, the weapon delivery system in which they are contained) are 21 feet long and 20 inches wide and carry 700-1000 lb warheads (you can find details here).  They are launched by ship or submarine, conveniently not requiring someone else’s sovereign soil. They cannot be launched by air.  If media chatter conjures images of fighter jets darting in tight formation over the already largely ruined country, please put aside that technophilic Top Gun fantasy.

The NYT reports two or three bombs would probably be launched at each target from the Navy’s giant Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, four of which are currently deployed in the eastern Mediterranean. Each carries about three-dozen missiles.

This means, to hit the area around the Damascus, where the most recent chemical weapon attacks were, they will be streaking over the skies of Lebanon first. These are logistical facts we are unlikely to be thinking about here in the United States.

We may have heard that (anti-Assad) Israel is bracing for possible retaliation from (pro-Assad) Iran—about 60% of Israelis have taken advantage of a national program distributing biological weapon protective gear, protections denied to Palestinians, thus exacerbating existing necropolitical distinctions between kinds of lives and accepted forms of deadly exposure, something war is always does.

But we have heard less of how, in its infamously distorted logic of proportionality, Israel would likely respond with increased violence along its northern border with Lebanon—which would, one imagines, be answered in kind—or in Palestine, where daily life is already an exercise in navigating endless duress.  It has already stepped up weaponization throughout the country in anticipation of U.S. strikes and subsequent violence.

Nor do we hear about the way this will affect violence in Lebanon, where recent bombings in Tripoli and the Hezbollah-controlled Beirut suburb of Ruwais are widely acknowledged as tit for tat murders by pro- and anti-Assad groups (whose enmity is also mapped on to other longstanding political cleavages).

Nor do we hear that airports will be closed and curfews imposed, trapping people where they are so they can hold their breath as supplies dwindle, infrastructure to deliver them is destroyed, and their hearts break and bleed at the news of each neighbor, friend, colleague, or fellow traveler killed, imperiled, exiled, vanished or broken by the consequences of America’s utterly stupid and feckless show of force.

Nor do we hear consideration of the old fact of total war: some of the installations of strategic value to Assad’s regime will also be of value to civilians remaining in the country or those who hope to return some day—particularly in the case of ‘command and control’ targets.  In this context, there is no such thing as a purely military target.

This, of course, is by no means an exhaustive list of what America is not thinking about as the Obama Administration sinks deeper into its own neurotic sovereign ecstasy. In fact, it seems to be ignoring the entire complex of local and regional politics and violence of which the U.S. already a part (see here for just one example you might have missed).

In his PBS News Hour interview on Tuesday, President Obama declared, “I have no interest in any kind of open ended conflict in Syria.”  Though presumably intended as a salve for quagmire-weary Americans, the comment expresses the luxury of another kind of disinterest; a disinterest in, and dismissal of, the way U.S. involvement is already and inextricably part of the already ongoing open-ended conflict that cannot be properly understood as “in Syria”, linked as it is by chains of proxy violence and flows of bodies in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, and Palestine, to name only the most obvious.

And we are supposed to be comforted by the President’s disinterest?

What the Obama Administration is interested in is a sovereign-scale act of corporal punishment: spanking Assad because he used chemical weapons, in violation of the United States’  ‘do what I say, not what I do’ threat.

America’s violence may be wrapped in more expensive machinery, but it is not superior, not qualitatively different, than the violence already underway. This violence will not work some sympathetic magic just because it is launched from an American ship or vested in technology that costs between $500,000 and $1,500,00 per missile.  It will escalate the scale, raise the stakes, and make familiar and navigable local violence more unpredictable, more dangerous, and less contained.

Unfortunately, it is Obama’s sovereign prerogative to pretend that he is acting in the name of father.  But regardless of this conceit, he is participating in the violence of an ongoing regional war. That he thinks his intention not to will travel inside those cruise missiles and, like some magic spell of kinds, make his strike against Assad a violence apart from the civil war that has killed more than 100,000 Syrians and made refugees of 2,000,000 more, is a hubris that wrenches at my gut.

In addition to the Syrians these actions will kill and the further damage this will do to Syria’s infrastructure, this violence will put the worlds of Lebanese, Palestinians, Israelis, and others in peril. Its immanence is already starting to do that.

In the last year, I have been lucky enough to cultivate my attention to these issues through my participation in the War and Global Health Working Group, based at the American University of Beirut. Our recent conversations had focused on the social epidemiology of the recent wars in the Middle East, the “therapeutic geographies” (in organizer Omar al-Dewachi’s term) they give rise to, and the moral and social valuation of particular forms of injury and exposure that shift as bodies move across political and geographical contexts.

Many members of the group live and work in and across these same embattled geographies, and others, like me, do not. This distribution enriches the kinds of thinking we can do—individually and collectively.

It was Omar al-Dewachi, for example, who pointed out to me just how the security situation in Lebanon was being made foreign by threatened U.S. bombing in Syria. And when, last week, with great sadness we were forced to reschedule our planned meeting in Beirut, our conversation continued over email.

Rita Giacaman writing from Bizreit University noted the historical echoes of disregarded lives, as she recalled the Israeli government’s refusal to give gas masks to her non-American passport holding family in 1991. And doctor and poet Fouad Mohamoud Fouad, displaced from Aleppo to AUB, noted that the lives of Syrians seem doomed, as in a Greek tragedy, to three hopeless options “endless, brutal dictatorship, or Jihadists, or US stupid intervention.”

In this frustration and tension, our collective thinking continues. And this kind of thinking (I am not the first to insist) is a something that must be done.

I want to begin by applauding the New York Times and Danny Hakim for devoting considerable energies to their Abused and Used series exposing the deadly peril within NY state’s system of care for people with developmental disabilities. It’s not exactly a hot topic for an exposè.

But I was angry that in their contribution to the series this weekend, Hakim and co-author Russ Beuttner fed into ideas about people with disabilities that are part of the same deadly system their work has the potential to undermine.

Their focus on broken rules and poor regulation presents people with developmental disabilities as troublesome things to be managed and “dealt with.” Even their retelling of the story of James Taylor’s death conveys his life through burdens felt by others. Despite the candor and care of his mother and sister, visible in this accompanying video, Mr. Taylor’s life is primarily depicted as dead weight.

To be fair, the coverage reflects a double bind: these lives are not valued, so the series focuses on death and abuse in order to get attention. But in focusing on death and abuse, the series suggests it is deaths rather than lives that are worth attention, intervention, and resources.

So why do we care more about how some people die than how they live? As Mr. Taylor’s sister puts it: “these sorts of people are not valued in society”. This is true, but unsatisfying. We need also to ask what makes some people, but not others, people of “these sorts”.

The Used and Abused series confirms a common sense answer: These people are sorted by the biological facts of impairment; the neck that doesn’t support the head any better than a newborn, the brain that is ‘developmentally equivalent’ to a three-month-old’s. Those are facts of Mr. Taylor’s impairment due to cerebral palsy as described by Hakim and Buettner.

But this common sense is nonsense. Mr. Taylor was a 41-year-old man, not a baby. Comparing him to an infant is an (evocative, ubiquitous, offensive) analogy, not a statement of biological fact. And the strength of his neck does not explain why he was made to live in conditions that killed him.

I did fieldwork with injured U.S. soldiers rehabilitating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As the NYT, Washington Post, and others have reported, soldiers often sustain brain injuries with major cognitive consequences. But we don’t evaluate injured soldiers the same way as Mr. Taylor—even when their brains are injured or literally missing.

Yet there may be no quantifiable difference between how someone with cerebral palsy can think and how a brain injured soldier can think. Nonetheless, we actively support the life of an injured soldier but merely try to prevent the death of people like Mr. Taylor.

The difference between these two “sorts of people” (or kinds of people, as Ian Hacking might put it) is one we make. It is rooted in morally weighted social facts, not biological ones. It is about the lives we value as a society and those we do not to. This is a basic human inequity for which we bear collective responsibility. Luckily, it is one all of us can work to change.

I was part of the interdisciplinary group, co-directed by Catherine Lutz, that co-authored the report which aims to comprehensively explore the vast scope and scale of the impacts, the many kinds of costs, of the U.S. military response to 9/11. So, not surprisingly, the mood strikes me to tell you something about it.

There were more than 20 of us who contributed to the project, and anthropologists were well represented alongside historians, journalists, political scientists, economists, and others.

One of the great strengths of the report and it’s interdisciplinary approach is that it brings together numbers (like international civilian casualty rates) and issues (like impacts of deployment on the children of U.S. service members) that are often disarticulated or overlooked all together.

Now, for better or worse, numbers make good headlines, and this report is chock full of them. We noted that:

The wars have created more than 7.8 million refugees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are 75% more likely to die in car crashes than their civilian counterparts; Military responses to terrorism have been successful in only 7%of the 268 examples since the late 20th Century; An M-1 Abrams tank gets about half a mile per gallon of gas; In the U.S., the proportion of hate crimes against Muslims has risen 500%since 2000, even though overall hate crime rates have gone down; And, as everyone from The Washington Post to The Toronto Sun noted, the report estimates an (incomplete) price tag of between $3.2 and $4 Trillion.

These numbers are compelling. And, true to the axiom “if it’s integerial, it leads,” (that’s how it goes, right?) numbers make good copy.

But as an anthropologist with a healthy disciplinary skepticism of faith in statistics and all their quantitative kin, and one who worked with injured soldiers and their families and wants people to know about their struggles, I was torn between the power of contagious numbers, and their simplifying and sometimes anesthetizing effects.

Thinking that some of you folks might be too, I thought I would share a few other findings of the report; findings that speak to the power of absent numbers:

The $4 Trillion number leaves much uncounted. For example, it doesn’t count ‘solatia’ payments that the U.S. makes to the families of some Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed or the cost of Predator and Reaper drones (we do know, however, that Predators cost $4.5 million each, and that more than one third of them have crashed).

Project Co-director Neta Crawford’s contribution on casualties begins with a poignant description of the historical, logistical, and political reasons that a death, especially, but not only, that of a civilian can be made uncountable.

Political scientist Alison Howell and I note the way that sensational statistics, like divorce rates, can mask the strains on military families, the very things for which they’re supposed to stand as proxy.

Matthew Evangelista’s contribution offers some important historical lessons using unexpected numbers often disappeared from amnesiac comparative histories of terrorism including those related to organizations active in the 1970s like Germany’s Red Army Faction, Italy’s Brigate Rosse, and Quebec’s Front de Liberation du Québec.

So, though Reuters has made $3.7 Trillion the headline of the Costs of War report, it seemed you might be interested in other ways the rest of us are doing the numbers.

One of the amazing things about the work of each of these artists is how resonant it is with what we do as anthropologists. Like ethnography, their images are not simply about ‘documentation.’ They are about conveying something of lived experience that allows us, provokes us, to ask questions about how some particular lives come to look they way they do. They invite us to linger on the lives of soldiers long enough to think about how they are, and also are not, like others.

It strikes me that in our disciplinary conversations about what various modes of anthropological engagement might look like, we often fail to recognize the possibilities of such resonances. These possibilities are especially promising when the lives we explore are characterized, in one way or another, by war. Here, issues of politics and ethics lie both close to the surface and close to the bone. Tim Hetherington’s work was powerful proof of these possibilities.

For example, he said many times that he hoped Restrepo, his thoroughly ethnographic Afghanistan war documentary, co-directed with Sebastian Junger, would offer a new and more productive starting place for thinking about the war and US military intervention.

As Tim put it in an excellent interview at Guernica where he responds to Leftist criticism of the film:

While moral outrage may motivate me, I think demanding moral outrage is actually counter-productive because people tend to switch off. […] Sure, the face of the U.S. soldier is the “easiest entrée into the Afghan war zone” but it has allowed me to touch many people at home with rare close-up footage of injured and dead Afghan civilians (as well as a young U.S. soldier having a breakdown following the death of his best friend). Perhaps these moments represent the true face of war rather than the facts and figures of political analyses or the black and white newsprint of leaked documents.

In a more personal mode, Tim offered the experimental film Diary, which reflects something of the compulsions, rhythms, and senses of his movement into and out of ‘zones of killing’, as he suggested we might think of such spaces. Here too, we can find resonances with anthropological explorations of the particular vertiginous experiences of being in and out and in such spaces of violence, and of the uneven geographies of deadly violence.

News continues to unfold about the incident in Libya that may have also killed photographer Chris Hondros, and that seriously injured photographers Guy Martin, Michael Christopher, among others. And as we continue to hear more of Tim Hetherington’s death, and more remembrances of his life and work, I’ll also be thinking about what his work, and the work of other artists and journalists, has to offer us anthropologists; the places where our various projects meet, and the possibilities for thinking and acting that might begin from there.

Breaking Ranks recounts, largely through interview excerpts, the stories of six Iraq War veterans who became involved with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and other military anti-war organizations and participated in the larger GI Rights Oral History Project. It takes us from their decisions to join the military, through combat, anti-war epiphanies, homecomings, and involvement in anti-war activism.

The patchwork composition of the book reflects the veterans’ attempts to piece together a narrative of their lives defined by the watershed of their experiences in Iraq. While book’s overall structure parses these experiences into a general arc of life—from enlistment, to the shock and fog of war, to political awakening, to struggles with trauma, to activism—it doesn’t smooth over the rough edges of these experiences or impose too clear an order on the muddle of reflexive memories that the soldiers offer.

As the authors note in the introduction, the book is an account of how these six people (five men and one woman; three soldiers, one sailor, one Marine, and one National Guardsman) found their way to a public, anti-war position and of “the striking and original ideas each developed to understand the war and what it meant. Their critiques are not simple matches to those of the civilian antiwar movement or to our own as authors” (8). Thus Breaking Ranks suggest that while it is possible to speak of a single anti-war movement, that singularity subsumes a multiplicity of different meanings and the ones we hear here are not always foregrounded.

Gutmann and Lutz’ Zinn-ian project of documenting the grassroots critiques so often written out of American History is well complemented by their anthropological attention to the little details of daily life (in the military, at war, and after) that aggregate into feelings of frustration and individual acts of political resistance, suggesting the complex and divergent paths through which soldiers come to, as they say, “speak out”.

Thought the text of the book is devoted to six stories, it is also peppered with facts and events that position these very diverse lives within a single post 9/11 historical moment which is also linked, by both the authors and the subjects, to the American legacies of the Vietnam War and its contemporary anti-war motifs.

In their curation of the stories, Gutmann and Lutz also demonstrate the ways that war insinuates itself into civilian life in America, making military service seem like the best possible option for many Americans whose lives are made hard or unstable by the exigencies of family expectations, national pride, poverty, and youth. The Introduction and endnotes are also full of data and resources for further reading about the ‘dark side’ (as Alex Gibney might say) of America’s war in Iraq.

Lately, ‘the good war’ in Afghanistan is consuming more and more of America’s attention and resources and, in the months since Breaking Ranks was released this summer, American combat operations in Iraq have been declared over (again) and the ‘draw-down’ of combat troops and ‘civilian surge’ there have begun. In this context, we can read in Breaking Ranks deeper questions about the different justifications for American military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq at the level of individual experience and public discourse alike, as well as about the fundamental nature of wars in which nation-states confront non-state entities through the sanctioned, violent acts of their citizens. As our attention, and perhaps attitudes, to America’s two main post-9/11 military operations seems to be shifting, Braking Ranks can help readers think about how things have (and haven’t) changed in military life and policy at home and down range.

In addition to being a powerful documentary record and conversation starter about the Iraq War, Breaking Ranks strikes me as an important, accessible, and eminently teachable book that speaks of the conflicted experiences of soldiers in war, the political failings of America’s doctrine of pre-emptive war, and the contingent evolution of personal conflict into political action. It would be well suited to undergraduate classes on war, trauma, social movements, public or activist anthropology, and—given its format—methods courses that discuss life-story interviews and practices of ethnographic writing.

[A bit of full disclosure: Royalties from Breaking Ranks are being donated to IVAW; an organization with which I did some fieldwork in 2008 and which I’ve personally supported]

There is much think and say about this event and these documents. Apropos recent conversations at SM, I’d like to point out that there are probably better places to say some of these things.

One thing that strikes me as relevant for comment here is the way that ‘facticity’ and authority based in being there are at the heart of some discussions.

Take for example this interview from NPR’s All Things Considered between co-host Robert Segal and Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange.

Here are the most relevant bits:

Julian Assange: The full story is only going to emerge over the coming weeks as that material is correlated to the witnesses who are on the ground, both the US soldiers and Afghanis

Robert Segal: [Challenging Assange’s comparison of The Afghan War Diaries to the Pentagon Papers] These are raw reports that are not confirmed and edited

JA: This material has its strength in that it is not an analysis, not written at the higher levels so it can be publicly massaged, it is in fact the raw facts of the war

RS: Some people would dispute your use of the word ‘facts,’ or indeed there might be something oxymoronic in ‘raw facts’

JA: The majority of reports are immediate reporting from the field from US military operations

What I see emerging here is an interesting conversation about textual authority, and one that resonates with our own disciplinary claims to authority based on ethnographic experience (see Clifford, Marcus, Gupta and Ferguson, etc. for some classic wailing on that old chestnut).

Assange begins by saying that these raw facts will only be fully cooked into a truthy pie once they are compared to the testimony of “witnesses who are on the ground.” And yet, when Segal notes the criticism that these raw facts are, in fact, too raw to be facts—that they need a little correlation before they can be safely consumed—Assange suggests that it is their very rawness that makes them good: Instead of truthy pie, he changes his order to sashimi.

The thing is, be they raw or cooked, pie or sashimi, these documents are not unadulterated. They are not like snapshots of the war, with all the claims to verisimilitude that visual medium implies (it’s worth mentioning that this connection between verisimilitude and the visual is also one way that witnessing stakes its authoritative claims). So, they are not like photographs. They are documents written within the generic constraints of military field reporting for a particular intended audience of surveilling authorities as official archival records.

Drop weapons are a concrete example of the things that are written out of these kinds of documents. Drop weapons are enemy weapons (like AK 47s) that US forces carry with them so that if they accidentally kill a civilian, they can ‘drop’ them by the body and have documentable proof that the civilian was actually an insurgent.

Drop weapons are useful because they alibi omissions (of the killing of civilians) from the After Action Report (AAR) which is part of the official record. But they are also useful because they enable the inscription of other things (the killing of insurgents) in the official record.

For a different and very interesting example directly from the Wikileaks docs, check out this corrective by Noah Shachtman, one of those on the ground witnesses.

The point is, however we choose to digest these documents, we need to consider them within the institutional and social context of their production, and whatever they are, they are not a diary.

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.

There is much to be said, and felt, about the shootings at Ft Hood on November 5th.

As a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist whose dissertation fieldwork was on a military base (I worked mostly at Walter Reed with a brief stint at Ft Dix), and who writes about the dissonance that emerges when discourses of the ‘war on terror’ and soldiers’ experiences collide, I’ve been feeling the need to say a few things myself.

I think we need to be paying close attention to the ideologies of language that are emerging in media coverage and online chatter about the apparent shooter, Maj. Nadal Hasan. Those who have been following the coverage will be aware that people are obsessed with how to name (or nominate) Hasan.

Call him Crazy

One set of names at stake has to do with being crazy.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, commentators rushed to the figure of the PTSD suffering soldier, invoking exactly the stereotype of the ‘crazy vet’ that Ken MacLeish has written about here, reinforcing the myth that PTSD makes people (or perhaps just soldiers?) kill other people.

As it became clear that Hasan had not been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and had not been in an active war zone, this category morphed into another one that, as far as I know, was newly coined: that of “secondary-PTSD” caused by the assumption of his repeated exposure to the first hand accounts of soldiers’ combat trauma while Hasan was working as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed.

As the night of the shooting wore on, and more information about Hasan found its way to news outlets like the New York Times, the category of mental illness took on another shape: Hasan’s supervisors at Walter Reed and at a Masters’ program at Uniformed Services University of the Health Science had apparently been concerned that he might be psychotic in some more run of the mill, non-service connected way.

The ‘T’ Word

There is also the parallel, and more heated, discussion about whether or not to call Hasan a terrorist. The cover of the November 23rd issue of Time Magazine which features Hasan’s face with “Terrorist?” across his eyes (which are rendered in negative) is perhaps the most iconic iteration of this question.

The question about whether or not to call Hasan a terrorist is not especially concerned with his motives (which is perhaps the only unifying thread of the plethora of definitions of terrorism I’ve seen). The ‘T’ word is on the table because of Hasan’s middle eastern sounding name and because he is a practicing Muslim. If you think this is too simplistic, imagine that his name was John Smith and that he was an Episcopalian, and ask yourself if the ‘terrorist’ moniker would have been on the tip of everyone’s tongue within hours of discovering these facts (though, come to think of it, if he was John Smith we probably wouldn’t even have found out that he was Episcopalian.).

New outlets quickly went to work blurring the lines between Islam and international conspiracy: By the time I got home from a long day of teaching (an introduction to linguistic anthropology, as it happens) and turned on CNN, we were already hearing details about a neighbors’ description of the “Muslim looking inscriptions” on Hasan’s front door, and Anderson Cooper was informing us about de-contextualized emails with unspecified “radical Muslim clerics” in Yemen and de-contextualized online postings about something to do with ideas of Jihad, the historical case of Kamakazi soldiers in WWII, and suicide bombing (which reminds me: I wonder if Talal Asad has made a watch-list yet). The significance of these communications has yet to be clarified.

What’s in a Name?

This consternation about naming indexes the common misconception that language simply and straightforwardly reflects and refers to the world, thus proving once and for all that if a linguistic anthropologist explains the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis to their students or the public, it doesn’t actually make a sound. It also demonstrates for us that these questions about the nature of the relationship between language and the world have real and dramatic consequences.

The discussions about whether or not to call Hasan a terrorist, or a victim of secondary trauma, or psychotic are conflated with the discussion of whether or not he is a terrorist or a victim of secondary trauma, or psychotic.

But if ever there were a case that ought to complicate these simple referential categories it was this. Hasan was a psychiatrist and potentially psychotic, he is Muslim and American, he is a soldier and is opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afganistan, he is an officer and he is (apparently) a murderer, he has three degrees and was a very poor student. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

What’s more, these various categories can’t just be mixed together in some additive way to explain some integral ‘identity’, ‘personality’, or ‘self’ and they certainly can’t be mobilized to explain the things they claim to name—If we read an argument like that in one of our students’ papers, we’d mark it with a big X and scribble “tautological” in the margins.

A Speaking Subject

The point here is that ideas about language are central to this very visceral event.

Those of us who have been following the coverage have heard a lot of people call Hasan a lot of things, we’ve read some of the things he’s written and things people have written about him. And all of this hearing and reading has been narrated for us in a way that implies that words have simple, referential meaning.

But there is one bit of language that is not a name that has become an intense site of elaboration about Hasan. It is said that, just before he started shooting he yelled out the takbir, the article of faith that translates into English as “God is great” or “God is the greatest.” It’s usually rendered in the roman alphabet as “Allahu akbar.” The question of whether or not he yelled it out is itself unsettled, and you can trace the dissemination of it pretty precisely online. Here’s how I’ve been mapping it: start with post commander Lt. General Cone the morning after the shootings, then to an AP story and the rapidly developing Wikipedia page, then a Yahoo news report the night of the 6th, and then to a CNN interview with an injured soldier on the 9th and then a complaint about that CNN report, then to the comments in this Politico post on the 11th, and then here to Bill O’Reilly on the 12th.

There is much to be said about the various attempts to pronounce, spell, and punctuate the utterance, all of which gets at the emergence of language use as a way of indexing expertise and community membership and all of which pushes us beyond the reality principle that operates in the ideology of language as naming.

What is even more compelling, and disturbing, to me is the fact that this utterance, something that must be spoken out loud as a declaration of faith, has come to be heard as indexical of membership in a global terrorist network.

This tells us something powerful about practices of speaking and hearing as acts of social construction of selves and others. Assuming that Hasan did indeed make this utterance (if he “shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’” or “Allauh akbar […] which terrorists have used as a battle cry” or “ALLAH AKHBAR!!”), the conversation has not been about what he meant (was it intended to claim his actions in the name of God? Was it a confession of faith in the face of imminent death?).

The meaning has already been determined before the utterance is made: the utterance is understood to be a declaration not of faith, but of membership in a diffuse, global, radical, anti-American, terrorist network associated with a particular politicization of Islam and rooted in the middle east. It’s become a site of elaboration because if he made this declaration than it would seem we don’t need to worry about what to call him: We’ll finally have the expressive truth, straight from the horse’s mouth.

The thing I’ll be most interested in is what happens when we finally get to hear from Hasan, that is, when we hear the sound of his voice. I’m not that interested in what he’ll say. I’m more interested in what people will think when they hear the sound of this potential terrorist speaking like what he is: a 39 year old from suburban Virginia.