Tag Archives: Politics, government, power

Reconsidering American Power conference at University of Chicago, April 23-25

The University of Chicago’s Workshop on Science, Technology, Society & the State is hosting a follow-up to last year’s “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency” conference next week. Entitled “Reconsidering American Power“, the conference aims to expand beyond questions related to the militarization of anthropology to consider more generally the relation between the social sciences and the American state.

I’ll be presenting a paper during Friday’s panel session, “Uses and Abuses of Social Sciences: Disciplines of and for What?” Entitled “Are We Ready Yet for Action Anthropology?”, my paper is intended to counter arguments that anthropologists’ refusal to cooperate with military and intelligence efforts like HTS, PRISP, and the Minerva Consortium necessarily condemns anthropology to irrelevance. My hope is that by examining the model of action anthropology, which has gained little traction in academic anthropology in the 50 years since Sol Tax and his students proposed it, a way of meaningfully engaging contemporary issues might emerge that avoids the troubling issues raised by direct subordination to military and intelligence agencies.

Other participants include David Price, Catherine Lutz, Hugh Gusterson, Jeff Bennett, Robert Vitalis, Matthew Sparke, Sean Mitchell, Kevin Caffrey, Amahl Bishara, Rochelle Davis, Roberto Gonzalez, Keith Brown, Chris Nelson, and a variety of U of Chicago folks from anthropology and the other social sciences, including honorary Savage Mindster Marshall Sahlins. (Note: I’m listed as “editor” of Savage Minds, a title I neither asked for nor knew was being ascribed to me! I’m also listed as an “independent researcher”, despite my 6 years affiliation with the College of Southern Nevada…)

On a related note, the paper I presented last year will be out early 2010 from University of Chicago Press in a collected volume of essays from the conference. (Can we talk some time about academic publishers demanding all copyrights? For free?) As far as I know, the book will be titled following the conference, that is Anthropology and Counterinsurgency. Look for it in an academic bookstore near you!

Support Khalidi – Buy the Iron Cage

I think this is a great suggestion. I haven’t read any work by Khalidi, except this bilious, anti-Semitic, incitement to violence, even-handed assessment of the prospects for peace in Israel which was published in the Nation last May. But I am outraged and disturbed by the way Obama’s association with Khalidi has been used by the McCain campaign:

Despite the fact that a foreign policy organization chaired by Mr. McCain gave more than $850,000 to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies. Despite the fact that Khalidi is himself a semite, born in NY, with a “moral commitment to peace and justice in the Middle East.” Despite all this, the McCain campaign seems intent on pursuing this new McCarthyism.

For this reason I am endorsing supporting an idea I read about on Crooked Timber: that academics should show their support of Khalidi by buying his book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. As Henry Farrell says:

It doesn’t take much in the way of prophetic insight to predict that we are going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of innuendo from disgusting slime-purveyors like Daniel Pipes if Obama wins – one of the lessons of the Clinton years is that when the nastier elements of the right are losing elections, they start trying to turn the culture war back up to 11. It would be nice to get a head start on the pushback.

Now if only I can get Mike Goldfarb to call me an anti-semite to sell my book! (Hmmm, I guess I need to write a book first …)

China Cancels IAES

I mentioned back in February that I was excited to be attending this year’s IUAES conference in Kunming, China. I even arranged a Savage Minds party for the event, which had 10 confirmed guests and 22 “maybes.” So I’m very sorry to hear that the Chinese government has decided that anthropologists pose a security threat during the summer Olympics (which are being held in Beijing, 1,200 miles away), and canceled the event for fear of protests.

China is on the lookout for protesters seeking to disrupt the Beijing Olympics in the name of Tibet, press freedom, or religious rights.

Now anthropologists and ethnologists, academics who study human development, appear to have been added to the list.

Without giving a specific explanation, Chinese organizers have pulled the plug on July’s world congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, the latest in a slew of events to be canceled or postponed ahead of the games in August.

“I’m not very happy with it,” Union Secretary-General Peter J.M. Nas said by telephone from his office at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “And I hope still that they will listen to our arguments.”

Although distant from Beijing, Kunming is home to many minorities and, as the article says: “China is extremely sensitive to critiques of its policies toward minority ethnic groups and their languages, even more so since anti-government protests broke out in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and spread to other Tibetan areas in March.”

UPDATE: A blog post from the Chronicle:

On Tuesday the association’s Chinese affiliate wrote to the group’s international executive committee, saying that it had “encountered complex difficulties hard to resolve in its preparation work recently, which makes it impossible for us to hold the congress at the time originally planned.”

The executive committee has rejected the idea of a postponement, but it has not yet received a reply from its Chinese colleagues. “We still have no concrete information about the results of our plea not to postpone the congress,” wrote the association’s president, Luis Alberto Vargas, a professor of physical anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle today.

Mr. Vargas and other members of the executive committee declined to comment further, citing the delicacy of the situation.

UPDATE: From an article in the Chronicle: “Ms. Harrison, who is a member of the association’s international executive board, said that the conference might be postponed for a full year.”

Camelot Revisited: The Department of Defense’s New Plan for Academia

In a recent speech before the Association of American Universities, Defense Secretary Robert Gates described his ideas for a new military-academic partnership. The “Minerva Consortium”, as he calls his vision, would offer funding and research assistance for researchers across academia, in order to build up the military’s understanding of the world the operate in and create a pool of experts the military can draw on.

At first blush, it seems Gates — a former university president — has learned some of the lessons of the past that led to the meltdown of the Cold War military-academic partnership in the Vietnam years. Most notably, he has come down against secret research, and claims to encourage critical responses to Department of Defense programs and practices.

“Let me be clear that the key principle of all components of the Minerva Consortia will be complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity. There will be no room for ’sensitive but unclassified,’ or other such restrictions in this project,” Gates said. “We are interested in furthering our knowledge of these issues and in soliciting diverse points of view — regardless of whether those views are critical of the department’s efforts. Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand — or even seek to understand — the countries or cultures we were dealing with.”

University presidents are, of course, thrilled at the prospect, dreaming of university coffers flush with DoD funds once again. But academic researchers, particularly anthropologists, should be very nervous about Gates’ plans. This kind of direct involvement in the funding and direction of academic research, even without the veil of secrecy that military-academic partnerships have often had in the past, threatens to powerfully influence the shape of our discipline — even for people who reject military funding.

Continue reading →

A Special Offer and a Note About Blogging

Everyone’s arguing lately about Savage Minds — it’s “civil society” or lack thereof, its institutional position in the field of anthropology, it’s Euro-Americano-centrism, and so on. What’s missing, I think, is that while Savage Minds is a “place”, a “publication” of sorts, with some cohesiveness, it’s also a somewhat random collection of individual anthropologists bound together by no shared theoretical orientation, area specialization, political stance, or academic genealogy. I think it’s clear that we don’t always agree — in fact, we’ve disagreed quite sharply at times. More to the point, we not only blog about different stuff but we blog for different reasons.

For me, Savage Minds has always been a place to “mess around”, anthropologically speaking. A place to try out new ideas and thin hypotheses, a wall to throw stuff onto in order to see what sticks. A place where I could try my hand at the kind of argument Yehudi Cohen makes in Disappearance of the Incest Taboo (that’s an AnthroSource link, for those with access) and string together some ideas about the end of marriage, or muse about the moral underpinnings of anthropology. A place to incubate arguments and positions — and to receive feedback from my peers both inside and outside of the field.

It’s been invaluable to have this kind of forum, away from the main channel of academic thought — the journals and academic presses that are our disciplinary mainstream, even if many of them have lower readerships than Savage Minds. So valuable, in fact, that I felt it absolutely necessary to include Savage Minds in my “Acknowledgements” when I published Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Here’s what I wrote:

Over the years, two online communities have proven invaluable as both a source of new ideas and a place to rehearse my own fevered anthropological imaginings. To the members of ANTHRO-L (especially Ron Kephart, John McCreery, Richard Senghas, Jacob Lee, Richard Wilsnack, Anj Petto, Ray Scupin, Robert Lawless, Wade Tarzia, Lynn Manners, Martin Cohen, Bruce Josephson, Richley Crapo, Tom Kavanagh, Scott MacEachern, Mike Pavlik, Thomas Riley, and Phil Young) and my fellow Savage Minds, (Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Chris Kelty, Nancy LeClerc, Kathleen Lowery, Tak Watanabe, and newbies Thomas Erikson, Maia Green, and Thomas Strong) I offer both my gratitude and respect.

In the end, I’m not sure I could have written Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War without having had this forum to develop those ideas. The other Minds and the many people who comment here not only helped me to refine my thoughts on anthropology and its role(s) in society, but to rethink myself as an anthropologist.

By way of gratitude, then, I asked my publishers if I could offer at least a little something back to this community which has offered me so much. They responded enthusiastically, providing me with a discount code to offer Savage Minds readers. So here’s the deal:

  1. Order Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War from U Mich Press.
  2. At checkout, enter the coupon code: WAX08UMP
  3. Enjoy a 20% savings!

With the coupon code, the US price is $26.00 instead of the usual $32.50. As far as I know, this offer is not limited to US buyers, but I’m pretty sure the price of international shipping will eat up any savings over buying the book at full price locally. The coupon code expires on May 30, 2008.

For more information about the book, check out the review by Penny Howard at the Socialist Review. More reviews and information about the book will be posted at my personal site on the book page as it becomes available.

And if you’re not interested, for whatever reason (maybe your mother was cruel to you as a child?), that’s cool, too — I offer you as a member of the Savage Minds community my thanks.

But really, buy the book. Buy the book or I shall plug at you a second time! Tphptptptptp!

Anthropology and Global Counter-Insurgency Conference in Chicago, April 25-27

I’ve been invited to speak at a conference hosted by the University of Chicago later this month on the topic of “Anthropology and Global Counter-Insurgency”. Other speakers will include David Price and Hugh Gusterson, who are doing yeoman’s work on the issue. Despite the fact that my introduction to Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War discusses issues related to counter-insurgency at some length, it is because of my work here at Savage Minds that I’ve been invited to speak. Take that, traditional publishing models!

Here’s the skinny on the conference, from the organizers: Continue reading →

On Frictionless Scale-Making

I was actually thinking along very similar lines to CKelty [PDF] when I began looking at the literature on scale-making this week. In the world of the internet scale-making is all about scalability, about the ability to go from a website which can handle a few hundred users to one which can handle millions. Google recently launched a new service, App Engine, based around the promise that you’ll have Google behind you if your application takes off and needs to scale.

The reason I was thinking along these lines is that I recently finished Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody. Shirky argues that one of the defining features of the internet (once it has become a ubiquitous and prosaic part of our lives) is that it reduces the barriers to collaboration and collective action. But while the ridiculously easy group formation fostered by the internet makes it easy to form a group, the very fact of scale no longer serves as an index of group-strength. He gives this example from Howard Dean’s presidential campaign:

because Meetup makes it easier to gather the faithful, it confused people into thinking that they were seeing an increase in Dean support, rather than a decrease in the hassle of of organizing groups — the 2003 Dean Meetup simply brought out a much larger percentage of Dean supporters than would have shown up previously. We’ve seen this sort of effect before, as when written correspondence on letterhead stopped being a sign of a solvent company, thanks to the desktop-publishing revolution.

Continue reading →

Still Hearing Anna’s Voice

UN Pic

I am currently working with a group of scholars here in Helsinki on the discourse of global indigeneity or indigenism following the September 2007 adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the UN General Assembly. We are reading through some contemporary anthropological and legal literature on the topic, and presenting case studies from our own research. Last week we discussed Cameroon, and in particular the Mbororo. This week we are moving to Indonesia and transformations in adat and tribal identity there. We will be discussing Sami as well. If our cases span the globe, this is because the construct ‘indigenous’ has become more and more persuasive in recent years precisely through linkages that are transnational in nature. How are these linkages sustained culturally and organizationally? What has drawn diverse people(s) together? As Ronald Niezen points out, indigenous activism is in a sense necessarily transnational because it seeks a politics that does not conform to the liberal logic of the nation-state. Reflexive ‘cross-nationality’ is thus a key component of successful indigenous organizing, drawing on national boundaries and cultures of nationality but cutting across them, putting them under erasure, so to speak.

This is one claim that Anna Tsing makes in an essay called ‘Indigenous Voice.’ (No, SM is not becoming an Anna Tsing fan site — I wanted to post this before Kerim’s recent posts, but Kerim’s prodigious blogging can hardly be matched.) Tsing argues that political identities must sustain a public to have effect, and they do this through a ‘voice’ that can be heard:

I track variations in the public articulation of indigeneity in different places. I follow not the ambivalence of ordinary people but the claims of those who set the terms of discussion — for example, activists, community leaders, and public intellectuals. Their claims become influential discursive frames to the extent they can gain both a following and an audience. These frames inform what one might call ‘indigenous voice.’ By voice, I am referring to the genre conventions with which public affirmations of identity are articulated. Because it is the genre convention, not the speaker him or herself, that has power, totally unknown people can speak with this kind of voice; but they must speak in a way that an audience can hear.

One might expect then to read an essay about kinds of speech, an analysis of rhetoric or register, a focus on discourse and text, as well as an essay about the conceptual (discursive, cultural) preconditions that precede and enable transnational recognition. However, Tsing follows this argument with a further thesis: “Cross-National Links Inform Transnational Fora.” What follows are lucid little synopses of different (national) cases and their (cross-national) linkages, each illustrating one axis around which indigenous political organizing gathers. Her first example is the connection between Canadian First Nations activism and New Zealand Maori activism in the 1970s — she boldly claims that this particular transnational axis is the most consequential source of contemporary rhetorics of sovereignty in indigenous movements (cf. Michael Brown in the same volume). Further examples concern ‘pluri-ethnic autonomy’ in the Americas, and environmental stewardship in the Amazon and elsewhere. At each of these sites, people secure political purchase by finding ‘allies’ in other national settings (sometimes the alliance is unreciprocated; some groups, unbeknownst to them, become models for others). This all makes a lot of sense and the essay is not merely celebratory, but points out problems (fissures or ‘friction’) generated along each of Tsing’s comparative poles.

Yet I was still left wondering. Continue reading →

Scale Making Revisited

Thanks to everyone who responded to my last post. In response to my queries, I was able to track down some excellent overviews of the human geography literature where the keyword to search for is “politics of scale.” (See especially here and here.)

In that post I failed to link to Rex’s piece from last year, where he wrote:

In fact most of what we anthropologists talk about when we talk about ‘scale making’ is not an investigation of regional or global processes. We do not attempt to discern how many places we will have to travel to to examine these processes. Instead we talk about how people in the localities that we do our fieldwork ‘make scale’.

Having spent the better part of the last few days going over this material, I better understand the distinction Rex was making. Indeed, it seems that the way the term is used by human geographers often suffers from assuming that scale is an ontological category. Rex is more interested in looking at “the imputation of agency to collective subjects versus individual ones.” And I am more interested in the contested ideologies of scale which define the “local” in Taiwan in relation to the Austronesian linguistic sphere versus the Chinese one. Both of these projects relate to the making of scale through social action as opposed to the operation of individuals at pre-defined levels of scale.

However, having already spent some time going over the literature on scale within human geography, I think it would be a mistake to either abandon the term entirely (as Rex seems to suggest) or to ignore its genealogy outside of anthropology (as Tsing chooses to do). As Richard Howitt’s excellent review shows us, we have a lot to learn from the various debates over the use of the term within that discipline. For instance, too great an emphasis on process and human agency might blind us to the very real constraints on scale created by existing corporate, legal, and political institutions. In his sections on “the idea of scale” and “empirical studies of scale” Howitt shows how geographers have struggled with social-constructionist approaches to the concept of scale in ways which seem to anticipate some of the issues anthropologists have tackled in thinking about these issues.

AAA Policy Briefs

I’d like to commend the AAA on the creation of its first “policy brief” last September. Although I didn’t hear about it at the time, it deserves mention.

The AAA Committee on Public Policy of is proud to introduce a new informational resource for the public policy community: the AAA Policy Brief. AAA Policy Briefs address policy issues and initiatives from an anthropological perspective, examining the insights that contemporary anthropological research contributes to policy discourse. These theme-focused briefs do not take a position on public policy issues. Instead, they introduce the reader to anthropological knowledge that is necessary for making fully-informed policy decisions.

You can find these policy briefs on the “government relations” page of the AAA website. Currently there is only one such brief, about labor policy, “specifically the right of employees to organize unions as outlined by the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800, S. 1041)” [download PDF]. It reads like an executive summary of an Annual Review article, with a focus on policy implications.

I think it is a great resource to highlight the role that anthropological knowledge can play in the wider public sphere. If you have an idea for a policy brief you’d like to contribute, here is the information on how to do so:

If you are interested in contributing to a future Policy Brief or in suggesting a future topic, please contact Dinah Winnick of the AAA Department of External International & Government Relations at dwinnick@aaanet.org or (703) 528-1902.

I hope that in the future the AAA will do more to draw attention to these policy briefs, posting them to a blog rather than burying them in the website.

The Office

No. Not the BBC show or the American spin-off, but a wonderful Flickr photo set, by Dutch photographer Jan Banning.

Bureaucracy is an everyday form of state power with which citizens are confronted everywhere. Jan Banning has done portraits of bureaucrats at all levels, from village clerks to governors. Although the bureaucrats pose, their desk is the real subject. Thát is the permanent expression of their status and power. The person behind it is interchangeable, during his working hours assuming the role of immigration officer or revenue agent. That is emphasized by the pose in which he is photographed: as an actor playing himself. THE OFFICE (India/Indonesia, 2004-2006) is a work in progress, eventually to include bureaucrats in ten countries. The series on Bihar, a state in the world’s largest democracy, India, is completed; the series on Indonesia has just begun. The photographs are accompanied by interviews by Will Tinnemans.

These photos reveal wonderful little details, like this one from Bihar which shows that the highest ranked civil servant has a towel on his chair, which is claimed to be a tradition inherited from the British.

Anthropologists of the World, Unite!

Apropos of the recent discussion of anthropology’s use in torture and other military action, I received notice this morning of an effort launched by several anthros (including David Price, Hugh Gusterson, and Catherine Lutz) to encourage the development of an ethical anthropology and to oppose anthro’s participation in counter-insurgency. Here’s the relevant part of the email:

The Department of Defense and allied agencies are mobilizing anthropologists for interventions in the Middle East and beyond. It is likely that larger, more permanent initiatives are in the works.

Over the last several weeks, we have created an ad hoc group, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, with the objective of promoting an ethical anthropology. Working together, we have drafted a pledge of non-participation in counter-insurgency, which we have organized as a petition (see attachment). We invite you to become a part of this effort by taking the following steps:

  1. Download and print the attached pledge (in .pdf format) [. Ask your colleagues to sign the pledge, and promptly send it to us via regular mail. Our address is Network of Concerned Anthropologists, c/o Dept. of Anthropology, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 3G5, Fairfax, VA 22030 (USA). If it is more convenient, email a .pdf copy of collected signatures and send it to us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com.
  2. Forward this message to your colleagues, and encourage them to sign.
  3. Join our network by emailing us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com. Be sure to include your name, title, and affiliation. We will add you to our email list.
  4. Visit our web site at http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home for more information and updates.

Email us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com if you would like more information or if you have questions.

Sincerely yours,
Network of Concerned Anthropologists

Catherine Besteman
Andrew Bickford
Greg Feldman
Roberto Gonzalez
Hugh Gusterson
Gustaaf Houtman
Kanhong Lin
Catherine Lutz
David Price
David Vine

Cultural Dynamics in Interrogation: The FBI At Guantanamo

“It is easy – commonplace – for anthropologists to have an opinion on “the war” and to think that our opinions are worth hearing. But those opinions are more informed, nuanced, and will carry further if they are shaped by the close, yet open-minded, encounters with ground level realities, and practice, whose importance we, and our disciplinary forbears, have worked so hard to promote.” – p. 327 in Keith Brown and Catherine Lutz, “Grunt Lit: The participant observers of empire.” AE 34:2, 322-328.

For Brown and Lutz, the autobiographical accounts of soldiers provide a window into the messy and chaotic instantiation of empire in war, and are worth submitting to what Lutz calls “[the] discipline’s standard tropes of person-centered, contextualized understanding” (Lutz 2006 in AE, 33:4, p. 593). Along these lines, the interrogation records of the GWOT should be subject to the same ethnographic scrutiny. If nothing else, they reveal that (to paraphrase Clausewitz) interrogation is the extension of war by other means, as a complex ideological conflict is waged discursively in the context of the prison interrogation room.

To make this point, I’ll share a very abbreviated draft of article I’m writing, for which I draw on a subset of roughly 500 pages of documents dealing with FBI interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between February 2002 and July 2004. Within this collection, there are approximately fifty FBI “transcriptions” (which are perhaps better described as summaries of interviews, “interview” being FBI parlance for interrogation). Because many are heavily redacted, it can be hard to discern where one interview ends and another begins. Reading these is akin to listening to a radio broadcast between bursts of heavy static, or watching a movie interrupted by sporadic blackouts. Although the interview transcriptions do use proper names, identifying information is always redacted; and for convenience, I am following FBI convention in referring to the parties as “interviewers” and “detainees.” I use a bracketed ellipsis to denote redactions […], and I quotations to the official document number so that interested readers can look up the source material (e.g., 4042).

Redactions notwithstanding, this collection provides fascinating insight into the manifold ways in which “culture” makes its presence felt. As Robert Rubinstein points out in his forthcoming book, Peacekeeping Under Fire: Culture and Intervention (Paradigm 2008), culture operates at many levels in UN peacekeeping efforts. He identifies three interlocking cultural dynamics that shape the trajectory of these operations: interactions between peacekeepers and local populations; interactions between participating local and national bureaucracies; and in a meta-sense, as international perceptions of “peacekeeping” evolve politically and institutionally.

Similarly, cultural dynamics operate at multiple levels in interrogation. At its most basic, interrogation aims to get specific information for specific purpose: for example, to develop a criminal case, obtain a confession, or provide “actionable intelligence” that can be used in tactical decision-making. That interviewers are seeking such information is apparent when detainees are asked to explain their presence at an Al Qaeda training camp, or shown photos of other detainees and asked to identify co-conspirators (e.g., 3904). However, far more is going on in these FBI interviews than attempts to elicit specific facts from recalcitrant detainees. In the interrogation encounter, detainees and interviewers look at each other across the table and, with the help of a translator (who is always silent in the transcriptions), they dive into a discursive exchange that reaches far beyond the confines of the interrogation room.

For example, interviewer-detainee exchanges shed light on the dynamics of guard-prisoner interactions in detention operations at Guantánamo. Often, the detainees complain to the interviewers about mistreatment by military police: roughing up prisoners, insulting detainees, and disrespecting the Koran are all sore points among the detainee population. But the weak have weapons: in one interview, a detainee gives the interviewers advice for how guards should comport themselves in front of the detainees – and in doing so, hints at vibrant hidden transcript, in which the projection of state power, embodied in the masculine form of the military police guard, is undermined by a simple technology:

Detainees see the guards as babies, especially the “big American guards that fill the doorway.” This is because the guards are supposed to be strong, yet they walk around with a “camel” (a backpack water storage device with a drinking tube attached) on their back sucking on a tube of water all of the time. A strong man is able to go without water for long periods of time. (The detainee) suggested that the water be kept out of sight of the prisoners and have the guards walk to where the water is kept. (3913)

Secondly, the records illustrate how detainees under interrogation challenge the official transcript of GWOT internment with complex counter-narratives about such topics as the war in Afghanistan (e.g., 3906), jihad and September 11 (e.g., 3899, 4080, 3845, 3844, 3850), American imperialism and foreign policy (e.g., 3918-21, 3912, 3913, 3916, 3925, 3842, 3861, 4086), and the fact that the detention operation at Guantanamo violates legal rights guaranteed by the US Constitution (3924). Along the way, the detainees also share their views on Christianity (e.g., 3906), Israel and Judaism (e.g., 4026), popular culture and sexuality (e.g., 3921), proper treatment of the Koran (e.g., 4803, 4024) and privacy of the body and shame (e.g., 3836, 3854, 4061). Sadly, there are also numerous descriptions of physical abuse, mostly beatings, particularly when the detainees are initially arrested either by Northern Alliance (e.g., 3903) or US troops (e.g., 3892).

But just as the detainees challenge the official discourse of the GWOT, we can see the FBI interviewers developing their own counter-narratives of Islam for the purpose of convincing the detainees that they should share what they know about Al Qaeda, terrorism, 9/11, and the Taliban. The manipulation is psychological, playing heavily on old-fashioned self-interest, but is arguably cultural, too, insofar as the manipulation draws on a framework of religious beliefs. For example, in one transcription (4033-4034), the interviewing agents show the interviewee a movie and photographs of people dying in New York and Washington on 9/11. As they do so, they invoke a narrative of Islam that questions the theological basis for mass violence, then point out that the detainee had become involved with a group of people who “…(abused and maligned) the religion, and will feel God’s wrath and anger on judgment day. […] appeared visibly shaken by this realization.” The interviewer then offers the detainee a chance for absolution through cooperating with the FBI. He warns the detainee that his fellows are “out to save their own butt,” and tells him the window of opportunity is closing. The technique, it seems, is emotionally powerful, as illustrated in a surprisingly poignant closing paragraph:

“At the conclusion of the interview, the interview team wished […] luck and that God may accept his prayers. After exiting the room, the interview team witnessed […] with his head down on his hands on the table in front of him… […] was crying and sobbing with the tears falling down on the table when he lifted his head” (4033-4034).

Whether or not this individual eventually gave the FBI team what it wanted is not clear.

By now it should be apparent that interrogation does not necessarily involve the forcible elicitation of “facts”. In these transcriptions, interrogation is revealed as a complicated communicative exchange in which participants share, gather, construct, and deploy knowledge as they provoke and/or resist an alien Other. As Alfred McCoy points out (2006), FBI interrogation strategies strongly emphasize rapport-building over coercion; and we can see FBI agents putting this ethos into practice in the interrogations they conduct. The resulting knowledge that emerges in these exchanges is often profoundly cultural, but not necessarily anthropological. Moreover, the headers on these transcriptions indicate that they were shared among the agencies involved in Guantanamo (DHS, DoD, and FBI) and as such, are likely source material for interrogators and intelligence analysts constructing their own model of the Arab/Islamic Other.

This raises another question about culture; namely, the problem of institutional culture and interagency power struggles as three major government bureaucracies – the FBI, DHS and the Department of Defense – each implement their own strategies for eliciting information from detainees. In particular, DoD interviewers frequently take a much more forceful approach to interrogation, something that FBI agents – and indeed, many DoD personnel – find troubling. And that’s the teaser for my next post.

Some general thoughts about anthropology, interrogation, and torture

A few months ago, in a November 2006 post reflecting on the twin Gonzalez-Lin resolutions against the war in Iraq and the use of anthropological knowledge in torture, Rex asked whether anthropologists might be in danger of generating more heat than light. I’ve asked myself the same question. Ever since Sy Hersh published his three-part series on Abu Ghraib in 2004, anthropologists have been worried about the involvement of their counterparts in torture, or the use of ethnographic information in torture. But aside from a lot of people quoting Sy Hersh, over and over and over again, I’ve come across no corroborating evidence of a link between anthropology and Abu Ghraib – or even in plain old GWOT interrogation, for that matter.

As I discuss in an upcoming short piece in Anthropology News (likely to be published in October), I wrote Hersh a letter and asked him to comment on the link between Patai and torture. He actually called me back in July to tell me that he doesn’t think that Patai’s book played a role in Abu Ghraib (yes, you read that right). When I told him that anthropologists took his claims in “The Gray Zone” very much to heart, and that we’d even put forth resolution against the use of anthropological knowledge in torture, Hersh seemed genuinely surprised, and pointed out that he’d never actually written any such thing. Which, strictly speaking, is true. Read the piece here.

So here’s my plea: don’t point to Hersh as evidence of ethnographically informed torture, and when people do point to Hersh’s article as evidence of such, question whether or not there’s anything to corroborate the claim. If you want to go the extra mile, then dig into the documents yourself. There’s plenty of documentation out there that supports research into the problem of ethnographically informed torture. Several organizations, including the Center for Public Integrity, the University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, and the ACLU all maintain extensive electronic archives of FOIA’d documents around interrogation and detention operations involving the DoD, the intelligence community, and the FBI. In 4000-plus pages of reading, I’ve seen no evidence of anthropologists being involved in torture or interrogation. In fact, I’d have to characterize anthropology as conspicuously absent from detention and interrogation operations.

But that doesn’t mean culture isn’t important. Indeed, the Global War on Terrorism constitutes a cultural encounter of some kind – we just haven’t figured out what, precisely, that means. There’s an opportunity for excellent critique, but making our critique relevant requires some new thinking about our own “sources and methods,” to borrow a term from the intelligence community.

In this regard, I liked Keith Brown and Catherine Lutz’s recent article on “grunt lit,” in which they describe soldiers as the “participant-observers of empire” (2007). They argue that anthropologists should pay more attention to soldiers’ memoirs as a window into the confusing and contradictory microdynamics of empire. In doing so, we might learn a lot about the instantiation of empire and the shifting identity of the American nation-state in the post-Cold war, post 9-11 era.

I’ve come to think of the thousands of pages of memos, emails, depositions, forms, reports in the FOIA collections as the electronic precipitates of the Global War on Terrorism. As such, they offer a glimpse into the nature of American empire – which is, among other things, a bewildering conundrum of personnel, agencies, policies, procedures, acronyms, directives, rosters, and the like. In detention and interrogation operations, this Gordian knot of bureaucracy is unleashed on enemy combatants and prisoners of war, most of whom seem to hail from Arabic-speaking regions of Central Asia and the Middle East.

This is where anthropology comes in, but not as instrumentally or formally as many anthropologists seem to have assumed. It’s not that the military-intelligence-security apparatchik systematically sought anthropologists (or even ethnography) to play the role of cultural seer in interrogation. Rather, what’s anthropologically interesting is the way that people within the bureaucracy are actively engaged in making sense of an alien Other, and in doing so, are formulating their own theories and understandings about what makes this Other tick. Moreover, there’s evidence that the Other is engaged in reciprocal effort vis-a-vis guards and interrogators. As such, interrogation itself constitutes a sociocultural encounter of an astoundingly complicated kind. I’ll be writing more about this topic for my next post, using a couple of examples from a collection of FBI observations about detainee treatment at Guantanamo, and talking a bit about Robert Rubinstein’s ideas about culture in peacekeeping operations in a forthcoming book of his.

Introducing Myself

Hello everyone, and thanks to Savage Minds for the nice introduction and the chance to blog about my experience reading government documents about interrogation and torture in the Global War on Terrorism. I desperately need the outlet – it’s been a strange and somewhat lonely experience, simply because I don’t know of any other anthropologists who’ve done the same. (If you have, I’d love to hear from you.)

Before I go any further, let me issue the disclaimer: Chris noted that I work at Sandia National Laboratories – I was at Los Alamos National Laboratories for 6 years, too – but absolutely nothing I write on this blog has anything to do with Los Alamos, the Department of Energy, Sandia National Labs, Lockheed Martin, or anyone who signs my paycheck. In my day job, I pursue fairly technical work among computer scientists and mathematicians, but I won’t be writing about that. Instead, I’ll be blogging about my personal obsession with torture and interrogation. I only point this out because I was criticized as something of a shill for national security community(mostly on the basis of my institutional affiliation, I think) when I wrote a short editorial about Patai and torture in Anthropology Today. So I want to make it very clear that no one is paying me to dig through FOIA’d interrogation documents. This is my own thing, and I pursue it purely for my own interest, and on my own time, and with my own resources, because I find it fascinating, and because the more torture documents I read, the more I’ve come to believe that interrogation and torture are ethnographic problems worth our collective attention. I mean, this stuff is really interesting.

So, now that that’s out of the way, you might be wondering why anyone would spend their weekends downloading, reading, and taking notes on PDFs of poorly scanned, redacted, jumbled, jargon-and-acronym filled government documents. It all started in 2006, when I was asked to lead a roundtable discussion on anthropology and ethics at the inaugural Ethics in Intelligence conference in Springfield, VA. I wanted something more recent than the usual Project Camelot-Vietnam-Franz Boas stories, so I chose the Raphael Patai/sexual humiliation/Abu Ghraib story as a case study to illustrate why anthropologists tend to be hostile to military and intelligence activities. I knew I’d probably have some experienced intelligence and military personnel at the table, so I figured it was a good idea to have more material than just Hersh’s article.

And that’s how this all began. In searching for articles that might shed more light on how Patai’s book had been used in Abu Ghraib, I came across plenty of people citing Hersh. However, I couldn’t find any independent accounts that corroborated his allegations about Patai’s book being linked to torture. Since then, I’ve thought long and hard (obsessively) about torture, anthropology, politics, war, interrogation, critique, and culture, and – as I noted above – it’s been a long, strange, often depressing trip. I am working on a couple of articles about these topics, but in the meantime, I’ll be blogging sporadically about some of the more interesting materials I’ve come across. So – more to come.