Tag Archives: war

Silos of Casino Capitalism

Something called a “silo” kept cropping up in my field research with media reform broadcasters throughout 2012. At the National Conference of Media Reform in 2011 I attended a panel, “Getting Out of the Silo: Editing Video as a Community.” The organizer told me she was “looking to create an intersectional narrative of collaboration” with the panelists. “We are all living in our little silos,” said the general manager of a small television news network explaining how a possible partner rejected his overture for collaboration. Its “the silophication of the company,” said a vice president of a television news network of the process by which internet, television, and marketing divisions were not well-integrated while taking different approaches to the same product.

What is a Silo?

Silophication is most actively theorized by a person who straddles anthropology, global finance, and journalism: Dr. Gillian Tett, a Cambridge trained anthropologist and US managing editor of the Financial Times. Below I build theory through  categorizing Tett’s use of the term silophication in her financial journalism critical of how regulator’s and banker’s silophication led to an absence of information sharing and the presence of a global financial crisis. Continue reading

When the guiltiest guy in the room, is the room

This one is a shout out to David Weinberger, who I stole the title from.

Is Obama inappropriately receiving credit for killing Osama bin Laden? Given the upcoming presidential election it is a question that might be asked for longer than one news cycle. As someone who tries to keep from plunging his head too deeply into the endless torrent of opinion that is the blogosphere, I have to admit that I haven’t fully probed the variety of answers that people are asking here. But as an anthropologist I do want to comment briefly on what anthropology might have to add to this debate.

Continue reading

It’s The People, Stupid

Most of the way that we talk about doing ‘literature reviews” is widely misleading. We talk about ‘how to find sources’ creating ‘topic maps’ and defining ‘arguments’. But as anthropologists we know that ultimately, a literature review is about people. It is, in actuality, a map of the personal networks that create the literature. This is particularly true in anthropology, which is a relatively small field compared to, say, biology.

Doing a ‘literature’ review, then, basically means creating a series of dossiers of the scholars with whom you will be interacting. The more creepily complete, the better.

Continue reading

Around the Web Digest

In academia the month of December is a crescendo of responsibilities, but our Twitter feed of links to anthroblogs, world news, and internet flotsam sailed on. This handy monthly report is a sample of what we were reading. If you’ve seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community, email me at MDTHOMPS @ ODU.EDU.

Annual Highlights – 2011

It was a good year for the vibrancy of the Savage Minds community. There were plenty of interesting posts to comment on and issues to debate. Here in our annual year-in-review I’ll point you towards some of our greatest hits, maybe there’s one you missed! The top ten posts of the year are highlighted in boldface.
 
Personally, my favorite posts are in the how-to or ask-the-crowd genres. There was a lengthy list of “exotic” ethnographies (#5) appropriate for undergraduate intro courses and a plea for help on how to best choose intro level textbooks. Ahead of the annual meeting of the AAA there was a post on how to write conference papers. Our resident photographer, Ryan, wrote two handy pieces on cameras in the field. One was on the authenticity of the iPhone app Hipstamatic vis-a-vie the kind of photography done by “real” photographers, the second a call for reflexivity in the use of photographs, typically used without critical reflection in ethnography. Perhaps tangentially visual, Kerim unearthed an early twentieth century method of categorizing skin color based on Milton-Bradley produced spinning tops. On the topic of writing Kerim wondered why established scholars seem to repeat themselves so often and he weighed the benefits of adopting such a style.
 
Some of Savage Minds’ most popular features were original research, notes from the field, and other stepping stones to new publications. Guest-blogger Lua Wilkinson reported on her work on nutrition in China and the intersection of food culture and neoliberalism (#10); there was also a companion piece on breastfeeding and infant nutrition in China. Marking the one year anniversary of Haiti’s devastating earthquake guest-blogger Laura Wagner shared some of the jokes Haitians tell to make light of the situation (#6). Kerim reflected on Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption hunger strike in India based on what he had learned over the course of five years fieldwork there. And nowhere but on Savage Minds will you find posts on Taiwanese parodies of Bollywood music videos posted on YouTube. Continue reading

Around the Web Digest

If you’re already following @savageminds or liking us on FB then you had the chance to read Kerim tweet:

The following Brilliant Anthropological Insight™ comes to you courtesy of Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski (cont’d)…
 
“Two human beings of different sex who are engaged in the business of reproduction…cannot be separated by a great distance in space.”

For those of you not being bombarded by our extraordinary insights and clever #timewasters here’s your chance to catch up on what we were reading in the month of November. Note that last month was the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association and so I chose to be selective in which conference related tweets got preserved in the digest. If you’ve seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community, email me MDTHOMPS @ ODU.EDU.

Valuing Life, Death, and Disability: Sorting People in the New York Times

[This post is a departure from my usual topics related to war, but since thinking about injured soldiers (as I do) means thinking about moral categories of embodied personhood, I hope the connection will be clear.]

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.

Around the Web Digest

Here at the master control center for the Savage Minds Twitter feed, @savageminds, when we’re not out scouring the web for the finest in links we’re cutting and pasting them into a text editor at the end of the month. So here is your Around the Web Digest for the month of September dear reader. We hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed tweeting them. If you’ve found something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community feel free to email me at mdthomps AT odu.edu. You can also “like” us on Facebook. See you round teh Interwebs!

A US Soldier’s Experience in Iraq on 9/11

Here is some raw data–a second interview with my friend serving his second term in Baghdad. We talk about his ‘cultural training’ exercises, Bradley Manning, and his engagement with the local Iraqis.

 *

What type of cultural training are you given? What are you told about Iraqi culture? Where would you go if you needed a translator?

We were given very basic cultural training before my last deployment. This deployment I don’t remember any classes or anything being said much. I do remember that I was told at JRTC (month training exercise in Louisiana) that I should take it upon myself to learn some basic Arabic words. Arabic is a tough language. I’ve learned and forgotten many words and phrases. The truth is we don’t need to learn the language, we have an interpreter with us at all times outside the wire and we never use them anyhow. Anything a soldier learns about the culture here is on there own accord. I could go on for quite some time about the varying lifestyles of Iraqis from the illiterate rural farmers to the college educated inner city modern Iraqis. The people here in eastern Baghdad are mostly Shiite and … are strictly religious and are concerned mostly with the world as it applies to Shiites. The last big uproar these zealots had with the US was the fact that we weren’t doing enough to help there Shia bretheren in Bahrain. Anyhow most of what I learn about the Iraqis is through our Iraqi interpreters. They live with us on base and live the life of secret agents. They keep it a secret from even their families that they work with the US and have many times told me that they’d be dead if word got out. Our interpreters work with us for three years for their US citizenship. Our current two interpreters with our platoon have been on more route clearance missions than any American soldier that I know. Perhaps 4 to 5 hundred.

You are asked to go out and be friendly with the locals but then you are told not to. What is up with that? This is really interesting, why the mix messages?

The suggestions to mingle with the locals is coming from one echelon, while our missions are being commanded by another. The two echelons obviously have a different idea of how things should be done. I’m not sure what the right decision is. I know it’s a risk to walk around in the neighborhoods of eastern Baghdad, but it’s not like driving through them is any safer. I think if it were up to me we would stop at a different local market every time we went on mission and simply ask random Iraqis what were in for that day. I would as well stop and talk to the Sons of Iraq and ask them what is up. The SOI or Sons of Iraq are like volunteer police. They used to be paid by the government but now I believe they are free agents so to speak. Sometimes the locals pay them and sometimes they are burned alive by the local insurgents. They are the brave son of a bitches who stand on the streets with their AK 47’s everyday so they are in the know. Why we don’t interact with them more is beyond me. I think anyway you slice it we are in for a bad day, so my view is we should be doing as much as possible to figure out when and where it is coming from. If we get shot at or blown up while doing so, at least were dictating where and when.

What is the going consensus around the base regarding Bradley Manning? Are your fellow soldiers into discussing politics, watching news? What issues do you guys talk about alot? Are the majority of your soldier friend cynical or optimistic about what we are doing there?

The only military people optimistic about what we are doing are the ones who’s job it is to be optimistic. Every conversation about Iraq amongst soldiers is the same. We are wasting our lives in this shithole and I don’t care what any general on up has to say, we are accomplishing nothing. Of course you can’t say that at a soldiers memorial or funeral. But we all say the same thing. Its a fucking waste of time.

Bradley Manning is a traitor. He sold himself out to make a name for himself. Anyone in the military will tell you the same thing. No matter what the situation is, if you are in the military you take an oath and give up certain rights. It’s one of the few things soldiers can take pride in. Loyalty to your fellow man. You turn your back on your peers in the Army by leaking classified information, well good riddance and good luck. He won’t see the light of day for some time. The Universal Code of Military Justice is pretty black and white. You don’t play by the rules and you go away for a long time.

Most soldiers political conversations are very uneducated and uninteresting. Occasionally I’ll have a good argument with an officer or one of the few intelligent soldiers. You’ve gotta look hard but there are a few smart grunts out there. Perhaps you should have asked me this question before I’d spent 7 months in this shithole. Most of our conversations have been reduced to laughing at things that would make most people shutter. 8 or 9 nine months into a deployment is when the mind starts to turn to mush. Speaking for myself I don’t give a shit about much of anything other than going home. I don’t care people about dying that I don’t know and have never met. I don’t care about 80 civilians being killed by a car bomb at a funeral. I don’t care about Al Qaeda taking 30 government officials hostage and blowing themselves and their hostages up. Perhaps I should care but I think I’ve soaked up as much as I can take and really at some point you have to put up your defenses. All that matters to me is getting myself and my friends home alive. Everyone else is on there own. That is as much as I can do for myself or anyone else.

The Anthropology of Freedom, pt. 4

I Prefer the Anthropology of Morels of course.  (Much more excellent photo of Morels by: Odalaigh at  http://www.flickr.com/photos/odalaigh/2515458601/)
I Prefer the Anthropology of Morels of course. (Much more excellent photo of Morels by: Odalaigh at http://www.flickr.com/photos/odalaigh/2515458601/)
Recent comments on this series have raised a bunch of great issues that I would love to explore. Conveniently, one of them is the question Rex raised about “Anthropologies Of...” I honestly didn’t mean to signal “The Anthropology of Freedom” as a proposal so much as a query. Because anthropology is so relentlessly ecumenical in its topics and approaches, it should be illuminating to think about what anthropology does not study (or does not allow the study of, in some proscriptive sense, like working for the military). There are some things that we are just silent on, and my hunch is that exploring some of these might sometimes be more illuminating than trying to say what it is anthropology does do. The question of an “Anthropology of Freedom” is at least diagnostic in this sense, if not programmatic. And to be clear, I am not in a programmatic mood here.

But that being said, there are in fact a lot of other “Anthropologies of…” which border very closely on anthropology of freedom, and I want to dwell (at too much length) on one of them here: the anthropology of ethics. There is another one going by the label of an “Anthropology of the Will” which will have to wait until whoever has the book checked out returns it to the library, cause there is no way I will pay $55 for it, thank you very much Stanford University Press. There is also the “Anthropology of Happiness” which insofar as freedom is a means rather than an end might be something anthropologists do study. I’m much too pessimistic for that.

But the anthropology of ethics has finally arrived. This year has seen the publication of two books: Ordinary Ethics, (a semi-reasonable $30, $21.99 on Amazon) ed. by Michael Lambeck, and James Faubion’s An Anthropology of Ethics (ditto). The former is a great collection of essays that includes both anthropologists and philosophers (and includes one from Faubion), the latter is likely to appeal to me, Rex, and like 5 other people, which says nothing about how awesome it is, but rather, indicates a perhaps perverse pleasure in being inside James Faubion’s brain. Nonetheless, both of them lay out some problems and concepts for an anthropology of ethics in rigorous and satisfying ways.

It should be said that the “anthropology of ethics” referenced here probably means many things Continue reading

Making the (Funding) Cut: The NSF, Anthropology, and the value of social science

Social science research isn’t on the firmest ground in these days of economic malaise, but it’s not like this news is exactly exploding into the headlines across the nation.  Funding cuts, like the recent “trimming” of the Fulbright program,* seem to take place somewhat under the radar.   The same can be said of the recent debates about the value of social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences that took place about a month ago in a congressional hearing on June 2, 2011 (this link has PDFs of the introductory statements and the testimony of all the witnesses).  The social sciences face an uphill battle, in part, because some folks see them as mere “soft sciences” that do not merit public support.  The House panel subcommittee meeting was about assessing the relative merit of the social sciences and how federal funding should or should not be allocated to researchers.  Did you hear about this?  Well, I didn’t–at least not until just a few days ago.  Funny what can happen in the middle of the summer, isn’t it?  Anyway, here’s a recap of what went down according to a summary from the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA):

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) chaired the panel, which included the testimony of four witnesses:  Myron Gutman (Assistant Director for NSF’s SBE directorate), Hillary Anger Elfenbein (Olin School of Business at Washington University, St. Louis), Peter Wood (President of the National Association of Scholars), and finally Diana Furchtgott-Roth (Senior fellow at the Hudson Institute).  Here’s how Brooks described the basic purpose of the hearing:

The goal of this hearing is not to question whether the social, behavioral, and economic sciences produce interesting and sound research, as I believe we all can agree that they do. I come from a social science background. I have a degree in political science and economics. Rather, the goal of our hearing is to look at the need for federal investments in these disciplines, how we determine what those needs are in the context of national priorities, and how we prioritize funding for those needs, not only within the social science disciplines, but also within all science disciplines, particularly when federal research dollars are scarce.

Brooks’ language sounds cool, rational, and impartial.  However, according to journalist Jeffrey Mervis:

Brooks may have been pulling his punches. In comments to ScienceInsider after the hearing, Brooks expressed serious doubts about the value of the social sciences. The freshman legislator said he “understands the value of basic research” because his constituents in and around Huntsville, Alabama, make up “one of, if not the most, highly educated districts in the sciences.” Brooks did say that “my priorities would be to protect basic research in the sciences as much as possible, even to the extent of cutting entitlements, in order to generate enough funding for basic research.” But his definition of the term “basic research” turns out to be synonymous with the so-called hard sciences, and to exclude the social sciences.

Continue reading

Costs of War: Doing the Numbers

If you Google “$3.7 Trillion” and “war” today, you’ll find a torrent of news coverage about the newly released Costs of War report authored by the Eisenhower Study Group based out of Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

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.

Illustrated Man, #6 – Burma Chronicles

Guy Delisle gets around, notably to places most of us don’t go. Pyongyang, perhaps his best known work, is a graphic memoir of his travels in North Korea. An animator by training Delisle was granted a two month work visa to oversee the production of a children’s cartoon in that isolated nation. A similar work situation found Delisle temporarily placed in Shenzhen, China, an experience that was also turned into a travelogue. Comic fans and other curious characters can find previews of these works over at Drawn and Quarterly, he also keeps his own website with a blog in French (the man is Quebecois).

In this installment of Illustrated Man, we turn our attention to Burma Chronicles, Delisle’s most recent foray into the graphic representation of a westerner’s encounter with an Asian culture. Why Burma Chronicles you ask? They shuttered our local Borders Books and I got it on clearance, that’s why. I for one am not thrilled at that company’s implosion (unlike some snarky others). Shit man! I live in a city of 180,000 and now we have one bookstore left, a Barnes and Nobles. Okay, two if you count the used store that specializes in romance novels.

Back to the comic. Guy’s wife, Nadege, is an admin for Medecins Sans Frontières, and she brings them to Rangoon while MSF attempts to reach a remote and stigmatized ethnic group who reside along the border with Thailand. While Nadege is away Guy spends a lot of time caring for their infant son Louis, socializing with the NGO crowd, trying to squeeze in a little work on the side, and making wry observations about everyday life under the military junta.

Continue reading

Information Imperialism?

By the end of the year the US State department will spend $70 million on stealth communications technologies to enable activists to communicate beyond the reach of dictators according to a recent NYT article. Prototypes include a suitcase capable of quickly blanketing a region with a free wifi network, bluetooth devices that can silently share data, software that protects the anonymity of Chinese users, independent cellphone networks in Afghanistan, and underground buried cell phones on the border of North Korea for desperate phone calls to “freedom.” These are political tools deployed to promote the agenda of one nation over that of another. How should we address information imperialism? The use of networked communications tools to subvert so-called regimes exposes a proclivity for digital intervention that likely also includes digital literacy projects to provoke revolutionary actions, propaganda campaigns to make celebrities out of bloggers, and covert code warfare. Let’s review the spectrum of information interventions to ascertain the ways and hows of information imperialism. Continue reading

A Memorial Day Interview with a U.S. Soldier in Iraq

My oldest and best friend, who has elected to be anonymous, is 100 days away from ending his second U.S. Army tour of Iraq. To commemorate his survival and soon departure he honestly answered some questions for us about Army culture, the U.S. ‘mission’, and his contact with Iraqi culture.

Describe your two tours, what you do, and how the 2 tours have differed.

I do route clearance as a combat engineer in the army. Route clearance is just as it sounds, we are clearing the route for those who follow behind us. We are simply looking for IED’s to make sure the people behind us don’t have to deal with them. The first one year tour was a cake walk compared to this one. The first tour I was in Western Baghdad whereas now I’m in eastern Baghdad. It has nothing to do with the overall condition of Iraq, but rather the eastern Sadr City district is a bad region to be doing route clearance. We get blown up by IED’s on more than half our missions and two months into our tour we lost spc. Jose Torre to RPG fire. My unit got lucky on our first tour. We were seldom attacked and only suffered minor injuries when we were attacked. I feel we have been lucky this tour as well. Though we lost one of our most respected platoon members in Jose, there could have been more. My first tour I never dealt with incoming or rpg’s or half the shit we deal with on a weekly basis this go round. The two tours couldn’t be more starkly contrasted.

How have things changed?

Continue reading