anthropologists and the military - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 10-05-2007, 10:14 AM

i ran across this story in today's ny times and found it interesting.
i'll just post it rather than do the hide thing because this is an op and without the article, nothing that follows will make any sense.

Quote:

October 5, 2007
Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones
By DAVID ROHDE

SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.

“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”

In September, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates authorized a $40 million expansion of the program, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since early September, five new teams have been deployed in the Baghdad area, bringing the total to six.

Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as “mercenary anthropology” that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.

“While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world,” the pledge says, “at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties.”

In Afghanistan, the anthropologists arrived along with 6,000 troops, which doubled the American military’s strength in the area it patrols, the country’s east.

A smaller version of the Bush administration’s troop increase in Iraq, the buildup in Afghanistan has allowed American units to carry out the counterinsurgency strategy here, where American forces generally face less resistance and are better able to take risks.

A New Mantra

Since Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the overall American commander in Iraq, oversaw the drafting of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual last year, the strategy has become the new mantra of the military. A recent American military operation here offered a window into how efforts to apply the new approach are playing out on the ground in counterintuitive ways.

In interviews, American officers lavishly praised the anthropology program, saying that the scientists’ advice has proved to be “brilliant,” helping them see the situation from an Afghan perspective and allowing them to cut back on combat operations.

The aim, they say, is to improve the performance of local government officials, persuade tribesmen to join the police, ease poverty and protect villagers from the Taliban and criminals.

Afghans and Western civilian officials, too, praised the anthropologists and the new American military approach but were cautious about predicting long-term success. Many of the economic and political problems fueling instability can be solved only by large numbers of Afghan and American civilian experts.

“My feeling is that the military are going through an enormous change right now where they recognize they won’t succeed militarily,” said Tom Gregg, the chief United Nations official in southeastern Afghanistan. “But they don’t yet have the skill sets to implement” a coherent nonmilitary strategy, he added.

Deploying small groups of soldiers into remote areas, Colonel Schweitzer’s paratroopers organized jirgas, or local councils, to resolve tribal disputes that have simmered for decades. Officers shrugged off questions about whether the military was comfortable with what David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist and an architect of the new strategy, calls “armed social work.”

“Who else is going to do it?“ asked Lt. Col. David Woods, commander of the Fourth Squadron, 73rd Cavalry. “You have to evolve. Otherwise you’re useless.”

The anthropology team here also played a major role in what the military called Operation Khyber. That was a 15-day drive late this summer in which 500 Afghan and 500 American soldiers tried to clear an estimated 200 to 250 Taliban insurgents out of much of Paktia Province, secure southeastern Afghanistan’s most important road and halt a string of suicide attacks on American troops and local governors.

In one of the first districts the team entered, Tracy identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one village, Colonel Woods said. Their lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, she determined, a burden that could drive the young men to join well-paid insurgents. Citing Tracy’s advice, American officers developed a job training program for the widows.

In another district, the anthropologist interpreted the beheading of a local tribal elder as more than a random act of intimidation: the Taliban’s goal, she said, was to divide and weaken the Zadran, one of southeastern Afghanistan’s most powerful tribes. If Afghan and American officials could unite the Zadran, she said, the tribe could block the Taliban from operating in the area.

“Call it what you want, it works,” said Colonel Woods, a native of Denbo, Pa. “It works in helping you define the problems, not just the symptoms.”

Embedding Scholars

The process that led to the creation of the teams began in late 2003, when American officers in Iraq complained that they had little to no information about the local population. Pentagon officials contacted Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the Navy who advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy.

Ms. McFate helped develop a database in 2005 that provided officers with detailed information on the local population. The next year, Steve Fondacaro, a retired Special Operations colonel, joined the program and advocated embedding social scientists with American combat units.

Ms. McFate, the program’s senior social science adviser and an author of the new counterinsurgency manual, dismissed criticism of scholars working with the military. “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology,” she said. “But we’re really anthropologizing the military.”

Roberto J. González, an anthropology professor at San Jose State University, called participants in the program naïve and unethical. He said that the military and the Central Intelligence Agency had consistently misused anthropology in counterinsurgency and propaganda campaigns and that military contractors were now hiring anthropologists for their local expertise as well.

“Those serving the short-term interests of military and intelligence agencies and contractors,” he wrote in the June issue of Anthropology Today, an academic journal, “will end up harming the entire discipline in the long run.”

Arguing that her critics misunderstand the program and the military, Ms. McFate said other anthropologists were joining the teams. She said their goal was to help the military decrease conflict instead of provoking it, and she vehemently denied that the anthropologists collected intelligence for the military.

In eastern Afghanistan, Tracy said wanted to reduce the use of heavy-handed military operations focused solely on killing insurgents, which she said alienated the population and created more insurgents. “I can go back and enhance the military’s understanding,” she said, “so that we don’t make the same mistakes we did in Iraq.”

Along with offering advice to commanders, she said, the five-member team creates a database of local leaders and tribes, as well as social problems, economic issues and political disputes.

Clinics and Mediation

During the recent operation, as soldiers watched for suicide bombers, Tracy and Army medics held a free medical clinic. They said they hoped that providing medical care would show villagers that the Afghan government was improving their lives.

Civil affairs soldiers then tried to mediate between factions of the Zadran tribe about where to build a school. The Americans said they hoped that the school, which would serve children from both groups, might end a 70-year dispute between the groups over control of a mountain covered with lucrative timber.

Though they praised the new program, Afghan and Western officials said it remained to be seen whether the weak Afghan government could maintain the gains. “That’s going to be the challenge, to fill the vacuum,” said Mr. Gregg, the United Nations official. “There’s a question mark over whether the government has the ability to take advantage of the gains.”

Others also question whether the overstretched American military and its NATO allies can keep up the pace of operations.

American officers expressed optimism. Many of those who had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq said they had more hope for Afghanistan. One officer said that the Iraqis had the tools to stabilize their country, like a potentially strong economy, but that they lacked the will. He said Afghans had the will, but lacked the tools.

After six years of American promises, Afghans, too, appear to be waiting to see whether the Americans or the Taliban will win a protracted test of wills here. They said this summer was just one chapter in a potentially lengthy struggle.

At a “super jirga” set up by Afghan and American commanders here, a member of the Afghan Parliament, Nader Khan Katawazai, laid out the challenge ahead to dozens of tribal elders.

“Operation Khyber was just for a few days,” he said. “The Taliban will emerge again.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/wo...hp&oref=slogin

it seems to me that the main points of debate are included in the article:
on the one side, there is the argument that it is better not only for the military, but also for the afghani populations affected by military operations that there be anthropologists involved with operations because, well, knowing at least something of the environment through which an operations moves is far preferable to not knowing, if the idea behind a given action is that it make sense.

the counter position is that this amounts to a co-optation of anthropologists by the military, which amounts to a kind of uncomfortable reminder of the relations between anthropology as a mode of knowing about the "Other" and colonial/military occupation--but the argument above doesnt go here--instead, you have the claim that it is in itself unethical for anthropologists to collude with a military occupation.

this dilemma is trickier than you think, however.
for example, is the argument against anthropologists' participation in this kind of operation a function of assumptions about academic knowledge as value-neutral, or does it follow more from the politics of the speaker?

but if you argue that the politics of the speaker are determinate, then does that mean that there is no particular distinction between academic information and military information? between the role of anthropologist and that of occupier?

and it just keeps going...
what do you think?

MrTia · 10-05-2007, 10:52 AM

interesting article, unfortunately, i'm at work and too busy to read the whole thing. maybe i'll print it and read it on the train tonight.

at first blush it seems like a good idea, particularly as these numerous military invasions and military incursions that seem to have become the cornerstone of US foreign policy have in common that they involve countries about whom the policymakers in washington appear to know very little.

i do find myself wondering, yes, whether from a professional point of view it presents ethical problems, a lot like the brouha about doctors and psychiatrists being used to monitor torture sessions. (can you believe that we’re now having to talk about what happens when the US tortures people -- i’m still stunned to now be living in an america where it’s just a matter of policy that the US government tortures people.) i recall the anthropological community being particularly outraged when the administration let the iraqi museums get looted. this is the sort of thing that makes me think that this could be a fruitful short-term partnership but in the long run anrthopologists and the military are going to make poor bedfellows. after all, one of the things that “Shock and Awe” involved was a brutal frontal assault on one of the formative cities of modern civilization. the damage this war has done to anthropology and our sense of humanity’s collective history is inestimable, which kinda puts the military and the anthropologists on different sides of the fence.

from that story...

“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”

some interesting hierarchical presuppositions in the use of the word "down" here. that’s another reason why i’m pessimistic about the long-term prospects of a project like this -- a lot of these colonial projects are founded on vaguely patronizing assumptions of submerged universal cultural sameness, which is antithetical to anthopology in its essence. for instance, i was listening to a press conference the other day about iraqi “reconstruction” and why it seemed to be taking so long and the press secretary, falling back on the old blame-the-iraqis-for-not-being-better-at-being-occupied strategy, said, “look, you can’t expect the iraqis to become like us overnight.” my jaw fell to the floor -- become like us? it reminded me of the old line from full metal jacket, “inside every gook there is an american trying to get out.” and that’s the essential disconnect: the laissez-faire capitalist reformation of iraq presumed that somewhere in the iraqi culture an impulse toward western-style entrepeneurship lay latent, and the occupation is failing because this presupposition is so thoroughly, and tragically, wrong. but this is the problem with the philosophy behind the invasion, it’s this idea that all of america outside the continental 48 is some variation of the frontier west, an extension of america that hasn’t found its inner ‘america-ness’ yet. hard to imagine anything less sympathetic to the practice of anthopology than seeing all other cultures as a projection of one’s own, yanno?

Plan9 · 10-05-2007, 11:45 AM

Great article, but it has icky-bad-ju-ju vibes in it for me.

(mild threadjack may follow)

Smells like Vietnam syndrome to me. Just can't quit on a losing note.

"We'll MAKE 'EM LOVE the American lifestyle if we have to kill them to do it!"

In a noble effort to understand the enemy... we're just rolling our dicks in the sand for that much longer.

We're done. We've been done in A-stan for a while. Iraq? Done last year.

Our leadership (military and civilian) are so focused on saving face that they forget the body count.

...

I feel sorry for General P. being the posterboy for this botched conflict. I met him in 2003. Seems like a pretty decent human.

mixedmedia · 10-05-2007, 12:33 PM

Well, I too think it is very interesting, and, like many interesting things could be both good and bad.

I don't think anyone can argue that enabling Afghans to become less vulnerable to Taliban influence while in the process killing less of them is a bad thing.

But at the same time, I completely understand the (possible) ethical dilemmas posed by you, rb, and MrTia in using the information to 'understand' the occupied and thereby, concievably, manipulating them in our own interests. That is scary to me.

And this for instance...

Quote:

Along with offering advice to commanders, she said, the five-member team creates a database of local leaders and tribes, as well as social problems, economic issues and political disputes.

????

Maybe because I've been watching Costa-Gavras movies the last couple of weeks...it perks up my 'insidious American meddling' antennae.

Plan9 · 10-05-2007, 12:41 PM

(notices giant American finger in 3rd world pie)

Ustwo · 10-05-2007, 12:54 PM

So we go in blindly and we are told we don't know how to work with the people or cultures and will fail, under heavy criticism for not understand the cultures.

We bring people who do know, and its an ethical dilemma?

And btw when you get an anthropology degree that doesn't make you a non-citizen of the US. Its the arrogance of the ivory tower that thinks being at an university somehow elevates them above the masses.

Quote:

In one of the first districts the team entered, Tracy identified an unusually high concentration of widows in one village, Colonel Woods said. Their lack of income created financial pressure on their sons to provide for their families, she determined, a burden that could drive the young men to join well-paid insurgents. Citing Tracy’s advice, American officers developed a job training program for the widows.

I mean, the horror of such policy!

Really, its difficult to make what seems to be long over due common sense policy into an issue but this seems to be the goal here?

Plan9 · 10-05-2007, 12:58 PM

Fuck, the goal has been the debate since day one.

mixedmedia · 10-05-2007, 12:59 PM

No, we're seeing what could be negative implications, too.

No one said that the work cited in the article was wrong.

Or do you go through life taking everything at face value without considering the implications?

Ustwo · 10-05-2007, 01:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mixedmedia

No, we're seeing what could be negative implications, too.

No one said that the work cited in the article was wrong.

Or do you go through life taking everything at face value without considering the implications?

Hand wringing over every contingency leads to paralysis. I don't see any negative implications, I see people trying to make the best of a country devastated by war and oppression.

This isn't star trek where we can debate the prime directive and make long convoluted episodes where somehow the natives help themselves despite the blundering of a well meaning starfleet officer.

I could give a crap if someone at Berkley is worried about the 'militarization of anthropology' when we have people dying because we don't understand whats going on.

roachboy · 10-05-2007, 01:42 PM

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.

mixedmedia · 10-05-2007, 01:59 PM

Personally, I am uncomfortable with it, too.

Yet, I can see the positive and negative implications of it.

That doesn't translate into a naive outlook on the questions raised by the reading the article.

And you know, the trouble with being an apologist for aggression and violence as a means of solving problems, you lose a lot of credibility when it comes to 'saving lives' as support for your arguments. At least, that's how it works on me. Others may differ...

abaya · 10-05-2007, 02:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

but that's not the question, really---does this relation compromise anthropology as a field?
or just the work done by these particular anthropologists?

I'm a little late to the thread, but I'd have to go with the latter, rb. I see these kinds of anthropologists as mercenaries. In my dep't, we get recruiting e-mails from the government pretty often, promising all kinds of goodies if fresh PhD's would be willing to go to places of military interest and act as go-betweens, translators, etc. We've all laughed loudly and shaken our heads, whenever we receive these e-mails. None of us would touch that with a ten foot pole. It has nothing to do with us being American citizens (of which half of us are not, in my department... keep in mind that a shit-ton of grad students in the US are foreign) or being "divorced" from the real world. I have no intention of going into the ivory tower, but I would never use my ethnographic skills to abet any kind of military activity whatsoever.

I subscribe to a list-serv of economic anthropologists, and of course this article has stirred up some discussion in that forum as well. Here is what one member said (I'm keeping the person anonymous, since it's a closed list-serv):

Quote:

This is very similar to the debate between Margaret Mead and others over the AAA [American Anthropological Association] code of ethics during and after the Vietnam War, if I remember correctly.

Anthropologists were involved in WWII in a number of positive ways. However, the ways in which anthropologists' reports have been used in Vietnam, Guatemala and other parts of Latin America has been of serious concern for the discipline.

There are two parts of this story that I think need to be highlighted. Tracy, "vehemently denied that the anthropologists collected intelligence for the military" and a few lines below this is quoted as saying, "Along with offering advice to commanders, the five-member team creates a database of local leaders and tribes, as well as social problems, economic issues and political disputes". This type of information is routinely included in CIA intelligence gathering and is used for military purposes.

I have talked at some length with anthropologists who worked for AID in Guatemala and initially believed that their work would be used to improve the safety and well being of the villages they studied. However, they eventually discovered that much of it was shared with the Guatemalan military and used to identify and "disappear" leaders as well as to decide which areas to invade and/or bomb. Others have talked about similar experiences in Vietnam.

There is a serious problem here and the edges are somewhat gray. We never know for sure how the information we collect may be used in the future. Government service has been an important part of anthropology´s history. And, to paraphrase Mead, "They are going to do it with us or without us. They will do a better job with us." As I recall she was speaking about family planning programs. But the same could be said about building the social infrastructure for democracy and peace.

However, in this situation, it seems clear to me that in not considering the historical lessons that resulted in the code of ethics, some anthropologists are being used. The most important issue of course is the protection of the persons and communities we research. While there is no guarantee that any published information will not someday result in some disadvantage, there are ways to reduce the risk.

These include first, the standard procedures of making clear to the research subjects what the research will be used for and to whom it will be given, as part of obtaining informed consent.

Second, in dangerous situations the subjects should be asked to review a draft of the report and their perceptions of potential risk involved in including certain information in the report should result in the removal of this material or its modification such that the persons involved do not consider its release to constitute a potential danger to their security or wellbeing. This is essential because fieldwork techniques are designed to build rapport and trust, and thus result in an interpretation of the anthropologist as a "friend" or even "adopted family member", which results in people confiding things to us personally that they had no intention of our reporting to others in a written document.

Finally the research reports need to be given to the participants at the same time that they are given to those who are paying for the research. In situations like this, a translation needs to be provided by an independent translator to assure accuracy. Making this available in a timely fashion is critically important in situations of war or civil unrest. The results should also be published and thus available to the public for criticism and debate.

These steps would greatly lessen the risks to the subjects of the studies being done, but are probably forbidden by the contracts these anthropologists are obligated to sign with the military concerning "confidentiality" for "national security reasons". That is the center of the problem. Applied anthropologists frequently find themselves in situations where the conditions of an offered contract would be in violation of the code of ethics. This situation has been a subject of debate for many years.

I think this issue is of sufficient immediate importance and brings together so many issues that have been debated for so long, that perhaps the AAA should consider constituting a task force to investigate these issues. Certainly these activities, like similar ones in Vietnam and Guatemala, potentially affect all of us who work in countries where we are frequently suspected of secret employment by the CIA or the US military. At least in this case the anthropologists are officially employed and their role is known to the public. However, the fact that their names are not is a possible indication that the information they are providing the military and the CIA is secretive intelligence of military value.

It's long, but I bolded the part that I agreed with the most. Anthropologists are supposed to be bound to a strict code of ethics, which we are supposed to hold to even in a court of law (when we are called as expert witnesses, for example, but have no protective rights as doctors or psychologists do in similar situations). Helping the military in this sense goes against all my understanding of those ethics. It seems quite clear to me, but I suppose not everyone has the same principles... which I find unfortunate for the discipline.

Nimetic · 10-05-2007, 03:01 PM

I'm not sure that boycotting work like this actually helps anyone.

If the concern is with neutrality, then that can be sorted by requesting a specific contract (although how enforceable that might be once your in a foreign land is questionable). Anyways, you can say all you need afterwards presumably.

If the concern is that a recommendation made by the specialist might or might/not lead to deaths, yeah I can understand that. However this reminds me of the 'pick one person not to be killed' moral dilemma.... is abstaining from a choice actually helping.

To put it into perspective - there was a doco on Afghan widows the other night. The situation as shown was really too nasty to be watchable TV. We hear about this stuff all the time - the locals are uneducated and their morals/ethics are stranger than anything we see locally.

So I think it's right to help in some way. As long as late recruits don't get trapped into becoming designated scapegoats (ie "we did everything they suggested and it was a failure").

It might help if the recruits put their stated conditions in the contract or documented these carefully and mailed them to a lawyer first. Dunno. Just a thought.

Ustwo · 10-05-2007, 03:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

I'm a little late to the thread, but I'd have to go with the latter, rb. I see these kinds of anthropologists as mercenaries. In my dep't, we get recruiting e-mails from the government pretty often, promising all kinds of goodies if fresh PhD's would be willing to go to places of military interest and act as go-betweens, translators, etc. We've all laughed loudly and shaken our heads, whenever we receive these e-mails. None of us would touch that with a ten foot pole. It has nothing to do with us being American citizens (of which half of us are not, in my department... keep in mind that a shit-ton of grad students in the US are foreign) or being "divorced" from the real world. I have no intention of going into the ivory tower, but I would never use my ethnographic skills to abet any kind of military activity whatsoever.

The war is already THERE, you are not helping military activity you are helping PEOPLE, people who are DYING. Note the all caps, you feel your imaginary anthropology code of ethics you would be letting people DIE because you feel its wrong to somehow interfere? Its about being human, not an american, though it would be nice if you didn't hold your non-oath code of ethics over the lives of US soldiers, but I don't thats too much to ask of people.

Quote:

which I find unfortunate for the discipline.

I want you to think about this and yes you are very very high in an ivory tower right now, looking down on humanity with dispassionate eyes with a code of ethics that doesn't even really exist, as you said it gives you no court protection because its not recognized as such. You find it unfortunate that anthropologists are helping people in a life or death situation.

Thats really sad.

Army: We don't understand what the problem is, why do we have so many suicide bombers coming from this one particular village?

Anthropologist: I can see the problem but my code of ethics keeps me from helping you.

Army: 30 civilians were killed last week alone and we lost 8 marines!

Anthropologist: I'm sorry I can not help you, it would be unethical.

Ironically this is most likely one of the few practical uses for anthropology I've ever heard and its apparently unethical, go figure eh?

Well thankfully not every anthropologist is so 'ethical'.

host · 10-06-2007, 01:50 AM

retracted my own post, after it was edited by a mod to remove the "[hide= " tag, that I recentlly was using in every post to avoid the potential of mod edits.

SecretMethod70 · 10-06-2007, 02:20 AM

The horror! I find myself agreeing with Ustwo! (And Nimetic.) At least insofar as whatever negatives there are, they do not negate the positives. As Nimetic pointed out, it's like being told to pick which person doesn't die. You can avoid making the decision and let both die, or you can do something. I'd rather people do something.

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

retracted my own post, after it was edited by a mod to remove the "hide" tag, that I recentlly was using in every post to avoid the potential of mod edits.

*sigh* Come on host, you're a smart guy...using the "hide" tag to unnecessarily hide your entire post, which didn't even contain an article, is obviously not even remotely close to its intended use, and you were just being a smartass about it. Don't you think it's a bit silly to get upset over someone leaving the entire content of your post intact and only removing a totally unnecessary and sarcastic use of the "hide" tag?

If you're not going to leave it, I'll repost it for you (including the "hide" tags) so that others can see exactly what I'm talking about (and because, "hide" tags aside, it was a good post). The benefits of having left the page open...

Ustwo click to show

Halx · 10-06-2007, 07:28 AM

The situation is so fucked up in its current stage that going in there and helping out couldn't possibly hurt. There are some universal socio-economic algorithms that apply to all societies and applying them to battered and broken communities will not do much harm that hasn't already happened far worse. As long as nobody suggests building a mission and spreading religion, I'm fine with lending a helping hand.

Willravel · 10-06-2007, 12:53 PM

Tiny threadjack: Maybe in the TFP Rules and Guidelines, section II, subsection i, we can include something that has the suggested use for the hide tags.
4. When posting large articles or multiple articles, we suggesting using the hide tags on the articles, only showing the gist (a few sentences) of an article.

Neeways...
I recall watching the documentary "Fog of War", and thinking "Why did we invade a country we knew nothing about? From that perspective, it's amazingly important to any situation where US representatives are in another country. Obviously I don't agree with... well actually any US action in the ME in history, but if we're there, and we can't convince the decision makers that they're all idiots and we need to get out, it's VERY important to have an understanding of the people and the situation we're getting in to. Just deploying blind is the worst kind of madness. So, yes it's very important to have that understanding.

Of course, I said that about psychologists being present for prisoner interrogation, and boy was I ever wrong about that. Simply having the experts that could resolve problems on the ground does not mean that they will solve the problems. In fact, I'd go so far to say that having psychologists in with prisoner interrogation as been ultimately harmful and could have very well assisted in the torture of innocent illegal prisoners. In the situation above with anthropologists, one could assist in understanding how to get along with a culture, or one could outline weaknesses. If I was a betting man, based on the precedence, I'd bet on the latter.

mixedmedia · 10-07-2007, 03:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

In the situation above with anthropologists, one could assist in understanding how to get along with a culture, or one could outline weaknesses. If I was a betting man, based on the precedence, I'd bet on the latter.

This is kind of what I was getting at. To not consider this presupposes that the primary consideration of our government and the US military is altruistic.

Uh, and I'm being naive?

Charlatan · 10-07-2007, 03:39 AM

I am agreeing with Ustwo here.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a necessity. Understanding what is happening on the ground there is even more important now when we are working so hard to rebuild the nation.

The main reason we are failing (as a coalition) to aid afghanistan has everything to do with them not understanding us and vice versa (arguably, this is the same issue that is a the root of much of the Middle East conflict).

I would like to believe that our reasons for going into Afghanistan are (and were) noble. Afghanistan is not Iraq.

Nimetic · 10-07-2007, 04:31 AM

On a lighter note then - maybe the anthropologists can be hired by the Afghan government, to help their people understand the US troops and US govt.

roachboy · 10-07-2007, 07:49 AM

the question changes in its complexity depending on the angle you adopt toward it. from the military viewpoint, the advantages are obvious of having folk who can say something coherent about what is happening in the context of operations. without that information, it is close to impossible for operations to be coherent. but one would have thought that the military would gather this kind of information by way of intelligence operations.

in other words, the real problem appears to be the ineffectual character of intel gathering and processing operations within the american "security" apparatus. without intelligence, it doesnt really matter how many shiny hyper-expensive toys you have...you dont know where best to aim them.

so it seems to me that this amounts to either (a) a concession of incompetence concerning intelligence gathering in a combat area--which is very bad indeed for the us and (b) a logical extension of the rumsfeld just-in-time military, an outsourcing of intel functions that does not manage to speak its actual name.

from the viewpoint of an academic looking at this arrangement...
there are obviously violations of professional ethics involved because of the nature and flows of information generated.
there is a compromise of the character of anthropological work itself, a regression to the bad old colonial days when "knowing about" the Other meant translating a rationality into western-terms, a relation in which the Other was Strange and western rationality neutral. so its not really about understanding different social-imaginary spaces--its about subordinating them. instrumentalizing them. enabling a new and improved colonial presence, a somewhat more humane seeming one---anthropology in this context is a transition management technology, one that enables a shift from kill the heathen to use the natives....

a war situation simplifies things a bit by substituting the more accurate application of lethal force for the questions of managing the colonized.

there are more arguments along these lines thatone could spin out---but i gotta pull myself together for a 3-d event, so will stop here.

10-05-2007, 10:52 AM	#2 (permalink)
MrTia Tilted	interesting article, unfortunately, i'm at work and too busy to read the whole thing. maybe i'll print it and read it on the train tonight. at first blush it seems like a good idea, particularly as these numerous military invasions and military incursions that seem to have become the cornerstone of US foreign policy have in common that they involve countries about whom the policymakers in washington appear to know very little. i do find myself wondering, yes, whether from a professional point of view it presents ethical problems, a lot like the brouha about doctors and psychiatrists being used to monitor torture sessions. (can you believe that we’re now having to talk about what happens when the US tortures people -- i’m still stunned to now be living in an america where it’s just a matter of policy that the US government tortures people.) i recall the anthropological community being particularly outraged when the administration let the iraqi museums get looted. this is the sort of thing that makes me think that this could be a fruitful short-term partnership but in the long run anrthopologists and the military are going to make poor bedfellows. after all, one of the things that “Shock and Awe” involved was a brutal frontal assault on one of the formative cities of modern civilization. the damage this war has done to anthropology and our sense of humanity’s collective history is inestimable, which kinda puts the military and the anthropologists on different sides of the fence. from that story... “We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.” some interesting hierarchical presuppositions in the use of the word "down" here. that’s another reason why i’m pessimistic about the long-term prospects of a project like this -- a lot of these colonial projects are founded on vaguely patronizing assumptions of submerged universal cultural sameness, which is antithetical to anthopology in its essence. for instance, i was listening to a press conference the other day about iraqi “reconstruction” and why it seemed to be taking so long and the press secretary, falling back on the old blame-the-iraqis-for-not-being-better-at-being-occupied strategy, said, “look, you can’t expect the iraqis to become like us overnight.” my jaw fell to the floor -- become like us? it reminded me of the old line from full metal jacket, “inside every gook there is an american trying to get out.” and that’s the essential disconnect: the laissez-faire capitalist reformation of iraq presumed that somewhere in the iraqi culture an impulse toward western-style entrepeneurship lay latent, and the occupation is failing because this presupposition is so thoroughly, and tragically, wrong. but this is the problem with the philosophy behind the invasion, it’s this idea that all of america outside the continental 48 is some variation of the frontier west, an extension of america that hasn’t found its inner ‘america-ness’ yet. hard to imagine anything less sympathetic to the practice of anthopology than seeing all other cultures as a projection of one’s own, yanno? __________________ The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity. -- Bruce Lee Last edited by MrTia; 10-05-2007 at 11:09 AM.. Reason: Automerged Doublepost

10-05-2007, 11:45 AM	#3 (permalink)
Plan9 I Confess a Shiver	Great article, but it has icky-bad-ju-ju vibes in it for me. (mild threadjack may follow) Smells like Vietnam syndrome to me. Just can't quit on a losing note. "We'll MAKE 'EM LOVE the American lifestyle if we have to kill them to do it!" In a noble effort to understand the enemy... we're just rolling our dicks in the sand for that much longer. We're done. We've been done in A-stan for a while. Iraq? Done last year. Our leadership (military and civilian) are so focused on saving face that they forget the body count. ... I feel sorry for General P. being the posterboy for this botched conflict. I met him in 2003. Seems like a pretty decent human. __________________ *Whatever you can carry.* "You should not drink... and bake." Last edited by Plan9; 10-05-2007 at 12:03 PM..

10-05-2007, 12:41 PM	#5 (permalink)
Plan9 I Confess a Shiver	(notices giant American finger in 3rd world pie) __________________ *Whatever you can carry.* "You should not drink... and bake."

10-05-2007, 12:58 PM	#7 (permalink)
Plan9 I Confess a Shiver	Fuck, the goal has been the debate since day one. __________________ *Whatever you can carry.* "You should not drink... and bake."

10-05-2007, 12:59 PM	#8 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	No, we're seeing what could be negative implications, too. No one said that the work cited in the article was wrong. Or do you go through life taking everything at face value without considering the implications? __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

10-05-2007, 01:42 PM	#10 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	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. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

10-05-2007, 01:59 PM	#11 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	Personally, I am uncomfortable with it, too. Yet, I can see the positive and negative implications of it. That doesn't translate into a naive outlook on the questions raised by the reading the article. And you know, the trouble with being an apologist for aggression and violence as a means of solving problems, you lose a lot of credibility when it comes to 'saving lives' as support for your arguments. At least, that's how it works on me. Others may differ... __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

10-05-2007, 03:01 PM	#13 (permalink)
Nimetic Junkie Location: Melbourne, Australia	I'm not sure that boycotting work like this actually helps anyone. If the concern is with neutrality, then that can be sorted by requesting a specific contract (although how enforceable that might be once your in a foreign land is questionable). Anyways, you can say all you need afterwards presumably. If the concern is that a recommendation made by the specialist might or might/not lead to deaths, yeah I can understand that. However this reminds me of the 'pick one person not to be killed' moral dilemma.... is abstaining from a choice actually helping. To put it into perspective - there was a doco on Afghan widows the other night. The situation as shown was really too nasty to be watchable TV. We hear about this stuff all the time - the locals are uneducated and their morals/ethics are stranger than anything we see locally. So I think it's right to help in some way. As long as late recruits don't get trapped into becoming designated scapegoats (ie "we did everything they suggested and it was a failure"). It might help if the recruits put their stated conditions in the contract or documented these carefully and mailed them to a lawyer first. Dunno. Just a thought.

10-06-2007, 01:50 AM	#15 (permalink)
host Banned	retracted my own post, after it was edited by a mod to remove the "[hide= " tag, that I recentlly was using in every post to avoid the potential of mod edits. Last edited by host; 10-06-2007 at 10:20 AM..

10-06-2007, 07:28 AM	#17 (permalink)
Halx Please touch this. Owner/Admin Location: Manhattan	The situation is so fucked up in its current stage that going in there and helping out couldn't possibly hurt. There are some universal socio-economic algorithms that apply to all societies and applying them to battered and broken communities will not do much harm that hasn't already happened far worse. As long as nobody suggests building a mission and spreading religion, I'm fine with lending a helping hand. __________________ You have found this post informative. -The Administrator [Don't Feed The Animals]

10-06-2007, 12:53 PM	#18 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	Tiny threadjack: Maybe in the TFP Rules and Guidelines, section II, subsection i, we can include something that has the suggested use for the hide tags. 4. When posting large articles or multiple articles, we suggesting using the hide tags on the articles, only showing the gist (a few sentences) of an article. Neeways... I recall watching the documentary "Fog of War", and thinking "Why did we invade a country we knew nothing about? From that perspective, it's amazingly important to any situation where US representatives are in another country. Obviously I don't agree with... well actually any US action in the ME in history, but if we're there, and we can't convince the decision makers that they're all idiots and we need to get out, it's VERY important to have an understanding of the people and the situation we're getting in to. Just deploying blind is the worst kind of madness. So, yes it's very important to have that understanding. Of course, I said that about psychologists being present for prisoner interrogation, and boy was I ever wrong about that. Simply having the experts that could resolve problems on the ground does not mean that they will solve the problems. In fact, I'd go so far to say that having psychologists in with prisoner interrogation as been ultimately harmful and could have very well assisted in the torture of innocent illegal prisoners. In the situation above with anthropologists, one could assist in understanding how to get along with a culture, or one could outline weaknesses. If I was a betting man, based on the precedence, I'd bet on the latter.

10-07-2007, 03:39 AM	#20 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	I am agreeing with Ustwo here. The invasion of Afghanistan was a necessity. Understanding what is happening on the ground there is even more important now when we are working so hard to rebuild the nation. The main reason we are failing (as a coalition) to aid afghanistan has everything to do with them not understanding us and vice versa (arguably, this is the same issue that is a the root of much of the Middle East conflict). I would like to believe that our reasons for going into Afghanistan are (and were) noble. Afghanistan is not Iraq. __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke

10-07-2007, 04:31 AM	#21 (permalink)
Nimetic Junkie Location: Melbourne, Australia	On a lighter note then - maybe the anthropologists can be hired by the Afghan government, to help their people understand the US troops and US govt.

10-07-2007, 07:49 AM	#22 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	the question changes in its complexity depending on the angle you adopt toward it. from the military viewpoint, the advantages are obvious of having folk who can say something coherent about what is happening in the context of operations. without that information, it is close to impossible for operations to be coherent. but one would have thought that the military would gather this kind of information by way of intelligence operations. in other words, the real problem appears to be the ineffectual character of intel gathering and processing operations within the american "security" apparatus. without intelligence, it doesnt really matter how many shiny hyper-expensive toys you have...you dont know where best to aim them. so it seems to me that this amounts to either (a) a concession of incompetence concerning intelligence gathering in a combat area--which is very bad indeed for the us and (b) a logical extension of the rumsfeld just-in-time military, an outsourcing of intel functions that does not manage to speak its actual name. from the viewpoint of an academic looking at this arrangement... there are obviously violations of professional ethics involved because of the nature and flows of information generated. there is a compromise of the character of anthropological work itself, a regression to the bad old colonial days when "knowing about" the Other meant translating a rationality into western-terms, a relation in which the Other was Strange and western rationality neutral. so its not really about understanding different social-imaginary spaces--its about subordinating them. instrumentalizing them. enabling a new and improved colonial presence, a somewhat more humane seeming one---anthropology in this context is a transition management technology, one that enables a shift from kill the heathen to use the natives.... a war situation simplifies things a bit by substituting the more accurate application of lethal force for the questions of managing the colonized. there are more arguments along these lines thatone could spin out---but i gotta pull myself together for a 3-d event, so will stop here. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite