Professional Knowledge Creation in the World-System

Building an anti-imperialist “anthropology,” plus an anthropology that studies imperialism, and that studies itself as a received invention of imperialism, means much more than just analyzing and questioning how anthropologists served this or that colonial venture. It means totally unthinking anthropology as a social science; more than that, it means totally unthinking social science. For whatever discussions of “decolonizing anthropology” have achieved, this ground was never covered in those discussions.

In the previous posts the discussion was centered on opening questions in a critique of the relationship between anthropology and imperialism, along with questions concerning the terms and concepts that, initially, appear to be central to the debate. Here we focus on the wider intellectual and geopolitical context of anthropology’s institutionalization, and the received baggage of 19^th century European social science. In particular, I resort to Immanuel Wallerstein for his analysis of the institutionalization and formalization of the social sciences, and how the very process of institutionalization created the knowledge boundaries, categories, and concepts we use today. Not least among these received conceptual boundaries, fundamental to the division of knowledge into “social sciences,” is the arbitrary construction of “society,” “economics,” and “politics.” Moving beyond the Eurocentrism of the social sciences also means getting past the false divisions in knowledge created by these institutionalized conceptualizations.

The particular works by Immanuel Wallerstein to which I will be referring, or that shape the overall discussion in some way, are:

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. 2006. European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power. New York: New Press. (Ch. 2, “Can One Be a Non-Orientalist? Essentialist Particularism,” 31-49)

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. 1999. The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Ch. 11, “Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science,” 168-184)

Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. 1996. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Ch. 1, “The Historical Construction of the Social Sciences, from the Eighteenth Century to 1945,” 1-32)

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. 1991. Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press in association with B. Blackwell. (Ch. 8, “A Comment on Epistemology: What is Africa?” 127-129; Ch. 9, “Does India Exist?” 130-134)

I strongly recommend these for a start. One really cannot “do” or “write” anthropology innocently any more after reflecting on these works.

The Institutionalization of the Social Sciences

In Open the Social Sciences, the Gulbenkian Commission led by Wallerstein, highlighted the main historical trends that led to the institutionalization of knowledge in universities. “The need of the modern state for more exact knowledge on which to base its decisions,” they observe led to the emergence of new, though still uncertain, categories of knowledge already in the 18th century. The university was until then a largely moribund institution, at least since the 16^th century, having been too tightly linked with the Church. In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, however, the university was largely revived as the primary locus for the creation of knowledge (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 6).

The revival of the university was not actually led primarily by the natural scientists, but rather those who stood to lose most from the development of a hierarchy of a value emerging from the split between science and philosophy (see the “two cultures” below). Instead, it was “historians, classicists, scholars of national literatures…who did most to revive the universities in the course of the nineteenth century, using it as a mechanism to obtain state support for their scholarly work” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8). They sought the alliance of natural scientists in promoting the new university structures, in order to profit “from the positive profile of the natural scientists,” and in the process reinforcing the distinction, and the tension, between the humanities/arts and the sciences (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8).

“The intellectual history of the nineteenth century is marked above all by this disciplinarization and professionalization of knowledge,” the Commission argued, pointing to “the creation of permanent institutional structures designed both to produce new knowledge and to reproduce the producers of knowledge” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 7).

In the wake of the French Revolution, and especially in Great Britain and France, the pressure for political and social reorganization were felt strongly by the powers that be. In place of a belief in the “natural order” of things, many now recognized the normalcy of change, and argued that,

the solution lay rather in organizing and rationalizing the social change that now seemed to be inevitable in a world in which the sovereignty of the “people” was fast becoming the norm, no doubt hoping thereby to limit its extent. (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8).

“But if one were to organize and rationalize social change,” the Commission points out, “one had first of all to study it and understand the rules which governed it” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8). Hence the proclaimed need for a “social science.” Social science was charged with developing “systematic, secular knowledge about reality that is somehow validated empirically” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 2). The classical premise of science at this point was two-fold: one, the Newtonian vision of a symmetry between past and future, and two, Cartesian dualisms of humans and nature, mind and matter, and so forth. Accompanied by notions of progress, and a finite, knowable world, the aim was to “facilitate the explorations and exploitation demanded by progress, and to make practical and realizable Western aspirations to dominion” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 4). Exploration, exploitation, and rapid social change, all pointed to the need to investigate order, and for that Newtonian physics offered the most useful support.

It was especially in the period from 1850 to 1914, when we witness a university boom in Europe, North America, and Australia, with many new universities being founded in that very period, that we also see the disciplinarization of knowledge in the form of the social sciences as we know them today (Gulbenkian, 1996, pp. 12-13). The five primary social sciences were history, economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Owing to the struggle between science and philosophy, and the social prestige of science, the primary emphases of these “social sciences” were the “emphasis on the existence of a real world that is objective and knowable, the emphasis on empirical evidence, [and] the emphasis on the neutrality of the scholar” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 15).

Between 1850 and 1945, the new social science disciplines were institutionalized: “This was done by establishing in the principal universities first chairs, then departments offering courses leading to degrees in the discipline” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 3). “Training” was institutionalized as was “research”: “the creation of journals specialized in each of the disciplines; the construction of associations of scholars along disciplinary lines (first national, then international); the creation of library collections catalogued by disciplines” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 3). Of course one of the key elements in this institutionalization was for the social sciences to stress the differences between them, what made them unique, and thus what required that a special place be made for them in the new universities. Institutionalization, disciplinarization, expanding world capitalism, and rapid social change thus all combined to create and shape the social sciences as we have known them. Each of these is tied into the others.

The Eurocentrism of Social Science

Wallerstein’s core argument is that the creation of the structures of knowledge, specifically the institutionalization of the social sciences, is a phenomenon that is inextricably linked to the very formation and maturation of the capitalist world system (or what others might loosely, and less comprehensively, refer to as imperialism or capitalist hegemony). There is nothing that is either natural, logical, or accidental about the institutionalization of the social sciences. The structures of knowledge are accepted ways of producing knowledge of the world. In particular, the universalism-particularism dichotomy, and all framings of knowledge that fit within or between that polarity (of especial relevance to anthropology’s intellectual mission, and central to the revival of cosmopolitanism), is part of the intellectual double bind of the capitalist world system (see Wallerstein, 1991, p. 128).

In broad terms, “social science has been Eurocentric throughout its institutional history,” Wallerstein explains, “which means since there have been departments teaching social science within university systems” (1999, p. 168). There should be no surprise here, he adds, since social science “is a product of the modern world-system, and Eurocentrism is constitutive of the geoculture of the modern world” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168). In particular, “as an institutional structure, social science originated largely in Europe (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168).

By “Europe,” Wallerstein means primarily western Europe and North America. One could broaden that, using native studies discourse, to mean Europe and European settler states. Even with that more expansive definition, Wallerstein observes that  “the social science disciplines were in fact overwhelmingly located, at least up to 1945, in just five countries – France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the United States” (1999, p. 168). “Even today,” he continues, “despite the global spread of social science as an activity, the large majority of social scientists worldwide remain Europeans” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168). Penetrating deeper, Wallerstein argues that,

Social science emerged in response to European problems, at a point in history when Europe dominated the whole world-system. It was virtually inevitable that its choice of subject matter, its theorizing, its methodology, and its epistemology all reflected the constraints of the crucible within which it was formulated. (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168)

The Eurocentrism of social science has come under increasingly vigorous attack, especially in the period since 1945 with the formal decolonization of Africa, Asia, and much of the Caribbean, and Wallerstein sees this attack as “fundamentally justified.” Moreover, he argues, that “if social science is to make any progress in the twenty-first century, it must overcome the Eurocentric heritage that has distorted its analyses and its capacity to deal with the problems of the contemporary world” (Wallerstein, 1999, pp. 168-169). To do this, we must understand what constitutes Eurocentrism and its “many avatars” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 169).

There are at least five distinct yet overlapping ways that social science is Eurocentric, as Wallerstein explains. The Eurocentrism of social science is expressed in “(1) its historiography, (2) the parochiality of its universalism, (3) its assumptions about (Western) civilization, (4) its Orientalism, and (5) its attempts to impose the theory of progress” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 169).

While “institutionalized social science started as an activity in Europe,” Wallerstein’s argument is about much more than this important historical and cultural recognition. The problem with Eurocentric social science is that it has been “charged with painting a false picture of social reality by misreading, grossly exaggerating, and/or distorting the historical role of Europe, particularly its historical role in the modern world” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 177). “Whatever Europe did,” Wallerstein affirms, “has been analyzed incorrectly and subjected to inappropriate extrapolations, which have had dangerous consequences for both science and the political world” (1999, p. 178).

The Received Baggage of the 19^th Century

The “two cultures” division is one of the most fundamental bases for the modern world-system’s structures of knowledge. By the “two cultures” Wallerstein is drawing on the work of C.P. Snow, and referring to the division between the sciences and the humanities. “No other historical system has instituted a fundamental divorce between science and philosophy/humanities,” Wallerstein observes (1999, p. 183). It took about three centuries for this rupture to become triumphant in Eurocentric thought, and to become institutionalized. Now that this has taken place, the “two cultures” is “fundamental to the geoculture and forms the basis of our university systems” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 183).

It is this very split, between the two cultures, that enabled “the modern world to put forward the bizarre concept of the value-neutral specialist, whose objective assessments of reality could form the basis not merely of engineering decisions (in the broadest sense of the term) but of sociopolitical choices as well” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 183). Indeed, one of the central foundations of the Eurocentric social sciences is this very idea of “objective science”:

The idea that science is over here and sociopolitical decisions are over there is the core concept that sustains Eurocentrism, since the only universalist propositions that have been acceptable are those that are Eurocentric. Any argument that reinforces this separation of the two cultures thus sustains Eurocentrism. If one denies the specificity of the modern world, one has no plausible way of arguing for the reconstruction of knowledge structures, and therefore no plausible way of arriving at intelligent and substantively rational alternatives to the existing world-system. (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 183)

With the split between the two cultures, the alternative to “science” was seemingly plagued by “a lack of internal cohesiveness, which did not help its practitioners plead their cause with the authorities, especially given their seeming inability to offer ‘practical’ results” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 6). This story should be very familiar to anthropologists, in their drive to create “applied anthropology” and anthropology in the service of military, intelligence, and colonial administration. The opinions of the authorities, especially those promising funding, and demanding practical benefits, have weighed heavily. From early on, “it had begun to be clear that the epistemological struggle over what was legitimate knowledge was no longer a struggle over who would control knowledge about nature (the natural scientists had clearly won exclusive rights to this domain by the eighteenth century) but about who would control knowledge about the human world” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 6).

One can sum up in this way the key dichotomies that arose from the 19^th century institutionalization of the social sciences, dichotomies that are vital to sustaining the Eurocentrism of the social sciences:

• science versus philosophy/humanities
• discontinuity-continuity
• state-centrism in analysis
• idiographic versus nomothetic
• determinism versus agency
• objectivity versus subjectivity
• politics versus economics

In review:

Anthropology’s Baggage

The Gulbenkian Commission devoted attention to each of the five social sciences. What follows is their description and analysis of the emergence, institutionalization and disciplinarization of anthropology. At the most basic level, the expansion of the modern world-system involved the European encounter and usually conquest of the peoples of the rest of the world. In particular, those people who were organized in social structures that Europeans classed as small, without written records, and not part of a geographically wide ranging religious systems, were classed as “tribes” or “races.” They became the domain of what would later be called anthropology. Anthropology had largely begun as a practice of explorers, travelers, and officials of the colonial services of the European powers, and then subsequently became institutionalized as a university discipline (Gulbenkian, 1996, pp. 20-21).

Anchored within the structures of the university, anthropologists were constrained to maintain the practice of ethnographic fieldwork “within the normative premises of science” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 21). Some were of course attracted to ideas of a universal natural history of humanity, with assumed stages of development, but their discipline was one pressed into studying particular peoples, requiring a very specific methodology, that of fieldwork. Consumed with the ostensible interest in human difference, and the particulars of non-European modes of being, anthropologists largely adhered to an idiographic epistemology, with some lingering desires for developing nomothetic propositions (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 22).

Anthropology’s special baggage then – in the preliminary type of analysis offered by the Gulbenkian Commission – was idiographic research, focused on the non-West, and in particular focused on tribes (not the non-Western “high civilizations” that were more the domain of the Orientalists). As we go further, this analysis will be deepened significantly, but it will be useful to remember some of the broad historical forces at work, as presented in this essay.

Phrases such as “decolonizing anthropology”* and “anthropology and the colonial encounter” have become salient in anthropology especially since they are the titles of two of the better known, most widely quoted books on the subject. What subject? That is what is lacking clarity, because presumably the phrases above are meant to mean something, and if so, then one has to wonder: why not “anthropology and imperialism” or “de-imperializing anthropology”? What choices are we making when we choose the term colonialism, rather than imperialism?

Throughout the course of this blog, “imperialism” and “colonialism” have frequently been used interchangeably, especially with reference to anthropology. I have written about “re-imperializing” anthropology, as I have about “re-colonization,” and “decolonizing anthropology.” Aside from anthropology, dealing with the two phenomena can lead to choices of when to use one term and when to use the other: the choice of terms can depend on the historical setting that one has in mind (whether writing about actual colonies, or the exertion of force at a distance); the ultimate intentions of the given forms of intervention (the effective inhabiting of another society and efforts to remake it to suit the desires of the intervening power, or, the effort to exert and monopolize power in a given space); or the proximity of the actors (colonialism usually being an “up close and personal” kind of relationship). Abstracting these ideas to the epistemic and methodological level (“methodological colonialism”) would seem to create even greater ambiguity around the choice of terms. It also seems, at first glance, that “imperial anthropology,” “imperialist anthropology,” and “anthropological imperialism” are not all the same “thing” necessarily. Before proceeding to the next in this series of lectures/essays, that will situate the institutionalization of anthropology within expanded and renewed Euro-American imperialism in the late 19^th century, it seems necessary to spend some time on the question of terminology.

One of the persistent themes in this essay will be the fact that colonialism/imperialism should not be treated as solely academic concepts to be defined and circumscribed by analysts (usually within imperial institutions that we call “universities”), or to see colonialism as solely something that is done to others. The colonized’s “decolonization” (at best, a work in progress), will always only be a truncated “achievement” as long as the colonizers have not “decolonialized” themselves as well (I use these two different terms to refer to distinct sides of anti-colonialism).

In this piece I refer primarily to two items (there are many more, but these are the simpler and more condensed pieces I use for teaching purposes). One is Ronald J. Horvath’s “A definition of colonialism” (Current Anthropology, 13 (1), Feb. 1972: 45-57) – the first article about colonialism to ever be published by that journal, and even at that late stage we did not have an article by an anthropologist as such (Horvath was a professor of geography). The second is from a large production, that opens with a decent review of the histories and theories of colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism. That is  Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An historical introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

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Colonialism

Young begins by sounding very concerned about the careless use of distinct concepts such as colonialism and imperialism, as if they were simply synonyms:

The use of the term ‘postcolonial’ rather than ‘post-imperial’ suggests that a de facto distinction is being made between the two, yet a characteristic of postcolonial writing is that the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘imperial’ are often lumped together, as if they were synonymous terms. This totalizing tendency is also evident in the way that colonialism and imperialism are themselves treated as if they were homogeneous practices. Although much emphasis is placed on the specific particularity of different colonized cultures, this tends to be accompanied by comparatively little historical work on the diversity of colonialism and imperialism, which were nothing if not heterogeneous, often contradictory, practices. (Young, 2001, p. 15)

There is also basic confusion about if or when the terms, colonialism and imperialism, should be separated from one other: colonies constitute an empire, but imperialism does not necessarily require colonies. That the terms are often used synonymously can also be seen in the work of Edward Said. Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre also tended to speak of colonialism as a single formation, a single system (Young, 2001, p. 18). Quoting Said, Young reminds us that his conception of colonialism was centered on a fundamentally geographical act of violence employed against indigenous peoples and their connections to the land.

On the other hand, Young offers some useful ideas about why the terms have been understood by some as referring to distinctly different phenomena:

The term ‘empire’ has been widely used for many centuries without, however, necessarily signifying ‘imperialism’. Here a basic difference emerges between an empire that was bureaucratically controlled by a government from the centre, and which was developed for ideological as well as financial reasons, a structure that can be called imperialism, and an empire that was developed for settlement by individual communities or for commercial purposes by a trading company, a structure that can be called colonial. Colonization was pragmatic and until the nineteenth century generally developed locally in a haphazard way (for example, the occupation of islands in the West Indies), while imperialism was typically driven by ideology from the metropolitan centre and concerned with the assertion and expansion of state power (for example, the French invasion of Algeria). Colonialism functioned as an activity on the periphery, economically driven; from the home government’s perspective, it was at times hard to control. Imperialism on the other hand, operated from the centre as a policy of state, driven by the grandiose projects of power. Thus while imperialism is susceptible to analysis as a concept (which is not to say that there were not different concepts of imperialism), colonialism needs to be analysed primarily as a practice: hence the difficulty of generalizing about it. (Young, 2001, pp. 16-17)

As many others observed previously, Young also recognizes that if we restrict discussion to colonialism alone, then one has to be mindful that historically there has been immense diversity in colonial forms. There have been colonies of settlement (for example, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.); colonies of exploitation (where no large European settlement was the aim, as much as the extraction and export of local resources); and various dominant colony-like enclaves, such as military bases on islands, in harbours or other strategic points, that sometimes forged commercial relations with a nearby mainland. There is the added fact that colonies could allow for limited forms of local rule, while in other cases they were administered directly from the colonial metropole (sometimes the very same colonial power could use both strategies, at different times). Some colonies were governed through native intermediaries, while others implanted officials from the “mother country.” Some colonial powers tried to effect cultural assimilation, while others did not. Some stationed their armies in the colonies, and others instead preferred to rely more on locally recruited armies. Thus, as Young argues, a “general theory” of colonialism is more than just a challenge. Young prefers to see “imperialism” as referring to a “global political system,” but that too begs the question as to why he would leave out the economic dimension, and whether there has not also been a diversity of global political systems.

The very interesting question that Young raises (2001, pp. 18-19), is whether this discussion in the end boils down to (a) a rather sterile and abstract academic discussion, and, (b) one that is meaningful mostly from the perspective of the colonizers themselves:

the apparent uniformity or diversity of colonialism depends very largely on your own subject position, as colonizing or colonized subject. From the position of the ruling colonial power, its administrators, and from the perspective of historians of British colonial history such as John MacKenzie, Britain’s different colonies do indeed look, and were, different in the ways in which they were acquired and administered….From the point of view of the indigenous people who lived their lives as colonial subjects, however, such distinctions have always seemed rather more academic. As far as they were concerned, such colonial subjects lived under the imposition of British rule, a view not discouraged by the imperial ideology of Pax Britannica. Anti-colonial practices of cultural resistance to the dominant ideology of imperialism encouraged the critical analysis of common forms of representation and the processes of knowledge-formation. At another level, the links established between Irish, South African and Indian nationalists at the end of the nineteenth century were developed to share knowledge of anti-colonial techniques and strategies. An attack on a police station in Ireland functioned in a very similar way, and with very similar objectives, to an attack on a British barracks in India. The differences in colonial history, in administrative practices, or constitutional status…made for very little difference as far as anti-colonial revolutionary strategies were concerned. From the point of view of anti-colonial political activists, the British Empire looked much the same everywhere….Postcolonial critique tends to take the same point of view because it identifies with the subject position of anti-colonial activists, not because of its ignorance of the infinite variety of colonial history from the perspective of the colonizers.

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Imperialism

Imperialism as a term became current in English only in the second half of the nineteenth century (Young, 2001, p. 26, drawing on Hobsbawm). As Young explains, while originally referring to direct conquest and occupation (nation-states develop empires by making colonies, becoming imperial states whose action over others is imperialist), thanks to Marxism the concept usually became one that referred to a general system of economic domination, with or without direct political domination (i.e., there could be imperialism without colonies). Why “post-colonialism” ultimately makes sense, Young suggests, is that those subjected to it have most often used the term colonialism to refer to previous systems of domination they suffered under the British and French, for example, while using the term imperialism to refer to American domination – essentially a distinction between “old” imperialism and “new”. As Young says, “history has not yet arrived at the post-imperial era” (Young, 2001, p. 27).

Imperialism became a target of anti-colonial struggle, and understood as a general concept of domination, probably with the advent of the Communist International of 1919 (see: archive of the Communist International, 1919-1943; Comintern archives; League Against Imperialism). Reverting to his position as an analyst, Young situates imperialism in a way that it pertains to rivalry between expansionist states, seeking to enhance national prestige and domestic political and social stability, and finding outlets for expanded capitalist production and consumption (Young, 2001, pp. 30-33).

While saying that imperialism is never static, he does seem to find comfort in trait-listing imperialism, which is fine for historical sketches that provide broad characteristics of imperialism at different times, but not so useful for the purposes of contemporary critique. In fact, it can be very counterproductive. The problem, apparently not within the scope of Young’s overview, is that of imperialism denial, which often resorts to ironically static and simplistically empirical historicist analogies. If any traits between “alleged” imperialism today do not square with those of other powers of yesterday, some imperialism deniers seize this as “evidence” that today’s imperialism is not imperialism at all, and that only sinister “biased” characters would insist on using the label. Curiously, given that imperialism denial is today a primarily American phenomenon, few Americans who deny imperialism on the grounds of historicism would be willing to perform the same mental operations when it comes to their own nation: since America of a century ago is little or nothing like America today, then there is no America today. Moreover, denying that America was ever imperialist, is denying that America was ever America.

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Neo-colonialism

Neo-colonialism has come to refer to a system of formal political independence, with direct economic control exercised by foreign power. If we were meant to have clear definitional boundaries between “colonialism” and “imperialism,” the concept neo-colonialism would seem to merge the two: “Neo-colonialism is…the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress (Kwame Nkrumah, 1965, p xi)” (quoted in Young, 2001, p. 44). The first and most prominent theorist of neo-colonialism was not a Western academic, but rather the Ghanaian independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah saw neo-colonialism as the American stage of colonialism, of an empire without formal colonies (Young, 2001, p. 46).

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Anthropological Correlates of Imperialist Theories?

Regarding imperialist theories of indigenous cultures, Young’s synthesis is one of the more useful ones. On the one hand, the French mission civilisatrice “assumed the fundamental equality of all human beings, their common humanity as part of a single species, and considered that however ‘natural’ or ‘backward’ their state, all native peoples could immediately benefit from the uniform imposition of French culture in its most advanced contemporary manifestation” (Young, 2001, p. 32). This shares the identical assumptions of cultural evolutionism and more recent international development theory. It is also an unstated premise of the “spreading democracy” thesis of American imperialism today. To the upholders of the idea of essential sameness, critics appear to be denying the humanity of humans: all humans want freedom, so the story goes, and if you don’t believe that Iranians “deserve democracy,” and want to live like us, then you are denying their essential humanity. If you do not want “democracy” for Iranians, then it is probably because you think “they aren’t good enough” to have it. As Young argues, the “very assumption [of equality] meant that the French model had the least respect and sympathy for the culture, language and institutions of the people being colonized – it saw difference, and sought to make it the same – what might be called the paradox of ethnocentric egalitarianism” (Young, 2001, p. 32).

The irony is that the alternative was no less imperialist. British imperialism from the mid-1800s onwards assumed a radical, racially-based difference between the British and their subjects. Assimilation, strictly speaking, would be impossible: assimilating Africans would make as much sense as putting suits on chimps, or trying to teach table manners to dogs. As Young explains, “the British system of relative non-interference with local cultures, which today appears more liberal in spirit, was in fact also based on the racist assumption that the native was incapable of education up to the level of the European – and therefore by implication required perpetual colonial rule. Association neatly offered the possibility of autonomy (for some), while at the same time incorporating a notion of hierarchy for the supposedly less-capable races” (Young, 2001, p. 33). Today, in fact, it might appear less liberal, with the revival if liberal interventionism under the banner of the “responsibility to protect.”

Both forms of imperialism are arguably variations of liberalism. One, ethnocentric egalitarianism, promises to open the doors of empire to all subjects willing (or not) to undergo cultural transformation, which serves to spread empire into the hearts and minds of the dominated. The dominated are thus “liberated” – liberated from the “burden” of being themselves, of being different. The other variant, a racist “respect” for difference, substitutes tolerance for equality. Both equality with the other, and, tolerance of the other, are vaunted as lofty and noble liberal values. Both are equally imperialist. One understates difference, the other overstates it. Both, arguably, recognize difference only to the extent and in the manner that suits the particular goals of power.

Anthropology seems to have had its own “Dual Mandate” of “protection” and “exploitation” with regards to the peoples at the focus of its mission as a university discipline (when anthropology, by definition, was that which you never did at home). Protection came in the form of salvage ethnography, cultural resource management, and some forms of advocacy. Exploitation: by recruiting natives to transcribe their cultures, for academic projects, and by lifting cultural artifacts and even human remains and amassing them in academic institutions. This is not to mention various types of “applied anthropology,” in service of corporations, development, international lending agencies, and military and intelligence communities.

Ethnographic Colonialism, Anthropological Imperialism, and Incorporationism

Back to the terminological problem underscored at the very start. It turns out that even some imperialists could be anti-colonialist, because maintaining colonies was expensive and inefficient where economic dominance and hegemonic political power were concerned. This poses a problem for us then, in our choice of terms: it seems one could be in favour of “decolonizing” anthropology while defending anthropological imperialism (hypothetically). That is meaningful only if we intend to use these terms in order to associate anthropology with (a) certain academic activities that resemble colonialism and imperialism on an intellectual level, and/or, (b) actual policies and practices of states and corporations.

Colonialism may be better coupled specifically with ethnography, in analytical terms, since both require physical presence, in person, and a form of settling within someone else’s home – entering their territory, and setting up camp. This is what we might call “ethnographic colonialism” and it seems to make more sense than calling anthropology colonial, unless one is focusing on anthropologists working in colonial settings. Otherwise, it would seem to be better to couple anthropology as a broad endeavor, with another equally broad endeavor, imperialism. “Anthropological imperialism” could then refer to institutionalized, professionalized, theoretical practice, where anthropologists speak about what is humanity, “on behalf of” all of humanity.

Is there an “anthropological neo-colonialism”? One could argue, as we will see later on, that various national anthropologies, instituted in (few) universities in Africa and Asia following formal political decolonization, were in fact neo-colonial in their political positioning with respect to the state and its nation-building mission, and with respect to its content which was focused on national development.

Ultimately, however, the plethora of concepts (empire, imperial, imperialist, colonial, colonialist, neo-colonial, etc.) can be see as variations, fluctuating in time and space, of a much broader phenomenon that encompasses them all, that renders them means toward and end. That end would be what I refer to as incorporationism. Neither imperialism nor colonialism make sense by themselves, until one relates them to their fundamental premises, ideals, and goals: to make use of others by various means of exploitation, drafting others into one’s sphere in order to extract from them whatever is valued.

The purpose here has been to signal the understandable confusion that can arise in discussing the relationship between anthropology and empire, at the very least on a conceptual level – that is, if we omit the discussions to follow, which should deepen this discussion much further.

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* The phrase, “decolonizing anthropology,” when entered as a search term (retaining the enclosing quotes), produces 3,530 results in Google, and 230 citations in Google Scholar. For a phrase that we are told is prominent in anthropology, or that refers to an important concern that has been the subject of much writing, one will note two things: (a) in the first set of results, my own web pages dominate the top listings, with the others pertaining to Faye Harrison’s edited collection; and, (b) that both Harrison’s volume is out of print.

Introduction

On 26 February 2009, a report by John Stanton was published on this blog (Some Breaking News on the Human Terrain System: Death Threats Against Female Colleagues). At the time it caused some uproar, was discussed on several other blogs, and perhaps no other story on this blog received so many comments as that one (200 comments to be exact). The story was followed up with this one: US Army 101st Airborne Investigative Report on Human Terrain System. In the midst of the furious commentary, many allegations were made about the person at the center of the story, Dr. Marilyn Dudley-Flores. Now, for the first time, Dr. Dudley-Flores presents her own story to the public. The text that follows was first sent to me by Dr. Dudley-Flores as an e-mail message earlier this week, and it is of course reproduced here with her permission and approval.

One last point before we proceed: as we know, the U.S. Congress is conducting an assessment of the Human Terrain System (see: John Stanton: U.S. Congress to Assess Human Terrain System [29 September 2009]; U.S. Congress and the Human Terrain System [04 October 2009]; and, John Stanton: US Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harm’s Way [10 October 2009]). It may be useful for all parties to send as much information and analysis as possible to the U.S. House and Senate Armed Services Committees, in order to assist them in their review.

It may be for naught, as the same U.S. Congress has supported HTS generously. Indeed, one HTS blogger, “Caleb” (who of course blocked access to his blog, Always Under Way, as soon as it started to get attention) was already celebrating the Congressional review in his post for Wednesday, 30 September, 2009, “H.R. 2647“:

“This will be an opportunity for this amazing program to gain even greater buy-in by Congress, the Department of Defense, and the Obama Administration – all of whom have expressed their support for the program….That’s right, support the expansion of the HTT concept, including to other combatant command areas of responsibility!! We’re worldwide!” [his emphasis]

Well, Caleb was totally wrong about the play, “Anthropology–Or How to Win Friends and Influence Afghans,” thinking it was a prestige-making event that would applaud HTS, rather than criticize and mock it. He is very cheerful, and while his gushing optimism may be correct when it comes to Congress supporting HTS further (I think it will), the idea would be to make it as difficult as possible for them to accept a positive assessment without producing a tortuous, labored explanation.

From Marilyn Dudley-Flores:

[originally directed primarily to Christian Caryl at Foreign Policy]

I have just seen your piece entitled “Reality Check: Human Terrain Teams” over the Foreign Policy website dated 8 Sep 2009 ( http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/08/reality_check_human_terrain_teams ).

I have no major argument with your piece, but I do feel you unfairly cast me in a “feuding” role with soldiers in the field in Afghanistan. You wrote that writer John Stanton “included excerpts from an internal investigation by the 101st Airborne Division that harshly criticized failings in training and administration that contributed to a disastrous feud between one of the HTT scientists, Marilyn Dudley-Flores, and regular Army troops in the field in Afghanistan involving allegations of sexual harassment and death threats against the professor.”  Who were these regular Army troops?

I wanted to let you know that at no time was I locked in a feud with anyone at all in Afghanistan. There is a clear difference between a feud and a systematic running assault. One implies something along the lines of a more or less equal conflict that proceeds over time; the other has one or more perpetrators attacking a victim or victims.

FYI. I was sent out from Stateside to Afghanistan, spending 7-8 days in transit. Upon my leaving Fort Benning, Georgia was the only prior “heads-up” that was given to my team that I was being sent to them to co-lead and to provide counterinsurgency research services for the division-level Human Terrain Analysis Team (HTAT) on Bagram air base. The HTAT was then wired up to the 101st Army Airborne, although how we were wired up was not clear, because none of the women were allowed by the HTAT team leader to make briefings to or go to meetings with the senior staff officers of the 101st Army Airborne, as we were supposed to do. On Bagram, I almost immediately found my SECRET clearance only “pending,” although official documents on me do not reflect that, indicating that by 1 Sep 2008 I had an unfettered SECRET clearance. Having only a “pending” SECRET meant that I could not be badged to work in my own office on Bagram. This was a mystery (and still is in some respects) until HTS management “worked the issue” and got me badged somehow.

After about two weeks waiting to be badged, when I was able to get into my office in the day-to-day, after some time, I saw the female complement of the HTAT (three women) working in the office under such a regime, as if they were POWs, hectored around by, evidently what turned out to be two phony PhDs, a former Special Forces man with an apparent learning disorder and a lot of muscle, and an immature 30-year-old 1LT in the Puerto Rican National Guard. The “muscleman,” our HTAT’s deputy team leader, had formerly worked for the subcontractor company that had recruited and hired me for the HTS through an American Sociological Association ad. Present on our team was a decent young man with good credentials, a military veteran, and a criminal justice background, but he was due to rotate back Stateside soon after I arrived. With him gone, we were at the entire mercy of the others as I would go on to experience with the other women.

In the meantime, my subcontractor company, stopped paying me. About a month on the scene, in early December, the day after they began to catch my pay up, they inexplicably fired me from my position as a key asset to the Army Human Terrain System in the war zone. This is a little like a soldier in the foxhole saying to his mates, “Sorry, guys, I’m off the clock, my pink slip has been handed to me.” HTS managers apparently didn’t know anything about it.

HTS managers scrambled to turn this new fiasco around. That is when the managers discovered some sort of communication between Bagram and the little hiring company exuding false information about the fit of my body armor and my ability to get in and out of humvees. Even after this was laid to rest, a company spokesperson was talking to authorities on Bagram about my having been fired. HTS managers had to go to extraordinary steps to make it clear that the 101st was supposed to be communicating about HTAT personnel with them and no one else.

This situation might not have existed except that the phonies had been “empire building” and covering their lack of ability to perform our mission with one or more Reserve Information Operations officers on the 101st’s senior staff who were jones’ing to hook up with the HTS program and make the large amount of money that HTS’ers did. That element covered for their inadequate performance, as well as contributed to the information ops that was devised against me while I was in transit to Bagram. (Read: a weapon of war was used against me before I set foot on Bagram.) I was not a welcome addition to the team because the baddies already figured out that I had a substantial background from Googling on me. (They did not previously know me from training, although one of the women recalled seeing me around Fort Leavenworth. Several hundreds or thousands of hits will come up if you Google on “Dudley,” “Dudley-Rowley,” or “Dudley-Flores.”) They evidently feared exposure as posers and they found a lot of fodder with which to propagandize me.

Not able to zing me back Stateside within a few days, the real slagging began. While sexual harassment was present, and had been before I had arrived, that was the least of our problem. All of us women were in fear of physical intimidation, as had been used on us. And, a major biggy: the “Rev. Dr.” Sturgis, the team leader, was ramping up the immature 1LT to view us as traitors. Outside the wire, in the field in Ghazni Province, in December 2008, he had the 1LT trying to maneuver us into specific villages where we knew specific Taliban military commanders had re-infiltrated. We already had enough data we needed about those villages to know they were red hot and no purpose was served by going there for more interviews, us women unarmed. We would, in fact, have been going off mission as previously briefed if we would have gone to those areas. The three of us women on that mission knew what the story was on that note. The 1LT was following directions from Sturgis to position us to get attacked and killed. (At no time was anyone “just trying to scare us.”) And, the 1LT was so vapidly enamored with Sturgis with his promises of Dubai vacations, good officer evaluation reports, cherry postings, etc. that he would have been dumb enough to drive us over an IED-strewn road if Sturgis had told him to do it. None of the HTS managers back Stateside changed words with me when I turned to them for advice and told them that I was not taking the women into those places. The 1LT was crestfallen when he heard from higher-ups on the FOB where we lived on-mission that those places were too hot. But, he really was fit to be tied when he saw John Stanton’s story in December that tagged on a paragraph about us women’s difficulties in the field (that did not disclose any information from the scene that could not be found over Wikipedia). And, in any case, I was not the one to leak that news to Mr. Stanton.

But, Sturgis and his buddies likely thought that I was the leaker since they were obsessed with targeting me. So, next thing we knew, we were being hustled away from FOB Ghazni back to Bagram. Come to find out, Sturgis, himself and/or through the 1LT, communicated to the CO of the FOB that we were in violation of operational security and needed to come back to Bagram to be called to account. We were greeted to a sign in the office about being traitors (as seen over http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/02/26/some-breaking-news-on-the-human-terrain-system-death-threats/). No one ever debriefed us about any OPSEC violation. The 1LT’s behavior worsened.

On the 31st of December 2008, Sturgis and the 1LT tried to get me off alone on a part of the Joint Operations Compound on Bagram that we never used, but we women foiled that attempt. In the meantime, while the 1LT had a pistol and a rifle, the civilian men (except one of the posers who had gone on vacation) were buying long guns in the bazaar and trying to get them operational. One of the women, a civilian who was a Army Reserve captain, but not in uniform on this tour of duty, was hard over to obtain a weapon. Her husband from Stateside was demanding that she buy a gun if push came to shove. When military women in my sleeping hooch on Bagram found out what was happening to me, they lent me a rifle to keep in my sleeping cubicle in case they had to step out and would not be able to defend me. (One of the women’s superiors had previously barred the 1LT from their workplace on Bagram because of his inappropriate behaviors.)

I began carrying my combat knife at all times. On the 2nd of January 2009, we discovered the death threat written in Spanish on a dry erase board in the office. After five days’ trying to get advice from a silent HTS management back Stateside, at the behest of friends, family, and the other women, I asked my Member of Congress to get a message to the Commanding General about what was happening to us. A few hours’ later, HTS Deputy Program Manager, retired Army Colonel Steve Rotkoff phoned and told me to come back Stateside to report on what had been going on.

I did so and fully expected to re-deploy from the verbal and gestural responses I was getting from HTS managers who heard my three-and a-half-hour report. But, instead, afterwards, I was left for about four weeks in a Kansas City hotel room until I received a firing notice in the e-mail from the subcontractor that recruited me and hired me for the HTS. They claimed that BAE and the government authorized them to fire me for inadequate performance. Pinging HTS managers to confirm that this was, indeed, a genuine firing this second time around, met with silence. Two days later, John Stanton had the first of his stories up online about what happened to me and the other women.

It is interesting to note that in the timeframe that we women were trying to get help, and as subsequent events played out, HTS salesmen were selling the program to President Obama for the cornerstone of the civilian surge in Afghanistan: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/03/27/afghan_plan_adds_4000_us_troops?mode=PF

How we were treated suggests that our concerns were covered up so as not to blemish the sales pitch to the President. For, in the case of the only Afghanistan HTAT, it demonstrated that the HTS was easily sabotaged from its internal “bugs” contradictory to its mission as a warfighting system.

In the meantime, Sturgis was recalled around the same time as myself and fired or forced to resign. However, he almost immediately found work with some facet of Glevum Associates and I would not be surprised if he found his way back to Afghanistan: Kabul or back on Bagram — by June 2009. (Glevum was a subcontractor in service to MPRI-L3 that was on contract with the government to provide various media assessment support services in the region to HTS, the 101st Army Airborne [now to the 82nd Army Airborne], and another client.)

I was fired before the 101st was able to complete their “window dressing” investigation that involved no Criminal Investigation Division authorities. Two-thirds or more of the report given to my Member of Congress is a tissue of lies. The pictorial evidence meant they had to cop to the fact that sexual harassment was going on. Some parts of the report are actually revealing, however. Like, how the 1LT acted in ways to make his death threat credible. Like, (and I learned this later from more information sent my Member of Congress) how the Special Forces “muscleman” had his Joint Ops Compound badge revoked for his failure to lead as “deputy team leader.” Like how the “Rev. Dr.” and the muscleman were blacklisted for contract hire in connection to any 101st capacity ever again.

When I FOIPA’d for the background materials that went into the 101st’s “investigation,” I obtained Sworn Statements from three Army lieutenant colonels on the senior staff of the 101st and an Army Reserve LTC working for an HTS unit near ours. The 101st’s investigation lasted from about mid-January to late March. In the last week of their investigation, they pulled these Sworn Statements out of these LTCs. All of them would be viewed as “false official statements” under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Recall that by this time I had already been fired. In that final week of the investigation, statements were sought from these men to the tune that I told incredible stories about famous people I knew, about my prior military and other background, about poor alleged production that came from me (Sturgis blocked all of us women from briefing any senior officers about the operationally relevant data that we had uncovered in our counterinsurgent activities as we were supposed to do). Additionally, these Army field-grade officers made whopper statements about my being so fat that I had to come through doors at an angle and could barely walk and stand upright on a level floor or fit into a tactical vehicle. One of these men claimed that I was in the central Joint Ops Compound building all the time complaining about living conditions, etc. The fact is, the whole time I was in Afghanistan, I was only in the office part of that closely neighboring building for a grand total of two hours, about one and a half hours spent with an Army Inspector General LTC explaining what was happening to me and the other women just prior to being sent outside the wire to FOB Ghazni. A FOIPA procedure revealed that the man didn’t even file a report on my visit.

As I have said elsewhere, I think the whole debacle started out small with the posers and their buddies not wanting to be found out to be posing and/or inadequate to the mission, along with such facts that they had probably, in toto, been paid about one million federal dollars for not doing the work of the HTAT and instead spending a good portion of their time abusing the HTAT women. Yet to be discovered is what, if any role, Sturgis and one of the Info Ops officers played in diverting or causing to be misused (if indeed the case) a federal money train of perhaps as much as five million dollars from federal contractor MPRI-L3 to Glevum Associates where the HTS and the 101st Airborne and another party were clients. It will also be revealing to find out who all among the 101st senior staff were in on the active perpetration in the overall affair, who were passive perpetrators, and just how widespread was any sort of “social contagion” from Sturgis et al.’s mythmaking among the 101st senior staff officers. Whomever all were in uniform who participated in these events should be held to account just for giving the 101st a black eye on the “Duty, Honor, Country” front. So far, my FOIPA’d information suggests that almost all the 101st’s senior staff officers were ultimately involved in some way. If that is so, where is the 101st’s Army Airborne’s honor?

After I was fired…. When John’s 26 February 2009 article made the international online media, I began to be “counterblogged” over the Open Anthropology website (now Zero Anthropology). The blogger was an Army lieutenant colonel I did not know, LTC Robert Bateman. He was found to be counterblogging on me from his Pentagon computer during duty hours from his work in a DoD think tank close to the SECDEF. Besides Dr. Max Forte’s publicized data, I also FOIPA’d the proof right out of Bateman’s machine. In his blogs, he made crazy statements to make it sound like I never worked with Dr. Louis Dupree on the rescue and relocation of Afghans (a theme that the Bagram HTT LTC would hype in his Sworn Statement riddled with falsehoods). Bateman went on that I might be a fake veteran, and that “Mata la vaca” means “The Cow Kills.” I and my supporters’ analysis later found out that one of his associates is close to the HTS and has a history in opposition research. That person was Sean McFate, Dr. Montgomery McFate’s husband. I had to be separated from Dr. Dupree, now seen by a wider audience as the stellar Afghanistan scholar that he always was, because how crazy would it be seen in the media if a Dupree associate on a substantial project involving Afghans was removed from Afghanistan and the HTS (amid public accusations that very few scholars with any Afghanistan credentials are in the country with HTS)?

I did not engage in a disastrous feud with soldiers in the field, but I most assuredly am doing my best to let Congress and federal executives know what happened to me and the other HTAT women in Afghanistan in detail. Because, it is our story that is the “poster child” of what has gone wrong with the Army’s Human Terrain System. There are many stories like ours from among our “big tent” teammates from former and currently serving HTS’ers. Ours was just more egregious in many ways. However, in the aggregate, there is a clear signal in the noise, a pattern that reveals the raging flaws in the HTS program and who all are/have been those who create and/or duplicate those flaws. In many respects I have been making a human terrain analysis of the Human Terrain System. My abilities are not so much from my intermittent 30-year background as a professor, as from the other things I have done to put food on the table during that same time span, like having been a soldier, having been an investigative news reporter, having done criminal justice research for real live drug and human trafficking cases, and having sought grants and contracts for scientific studies outside of Academe in which I partnered. It is, in fact, this background in addition to my academic PhD that made me a logical asset for the HTS.

What has not been widely mentioned in the media thus far has been my prior background at the forefront of “human terrain analysis” in the organization of social structural concepts and analytical techniques for a victimization and property damages assessment for Kuwait toward the end of the Gulf War. This effort that created a body of methodology and some other features, like a hybrid team for insertion into a war-torn area and a reachback-like cell preceded Mitzy Cybele Carlough’s (aka Montgomery McFate’s) 1994 dissertation by at least three years, her bar napkin epiphany by 10 years, and the 2006 Army and Marine Field Manual on counterinsurgency by 15 years. (By the way, the other HTAT women did not even know this until I told them at supper in the chow hall the night before I was flown off of Bagram in January. So much for my bragging on myself and talking about “famous people.”) I only mention it now to show how dysfunctional the HTS was/is.

It is the height of craziness that I was not re-deployed with the HTS. What is more, though I have been in demand for other programs requiring a SECRET clearance, I can’t be hired for the jobs because Sturgis and collaborators screwed my clearance up. I call them collaborators in every sense of the word because they not only sabotaged me, but the functioning of a warfighting system in Afghanistan. At the end of the day, what was done was sabotage and not merely “grab assing” among bored field-grade officers and sophomoric pranksterism with civilian “good ol’ boy” buddies. And, it is a national shame that HTS higher-ups thanked me for my role in bringing it to their attention, my life on the line, by firing me to cover up the facts. We Viet Nam Era vets call such treatment the “f**k you very much for your service” phenomenon. The more things change the more they stay the same.

To date, I have pulled together 600+ pages of evidence, analyses, and narrative. This packet is in the hands of members of both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees and other interested parties. I can forward a copy to you, Mr. Cary, if you are interested.

In the meantime, please know that I was not a party to a “disastrous feud.” I and my female teammate were victimized by “snakes in our foxhole” while attempting to perform our duties. We tried to get help as best we could, and at other times, we kept our heads down to survive. Other than that note, thank you for writing about the HTS. It is important to keep it in the media eye and to discuss its issues.

Many Kind Regards,

Marilyn “Stryker” Dudley-Flores, PhD

Almost one year ago we celebrated the remarkable 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Today we learn that his body has died. In the meantime, we continue to work with what he has left us, as can be seen in the latest posts on this blog concerning his vision of a future anthropology, as seen back from the 1960s. One of the statements he produced at the time continues to be one of the leading mottos behind this project. I look forward to continue grappling with his work. No goodbyes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, rather à la prochaine fois.

Claude Lévi-Strauss obituary
French anthropologist whose analysis of kinship and myth gave rise to structuralism as an intellectual force. Obituary by Maurice Bloch, The Guardian, Tuesday 3 November 2009.

Image:
Sketch of Claude Lévi-Strauss, 20 August 2007, Edward Drantler: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Levi-Strauss.jpg

[A momentary "distraction" from my "zero series," and a big thanks to John Stanton for the first set of news below.]

Tonight, Friday, 30 October, a free play reading in North Hollywood will start at 8:30pm — the title of the production: ANTHROPOLOGY: Or How To Win Friends and Influence Afghans (see the circular). The play was written by Rick Mitchell, an associate professor in English at California State University, Northridge. The featured story line is,

“A satirical examination of the US policy of making the War on Terror more culturally sensitive, ANTHROPOLOGY: Or How To Win Friends and Influence Afghans features a poor Afghan family struggling to survive as an overpaid private contractor, with a predilection for opium, a drug dealing warlord, an earnest academic and bawdy shadow puppets battle it out for who controls the story and the land.”

According to the author of the play, Rick Mitchell,

“Due to the absurdities of the current occupation of Afghanistan, the play contains a significant amount of comedy, along with live music, out-of-control private contractors, and violent puppets. And the performance features a great, multi-ethnic cast.”

In Rick Mitchell’s very interesting project description that laid out the original plan for the play, the main “objective will be to create a sweeping, epic drama that theatrically examines, through the plight of an anthropologist embedded in Iraq [now Afghanistan], cultural differences and historical conflicts related to the Iraq War and, importantly, the battle over the control of knowledge.” The play, according to that initial plan, was to feature “several individual, culturally specific stories offering widely divergent points of view that are representative of stories being told, contested, and collected (by social scientists) within contemporary Iraq (and perhaps Afghanistan). The play will also suggest that the pertinence of such stories to ‘winning the war’ is well understood by the United States military, which attacks not only ‘enemy combatants’ and their supporters, but also— culturally and psychologically—the primary narratives that they tell.” The play also critiques the Army’s December 2006 counterinsurgency manual, FM 3-24, a portion of which is to be read out during the play.

Anthropology itself, which after all is the first word in the title, comes in for some critical exposure as well:

“US-backed anthropologists have historically operated in war zones, in places like Japan, Viet Nam, Central America, and, more recently, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in spite of the fact that many anthropologists are strongly against allowing anthropology to support US war efforts. They fear, like the play’s embedded anthropologist (at least early in the play), that there is potential for government-funded fieldwork within “theatres of war” to be turned against the very people whom the social scientists are living amongst and studying.”

Mitchell says that anthropology is “a discipline historically referred to as the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’” (which seems to take me back to my zero series). The role of science and society and the legacy of the Enlightenment figure in the play’s contextualization:

since the Enlightenment a key problem in the West has been: How should scientific knowledge (and technology) be utilized, and whom should it benefit (or oppress)? This problem is also relevant to Western portrayals of the current “War on Terror” that pit the consumerist, technologically advanced West, with its high-tech military apparatus, against the “underdeveloped,” “primitive” Islamic insurgents of the Middle East, who often rely on low-tech guerrilla warfare and improvised explosive devices.

Research for the play was based on “extensive reading of books, articles, and blogs,… interviews with anthropologists, Iraq War veterans, Iraqis living in the US, and US-supported soldiers-for-hire (from companies such as Blackwater).”

The play will also feature comedy, music, and audience interaction.

The reading takes place tonight at the Academy for New Musical Theatre, 5628 Vineland (near Burbank), in North Hollywood, at 8:30 p.m.

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HUMAN TERRAIN: War Becomes Academic, is a new documentary film by James Der Derian at Brown University. According to the synopsis posted on the website for the film:

‘Human Terrain’ is two stories in one. The first exposes the U.S. effort to enlist the best and the brightest of American universities in a struggle for the hearts and minds of its enemies. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military adopts a controversial new program, ‘Human Terrain Systems’, to make cultural awareness a key element of its counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack by academic critics who consider it misguided and unethical to gather intelligence and target potential enemies for the military. Gaining rare access to wargames in the Mojave Desert and training exercises at Quantico and Fort Leavenworth, ‘Human Terrain’ takes the viewer into the heart of the war machine and the shadowy collaboration between American academics and the armed services.

The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returned to Brown University to conduct research on military cultural awareness. A year later, he left to embed as a Human Terrain member with the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan. On May 7, 2008, en route to mediate an intertribal dispute, his humvee hit a roadside bomb and Bhatia was killed along with two other soldiers.

Asking what happens when war becomes academic and academics go to war, the two stories merge in tragedy.

On that site you can view a list of the persons who appear in the film, read an extensive director’s statement and more about the filmmakers, and check for upcoming screenings.

With respect to the director’s statement, it does not appear to be pitched as a war propaganda film, given the references to “a dying empire” and “illusions of empire.” On the other hand, the film seems to pivot around the figure of Michael Bhatia, his interests, circumstances, decisions, and ultimately his death as a HTS researcher in Afghanistan in 2008. The director notes, “Michael became a public figure, with all sides swift to attach their own interpretations upon his death.” He adds: “After extensive and often rending conversations with his family, we decided that we could not make the film without having Michael’s story be part of it.” It is not clear why that had to be so.

Why must the story be about Bhatia? Is it because he encapsulates all of the main features of HTS, its development, and application (unlikely), or is it because of the drama of his death (likely)? Both the director, Der Derian, and Bhatia were at the Watson Insititute at Brown University, so I can appreciate that there can be an insider’s angle on an insider’s story. At they very least, I can say that the logic of the decision to focus on Bhatia is open to question. Der Derian goes further: “To the extent it was humanly possible – and humanely necessary – we wanted to provide all parties to Michael’s life and death the opportunity to tell their side of that story.  We went to the family, back to the military, and interviewed the supporters as well as critics of Human Terrain.”

Not to continue to offend as I apparently have offended many American readers many times (not that this in itself is of concern to me), my question is a simple one: Why is the story always about the Western protagonist as if his life matters more, and is more valuable and worthy of note, than any of the thousands of Afghan civilians who were killed by Bhatia’s employers, the U.S. military?

As for the HTS critics interviewed, these comprise Roberto González, Hugh Gusterson, and Catherine Lutz — which is great, except that their voices are submerged under more than twice as many supporters of HTS in the film.

Here’s the trailer:

The film that remains to be made, and will likely never be made, is one about HTS that does not feature Western protagonists, whether they be supporters or critics of the program, but rather one that is filmed entirely in Afghanistan and features only Afghans, especially in villages that have been “visited” by Human Terrain Teams. It would be an unembedded film, and led by Afghans themselves.

Two relatively short articles from the 1960s that I found useful, especially in connection with the previous post, provide a number of insights that exceeded the scope of that post. I want to share some of my “notes and quotes” from those two articles, with limited commentary aside from my headings — think of it as an extended footnote to the last post.

“A Revolutionary Discipline”

By Stanley Diamond
Current Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 5 (Dec., 1964), pp. 432-437
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2740001

Anthropology: “off the mainstream“

Although careerism and slick professionalism have made their inroads among us, we are still largely self-selected to study people off the mainstream of contemporary civilization (p. 432).

We speak for others:

we speak for societies that cannot speak for themselves (p. 432)

Only the civilized outsider can document, create the idea of the primitive:

it is only a representative of our civilization who can, in adequate detail, document the differences, and help create an idea of the primitive which would not ordinarily be constructed by primitives themselves. (p. 433)

There is, then, no final or static or exclusively objective picture of primitive society. We snap the portrait, using film of different sensitivity for different purposes. Moreover, there is no really sophisticated portrait of primitive society which can be transmitted to us by an actor from within the system, precisely because it is our experience of civilization that leads us to see problems (for us) where he perceives routine, and to pose questions that the primitive person is unlikely to ask about his own culture. (p. 433)

“Anthropology: Its Achievements and Future”

Author(s): Claude Levi-Strauss
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Apr., 1966), pp. 124-127
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2740022

Anthropology = the study of always disappearing primitives

The day will come when the last primitive culture will have disappeared from the earth, compelling us to realize only too late that the fundamentals of mankind are irretrievably lost. (p. 124)

It has become the fashion in certain circles to speak of anthropology as a science on the wane, on account of the rapid disappearance of its traditional subject matter: the so-called primitives.  (p. 124)

It is precisely because the so-called primitive peoples are becoming extinct that their study should now be given absolute priority. (p. 125)

the physical disappearance of populations that remained faithful till the very end to their traditional way of life does, indeed, constitute a threat to anthropology (p. 125)

Human nature is singular, the expressions are diverse (or how differences are superficial)

enlarging our narrow-minded humanism to include each and every expression of human nature (p. 124)

it is already certain that the outer differences conceal a basic unity (p. 127)

we may never again be able to recognize and study this image of ourselves (p. 127)

The futility of a native anthropology

The suggestion has been made that in order to render anthropology less distasteful to its subjects it will suffice to reverse the roles and occasionally allow ourselves to be “ethnographized” by those for whom we were once solely the ethnographers. In this way, each in turn will get the upper hand. And since there will be no permanent privilege, nobody will have grounds to feel inferior to anybody else. At the same time, we shall get to know more about ourselves through the eyes of others, and human knowledge will derive an ever growing profit from this reciprocity of perspective.

Well-meant as it undoubtedly is, this solution appears to me naive and unworkable, as though the problems were as simple and superficial as those of children unaccustomed to playing together, whose quarrels can be settled by making them follow the elementary rule: “Let me play with your dolls and I shall let you play with mine.” (pp. 125-126)

Having natives do anthropology, does not change anthropology

if native cultures are ever to look at anthropology as a legitimate pursuit and not as a sequel to the colonial era or that of economic domination, it cannot suffice for the players simply to change camps while the anthropological game remains the same. Anthropology itself must undergo a deep transformation in order to carry on its work among those cultures for whose study it was intended because they lack a written record of their history. (p. 126)

Anthropology: an outsider’s science

anthropology is the science of culture as seen from the outside and the first concern of people made aware of their independent existence and originality must be to claim the right to observe their culture themselves, from the inside. (p. 126)

Anthropology in the future might not be “Anthropology”

Anthropology will survive in a changing world by allowing itself to perish in order to be born again under a new guise. (p. 126)

And within a century or so, when the last native culture will have disappeared from the Earth and our only interlocutor will be the electronic computer, it will have become so remote that we may well doubt whether the same kind of approach will deserve to be called “anthropology” any longer. (p. 127)

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Anthropology might look it came to us with a dual consciousness. On one side, a consciousness influenced by ideals of science and objectivity, driven to developing a commanding knowledge about human others. On the other side, a consciousness of itself as a creature of imperialism, guided by a scientific paradigm that imperialism made possible. Does this mean that anthropology effectively has two personalities? Or is there more in common between the above two “sides” than one might think?

Imperialism: Making Scientific Anthropology Thinkable

An article that I like to refer to in my opening sessions in Decolonizing Anthropology is one by Joseph G. Jorgensen and Eric R. Wolf [(1970) Anthropology on the warpath in Thailand (a special supplement). The New York Review of Books, 15 (9), November 19]. In that article the two authors speak of a problem that has “dogged anthropologists from the inception of the discipline”:

European conquest and colonialism had, after all, provided the field for anthropology’s operations and, especially in the nineteenth century, its intellectual ethic of “scientific objectivity.” But “scientific objectivity,” we believe, implies the estrangement of the anthropologist from the people among whom he works.

Jorgensen and Wolf draw some heavy support for this thesis from Claude Lévi-Strauss [(1966) Anthropology: Its achievements and future. Current Anthropology, 7 (2): 124-127]. There is nothing dispassionate about anthropology, Lévi-Strauss argues, it is not mere contemplation of things at a distance. Anthropology is the outcome of

an historical process, which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered, their institutions and beliefs destroyed while they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence. (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, p. 126)

Like Jorgensen and Wolf, Lévi-Strauss finds the imprint of colonialism in anthropology’s very epistemology: “Its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as an object.”

Turning to Stanley Diamond at the end of their article, Jorgensen and Wolf hammer home the point about the dominant epistemological method of anthropology:

it is precisely the objective study, the reified examination, which is proving to be an illusion. In this situation, there can be no more students of Man studying men as fixed specimens in fixed environments. This was a privilege that the Western world preserved for itself as a consequence of domination. There can only be men who learn to bear witness to each other. In the struggle for the creation of culture against collective and dehumanizing forces, no matter [what] their ideological pretension…there can only be partisans. [Stanley Diamond. (1964). A revolutionary discipline. Current Anthropology, 5 (5): 432-437]

The relationship between imperialism and anthropology, therefore, runs very much deeper than a mere bureaucratic relationship with colonial administrations and the provision of reports, data, and advice. That kind of superficial relationship to imperialism can be changed much more easily than the foundational paradigm that makes the doing of anthropology doable and thinkable.

Anthropology as Anti-Colonial Protest?

In the same critical spirit of Lévi-Strauss, Jorgensen and Wolf point out that anthropology has another side to it. They argue that,

in the tradition of Montaigne and Rousseau, [anthropologists] radically questioned the pretensions to superiority of Western civilization, while seeking alternative visions of man. This latter aspect of the anthropological consciousness has always been recognized in the United States, to the enduring credit of such men as Franz Boas, Robert Redfield, and Paul Radin. Throughout the history of the profession anthropologists have condemned the assault of the American government on American Indians (although the “solutions” they suggested were not, and perhaps could not have been, better than those from any other source); and the Association has defended the social and cultural rights of minority peoples, and taken early and unequivocal positions against fascism and racism. The Nazis, it should be noted, understood this aspect of the discipline in Europe and systematically sought to cut the heart out of German anthropology, reducing it to a reflex of the regime.

Jorgensen and Wolf thus raise the relativist tradition in anthropology, and they specifically refer to Montaigne and Rousseau. I will to turn to a discussion of the former in the next section.

Jorgensen and Wolf end their article by stating, “Admittedly, anthropology was ambiguously conceived.” It’s not very clear to me that in its conception there is notable ambiguity, especially given the strong mark of polygenesis and scientific racism both in the Anthropological Society of London, and in the American School of Ethnology, during the mid-1800s, as anthropology was being conceived before it became fully professionalized. Any ambiguity there may have been, at the very least, is the basis for the “big question” behind this post: how much of a schism is there, in the end, between science and racism on the one hand, and cultural relativism on the other?

Thinking about alternatives, Jorgensen and Wolf state that, “in our view, [anthropology] must disengage itself from its connection with colonial aims or it will become intellectually trivial.” For me this is both a positive goal and a subtle shift in their message. By this point in their article they have completely dropped any discussion of the epistemology of the discipline, how the structures of thought inherent to anthropology and its “credibility” (their word) are rooted in an objectivity that is itself rendered operational by the colonial experience. They certainly do conceive of an altered role for anthropology, however, which I support even if I am not clear as to the extent to which they took up this role themselves: “Anthropologists must be willing to testify in behalf of the oppressed peoples of the world, including those whom we professionally define as primitives and peasants.” Expert witnesses, speaking in defense of the oppressed: a critically important role. This still leaves some questions open: from where does their expertise spring? What marks their expertise as “anthropological” as different from the testimony of others? And why do “we” need experts to mediate when the oppressed often do, can, and want to speak for themselves?

An Anti-Imperial Tradition?

Jorgensen and Wolf raised the figure of Michel de Montaigne, speaking to the roots of cultural relativism in anthropology, and the radical critique of Western superiority that they believe they saw resting within anthropology. In the past I have had occasion to read and use Montaigne’s famous essay, “Of Cannibals” ([1578-1580] the complete text is freely available online). I was especially impressed by his introduction of Brazilian indigenous commentary on French society, thanks to three Brazilian Indians brought to France. They provide a rare commentary for the colonial epoch, and a strong critique of imperial society, noting first that it was amazing that the men they met submitted to a monarch who was little more than a child, and then this: “they had observed, that there were among us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, while, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean, and half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses.”

Richard  Handler has written [(1986). Of cannibals and custom: Montaigne's cultural relativism. Anthropology Today, Vol. 2, No. 5 (Oct), pp. 12-14] a very relevant critical, yet sympathetic analysis of some of the contradictions within the work of Montaigne, which could in fact not only undo Montaigne’s own theses, while providing support for criticisms of cultural relativism, but they also betray one critically important approach marking all anthropology and subjected to a withering critique by Vassos Argyrou (which I shall raise fully in later posts). Montaigne’s argument is, in Handler’s words, that “we justify what are necessarily relative ideas – that is, those that come to us via custom – as absolutes” (Handler, 1986, p. 12). Handler quotes at length from Montaigne’s essay, Of Custom. I will quote the same passage from a translation different than the one available to Handler, simply because it is freely available to all interested readers:

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom; every one, having an inward veneration for the opinions and manners approved and received among his own people, cannot, without very great reluctance, depart from them, nor apply himself to them without applause. In times past, when those of Crete would curse any one, they prayed the gods to engage him in some ill custom. But the principal effect of its power is, so to seize and ensnare us, that it is hardly in us to disengage ourselves from its gripe, or so to come to ourselves, as to consider of and to weigh the things it enjoins. To say the truth, by reason that we suck it in with our milk, and that the face of the world presents itself in this posture to our first sight, it seems as if we were born upon condition to follow on this track; and the common fancies that we find in repute everywhere about us, and infused into our minds with the seed of our fathers, appear to be the most universal and genuine: from whence it comes to pass, that whatever is off the hinges of custom, is believed to be also off the hinges of reason; how unreasonably, for the most part, God knows.

As Handler explains, what Montaigne is doing here is arguing what has become a central thesis in relativist anthropology: that people naturalize arbitrary cultural constructs, mistaking the relativity of customs for absolutes of “nature” or “reason.” According to Handler, Montaigne argues that “humans do not easily recognize the element of bias that inevitably accompanies a culturally particular worldview – that is, that humans more frequently defend, with whatever arguments are at hand, than criticize or relativize their customary orientation to the world” (Handler, 1986, p. 12).

The first ambiguity, if not outright contradiction that Handler finds, lies in Montaigne’s retention of an assumption of an absolute and universal reason. As Handler explains, “to say that people unreasonably mistake ‘what is off the hinges of custom’ for ‘what is off the hinges of reason’ is to suggest that despite the natives’ confusion of custom and reason, there nonetheless exists some absolute faculty of reason by which, if they appealed to it, they could avoid their confusion” (Handler, 1986, p. 13). Thus, despite Montaigne underlining the power of custom to shape reason itself, “he refuses to relinquish a notion of reason understood as a culturally neutral faculty capable of impartial judgment” (Handler, 1986, p. 13). There is yet another way of explaining this “contradiction,” and it will come up again when we talk about Argyrou, and that is simply this: where does Montaigne stand that is pure reason and unaffected by the arbitrary power of custom?

Without Any Difference

As Handler points out, Montaigne’s thinking gives weight to the Enlightenment belief in universal reason, reason that is the same for all persons and all cultures at all times: “In Montaigne, reason similarly takes on universalistic implications, since in spite of his insistence on the diversity of custom, he reserves a place for reason – at least for ‘reasonable’ reason – above and beyond custom, a reason that can transcend custom and judge it” (Handler, 1986, p. 13). The crucial point to observe here is that when your logic guarantees such universal human unity, your interpretation of cultural differences is that they are mere surface phenomena: same contents, but different form. In this regard, the relativist position melts into the universalist one, and anthropology becomes an exercise not in “understanding” or “explaining” difference, but rather just explaining it away. (Again, more of this from Argyrou later.)

Tzvetan Todorov [(1984). The conquest of America. New York: HarperCollins] also takes issue with depictions of Amerindian cultural difference as rooted in a basic, pristine human nature that existed before the development of civilization. Handler says that Todorov’s argument is that this is a “superficially charitable view of exotic others [that] does no better than racism and ethnocentrism when it comes to inter-cultural understanding (Handler, 1986, p. 13). Handler reminds us of what Montaigne says above, that even in defending relativism he can only do so by way of an appeal to an absolute human “nature”: the reason that we suck in with our milk, that is infused in our minds by the seed of the father (Handler, 1986, p. 13).

What anthropologists know from cultural evolutionists as the thesis of the psychic unity of humankind found earlier expression in Bartolomé de las Casas’ idea of the Christian unity of humankind: every human can become a Christian (Todorov, 1984, p. 161). In the Papal Bull of 1537, Pope Paul III reissued the declaration to “go forth and make disciples of all nations,” because all are capable of receiving Christ. “Without any difference” becomes a critical component of las Casas’ defense of the humanity of the Amerindians (Todorov, 1984, p. 162). Christian universalism implies an essential non-difference among all humans, Todorov explains. He points to a quote from Saint John Chrysostom, used by las Casas in his debates at Valldolid: “Just as there is no natural difference in the creation of man, so there is no difference in the call to salvation of all men, barbarous or otherwise, since God’s grace can correct the minds of barbarians, so that they have a reasonable understanding” (quoted in Todorov, 1984, p. 162). It’s a position that helps las Casas to explain away difference, when seemingly defending it: though the Amerindians may appear to us to be “indolent” and indifferent to wealth, that is only because they still observe a basic Christian virtue that we have forgotten, which is to be content with no more than what is necessary for survival.

Todorov’s critique of las Casas’ document, Apologética Historia, is penetrating:

If it is incontestable that the prejudice of superiority is an obstacle in the road to knowledge, we must also admit that the prejudice of equality is a still greater one, for it consists in identifying the other purely and simply with one’s own “ego ideal”  (or with oneself). (Todorov, 1984, p. 165)

They may be different now, but they will not always be so. (It also seems apparent, Todorov tells us, that las Casas could not live up to his own universalist creed, as he “never shows the slightest tenderness toward the Muslims” [p. Todorov, 1984, 166].)

Handler adds that “in European history the emergence of an anthropological ability to understand others has not necessarily led to compassionate interaction with them” (Handler, 1986, p. 13). Indeed, relying on Todorov, he notes that cultural relativism can be enlisted in the service of individualistic pragmatism, where one uses one’s alleged understanding of others in order to better manipulate others (Handler, 1986, p. 13).

Handler’s key conclusion is that “a science of others’ customs should not blind us to the customary underpinnings of our own sciences” (Handler, 1986, p. 14).

Can Anthropology be Anti-Imperialist?

In “New Proposals for Anthropologists” [(1968). Current Anthropology, 9 (5): 403-435 – online here and here] Kathleen Gough comments on the institutional positioning of professional anthropologists (in Europe and North America presumably) and how this impacts on their place in a world experiencing momentous upheavals. She writes:

From the beginning, we have inhabited a triple environment, involving obligations first to the people we studied, second to our colleagues and our science, and third to the powers who employed us in universities or who funded our research. In many cases we seem now to be in danger of being torn apart by the conflicts between the first and third set of obligations, whiles the second set of loyalties, to our subject as an objective and humane endeavour, are being severely tested and jeopardized. (Gough, 1968, p. 405)

The passage could have been written forty years later in another crisis decade that presents so many reminders of her own. Some might argue about the order of her list, or that those elements should not even form discrete items in a list since they are all tied to one another: the funding of research tied to the research of the people we study tied to our colleagues who read our research or hire us to teach it. Even then, Gough and others were reflecting on what to do next in the face of worldwide crisis. In fact she quotes a 1966 paper by Peter Worsley, significantly titled, “The End of Anthropology?” Her suggested direction, given that specialization in small-scale societies is losing currency in a world of rapidly expanding scales of social interaction, is that we start to study large-scale social systems. Then we must be prepared for the fact that our work will resemble that of political scientists, economists, and sociologists. What we must do, Gough urges, is to study “modern society as a single, interdependent world social system” (Gough, 1968, p. 405). This leads us to the study of imperialism ultimately.

Why have anthropologists not been at the forefront of studies of imperialism, failing to study it as a unitary phenomenon? One reason Gough suggests is the impact of the process of specialization within anthropology, and between anthropology and the other disciplines. A second reason is the tradition of fieldwork in small-scale societies, which is simply the wrong methodological basis for contemplating overarching global phenomena such as imperialism. A third is our general unwillingness to offend the governments upon whom we depend for funding and access. A fourth reason is what she calls in the language of her time, “the bureaucratic, counter-revolutionary setting” in which anthropologists work in universities, contributing to a sense of impotence and reliance on machine-like models (Gough, 1968, p. 406). (Updating her terms, we would be speaking of the corporatization of the university, the spread of neo-liberalism, the chilling of academic freedom, and the push toward business-relevant research.)

In one broad sweep, Gough provides many useful clues about the relationship between anthropology and imperialism: (1) we do not study imperialism, so that “critiquing” it becomes more difficult, and unusual; (2) we cannot study imperialism, because we have the wrong methods; and, (3) we should not study imperialism, because it might offend sponsors and bosses, and could unseat us. Ironic then, that the discipline that is institutionalized in universities at the same time as Euro-American imperialism reached new giddy heights, in the late 19^th century, the discipline that was imperialism’s traveling companion if not scout, is the discipline that is disarmed from studying the context, causes and conditions of its own creation and current existence. Anthropology is about the study of others out of fear of facing ourselves? That would be rather depressing, a kind of inverted narcissism.

Propositions to Go

Thus far what we have encountered above are the following issues relating anthropology to empire:

(a)    the imperial nature of anthropology’s inherent epistemology;
(b)   the colonial positioning of anthropologists in the field;
(c)    the dependence on sponsorship by imperial powers;
(d)   a crisis of confidence regarding the nature and purpose of our expertise; and,
(e)    doubts about whether we ever have, or ever could, actually understand difference.

We already know that anthropology, as we know it, is a Western construct. Anthropology is a Western way of producing knowledge of the world, based on many, disparate, small parts of the world. It is also one Western way of consuming the world. But it’s not just like any other form of gaining knowledge of the world, not anthropology as we know it. Nobody – no students, no professors – can really say that the only reason or the most important reason that they entered anthropology is that they were interested in knowing more about other cultures. It is not an innocent quest for knowledge. One does not need degrees to learn about other cultures, and learning about other cultures does not lead to degrees (for most humans). You may have a thirst for knowledge, but something else is motivating you as well, and that something else is of critical importance. When one enrolls in a degree program, one is enlisting in an industrialized, professionalized, system of production, one of whose outputs is credentials, and another being power. Anthropology in institutions is not just there to teach the world about the world: it is there to teach a small club of members about the “right ways” of knowing that world.

Likewise, ethnography would seem to be the very last candidate on a list of preferred, sane, and humane ways of getting to know others. Getting to know other people does not mean that we intimately scrutinize them, document them in our notes, and lay out their lives (according to the accepted formulas) for an audience of specialist surveyors, inspectors, and guardians of the discipline. Wanting to share knowledge about others should not mean that we think that only we can explain others, and that we can even explain others to themselves, like expert demystifiers, above it all. Otherwise it would seem absurd: those who taught me about themselves, as I was ignorant about them, need me to explain them to themselves?

However, it is not absurd, it is functionally useful for maintaining the Westerner in the position of protagonist. Anthropology as a science is a way for the West to maintain its imperial centrality in explaining the rest of the world to the rest of the world. It teaches the world that all legitimate and valid interpretations of the world are to be made by Westerners. Our appreciation for science reflects our lust for influence and desire for rewards. Science sells. Science develops innovative means of control. Science offers us better means of efficiently managing the animals.

As we proceed we will look at a number of proposed alternatives: native anthropology; indigenous anthropology; anthropology at home; and world anthropologies. Some of the “big questions” to be asked are already familiar ones on this blog, and a number of persons have already offered their comments – nonetheless, here they are again, in one list:

• Can a decolonized anthropology exist as anthropology as we know it?
• Would not the real decolonization of anthropology mean its complete termination?
• Would a decolonized anthropology even be recognized as anthropology?

It is not because of its mental endowments that only the Western world has given birth to anthropology, but rather because exotic cultures, treated by us as mere things, could be studied, accordingly, as things. We did not feel concerned by them whereas we cannot help their feeling concerned by us. Between our attitude toward them and their attitude toward us, there is and can be no parity.

Therefore, if native cultures are ever to look at anthropology as a legitimate pursuit and not as a sequel to the colonial era or that of economic domination, it cannot suffice for the players simply to change camps while the anthropological game remains the same. Anthropology itself must undergo a deep transformation in order to carry on its work among those cultures for whose study it was intended because they lack a written record of their history. (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, p. 126)

[This is the first in a descending series of articles that will bring this blog to a close.]

Circle the Wagons!

If the “nativism” that Adam Kuper alleges was spawned by the marriage of American post-modernism and radical political engagement means that only the native can speak for the native, then Kuper will have none of it. More than that, in “Culture, Identity and the Project of a Cosmopolitan Anthropology” (Man, 1994, 29 (3): 537-554), Kuper warns us – anthropologists, to be specific – that nativism is an “obvious challenge.” At risk is the whole anthropological enterprise, and the situation is urgent. We must regroup and reconnoiter.

Kuper’s work serves a useful purpose as a favourite foil of mine, to open my course, Decolonizing Anthropology. The “nativism” Kuper tilts against in his article is one form of an anthropology that rids itself of colonial ambitions to occupy other people’s representational territory, having submitted them to close and intimate inspection and analysis in a manner that echoes the zoological and anatomical precursors of institutionalized anthropology. Some might call it, for greater precision, a “decolonialized” anthropology, as in the colonialists resigning and withdrawing from territories they had settled, rather than a decolonized anthropology which can mean many other things.

While Kuper argues for a “cosmopolitan anthropology” to rescue the collapsing discipline from what he sees as its hostile ethnic critics, he does not mention that for a century the American Anthropological Association had no section for indigenous anthropologists – ironic cosmopolitanism. The American anthropological discipline, built on the backs of Native Americans, finally afforded them a distinct space within the AAA, a century after it was founded. Indigenous anthropologists won approval from the AAA to form a section, on 05 December 2007, with their section now named the “Association of Indigenous Anthropologists.” This development would have possibly complicated matters for Kuper, because what if the allegedly nativist native is also an anthropologist, is anthropology still in danger? And when a native becomes an anthropologist, is this not a concrete example of cosmopolitanism? More to the point perhaps, the formation of the AIA may be too little, too late, as indigenous studies programs have grown and spread across North America, and the AIA is easily rivaled in size and prominence by independent associations such as the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

Kuper appears to be rather unhappy that there has been any debate about the “authority” of anthropologists to represent others, his intervention thus forming part of a conservative, indeed reactionary, backlash against “post-modernism,” a reaction shared by many anthropologists of all political stripes. In particular, Kuper takes time to emphasize that the debates that have taken place, are American debates:

The recent debates have been dominated by American scholars, and it is necessary to make explicit something they take for granted. The project of anthropology that is in dispute in their work is the American project of cultural anthropology, one quite distinct in the second half of the twentieth century from the dominantly European project of social anthropology. Moreover, the political spirit that often informs it has, again, a distinctively American character. (p. 538)

In order to help him make his case, Kuper then devotes several uninspired pages to reprising the history of American anthropology and the evolution of the culture concept (as if there was not an extreme overabundance of such material already), without ever really making the connection to the nativist threat that trips so many alarms for him. However, as we shall see, even his American premise is in jeopardy.

“Political Correctness”

Kuper thinks he has found a paradox. On the one hand,

The post-modernists preferred the image of a cacophony of voices, commenting upon each other and as they say somewhat mysteriously ironicizing. The ethnographic object is multifaceted, it can only be partially and fleetingly glimpsed from any one perspective, and cannot be analysed. The assertion of objectivity in traditional ethnography had been in reality a display, promoting a claim to authority political as well as intellectual. The rhetorical performance of the ethnographer was a trick, an exercise in persuasion, and the critic’s job was to unmask it. (p. 542)

Yet on the other hand,

There was a kind of truth to which the ethnographer was nevertheless obliged to bear witness: the natives had to be given their unedited say. This prescription was justified by a political argument against domination, and in favour of democratic expression (most explicitly perhaps, in Marcus & Fischer 1986). The ethnographer therefore had the duty to bear witness for the natives, but without imposing an editorial voice. There was increasingly a vogue for ethnographies in which the ethnographer simply acts as a facilitator for a native autobiographer, or for oral histories. The ethnographer is a medium, translating and publishing texts (an enterprise which, interestingly enough, can be traced back to Boas). (p. 542)

Perhaps I do not understand what Kuper means by “paradox.” The definitions of which I am aware emphasize “self-contradictory,” “absurd,” a “false proposition.” I do not see a contradiction here. On the one hand, there is a cacophony of voices, of anthropologists speaking for themselves and about each other…and on the other hand, natives also being “allowed” to speak, or more accurately, acknowledged as doing their own speaking. As no native authority edits the anthropologists, no anthropologist edits the natives. This seems to be balance, not contradiction.

The apparent confusion masks Kuper’s real concern, namely that: anthropologists should resume taking each other’s ethnographies as valid, authoritative accounts, and they should continue to occupy a dominant position where there is any discussion of native people. In an article that preaches the values of cosmopolitanism, Kuper is reviving a monopolist ethic that seizes the terrain for the non-native expert on the natives. Maybe, once again, there is no real contradiction. The cosmopolitanism advocated by Kuper is a familiar one, averse to encouraging radical political involvements: “This is, inevitably, a cosmopolitan project, and one that cannot be bound in the service of any political programme” (p. 551). Without commenting much, Kuper leaves me with the impression that the following is problematic from his standpoint (which is not, of course, any kind of demonstration that the following actually is problematic):

It is the voices struggling to articulate a message of liberation that the ethnographer must strain to hear. The ethnographer should therefore convey the messages of progressive forces to sympathizers abroad. Rosaldo, for instance, advises us to pay particular attention to ‘social criticism made from socially subordinate positions, where one can work more toward mobilizing resistance than persuading the powerful,’ and he cites approvingly as one example of what he has in mind ‘Fanon’s uncompromising rage’.” (p. 543)

I think that such a position, as Rosaldo’s, is a valuable formulation that provides the basis for an engaged, public anthropology, that also opens itself to genuine collaboration with a host of non-anthropologists, and I certainly share his appreciation of Fanon. Kuper, on the other hand, is more ambiguous to say the least, and lest we spend too much time reflecting on this, he returns our attention to what he calls “the nativist challenge.” Again, Kuper performs a valuable service: in telegraphing his calls for emergency assistance, he indicates the presence of bleeding wounds. I wonder how many others smell the blood in the water.

“The Nativist Challenge”

Kuper is aware that indigenous critiques of anthropology were not invented by either post-modernists or politically correct anthropologists:

To be sure, a native protest against metropolitan ethnographers had been articulated long before post-modernism swept into anthropological discourse. African intellectuals – and others – were making a nationalist case against foreign ethnographers, and sometimes against ethnography altogether from the 1960s onwards. (p. 544)

Then it becomes very unclear as to why he spent the first half of his article writing as if nativism was primarily a fabrication of overly sensitive, self-doubting, post-modern Americans.

Kuper also concedes that there was a relationship between anthropology and colonialism:

To begin with, to be the subject of foreign, metropolitan, exoticizing ethnography is equated with the experience of colonialism. Certainly the two did often go together. (p. 544)

This is by no means a major concession – not making it would have been very adventurous, considering the labour that would have been required to write out the history of British anthropologists serving colonial administrations, and American ethnologists and ethnographers serving the causes of scientific racism, westward American expansion, and the administration of captive American Indian populations. Not to mention the presence of anthropological entrepreneurs at freak shows and World Fairs.

Having made these concessions, Kuper returns to a slightly more sarcastic mode: “Everywhere the dominant Westerners do the ethnography, marginalizing the natives, packaging their way of life for exploitation (if only in the economically rather unprofitable business of academic life)” (p. 544). The bracketed comment, I take it, is meant to elicit chuckles at the idea that we can be exploiters, especially if one limits and reduces exploitation to exclusively materialistic appropriation and gain. Unfortunately for Kuper, not even that argument will work, for those of us who have made careers and earned salaries in return for our ethnographic adventures among the natives.

Kuper does a very good job of outlining a number of critical points of view with which he takes issue.

First,

The foreign ethnographer, imprisoned in a culturally-constructed mind-set, cannot truly understand the native, or master the inwardness of the native language. American intellectuals had been told for some time that white people could never appreciate what it meant to be black, that men could not understand women, and that only the ill or disabled could understand those similarly afflicted. Some believed it. Few argued publicly to the contrary. These American gospels penetrated anthropology, and some were led to the conclusion that only the native can understand the native, only the native has the right to study the native. (p. 544)

Second,

The nativist can also appropriate the premiss – mysteriously taken for granted in much of the recent literature – that the only reliable knowledge is self-knowledge. The native ethnographer can claim an intuitive understanding of the native. This may be taken to confer a natural and exclusive right to be the spokesperson of all natives. (p. 544)

Third,

Some would go further, and argue not only that the native should speak for the native, but that the native ethnographer should address himself or herself not to the foreign scholar but to a native audience; and should, indeed, write up the ethnography in the native language. This would avoid the distorting compromises that result from translation into one of the colonizing, metropolitan languages; and, moreover, would protect the confidences of the family from prying eyes. (p. 544)

In response, what is Kuper’s lead point? “These debates have had consequences for access to the field” (p. 545). He adds, “The seventies spawned a whole library of books about the ways in which anthropology inspired and legitimated colonialism. I am sceptical about some of these historical claims” (p. 545). He understates his skepticism, as we shall see in later posts, and overstates the magnitude of literary production on the subject of anthropology and colonialism.

Researchers versus Ethnicity

The view that only natives should study natives, Kuper asserts, is an absurd orthodoxy. This has “potentially dangerous implications for the practice of anthropology today” (p. 545). We must beware, he says, “lest the question of whom we should study, who should make the study, and how it should be conducted is answered with reference to the ethnic identity of the investigator” (p. 545). Beware, indeed, given that he raises the Nazi specter in his next paragraph.

Kuper does make one surprising concession. Having insisted and repeated that the phenomenon he is attacking, nativism, is American – even if he later mentions that, yes, yes, sure, Africans and what not pioneered the critique – he then tilts against nativism in the Greek academy, after pointing out that nativism dominated Nazi German ethnology, survived in Eastern Europe, and currently flourishes in some universities in contemporary Spain (pp. 545-546). Perhaps the theme here is that “we are all Americans” after all, except that the Nazi phantom Kuper invokes means we are all Nazis too.

Regardless, Kuper does raise very important questions: “We must remember that there are alternative definitions of our project available. What does the process of ethnographic work really involve? Is the ethnographer analysing and composing ‘texts’ that are on a par with literary texts? And who reads the ethnographies, and for what purpose?” (p. 547).

How Does Ethnography Matter?

Having raised these questions, Kupers lead himself, and his readers, down a very interesting path, one with a trap pit for ethnography itself. In a discipline that has flaunted its ethnographic-ness, it is precisely this that Kuper lets fall onto the sharpened stakes in the pit. What anthropologists really contribute that is of value, is not a range of insider perspectives (which he patronizingly calls “folk models”), but rather that which is not developed through any fieldwork at all: “an analytical, historical and comparative perspective” (p. 549):

Folk models serve as ways of thinking and as guides to action, but they do not address the comparative and more abstract project of the ethnographers. (p. 549)

Indeed, like raw materials extracted from colonies and exported to the metropoles, the real production of ethnographic value does not occur in the site where ethnographic research was undertaken:

The ethnography – before and after publication – is subjected to critical, collegial examination by other ethnographers, and also by geographers, historians, economists and so on, themselves engaged in local research and equipped with overlapping and complementary expertise. This is a conversation that today decisively shapes ethnographic production, and, of course, it may often include both local scientists and a variety of foreigners… (p. 549)

Anthropological Cosmopolitanism?

Kuper emphasizes that “ethnographers should write for anthropologists” (p. 551). Leaving aside the fact that this means we must largely confine ourselves to writing journal articles, given that even academic book publishers prefer books that can sell to broader audiences, it raises a troubling realization. While seeking to push aside “ethnic” restrictions, the fact remains that when ethnographers write for anthropologists, those anthropologists are still primarily white, Euro-Americans. Such an anthropology, that arrogates to itself the label “cosmopolitan,” is merely a nativism with universalist pretenses. It is an ironic cosmopolitanism, that defines and defends itself as cosmopolitan precisely by leaving out the native except as a provider of curious folk models to be subjected to the theoretical manipulations of the anthropological expert. The aim is a plain and familiar one: “We should once again address social scientists, and aspire to contribute a comparative dimension to the enlightenment project of a science of human variation in time and space” (p. 552). Kuper’s choice of the word “science” is not accidental: he uses it in opposition to the humanities, and anthropology has no place in the humanities in his view.

But who are the creators of that enlightenment project after all? What happens to anthropology if or when “the natives” say no to being studied by anthropologists? What kind of system would support a profession studying “human variation”?

In the next post, I raise some other questions about anthropology and colonialism, questions that cannot be dispelled by simply re-labeling colonialism as “cosmopolitan.”

Over the past couple of weeks there has been much discussion online of the Taliban’s Youtube channel: Istiqlalmedia. The greatest amount of content on that site is, arguably, that generated by a mass of mostly hostile comments by YouTube users who in many cases would like to see the channel deleted. Right now, by any stretch, it is an utterly harmless channel that features a single video about reconstruction and love for Afghanistan. A far more prolific (allegedly/apparently) Taliban YouTube channel is that of The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, featuring much more of the kind of content that the YouTube users commenting above seem to have missed. The featured video on the latter channel is “US Base Annihilated in Afghanistan by the Taliban Mujahideen Oct. 2009,” shown below. I have tried repeatedly to post questions there, and far from getting an answer, the questions themselves are not being allowed to appear, while newer comments appear. My questions were simple ones: What is the exact date of the attack? Where did it occur? I was very suspicious of the fact that nowhere is there any other source that mentions the attack.

When you look more closely at this video, consider this:

• Is the truck shown at the start, which supposedly contains the mega-bomb that destroys the base, the same as the one that later appears in the video, moving slowly through the village next to the base?
• Is that a U.S. base? If so, how can one tell?
• And seeing that the U.S. has at least on one occasion sent in jet fighters to bomb a base that had been vacated, could the explosion in fact be the result of a bomb dropped by a U.S. plane, and edited to produce the suggestion that it was a result of the supposed truck bomb? Maybe explosives experts or members of the U.S. Air Force who can recognize their own handiwork might have some insight.
• Also, would a hovering U.S. helicopter allow an unknown truck to approach a base during a seemingly intense firefight, without firing on it?

In the course of what is now called a counterinsurgency campaign by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, we have been told a lot about using aid, latching onto civilian non-governmental organizations (“civil military fusion“), “mixing fighting and food,” building clinics, undertaking development efforts to ensure jobs and “bring progress” to Afghan villagers in order to lure them away from the Taliban, and various so-called “non-kinetic” measures, and of course the work of the Human Terrain System. War would now be fought differently, as if it were not war, which makes it less surprising to see commentary on this blog insisting now that it is not war. It’s more like buying the peace. So how do you buy the peace? The simple and direct Italian method is this: with money.

Silvio Berlusconi, 9 July 2008. Ricardo Stuckert/PR, Agência Brasil, http://www.agenciabrasil.gov.br/imagens. From Wikimedia Commons at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Silvio_Berlusconi_09072008.jpg

So why is there a “scandal” at whose centre is now The Times of London, pitted against the Italian government of Premier Silvio Berlusconi and the Italian Defence Minister, Ignazio La Russa? (See: “Silvio Berlusconi issues denials over Afghanistan bribe scandal,” Tom Coghlan and Nico Hines, Times Online, 15 October 2009.) The “scandal” is this, as ostensibly constructed by the media, and the official denials from Rome: that Italian intelligence paid off the Taliban in the Sarobi district east of Kabul to not attack Italian forces. In fact, Italian forces suffered almost no attacks, and no losses during their stay in Afghanistan, minimizing the political cost of the war at home. Indeed, “when six Italian troops were killed in a bombing in Kabul last month it resulted in a national outpouring of grief and demands for troops to be withdrawn” (source). Berlusconi then promptly announced, after that suicide attack that killed six Italian paratroopers, “we must bring our boys home as soon as possible” (source).

But is the fact of the payment of tens of thousands of dollars really the scandal? After all, the Italians, and the media, depicted the Italian zone of operation as “a benign area,” and one which “the Italian military had been keen to show off to the media as a successful example of a ‘hearts and minds’ operation” (source).

Haji Abdul Rahman, a tribal elder from Sarobi, recalled how a benign environment became hostile overnight [when the French replaced the Italians]. “There were no attacks against the Italians. People said the Italians and Taleban had good relations between them” (source).

(Given the last sentence, I envision scenes of Taliban fighters and Italian soldiers enjoying spaghetti alla marinara together, with some bottles of San Pellegrino aranciata, then some cannelloni and espresso, followed by games of briscola and bocce. Prosciutto crudo and vino, of course, would be off limits to il carissimo signor Talib.)

What is the difference between paying tens of thousands of dollars to the resistance, to “stay quiet,” and building schools and clinics or handing out food aid, or hiring them for security? Is it the belief that villagers are fundamentally neutral, that the Taliban are not inherently embedded in the villages, and that if the Taliban can be out maneuvered they will be forced to return to their true place of origin…which is where? Is it the belief that once a clinic is built, that the Taliban’s brothers, fathers, sons, and cousins in the village will not use the clinic to attend to their wounds? Or are occupation forces committed to raiding hospitals and clinics more frequently now, in continued violation of international law?

Instead, the scandals in question seem to be other ones entirely. First, there is the scandal that what was once an official secret, kept from all of us but known to all NATO military commanders in Afghanistan, has now become public. Secondly, it turns out that the Italians were not the only ones to be paying off the Taliban — everyone does, according to a senior Afghan Army officer, except for the Americans and the British, the ones to bear the brunt of Taliban attacks, and apparently the French (more later). As The Times revealed, everyone in NATO knew about this; high ranking NATO officials provided the information to the newspaper, and it was confirmed by other high ranking officials, and further confirmed by U.S. intelligence and the U.S. Ambassador in Rome. Thirdly, the scandal is that the Italians failed to inform the French who replaced them in the area, and who suffered a slaughter as a result in May of 2008 (See: “French Opposition demands answers on bribe claim in Sarobi ambush,” Times Online, 15 October 2009). The French public was scandalized to see photos of Taliban fighters wearing French helmets, flak jackets, watches, and holding French weapons after the attack, which also saw the mutilation of the bodies of the dead French soldiers.

The French Defence Ministry confirmed that it had long been aware of “rumours” of the Italian payoffs, and a senior Afghan Army officer told Agence France-Presse: “We knew that Italian forces were paying the opposition [fighters] in Sarobi so they would not be attacked. We have information on similar agreements made in the western Herat province by Italian soldiers under NATO command there” (source). As for the French: “Asked whether it was normal practice to pay the Taleban to avoid combat engagements, he [Rear Admiral Christophe Prazuck] added: ‘It is not French practice in Afghanistan in any case’” (source).

“One cannot be too doctrinaire about these things,” a senior NATO officer in Kabul said. “It might well make sense to buy off local groups and use non-violence to keep violence down. But it is madness to do so and not inform your allies” (source).

The scandals multiply further, however. There is also the scandal that NATO leaders claim their domestic publics will oppose the war in greater numbers if they see their troops dying to prop up an illegitimate government in Kabul, the result of an electoral fraud the extent of which U.N. itself has tried to cover up. This is not to mention wide condemnation of the marriage law passed earlier this year by the Afghan parliament, that many in the West saw as legalizing spousal rape. So how about a war that props up Taliban coffers? This is a war that, the more is spent on it, the richer the Taliban get, and the more powerful they become. No wonder they seem so eager in welcoming further troop surges — it’s not just bravado, they are being sincere.

Then there is the scandal of a shoddy, botched war effort that resembles more of a medieval crusade with soldiers of fortune, merchants, and bumbling monarchs. Even if the Americans decide to add 40,000 more troops, it seems that it will take them a year to get them and their supplies in place (source).

And the ultimate scandal remains: that foreign troops are dying for absolutely nothing, utterly in vain, and in the process killing Afghan civilians who also die for no reason other than just living in their homes, having attacked no Western nation.

As for the Italian method of buying the peace, it is simple genius. It made everyone happy, it seems, except for the Americans. One can just imagine the staged theater for any visiting American forces in Sarobi, with the Italians and the villagers feigning growls at each other to show the Americans that, yes, the fighting and hating was going on as planned. Apparently winning hearts and minds is only good as long as you don’t win all the hearts and minds; getting non-kinetic is only good for as long as there is some kinetic element; everything is good, as long as peace does not break out. What would become of the war then?

Here is a medley of updates concerning previous posts on this blog:

Concerning Montgomery McFate’s doctoral dissertation:

Montgomery McFate’s PhD dissertation (when she was Montgomery Cybele Carlough) has been digitized in its entirety and is available for download by persons using libraries with subscriptions to ProQuest. What follows are some of the significant details about her dissertation, especially with reference to recent discussion on this blog.

Carlough, Montgomery Cybele (1994).  Pax Brittania: British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, 1969-1982. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, United States — Connecticut. (Publication No. AAT 9522728).

In her Preface/Statement of Disclosure, Carlough (McFate) indicates her sources of financial support for her research: “This doctoral research was financially supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship (1991-94), Yale University Fellowships (1990-94), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation pre-dissertation Fellowship (1990-91), a Council on West European Studies travel grant (1993-4), John F. Enders Fellowship (1993-4), the William’s Fund (1991,1993-4), and the International Security Program/Smith-Richardson Foundation at Yale (1993-4).”

Providing us with an overview of her fieldwork activities, she writes: “Fieldwork was conducted in 1989, 1991, 1993, and 1994. Interviews, prison visits, participant observation, correspondence, and conversations were conducted with members of the Republican Movement in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Holland, and North America, including but not limited to the following groups: Provisional Sinn Fein (PSF), Glor na n-Gael, Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), Irish Northern Aid (NORAID), the Ulster Gaelic Club (UGC), and Information on Ireland (IOI).”

In addition, “Interviews, participant observation, correspondence, and conversations were conducted with members of the British defence establishment in the UK, including but not limited to the following groups: serving and retired members of the British Army, the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies (RUSI), the Corporation for Operations Research and Defence Analysis (CORDA), historians at Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, and an ‘independent military sub-contractor’ (mercenary).” [As David Price noted in his CounterPunch article, at this time Carlough/McFate was barely softening usage of the term, mercenary.]

Carlough/McFate also tells the reader: “Neither members of the British defence and security establishment, nor their Republican counterparts, were aware of my research on the other side of the military looking-glass, and this manuscript may therefore come as somewhat of a surprise to them. This research was conducted informally, without the assistance or official sanction of the British Army or the Republican Movement. No members of either organization exceeded the limits of security, or jeopardized their operations, by allowing me access to classified documents.”

Finally, with respect to her supervision, and other academics who assisted her, she writes: “I would like to acknowledge the intellectual contributions of Professor Harold Scheffler [anthropology], Professor David Apter, Professor George Andreopoulos, Professor John Middleton [anthropology], and Professor John Szwed [anthropology] at Yale University. I would also like to thank Professor Paul Bracken, Professor Graham McFarlane at Queen’s University, Belfast, Dr. John C. Dolan at University of Otago, New Zealand, Omid Mantashi, Linda Angst, Peta Katz, Alistair Renwick, Brian Baer and especially Arturo Cherbowski-Lask.”

Update: Thanks to a trackback from An American Lion, I “discovered” that Montgomery McFate is a “brave thinker” in this brave new world — The Atlantic, selects this as the quote of choice for this brave thinker: “If you understand how to frustrate or satisfy the population’s interests to get them to support your side in a counterinsurgency, you don’t need to kill as many of them.”

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Human Terrain System Contract: Georgia Tech

As indicated here:

Principle Contractor: Georgia Tech Applied Research Corporation [applied commercial research arm of the Georgia Institute of Technology]
Date of Issuance: 10/9/2009
Branch of Service: Army

Contract Details:
Georgia Tech Applied Research Corp., Atlanta, Ga., was awarded on Sept. 30, 2009 a $7,820,869 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for the Human Terrain System Project used to train personnel to deploy on human terrain teams and human terrain analysis teams in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. Work is to be performed Leavenworth, Kan., (65 percent), Atlanta, Ga., (30 percent), and Oyster Point, Va., (5 percent) with an estimated completion date of Aug. 31, 2010. One bid solicited with one bid received. U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal, Ala., is the contracting activity (W31P4Q-08-D-0006).

Total Contract Value: $7,820,869

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Minerva Research Initiative: Department of Defense, National Science Foundation

(1) I have been interested in finding which academic institutions outside of the U.S. have partnered with U.S. counterparts in receiving and working on projects funded by the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative. Despite proclamations of openness, the Pentagon never released this information in its first announcement of grants awarded, although the fact that three foreign institutional partners existed was mentioned. Searching the faculty news pages of the institutions of American grant recipients, I learned of the following non-U.S. institutional partners:

• Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sweden) — collaborating with Susan Shirk and Tai Ming Cheung on “The Evolving Relationship between Technology and National Security in China” (source).
• Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po (France) — led by sociologist Riva Kastoryano, collaborating with Arizona State University’s Mark Woodward on “Finding Allies for the War of Words: Mapping the Diffusion and Influence of Counter-Radical Muslim Discourse” (source).
• S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) — led by Kumar Ramakrishna, collaborating with Arizona State University’s Mark Woodward on “Finding Allies for the War of Words: Mapping the Diffusion and Influence of Counter-Radical Muslim Discourse” (source).

In the second round of awards, a Canadian university is the lead institution on a Minerva project:

• Patrick Barclay (University of Guelph) and Stephen Bernard (Indiana University) – “Status, Manipulating Group Threats, and Conflict Within and Between Groups”

(2) While some are saying that no anthropologist has been awarded a Minerva grant, that is not correct. Mark Woodward, of Arizona State University, mentioned above, is in fact a cultural anthropologist who teaches in the Department of Religious Studies.

Miscellaneous: Patricia Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies is conducting research with a Minerva grant, that violates international law. Martha Crenshaw, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, has made available online the research proposal she submitted to the National Science Foundation — have a look at it: “Mapping Terrorist Organizations” is a very good example of the kind of self-selecting adhesion to group-think, of telling the authorities what they want to hear (and in their own language too), that makes this an excellent example of the “Sovietization” of academic research in the U.S. It also mocks the intellectual credibility and academic value of the entire Minerva selection process, regardless of NSF “peer review.”

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How to get out of Afghanistan

Hugh Gusterson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 12 October 2009

EXTRACTS:

“The counterinsurgency strategy will fail because foreign troops, especially in a country such as Afghanistan, provoke nationalist resistance. Thus, counterinsurgency will be fuel for, not an antidote to, insurgency. The Biden-Levin strategy also will fail because Pashtuns don’t want to be policed by Uzbeks and Tajiks and because newly trained Afghan troops won’t fight hard in a war in which they see themselves as surrogates for Americans, deployed on behalf of an American cause for which Americans weren’t willing to give up their own sons. Did Washington learn nothing from the failure of the Vietnamization of the Vietnam War? Moreover, the aerial attacks on suspected Al Qaeda fighters advocated by Biden will, as counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen has argued, inevitably miss many insurgents while killing many innocent civilians. This will, in turn, produce further hatred of the United States among the Afghan population.”

“If it is not already doing so, the Obama administration should be entering into discreet conversation with a range of insurgent leaders in Afghanistan, seeking an accommodation that would divide a majority of the insurgents from the hard-line sympathizers with Al Qaeda. Such an agreement might allow Afghanistan to be ruled by a more legitimate government that would incorporate elements of the Taliban into a central administration or devolve regional power to them. In exchange for this and for foreign reconstruction aid, the United States might receive an assurance that Al Qaeda wouldn’t be allowed to resume its former operations in Afghanistan. If Al Qaeda returned, the penalty would be the loss of foreign aid and return of the drones.”

“Those who find it hard to imagine an accommodation with the Taliban should remember that, in the 1980s, as portrayed in the book and film Charlie Wilson’s War, we funded and armed some of these people. They fought the Soviets as our allies and surrogates, and President Ronald Reagan welcomed them to the White House, calling them the Afghan equivalent of our founding fathers. While it would be too much to hope for a Taliban Thomas Jefferson, that doesn’t mean we cannot reach a modus vivendi that will enable Afghans to live without their country being full of U.S. bases or Al Qaeda training camps.”

In key respects, Hugh is echoing the arguments made by Andrew Bacevich, and I have some sympathy for them. I do believe that one vital mistake is being made, and that is in thinking that Americans will be allowed any opportunity to meaningfully dictate the terms of their withdrawal to Afghans. The Taliban, some of whose leaders now insist they be called mujahidin (because maybe only a tenth of their fighters are actual Talibs), seem very content to forcibly drive out the U.S. and impose humiliating defeat…and it is succeeding. Given that the Taliban now control as much territory as when they formed the national government, I am not sure there is much incentive for them to agree to U.S. terms. The threat of drones? How about another 9/11 in return.

Today this blog marks its second year of existence, with so many unanticipated outcomes that I think a post-mortem will possibly take years (or hours) of reflection and will likely not appear on this site. Today also marks the start of the final phase of this blog, which I hope to conclude before the year ends, with a return to its origins as it begins to devour itself. For the remaining time the blog will be dominated by that which served as the more or less final “spark” that impelled me to launch it, and thus I return to Decolonizing Anthropology, the graduate course I have now taught twice at Concordia University. Most of the posts to come stem from what I prepared for that course, and should I offer it again (who knows), their availability online will help me to shorten the lectures considerably and allow more time for all of us to talk and listen. Before I move on, I thought it best to have an elaborate conclusion, rather than the abrupt kind of departure of the author that I see on most defunct blogs, whose unexpected final post essentially states, “I’m fed up,” or “I’m too busy,” or even “I hate you people, get lost.” Some do not offer even that much. I have chosen to use the symbol of the Ouroboros to mark this transition, and to connect it only symbolically to a project that departs from this one and which will neither seek to be construed as part of an online anthropology “community,” nor address itself to anthropology.

The blog and the project, named “Open Anthropology” to date, have had their names altered to suit this final phase. The larger project has been retitled, “An Openly Post-Anthropological Project,” with some major revisions. The blog is, as you can see, now called “Zero Anthropology” in part to represent this phase of counting down to zero posts. That is the simplest aspect. Select pages have been revised as well, such the project page, and to some extent, “new world.” More complicated and difficult to convey through two words alone, was the long-stated aim of this project to get past anthropology as something that one “does” and more toward engaging anthropology as something to be transformed by shedding its ‘disciplinariness,’ going outside of professionalization, withdrawing from it in some key respects while also regarding “anthropological knowledge” as useful when seen from the right angle. That right angle is, in my view, to study anthropology as a Western knowledge system, as a mode of consuming the world by what are by and large white middle-class persons, and as a means of producing that world for other privileged consumers and for the authorities. As I have been arguing all along, it is no accident that colonial administrations and contemporary militaries have made use of anthropology — they used it because it can be useful. My aim has been a contrary one, to make it more “useless,” also represented by “zero” as valueless. The desire to move on, and start afresh, also marks this as a “zero” moment. The anomalous nature of zero as a numeral, as a place holder, also made it attractive.

To start this final phase, a roughly hewn opening statement:

As someone whose research in anthropology was originally focused on indigenous peoples, and specifically contemporary indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, coupled with a history of interest in imperialism and colonialism, certain dimensions of anthropology and its development became ever more apparent to me, and ever more troubling. One of these is that since its inception as an amateur activity that pre-dated its institutionalization in universities, anthropology has consistently sold itself as, one, a science, and two, one premised on the long-standing assumption that indigenous peoples would (or should) disappear or be diminished. Self-identified anthropologists in the mid-1800s, lusting for recognition and influence, tried to make a name for themselves in various commercially organized freak shows, ethnographic exhibitions, and museum displays. The desire to sell anthropology to the powers that be, as a science of the other, has never disappeared.

Anthropology was not just built on the backs of indigenous peoples, as if the survival of the latter were needed to guarantee the survival of the former. Instead, when one looks more closely and more critically, it is a discipline that has always been premised on the expected extinction of the indigenous. Since that has not come to pass, and indeed we instead witness worldwide indigenous political and cultural resurgence, we note that anthropological theories began to treat these resurgences as virtual pathologies: symptoms of capitalism, instrumental means of gaining power, with traditions that are invented. Politically, anthropologists have frequently found themselves set against the interests of contemporary indigenous peoples, whether with respect to the continued possession of indigenous remains for “scientific” purposes, or in disputing the appropriate representations of indigenous cultures. Not surprisingly, American Indian Studies, First Nations, and Indigenous Studies programs have sprouted across North America, alongside Ethnic Studies, African-American Studies, and so forth. Suddenly, the peoples presumed to be at the heart of anthropology, began to flee its control. In a tailspin, anthropology either pretended to continue business as usual, or began to develop autobiographic tendencies, or was practiced in the home society of the anthropologist, and there it began to look more like ethnographic sociology.

To this day, anthropology in North America remains the whitest of all disciplines in the social sciences, in terms of the ethnic background of the vast majority of faculty and students. Anthropology has always been a mode of knowledge-making chosen by Westerners as a reliable means of consuming knowledge about the colonial world, and for producing knowledge of that world for the authorities back home. Turned on itself, an anthropology of anthropology becomes an interesting journey of exploration into one of the Western world’s premiere colonial knowledge systems.

Also and still to this day, anthropology retains the same terminology of instruments of foreign policy, whether the diplomatic corps or intelligence gathering agencies: time to spent with living human beings in another society is called being “in the field,” and closely identifying with one’s hosts is treated as a problem, called “going native”. The methods of “doing fieldwork” continue to be based on a routine, accepted, and usually unquestioned duplicity: one is to establish rapport, build trust, and negotiate access, and purely for the purpose of extracting knowledge that was otherwise private. One’s “informants” (just as spies refer to them) were not to receive compensation, which would be seen as buying information: they were to be satisfied with knowing they were contributing to knowledge about humanity, presumably a good in and of itself with certain unproven assumptions about this leading to greater mutual understanding, respect, and peace. In return, however, anthropologists advanced their personal careers, and not necessarily the cause of peace since activism and advocacy were widely frowned upon as eroding the objectivity and legitimacy of anthropology in the eyes of the powers that be. To be sure, some anthropologists have challenged this state of affairs vigorously and directly, and to be sure, they remain a minority.

Zero Anthropology is about knowledge after anthropology, after its extinctionist, Eurocentric, and scientific premises, an anthropology so decolonized that it is no longer recognizable as anthropology. This project began by emphasizing the value of opening knowledge production to reciprocal and collaborative engagements between academics and broader publics, while trying to put that into practice online. It was about building on ideas and examples of ways of speaking about the human condition that look critically at dominant discourses and that challenge the status quo of global capitalism. The project was therefore oriented toward contributing to non-state, non-market, knowledges and participating in a public practice that suited the project. The project was also an invitation to critically reexamine the institutionalization of knowledge, looking for ways to reintegrate anthropology with other knowledge systems, and other disciplines, while criticizing the “disciplining” of the social sciences. What was initially called, for lack of imagination perhaps, the “Open Anthropology Project,” was explicitly about decolonizing knowledge, combined with a pronounced anti-imperialist orientation. (continue reading here)

As I look forward to turning and turning further, the next posts will involve me in an activity which I have grown to like least on this blog, and that is to write about anthropology. Let’s see how it goes, especially the challenge of turning away from more important “distractions.”

Anthropology, Human Terrain’s Prehistory, and the Role of Culture in Wars Waged by Robots: From “Gentle Pursuasion” to “Better Killing”

David Price

CounterPunch, vol. 16, no. 17, Oct. 1-15, 2009, pages 1, 4-6.

In the current print edition of CounterPunch, distributed to subscribers, David Price provides us with a very valuable in-depth look at the Human Terrain System (HTS), on two levels. First, Price critically examines the ways in which HTS, the incorporation of social scientists into counterinsurgency, has been sold as part of a domestic propaganda effort while simultaneously trying to appease growing disquiet among professional colleagues. Second, Price, having obtained a copy of Montgomery McFate’s Ph.D thesis from Yale University (when she was Montgomery Carlough), reveals some of the telling ways in which McFate has long been thinking about how anthropology can be used for warfare. This preceded her cocktail napkin epiphany by at least a decade. Indeed, the lead question in the title of this post is her own. With David Price’s permission, I will be summarizing and extracting some of the key passages from the article below.

Ethnographic Violence: On McFate’s Doctoral Dissertation

I will start with the second of the above points first, Montgomery Carlough/McFate’s doctoral dissertation in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, which focused on the resistance of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and British military counterinsurgency campaigns in Northern Ireland in the 1969-1982 period. According to Price, “McFate’s research was supported by a mix of fellowships ranging from the National Science Foundation, Mellon, and several Yale-based fellowships directed toward international security issues” (p. 4).

Price takes issue with McFate’s representation of her doctoral work. He says that McFate recently explained that her dissertation examined, in her words, “how cultural narratives, handed down from generation to generation, contributed to war,” and “how people justify violence” (p. 4). However, Price argues, “this resume might lead one to assume her research was balanced between the positions of the Irish insurgents and British counterinsurgents. Such an impression would be false. Her dissertation reads as a guide for militaries wanting to stop indigenous insurgent movements” (p. 4). He adds this poignant observation:

This was not a cultural study designed to give voice to the concerns of an oppressed people so that others might come to see their internal narrative as valid; it was designed to make those she studied vulnerable to cooption and defeat. (p. 4)

Price also raises a point about whether McFate had taken care to destroy her materials wherein key IRA informants and their statements could have been identified, and if not, this might have opened the door to a serious subsequent ethical breach: “[given] McFate’s current work in environments requiring security clearances, such past contacts and records would have raised many questions when she applied for her security clearance. It would be standard operating procedure during a security clearance background investigation to ask about the identity of her 1990s contacts with the Provisional IRA and other groups, as it would be to ask such a clearance applicant for field notes and other such material” (pp. 4-5).

McFate today avoids linking militarized anthropology with killing, an obvious violation of the ethical principle that one’s research must do no harm, especially to our informants. However, when writing her dissertation in the early 1990s, Price notes the following: “in her dissertation days, she more openly asked if ‘one could conclude that ethnocentrism – bad anthropology – interferes with the conduct of war. But does good anthropology contribute to better killing?’ Though an affirmative answer to this rhetorical question is implied, McFate left this question unanswered. McFate today categorically rejects claims that Human Terrain Teams are involved in using anthropology for what she referred to in 1994 as ‘better killing.’ Yet, HTS anthropologist Audrey Roberts recently told the Dallas Morning News that she does not worry that her data may be used by the military when ‘looking for bad guys to kill’” (p. 5).

(Indeed, the exact quote from the report, with words from Audrey Roberts, who reappears below, is as follows:

“Roberts does not worry about what the military does with her information, even if it is fed into the intelligence used by U.S. Special Forces for killing or capturing insurgent leaders.

“If it’s going to inform how targeting is done – whether that targeting is bad guys, development or governance – how our information is used is how it’s going to be used,” she said. “All I’m concerned about is pushing our information to as many soldiers as possible.

“The reality is there are people out there who are looking for bad guys to kill,” Roberts said. “I’d rather they did not operate in a vacuum.”

We learn from Price that McFate’s dissertation indicated two key elements of counterinsurgency that required anthropological inputs. One was psychological warfare operations. The second argued that, in McFate’s words, “knowledge of the enemy leads to a refinement in knowledge of how best to kill the enemy” (p. 5). Expanding on this theme, Price presents us with two critical quotes from McFate’s dissertation. One is that knowing the enemy better leads to more efficient killing:

“The fundamental contradiction between ‘knowing’ your enemy in order to develop effective strategy, and de-humanizing him in order to kill efficiently is a theme to which we will return. Suffice to say, that the dogs of war do have a pedigree, which is often ‘anthropological’ and that counterinsurgency strategy depends not just on practical experience on the battlefield, but on historically derived analogical models of prior conflict. Paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, enemies are not only good to kill, enemies are good to think.” (p. 5)

The second emphasizes the value of ethnography for out-manoeuvring the enemy:

“understanding the possible intentions of the enemy entails being able to think like the enemy; in other words, successful pre-emptive counter moves depend on simulating the strategy of the opponents.” (p. 5)

The reason why McFate and her fellow proponents of HTS seem to be favouring approaches that involve less violence by U.S. occupation forces, is that minimal force and maximal anthropological knowledge “leads to a more efficient occupation, cooption and conquest of enemies,” in Price’s words, and “not because they object to occupation, cooption and conquest” (p. 5).

The False Flag of Humanitarianism; The False Coin of Cultural Change

As David Price correctly points out in the piece, there has been a domestic propaganda effort to sell HTS: “HTS sells itself to the public through remarkably well-organized domestic propaganda campaigns that have seen dozens of uncritical articles on HTS, with personality profiles, as a ‘peaceful’ means of achieving victory” (p. 4). I have also argued this here, and in addition I have argued that HTS is best viewed as domestic propaganda, because its aims abroad are more illusory, ethereal, and unattainable than those of further shaping an already militarized academic culture back home.

One part of the domestic sales pitch by HTS, and its in-house team of public propagandists, has been to sell HTS as part of counterinsurgency, especially now that counterinsurgency (COIN) seems to be all the rage in Washington. Yet, as Price notes, buyer beware:

“Even counterinsurgency’s lustiest cheerleaders, such as the political scientist David Kilcullen, admit that historical instances of successfully using counterinsurgency for military victories have been extremely rare in the past half-century. But Washington’s counterinsurgency believers share a certain hubris, or vanity, that they are clever enough to overcome this daunting record of historical failure.” (p. 1)

To the extent that HTS also projects the idea that it can effect a form of cultural change in places such as Afghanistan (where U.S. forces have now fully retreated from parts of eastern Afghanistan such as Wanat and Kamdesh, without intending to return), then buyer be very afraid. What HTS propagandists do not tell you is,

“just how difficult it is for anthropologists, or anyone else, to successfully pull off the sort of massive cultural engineering project, needed for a counterinsurgency-based victory Afghanistan….There is no mention of applied anthropology’s failures to get people to do simple things (like recycling, losing weight, reducing behaviors associated with the spread of HIV, etc.) – basic things that are in their own self-interest. These counterinsurgency advocates think they can leverage social structure and hegemonic narratives so that the occupied will internalize their own captivity as ‘freedom’.” (p. 6)

The second part of the domestic sales campaign for HTS has been to dress the venture up as a form of humanitarianism. In the articles surrounding the death of HTS member Paula Loyd, we noted how many times she was cast as a “humanitarian” worker, as if she was in Afghanistan to simply provide aid and comfort to the locals. That story, and indeed the media can be very effective in constructing personal stories because they are more readily consumed by readers, is a story that sold well.

Building on the falsehood of “humanitarianism,” we can read Audrey Roberts’ article, titled in a manner that should be seen as a transparent attempt to mislead the uninformed: “A Unique Approach to Peacekeeping: Afghanistan and the Human Terrain System,” Journal of International Peace Operations, vol. 5, no. 2, Sept-Oct 2009, pages 24-25. In that piece, Roberts asserts: “For better or worse, we have become part of the social structure in Afghanistan. We are effecting change by building relationships through understanding between our soldiers and the Afghans with whom we work so closely” (p. 25). The “we” she refers to are American HTS employees, in Afghanistan for at most nine months, residing in fortified American military bases. They do not live with Afghans, because it is too dangerous for them, which also tells you just how much the indigenous Afghan “social structure” has actually welcomed them. Roberts, as a citizen of what Ann Jones called Hescostan, where Afghanistan proper exists “outside the wire,” works “with” Afghans “closely” whenever a military patrol permits it, and as Robert Young Pelton noted, it is can be very difficult for a HTT to even get to go out with a patrol. (Addendum: a comment shared with John Stanton, relayed in his latest post, is very suggestive of the likelihood that HTTs do not get the time they want or need in villages: “if the security element commander says it is time to go, then it does not matter if it is a Sergeant or a Captain giving the order — we leave, period.”)

That the Human Terrain System could be constructed as a “humanitarian” effort is perhaps one of the more atrocious falsehoods fobbed off on uninformed media consumers. As Price argues,

“Human Terrain Systems is not some neutral humanitarian project, it is an arm of the U.S. military and is part of the military’s mission to occupy and destroy opposition to U.S. goals and objectives. HTS cannot claim the sort of neutrality claimed by groups like Doctors Without Borders, or the International Committee of the Red Cross. HTS’s goal is a gentler form of domination. Pretending that the military is a humanitarian organization does not make it so, and pretending that HTS is anything other than an arm of the military engaging in a specific form of conquest is sheer dishonesty” (p. 4)

Neither is it humanitarian, nor is it apolitical and objective. HTS is firmly a part of imperial domination, as Price argues: “no matter how anthropological contributions ease and make gentle this conquest and occupation, it will not change the larger neocolonial nature of the larger mission” (p. 4).

What Does This Mean for Anthropology?

David Price writes two seemingly contradictory statements that caught my attention. On one hand he writes, and I agree with him:

“McFate’s early writings clarify why those designing counterinsurgency campaigns crave anthropological knowledge – and given the economic collapse’s impact on the anthropological job market, I would not preclude the likelihood of some measure of success, especially as these calls for anthropological assistance are increasingly framed in under false flags of ‘humanitarian assistance’ or as reducing lethal engagements.” (p. 6)

On the other hand, he writes, “most anthropologists are troubled to see their discipline embrace such a politically corrupt cause” (p. 4) Perhaps he would reconcile the statements by saying some will join HTS, but most will remain opposed to it. However, I am not convinced that we know enough to say that most anthropologists are opposed to HTS. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists, of which Price is a leading member, has obtained many signatures for its pledge, roughly 1,000 we are told. The American Anthropological Association has well over 10,000 members.

If we know anything is that most anthropologists have remained perfectly silent and uninvolved in the debates surrounding HTS. One glimpse at what disinterest and remoteness look like, as anthropologists go about business as usual, is on the Open Anthropology Cooperative, where David Price maintains a group, that is not very active and has only a fraction of the membership of more popular groups, such as “Theory in Anthropology,” or the riveting “Call for Papers” (see here). Business as usual.

When Montgomery McFate argued that critcisms of HTS come from “a small but vocal group,” it’s not like one can counter by saying that she is wrong. She is right. Moreover, when McFate outlined in her article, “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship,” the multiple ways in which anthropology “was” colonialist, saying that “Anthropology actually evolved as an intellectual tool to consolidate imperial power at the margins of empire” (p. 28), she is correct again — except, I would sustain, on her choice of tense. One needs to keep both of her points in mind.

Universities in the U.S., and to some extent in Canada as well, have myriad interconnections with military and intelligence communities, far above and beyond anything that HTS promises, and that has been the case for decades. Going further, we, especially in Canada, are still very much tied to the state, and funding for our research and our university administrations remain almost totally dependent on the good will of the state. Even if HTS were to vanish…so what? And while some argue that it is vital to fight HTS to prevent the use of anthropological knowledge to do harm to others, one big question remains even if most seem reluctant to even think it: to what extent is the way anthropological knowledge is gained, constructed, and distributed harmful in itself?

One might have thought that the more anthropology busies itself by remaining the same, by even fiercely reacting against the weak internal dissent labeled (wrongly in most instances) “post-modernist,” that fundamental change very much remains an issue. One can also understand the fear, that the ultimate outcome might be zero anthropology, but I am getting ahead of myself now.

This is John Stanton’s 20th article on the Human Terrain System, with his previous ones available here at: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19.

John sent this article a few days ago, my apologies for being late. It is reproduced here with his permission, and has already been published in CounterPunch, which is also featuring an extended article by David Price in its print edition (a summary is coming next on this blog).

John has also published a book of his work on the Human Terrain System: General David Petraeus’ Favorite Mushroom.

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Human Terrain System 2009-2010: US Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harm’s Way

by John Stanton

• “They are writing hours down that they do not work.”
• “If the Department of Defense does not take a close look with a microscope at the program, then millions or perhaps billions of dollars will be wasted by the federal government and taxpayers.  The biggest and most grotesque problem that this program faces is the fear of calling it what it really is — Intelligence.”
• “I believe there are some serious power struggles and back stabbing within the HTS Program. The students are paying the price. Too many in HTS seem to be on a power kick or need their egos boosted. They say things to students or in front of students that are wrong or against US Army regulations.”
• “The social science personnel need serious screening to keep the psycho ones out. There seems to be an over abundance of them in the program. They all seem to be on some type of crusade.”
  
• “It may be the commander’s battle space but it is your research.”
• “Many HTT personnel would be willing to avoid the US Army Unit of Assignment mission to protect their research, and stand idly by while US /Coalition Forces and Local Nationals suffered casualties. This is not US Army policy and is completely contradictory to the HTS manual.”
• “Forget the money speech. Drill it into the heads of everyone your work belongs to the US Army, not you.”
• “HTS personnel do not recognize that the security element is in charge of the HTT’s safety when outside the wire — not the Social Scientist or the Team Leader. If the security element commander says it is time to go, then it does not matter if it is a Sergeant or a Captain giving the order — we leave, period. The Security Team Commander is responsible for the safety of an HTT. No Social Scientist has the tactical training or experience to make a critical decision.”
• “A Social Scientist, who remains in the program, should be investigated for placing a classified brief from theater on the shared drive when not everyone in the class had a final clearance. He can spin it any way he wants but the fact is the brief is classified.”
• “He was trying to pimp his book and see how many names he could drop. He dropped F-bombs and dipped tobacco during class. He was totally unprofessional.”
• “There are no written reports on anything the unit wants that are worth a damn.”
  

Doctor Max Forte over at Open Anthropology highlights some interesting language contained in the Duncan Hunter National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009.

“HTTs [Human Terrain Teams] are currently proving their value in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the committee believes that capability would prove equally valuable in other combatant command areas of responsibility. The committee recommends $90.6 million in Operation and Maintenance for the purpose of fielding additional HTTs to meet the current Central Command requirement of 26 teams. The committee encourages the Department to begin training, equipping, deploying, and sustaining human terrain teams with other regional combatant commands to include at least one each for Pacific Command, Southern Command, and Africa Command.”

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees are supporting an HTS program that is still in its infancy and whose concept — as of October 2009 — has not yet been proven. It can hardly qualify as a success story even though it was glowingly  portrayed as such by the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense,  Advanced Systems and Concepts in 2008 (acq.osd.mil/jctd/success.html). None other than the SECDEF, a Brigade Commander and “Sheiks of Al Tajy North, Iraq” weighed in by intimating that the US Army Human Terrain System was the best war fighting tool since the clenched fist. Wow! Not!

It is unfortunate that the proponents of using the US Army TRADOC HTS to divine the Human Terrain remain blind to program weaknesses and dubious data collection and reporting methodology. They are content to charge the American Anthropological Association as the primary opponent of HTS though it is those internal to the program — that have gone or are going through the HTS experience — that are its most vocal critics and, at the same time, strong supporters of the concept.

So here we are in October 2009 and reports continue to come in describing persistent problems with recruitment, training, deployment, and in-country performance. Sources indicate that little has changed to address these issues. Fraud in the form of over billing has now been alleged.

Social Scientists Do Not Understand the Mission: Screening Needed

“The academics in the program understand the world of quantitative and qualitative research and have typically worked alone,” said a source.  “They simply do not understand the team concept. This creates friction with other team members.  Further, the academics associated with the program only understand counterinsurgency from reading articles, books, and/or policy statements. This, they feel, makes them matter experts in the field.  Very few, if any, have ever been actively involved (on the ground) and experienced counterinsurgency in a direct fashion.  Just because someone (an academic) has read Galula, Kilcullen, Sepp, Nagl,  Schoomaker, Army FM 3-24, 3-24.2, or 3-0 does not mean that they have become experts in the field. Academics find it insulting to their intelligence that someone without a PhD could possibly know more [about counterinsurgency] than they do.” [Max Forte: one wonders if they are referring here to Karl Slaikeu, who took leave from his allegedly lucrative conflict resolution business to reinvent himself as a counterinsurgency theorist.]

Sources report that training needs improvement and that training should use real down range scenarios to teach the students.  For example, Counterinsurgency Training does not touch on platoon, company or battalion levels. These are the levels at which HTTs interact with the most. Training should include Patrolling, Reaction to Snipers, IED, Weapons Safety and Handling at a minimum.

“Students need to understand how training ties in with a combat unit’s downrange mission.  This point is the most important and is not explained or stressed during coursework. HTT personnel must understand that they are there to support the commander’s mission. This is not clearly understood by the students,” said one source. According to a source, HTT personnel can pick and choose research items and present what they want to the unit.

Some social scientists within HTS believe that their mission is to make the US Army a kinder-gentler fighting force when dealing with non-combatants, while at the same time warring with insurgents and other unfriendly elements.

Training rarely follows the HTS Handbook or is completely contradictory to it, according to sources. “Instructor’s put their personal spin during classes discussing politics, ethical beliefs, religious beliefs, and war stories. This is not conducive to a training environment and is very unprofessional. The instructors do not present the training well and it is obvious they are not trained in how to instruct. When the participation method of instruction is used the instructors often lose the class or lose control of the class.  There is too much training geared toward the Social Scientists and very little for Research Managers and Analysts.”

Peer evaluations should be modeled after the US Army evaluations. This leaves students no opportunity to evaluate someone’s personality and only allows for the review of someone’s performance and behavior.  In a program loaded with super-egos, this is very important.

According to sources, new social scientists to the HTS program were extended an invitation by the HTS lead social scientist. “Too many times I have heard that there was a personal invitation extended to them,” said one source. “Nearly all of the social scientists that I have had interaction with are in the program solely for the purpose of getting published at the conclusion of their deployment and return home.” According to sources, the social scientists guard their information as if it were Military Top Secret.  A local Unit Commander has continually been denied research data by social scientists who claim their work is proprietary, they say.

Sarcastic Know-it-Alls

Some HTS personnel are abrasive, sources indicate. One was rude and arrogant and would belittle the students during class. In one instance, sources say, a briefing by one instructor turned sour as she informed students that “the Social Scientist runs the teams and no one else has a say in anything.”  Clearly, according to sources, the instructor did not know the difference between an aggressive operation and a non- aggressive operation.  “For example, students are instructed that they will not be involved in a kinetic operation, such as a cordon and search. But any mission can go kinetic at anytime. “

The anthropology instructors have no practical experience with the HTS mission and attempt to relate their personal experiences in places like Africa studying AIDs/HIV to the students, sources report. The mission of the HTS is being lost in translation.  Sources say they can’t stress enough that “it is being presented to students that all the HTT will be doing is research on culture and people in the area. It is not understood that the HTT works for the unit of assignment, researching the items the unit wants and the HTT can lawfully perform. The primary focus is on the commanders.”

According to sources, a good example of this is an Ethics Class given by one instructor.  “Through the entire presentation he was adamant about how to handle research data. He made clear that HTT members should not write down any names of interviewees because this information should not be given to the military to be used for kinetic purposes. When the question was asked, What if the information gathered would directly impact the safety of the unit the HTT is assigned?  The instructor responded that the information was the property of the researcher and did not have to be given to the US Army Unit of Assignment.  He also stated that HTT personnel should avoid writing any information down so it could not be forced from the researcher. That being the case, many HTT personnel would be willing to avoid the US Army Unit of Assignment mission to protect their research, and stand idly by while US and Coalition Forces and Local Nationals took casualties. This is not US Army policy and is completely contradictory to the HTS manual.

Bright Spots

“There are numerous people in the HTS program who have an overabundance of knowledge related to counterinsurgency and the human terrain.  But these people are ignored because they do not have a PhD in Anthropology, Psychology, Political Science, etc.  It is my opinion that people who are in positions such as HTA’s, RM’s, and TL’s are just as important, if not more important, than the social scientists in that they are the ‘link’ between the military and social science,”  said one source.

According to sources, there are a number of training personnel who are top-notch. “The Immersion Training for Afghanistan is great.  The Language Training by one instructor is excellent. He takes a lot of time with us and is very patient.  The Geological Training conducted by another instructor was very educational. The History of Islam class is excellent.” According to one source, “I now have a better understanding of how Islam functions and why the attitudes of Islamic people seem so different from our own. It was very enlightening to see that Islam believes many of the same things as Christians do.”

Still, sources say, training should focus on the tribal problems, and areas of external tribal disputes. If HTT personnel had a general understanding of the differences between the Pashtu, Uzbek, and others, as well as why for example the Taliban was able to take over the country and it people when others in history could not do both, they say.

The Introduction to Anthropology Class and the Open Source Research Class received good marks.

“Language Training is the best,” said one source. “I would recommend staying away from the writing Arabic, three weeks is not enough time. Concentrating on conversational language would be more helpful. “

Sources had high praise for one instructor and some of the films made available to them for viewing in class. “The documentaries that another instructor has shown us are informative and provide a different view of how people used to live in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion. The instructor has, as is his normal operational procedure, taken extra time with us to ensure we understand the language and proper usage. He is a very fine instructor.  The documentaries we have watched from the library are very good and informative in their own respect. But students who come here in future classes must understand that some of the issues portrayed in these films are blamed on the US and NATO. These documentaries are also very much based on Women’s Rights and how the women of Afghanistan are being mistreated and how this is the fault of the USA. It must be understood that some of the things said maybe offensive to some students and could cause serious differences between students of different genders, political persuasions, rank and religious background.”

Dark Spots: Fraud, Waste Abuse Again: Regulations and Policy Are Just Guidelines

Logistical nightmares remain the norm for HTS personnel during deployment. One source believes that the entire operational side of HTS needs to be overhauled. Transportation miscues, identification badge errors, delayed clearances, HTT arrival in-country not expected by military personnel, and billeting issues have yet to be smoothed out.

Worse, according to sources, is that some HTT personnel are inflating hours on time sheets charging the US government for activity never undertaken. Research reports have little value. “They have no product that can be given to the US Army Units of Assignment.  Army personnel have been asking for a product but have been given just enough verbal information by HTT personnel to keep them off their back.”

“This needs to be reported to someone,” said one source.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security and political matters. His book, General David Petraeus’ Favorite Mushroom—Inside the US Army Human Terrain System—is available here http://www.wisemanpublishing.com/page11.php. Contact John at cioran123@yahoo.com.

A U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer bomber takes off on a strike mission against Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, for "Operation Enduring Freedom". DoD photo by Senior Airman Rebeca M. Luquin, U.S. Air Force. (Released) Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:B-1_Bombers_on_Diego_Garcia.jpg

While no doubt some Afghans will be celebrating the continued, lucrative, presence of another empire in their midst, and the momentary protection offered by armies from 42 nations, others will be celebrating the fact that under their sustained and expanding fire another empire grinds noisily into its eighth year of failure. At the moment, the ever more obstreperous General Stanley McChrystal is making statements such as the one in the image above, suggesting that more occupation troops are needed so that they can look like less of an occupation force. Astounding. Instead of occupiers, they will merely appear in Afghan eyes as tourists with guns, presumably. This is the logic that is being sold by “top brass.” This logic comes from a general whose specializations in Iraq were targeted assassinations, not counterinsurgency; his units engaged in repeated abuse of detainees, not “winning hearts and minds” (source). As for the Obama administration, pledging itself to think about a strategy for Afghanistan does not mean quite the same as pledging itself to think: “I don’t think we have the option to leave,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, “That’s quite clear” (source). Any regime that does not know what it is still doing in another nation cannot afford to slice off parts of its brain and render certain ideas “unthinkable.”

However, that too is to be celebrated, because it is with just this degree of hubris that the empire will more quickly meet with ruin. It is not just McChrystal’s fallacies that will speed empire to ruin, when his boss encourages digging in deeper. Recognizing that after recent major troop increases, oddly enough the Taliban have simultaneously increased their hold over 80% of Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has to say: “the Taliban do have the momentum right now” (source). And that really bothers him of course, because leaving now would mean that his enemies will sense a chance “to defeat a second superpower,” and, “what’s more important than that in my view is the message that it sends that empowers al Qaeda … The notion that they have come back from this defeat, come back from 2002, to challenge not only the United States but NATO, 42 nations, is a hugely empowering message should they be successful” (source). So empire is about saving face for empire? The regime confuses itself now, for it was Obama himself who recently said, “I’m not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or, in some way, you know, sending a message that America is here for the duration” (source). Then, as we saw above, his own spokesman says “I don’t think we have the option to leave.” No wonder they cannot decide on the right tactics; they do not know as much as what to say from one day to the next.

There is mounting opposition to the continuation of the Afghan war by majorities of voters right across many NATO nations (including the U.S. itself, the U.K., Canada, Australia, Germany). European public opinion on the whole is in favor of reducing or withdrawing troops from Afghanistan (55% of West Europeans and 69% of East Europeans according to a recent German Marshall Fund poll) (source). In the face of that, all the Obama administration can  offer regarding anti-war protesters such as those at the gates of the White House itself this Monday, October 5, is that: (a) they did not even know they were there (looking outside the windows of the White House is apparently also off limits); and, (b) a condescending, paternalistic dismissal: “I think the president has long believed that whether your opinion is on one side of this issue or the other, that this is the greatness of our country, is that you get to amplify that opinion” (source). In other words, cheer up, America may be just a paper-thin democracy, but that is still far better than the democracy implanted and paid for by NATO nations in Afghanistan (see here).

In the meantime, while Americans debate whether they can afford health care for themselves, the monthly cost per soldier in Afghanistan is $76,870 (source). If any of those soldiers is ever successful in killing a Talib by using a bullet, rather than a bomb, artillery shell or missile (all of which are far more expensive), it costs about $82,500 to kill one Talib, using bullets alone (source). Total war-related U.S. funding for Afghanistan now stands at $223 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service. Whatever the U.S. saves from drawing down forces in Iraq is likely to be more than expended in Afghanistan, where the total cost of the war could reach a trillion dollars (source). Almost 1,500 NATO troops have been killed thus far in Afghanistan (source), and the death rate is growing (source).

Coalition military fatalities by month during the Afghan-war. Source: http://www.icasualties.org/oef/ and on Wikimedia Commons at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Coalition_military_casualties_in_afghanistan_by_month.PNG

As many as 32,000 Afghan civilians have been killed in the war since it started (source). This is not counting those who have needlessly died from famine even while occupied by Western forces awash in multi-million dollar contracts and imported luxuries. In fact, for some foreigners, Kabul can even be a “luxurious hidden paradise.”

Source: http://www.icosfilm.net/static/video/050_map.pdf

As the Taliban have spread to the point that there is substantial Taliban military activity in 97% of Afghanistan (source) and heavy activity in 80%, are they promising “global jihad”? No, quite the contrary: “Afghan Taliban say they pose no threat to the West.” What if you do not believe them? “If the Taliban did return to power, I believe we are strong enough to deter them from attacking us again by strong and credible punishment and by containing them with regional allies like India, China and Russia,” said former State Department official Leslie Gelb (source). But surely their Al Qaeda “friends” will take advantage of the return of the Taliban? With a force numbering perhaps as few as 100? As Obama’s National Security Adviser, General James Jones said: “The al Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies” (source). Yet, if one asks General David Petraeus, he says repeatedly that there is no al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan (source).

A confused regime, speaking out of both sides of its mouth, admits to having no strategy for winning an unwinnable war, that is also by very far an entirely unnecessary war.

For those interested in copious amounts of background reading, you can download the following PDFs of international press extracts ranging across the topics above, and many more, complete up to 07 October 2009:

Afghanistan: Occupation and Resistance (3.4 mb, 280 pages)

Afghanistan Elections 2009 (3.07 mb, 160 pages)