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this turns on the professional ethics of academic work--it is still a going concern in the humanities because up to this point there has been limited cross-over with military funding, military objective, etc.--unlike areas in the sciences, which abandoned these particular professional ethics long ago in order to expand the field of grant money sources. on the other hand, work in the harder sciences operates with formal languages, which provide a veneer of neutrality that humanities disciplines--which operate in ordinary language--do not and cannot maintain.
so i think there is a difference between these general areas insofar as this integration or co-optation by the military is concerned, at least at the level of figleaf production and usage.
an anthropologist should be working with a relation to his or her own value-frame, his or her own set of political/cultural biais if you like (i hate that word "biais"--it says nothing really--it is far too weak) that would enable them to relativize them--which presupposes a distance between that kind of work and the dominant ideology that obtains. it is not obvious hwo one would go about this relativization if one is working for the military in a combat area. so the question of whether this sort of work is anthropology at all arises.
on the other hand, it is clear that having these folk around has already made some impact in making american military actions in areas of afghanistan more coherent.
first because killing everything in sight is not an option. the military cannot afford to be that stupid any more in any type of "non-conventional" conflict--and given that there hasnt been a "conventional" war since world war 2, it is hard to figure out how these terms mean anything anyway.
second because, like it or not, this is only partially a military operation--it is also an ideological operation--and an aspect of an ideological operation is a patronage operation--and that patronage operation cannot work--cannot work--unless there is adequate information concerning what the objectives might be, how to direct them, who to talk to, etc.
crompsin might invoke that rightwing myth called the "vietnam syndrome" but the fact that it is based on reactionary revisionism foudn mostly in rambo novels and has nothing to do with the actual history of the war in vietnam is on its own enough to dismiss it.
you could say that the lack of this kind of information about vietnam explains the american defeat--and not any number of hallucinations about the evil left stabbing the otherwise inevitably victorious doughboys in the back blah blah blah.
its complicated.
there seem to be no obvious answers, no easy responses.
no-one owes support to an american military adventure, particularly those which are being waged in bushworld. like it or not, this is still a pseudo-democracy and the right to dissent still exists. it doesnt matter if you like it or not.
but that's not the question, really---does this relation compromise anthropology as a field?
or just the work done by these particular anthropologists?
or does the fact that this work can be seen as saving lives, as stemming the tendency to massacre, that it provides at least some rational contact between military actions and the civilian population render all other considerations moot?
or does the answer to this depend entirely on where you are? if you are in afghanistan doing this work, you'd see it one way--if you're in the states and fretting about this as the leading edge of an intrusion of the military into the humanities, then you'd see it another.
personally, i am pretty uncomfortable with this.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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