For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search.

It’s one of those nice journalistic object lessons which seems to sum it all up at the exact moment that all of its assumptions leak out of the edges: that the Web must be one thing, that one must gain knowledge either from machines or people, that our circle of friends is “our” primary source of information, that we use facebook to get information or that its CEO’s vision maps onto its practices; and so forth.

But there is something crystalline about this. There is a change at work here, a kind of parochialization in process. The metrics of trust embodied by Google are a set of ideals grounded in the idea of a vast library, a global brain, “the world’s information” and the Internet as a vast sea of computable texts and actions; those of Facebook are ideals of human contact, facefulness, recognition, mimicry, identity management, constant contact, powerful control over one’s identity, social network and reputation, self-actualization. Google is dominated by an ethic of information openness in which more is better, because it makes it easier to comb through collect, sort and analyze data. The more open data is, the better your analysis of it will be. Facebook is dominated by something like an ethic of “revealed preferences”—the only information that matters is information tied to a autocthonous system that gives it meaning. Parochialize your Internet; re-embody your avatar. On Facebook, everyone knows you’re a beautiful and well-bred dog. On the capitalist side, this all comes down to how your information will be commodified: facelessly and anonymously, but with possible benefit for a general public (though that public is a geo-politically fraught one with fault lines called China and Saudi Arabia) or facefully and behaviorally targeted commodification, with maximum benefit for the social graph you make and belong to. If we want to talk about intentional communities today, let’s start here: with the automatic co-creation of consumer profiles. The war to make our own demography starts here.

I was at the first LA vigil on May 21 before Lisa Ling’s public involvement. There were seven people on a dog path along Venice beach. One person looked like Jason Schartzman. He wasn’t. He along with all others whorshipped at Laura’s church. At the second LA vigil at a swanky restaurant in Santa Monica I had to elbow through the valet, concerned beautiful people, television personalities, and cable news reporters to get my professionally premade “Save Laura” sign. After months of silence, when these media insiders wanted the attention it was instantaneous. I won’t say that this is an instance of media producer nepotism. It is a good story for ratings; a real news issue. We should campaign for the pardon of these two unfortunate journalists. However, the media blitzkreig explains much about the cultural capital and complicity of cultures of media production.

I want to think about individual cultural capital, namely Lisa Ling’s, and her use of that capital to advocate for the release of her sister, and how it relates to institutional cultural capital, namely the advocacy powers of American television networks. The play between institutional and individual cultural capital can be understood through the structure-agency dualism within the anthropological tool of practice theory. However, practice theory usually works within calculations of oppositionality and tensions. In the classic view, individuals, particularly activists, are in an antagonistic relationship with media institutions. The case of Lisa Ling and American news networks, on the contrary, consists of individual agency and institutional structuration overlapping. In the process, entertainment and activism synchronize. Let me explain.

There was a key moment, an event, that exposes the presence and strategic deployment of cultural capital in this case. Lisa Ling is a correspondent for CNN, National Geographic Channel, and ABC’s The View. Mitch Koss, who was with Ling and Lee in North Korea, is widely known to have been the mentor of Lisa and Laura Ling, as well as Anderson Cooper. These media insiders waited months to thumb threw their address books to get the numbers of Larry King, Anderson Cooper, and Matt Lauer (Today Show). With all due compassion to Laura and Lisa, it is important to note that in a world of increasingly edutainment-geared television news programming this is a “good” story complete with evil despots, nuclear weapons, and teary-eyed family members. Even without this engaging nonfiction narrative, I would argue, Lisa Ling would be able to get on every show, and have celebrity-dense, simultaneous vigils in several American cities coordinated with her television appearances.

What if Lisa wasn’t Laura’s sister? What is Al Gore hadn’t founded Current TV and weren’t involved? Would this issue had gotten on all major networks at primetime hours had Lisa not had these contacts and been so camera-ready and photogenic? These concerns could be somewhat tempered if we consider the class and cultural capital of the people who gain full-time employment in the creative industries. It isn’t Lisa’s ease and practice on camera which makes it possible or her connections, but a mix of these issues and more that constitutes her powerful cultural capital. While Current has branded their business as entrepreneurially democratizing media production and distribution to the masses, the people who are under the benefit packages and full-time salaries of these companies are unusually well-connected through family, elite schools, or other insider and backdoor operations.

With practice theory, we often conclude that agency is structured and the higher the agent gets within spirals of power the more structuration occurs. Activism, usually associated with individual agency, quickly is structured to death and transformed into spectacle. Strangely enough in the Ling situation, the individual and institutional cultural capital synchronize. This coordination usually happens only to elites. However, usually even to them, their political intentions are stripped in the pursuit of entertainment. This is not so in this case. Through personal favors, shared political concerns, and co-benefits in the economics of spectacle, the Ling family and major news networks coordinated to publicize the reprehensible situation of these journalists.

Also at the vigil for the first time were employees of Current TV, in my next blog I am going to investigate the political and capitalistic drive behind the censorship and denial by Current TV of this issue and the failed promise of the democratization of citizen journalism and participatory culture.

Zombeconomics:  Worried about the shrinking global economy and the over population of over qualified professionals?  Overthinkingit.com has the solution.  One major outbreak of zombie attacks would both thin out the world population, and, once controlled with biotechnology, become a cheap source of labor.  Makes sense to me.

The Public Anthropology Public: Daniel Lende wrote two posts on neuroanthropology this week on public anthropology.  The first purports to be a review of Rob Borofosky’s explanation of Public Anthropology, but it is much more.  The post assembles various perspectives and multimedia interviews and examples of public anthropology.  In the second post, Lende compiles a list of further resources for people interested in deeper exploration.

Hey, Hey, Hey, I’ve Got It (World Cup Fever): Well, actually, I was gay-vaccinated against the fever before first going to Brazil in 2002.  (They won that year, and I hid from the hours of fireworks).  But others have the fever.  Material World posted on Lynn Jarvis’s Homeless World Cup, and Language Log explores the reported origins of the vuvuzela, a South African horn played at soccer matches.  (yes, i said it, soccer).

Sugar and Spice: Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily posted a very just critique of a recent article from the Archives of Sexual Behavior, claiming that infant girls were more attracted to pictures of dolls while infant boys were drawn to pictures of toy trucks.  Perhaps the post should have been titled, ‘babies socialized into gender roles really f’in early.’

Ok, I promised myself that this week would be MJ free, but this post at Language Log reached down and tapped my inner-child-ethnomusicologist.  Benjamin Zimmer tells a compelling tale about the Cameroonian origins of Jackson’s line ‘ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa,’ and in the process the globalization and transnational consumption of popular music.  Wanna be startin’ somethin’ indeed.

The evidence? If you haven’t already, take a look at the Open Anthropology Cooperative. Back in May I wrote yet-another-post complaining about how the AAA relied upon poorly made user surveys instead of proper qualitative research, or genuine bottom-up democratic decision making. That sparked an interesting discussion on Twitter about what a more open, global, and democratic alternative to the AAA might look like. The discussion soon outgrew the 140 character limit, and so moved over to Kieth Hart’s forum. The discussion there progressed for a while until, at the end of May, Maximilian Forte suggested using Ning, and Kieth Hart set up the Open Anthropology Cooperative.

At present, OAC isn’t really an alternative to the AAA at all, its just another social networking site for anthropologists all around the world. But it seems to attract people interested in issues of openness and governance. In Shirky’s book he argues that the modern corporation was created to reduce the transaction costs involved in coordinating activity among large groups of people. It did that by imposing a large management hierarchy on top of the people actually doing the work. This model has worked for a long time, but it has limits. Such a management hierarchy is expensive to maintain, so it isn’t worth it for management to engage in activities which don’t generate enough revenue to support the hierarchy. Shirky argues that the social web solves this problem by reducing transaction costs to near zero. While the AAA may still be required to pull off something as monumental as the massive annual meetings, software like Open Conference Systems should make it easier to organize smaller conferences outside of the AAA. And, apart from their prestige, it is increasingly unclear that publishing in AAA journals offers any added value beyond what could be done with Open Journal Systems. Since much of the academic labor for these things is donated anyway, the cost really can be reduced to near zero.

But Shirky raises another point, which is that as the transaction costs get close to zero, it becomes trivially easy to do things which used to require either a strong ideological commitment or an oversized organizational hierarchy. As a result, it becomes much harder to gauge commitment. Signing an online petition is not the same thing as marching on Washington. So I was initially skeptical that what is essentially an Anthropologically branded version of Facebook would produce much in the way of “Open Anthropology.” It may still be too early to tell, but the site just seems to be growing and growing. There have been other attempts to create online forums for anthropologists but never have any of them succeeded like this. Time will only tell how well OAC survives its own success, but today gave me real hope saw the launch of yet another initiative: the OAC Wiki, thanks to the efforts of Paul Wren. I myself have tried to start a few wikis and given up because one needs a certain critical mass for a wiki to succeed. In general social media has a “user elite” who do most of the work editing and maintaining the site, even as content is added it bits and pieces by the entire membership. But with over a thousand people on OAC, maybe running a wiki has become boring enough that it can succeed.

Looking forward, one of the biggest hurdles will probably be in the realm of self-governance. Already this has been an issue on OAC, with Maximilian Forte leaving in a huff, citing “authoritarian and elitist tendencies” by which I think he means over-zealous moderation in the forums. Self-governance is difficult, especially since a small handful of people tend to do all the hard work of maintaining these communities. Two years ago I wrote a blog post about the bureaucratization of Wikipedia. It seems like these are issues already facing the fledgling OAC. But I’m encouraged that this time, Anthropology 2.0 might be taking off for real. I certainly hope so!

In the 1990s there were a few anthropologists working on the American commune. These studies focused on history. Examples include Don Pitzer’s cross-cultural utopianism and developmental communalism and Susan Love Brown’s ethnography of a yogic community and her accurate description of the importance of generations for the growth of New Age religiosity. Honestly, the history of the American commune doesn’t interest me as much as the future of small-scale socialism. As a media anthropologist, I want to see how this bricks-and-mortar intentional community relates to the taste and affinity cultures online. How to create analogies that move between this commune and digital socialism?

Skeptics of social media like Andrew Keen and Neil Postman agree that there is a fundamental and substantive difference between real and virtual communities. Something profoundly human is lost in the virtualization of relationships. Personally, I tend to see social media as augmenting my strong friendships, extending my informal friendships, and providing opportunities for new friendships. Regular use of social media affirms or complicates preexisting relationships, provide opportunities for the creation of new networks, while creating something perhaps unprecedented: virtual communities. These virtual communities could be seen as historical extensions of communes, political groups, audiences, fan bases, and other communities unified by analogue media. However, in some ways they might also provide for the invention of new sociality. Clay Shirkey, Henry Jenkins, and danah boyd expand on this generative thesis.

As distinct as they are materially and physically, it is difficult to textually code in a single word the differences between “real” and “virtual” communities. Cultural relativists like anthropologists are rightfully wary of “reality” and how “real” creates “unreal” communities. So “real” won’t work. What about “embodied?” Engagement with social media at a laptop isn’t the most active of corporeal engagements but it is nonetheless embodied. Will “symbolic” community work for the “virtual?” In-person engagements are mediated by fashion, language, body movements, and other symbolic forms of communication. So “embodied communities” won’t work for the “real.” The terms “mediated” or “symbolic” won’t work for the “virtual” which we know isn’t just virtual but also physical. Recourse to archaeology won’t work because virtual communities produce many tangible artifacts and a substantial infrastructure. I will use in-person to describe those person-to-person interactions in shared tangible space and online communities to describe the digital relationships knowing that this definition is leaky.

So here’s the pitch. A comparison between this commune and a virtual community could provide evidence for what are the differences between in-person and online communities. It will be necessary to locate and work with a vibrant virtual community that is networked via social media and who share a set of ideological beliefs or a division of labor. A Facebook group that interacts around political or religious ideas would work. The primary data will come from an identical questionnaire that will be filled-out by both the residents at the commune and the participants in the virtual community. The correct drafting of this instrument will be necessary to elicit evidence about what differentiates and unifies the in-person and online communities.

The most important point that unifies this intentional community and social media communities is “intentionality.” Both populations elect to be a player in the chosen community. They are not born into it by their gender or generation nor are they forced into it by circumstance and history. Intentionality is enshrined in the very title given by members of this “intentional community.” Communes, despite having ideological ideas about nature, consciousness, and social work going back to the 17th century, reflect one of the emergent qualities for the creation of new online communities. Doubters could see intentionality as the social fabric for community development as but an extension of the consumeristic mentality that prioritizes individualism and a shopping mentality taken towards social formation. Regardless of the connections between intentional community development and capitalistic interpellation, intentionality as a force for community growth is a frame through which we can observe and critique the formation of numerous cultures of affinity, competency, and taste both in-person and online.

What would be a good online community for comparison? Are there any precedents for this research?

Image via Wikipedia

The target of the bill appears to be Tucson Unified School District, whose Raza Studies program serves some 1,200 Latino students. Interestingly, students involved in this program show a marked improvement over the state average on the state’s standardized testing (which goes well with other evidence that students involved in bilingual education, as well as students given access to electives like art, photography, and creative writing perform better on standardized tests – they tend to be more focused on and more engaged with school overall than students who are deprived of these “optional” courses).

Exempted from the law are Native American-focused courses that are protected by federal law, and English Language Learner courses.

Attacks on courses that teach parts of American history that deviate from the traditional, conservative narrative of America’s greatness are not new, of course. When then-chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney commissioned a panel to develop national history standards in the early 1990’s, she was shocked by the results. In a piece published in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The End of History”, she railed against “an academic establishment that revels in the kind of politicized history that characterizes much of the National Standards” – history that includes Native Americans and the Underground Railroad as part of the American story, as well as the embarrassments of McCarthyism (this was a time when conservatives were still embarrassed about McCarthy) and the Ku Klux Klan. (So infuriated was Cheney by the standards that in 2004 she had a pamphlet for parents called “Helping Your Child Learn History” pulped and re-printed because it included references to the standard!)

At risk for conservatives like Cheney is not history, per se. After all, the Massacre at Sand Creek happened, the Constitution really did set black people’s worth at 3/5 that of white people’s, and police and militia really did attack the children of striking workers in Lawrence, MA, as they approached the train station en route to lodging away from the hunger and violence of the strike. In a place like Tucson, which was after all part of Mexico until the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, the history of “la Raza” is particularly relevant.

What is at risk is the notion that American history should not be just (or even in many cases) the facts of our past but should be a story that edifies national citizenship. In her response to the National History Standards, published as American Memory, Cheney wrote that:

Knowledge of the ideas that have molded us and the ideals that have mattered to us functions as a kind of civic glue. Our history and literature give us symbols to share; they help us all, no matter how diverse our backgrounds, feel part of a common undertaking (Quoted in Symcox, Linda, [2002] Whose History?  P. 85).

In Arizona, and in the Southwest in general, this narrative takes on special importance as an assimilative tool, because for the most part, it is not the history of the people who live there. Latino children in traditional US history classes get the dubious pleasure of sitting through months of a history that, unless by some miracle the teacher manages to get up to the 1960s  and the agricultural worker strikes led by Cesar Chavez, is unlikely to contain a Latino name except as enemies. This narrative that largely excludes the Latino experience form American history defines our history largely as the history of white folks, predominantly male. (It is probably not coincidental that more-assimilated Hispanics in the US tend to identify themselves as “white” on the Census, while less-assimilated Hispanics tend to identify racially as “other”.)

Ethnic Studies (along with Women’s Studies, another pet peeve of Arizona’s education superintendent) challenges this narrative, which is why it is a favorite target of conservatives. We saw, for example, how the Ward Churchill affair quickly and easily spilled over into a condemnation of the entire field of Ethnic Studies. (Consider Don Feder’s contribution at Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com, in which he places the term “ethnic studies” in shudder-quotes in the first line, to suggest that it’s not a “real” academic discipline.) In the wake of 9/11, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni rushed into print a pamphlet called “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It” [links to PDF file] which complained that after 9/11,

…instead of ensuring that students understand the unique contributions of America and Western civilization—the civilization under attack—universities are rushing to add courses on Islamic and Asian cultures (Martin, Jerry and Anne D. Neal [2002] P. 6).

Of course, with it’s anglo-centrism and privileging of the doings of white elites, American history as preferred by Cheney and her ACTA cohorts, and by Feder and Horowitz, and so many others is as much an “ethnic study” as Tucson’s La Raza program. It will be interesting to see what happens when some smart activist gets it into his or her head to challenge the inclusion of traditional US history in the Arizona high school curriculum. The law in question prohibits the teaching of classes that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals“ – by the same standards that would forbid the teaching of Latino history and culture, the teaching of Anglo history and culture is also prohibited by this law.

(The issue of treatment “as individuals” is a complex and troubling one, but one which I don’t understand well enough to comment on – I think the argument is that treating students as “Latinos” somehow deprives them of their individuality. Again, by that standard, treating them as “Americans” would also be prohibited, but I feel like there’s something deeper and more disturbing at work in this language.)

Meanwhile, though, students in Arizona will be deprived of history in exchange for a fairy-tale version of history that pretends to be their story. If successful, I would expect to see similar laws passing in any state that offers programs like Tucson’s La Raza program – and state legislators being who they are, attempts to impose similar restrictions on public universities and colleges as well.

Justice is Blind, But Still has Fashion Sense:  Feminist Law Professor Collin Miller blogged on this week’s Michigan Supreme Court Amendment to all state courts’ operating procedures that Judges can enforce certain dress codes to verify witnesses’ identity or to assess their demeanor.  This basically upholds the decision of a lower court judge who threw out a case brought by Muslim who refused to remove her niquab, or face covering, during proceedings.  In good lawyerly fashion, Miller gives a comparison of other legal conflicts between the guys in robes and the ones in ethnically marked garb.  

Friends with Class:  Emily Bazelon at Slate.com wrote a provocative piece on how the flagging economy’s is transforming social networks of friendship in the U.S.  From exposing irreconcilable differences of consumption patterns between friends to breaking up office social circles, the recession is ruining our personal lives.  

Online?  How About Some Anthropology?  Daniel Lende at neuroanthropology.net complied a list of social networking and other sites bringing anthropologists together to converse and share information.

AnthroIT: The Kuala Lampur English language paper, the Star, published an interest piece on corporate anthropologist Genevieve Ball, her experience as a PhD student, and her transition to work in the world of IT.  

Want something included?  Just reply in the comments section or send an email for future posts.

So, when you see this woman with red fingernails, she’s not just risking arrest for holding that sign, she’s risking it for the shade of her nail polish.

It relates to a Juan Cole piece, “Class v. Culture Wars in Iranian Elections” in which he pointed out that “the Iranian women who voted in droves for Khatami haven’t gone anywhere…”

I don’t know enough about class and gender politics in Iran to say much about this. The fact that the women in these pictures often conform to Western notions of glamor, including fair skin, had struck me in the media coverage about the elections, but I hadn’t thought about it beyond that until I read Jezebel and Juan Cole’s posts. What do you think?

UPDATE: Thanks to Gregory Starrett for mentioning Pardis Mahdavi’s new book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. Here is an interview with her:

I have often wondered how different my local world would be if it were anthropologists in charge of designing, implementing, and teaching cultural humility, instead of the relatively thin but conventionally dominant and poorly named “cultural competence.

You Can’t Say That in Science! Language Log has a plea for action regarding a libel lawsuit against British science journalist Simon Singh. Singh is currently fighting a lawsuit brought from the the British Chiropractic Association, claiming that Singh’s challenges to the validity of certain claims of chiropractics lack demonstrable evidence constitute intent to defame the Association. Perhaps more interesting than the case itself has been the response from various public interest groups claiming that free speech is necessary to scholarly practices of critique. The comments to this post also raise some interesting views.

Biopower at the Limits: Thanks to Somatosphere for linking to a new blog post by Paul Rabinow discussing his research collective’s conceptual work on synthetic anthropos—an emergent constellation of effects and propositions borne out over the struggle between the figures of biopower and human dignity. Or something to that effect. Eugene Raikhel’s somatosphere post has some interesting views on this as well.

In Memoriam [Updated 6/16/09]: Stephen Christomalis at Glossographia has a great tribute to Willard Walker, recently deceased linguistic anthropologist and expert in (the admittedly specific field of) Cherokee numerals indigenous literacy in the Americas, most specifically the Cherokee syllabary.  In all cases, a really interesting description of one scholar’s life’s work.

As always, feel free to write in or post any other news.

Want to Talk with Common People, like you: Mark Dawson from ethnography.com has a new project. It’s part visual ethnography, part Studs Terkel, part road trip movie. And the first installment is really good. The ‘Ordinary People Project’ has Dawson driving around Northwest Canada and Alaska documenting the everyday stories of people who live there. The first installment is already up.

Losing Ground: Journalist Mark Dowie writes in the UK Guardian about his new book on the struggles between environmental conservation movements and the indigenous people displaced by declared wilderness areas.

Native American Construction: Material World posted an essay by Joana Alario discussing the cultural politics of building Native American casinos and museums in the Northeast U.S.

Caught in the Middle: Jean Jackson published a report on the AAA Human Rights website about the precarious situation for rural indigenous groups in Colombia still stuck between the politics of the FARC and the Uribe government. The report comes after a massacre of at least 8 Awa people, who the FARC accused of being military informants.

Traveling Exhibit: Valeri Russ at The Philadelphia Daily News writes a review of the AAA’s ‘Understanding Race’ exhibition which will run this summer at the Franklin Institute in Philly this summer. Russ’s article mixes a discussion of the exhibit with local Philadelphians experiences of race.

Ethnographers’ Personae: Lorenz at anthropologi.info reviews the new online edition of Anthropology Matters, with 11 articles by students on the identities one is forced to take on during fieldwork.

Want something else included?  Post in the comments or email me.

Image by Libertinus via Flickr

For the past several years, my research has led me further and further into the world of counterinsurgency, military anthropology, human terrain, and other aspects of a military regime of knowledge. What concerns me, most of all, is the way that knowledge generated by social scientists can be used (and, if the past is any indication, will be used) to the disadvantage of the people on, from, and with whom anthropologists and other social scientists generate that knowledge.

This issue is hardly limited to anthropologists, though we have traditionally held a kind of loose monopoly on the world’s most vulnerable peoples. Nowadays, social scientists of every stripe traipse through the same terrain anthropologists once considered their own – and we, of course, have no problem returning the favor.

So when a friend forwarded me a story about geographers in Oaxaca mapping the “cultural terrain”, my disciplinary ears perked up. At issue are many of the same issues at play in debates over anthropologists’ and others’ involvement with HTS in Iraq and Afghanistan, although in many ways I find the situation I’m about to describe more frightening still, as it presages wars or conflicts as yet unfought – even counterinsurgencies to insurgencies yet to surge.

México Indigena and Mexican Indigenes

From 2005-2007, a team of geographers led by Jerome Dobson and Peter Herlihy of the University of Kansas worked with local trainees to map land ownership and claims on collective lands in indigenous communities in Oaxaca and San Luis Potosi. Called “México Indigena” and partially funded by the US Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), the project was a pilot program for the American Geographic Society’s Bowman Expeditions, which intends to create maps of the “cultural terrain” of poor and indigenous communities throughout the world.

Dobson’s project seems on its surface like a straightforward exercise in cultural geography. Working with a local university, México Indigena trained members of local communities to collect GIS data throughout their communities, with particular emphasis on defining privately- and communally-held lands. This data is useful for communities wishing to document their holdings, as well as to researchers interested in studying the impact of Mexico’s PROCEDE program, which shifts public and communal lands into private hands. México Indigena is committed to producing “open source” data that can be used freely by the communities they study (a concept worth revisiting, as “open source” neatly cuts across both the Open Source software movement on one hand and the Open Source intelligence movement on the other).

What makes México Indigena troubling is the involvement of FMSO. Headquartered at the Leavenworth Army Base, FMSO is explicitly concerned with counterinsurgency and “asymmetric” warfare. According to its website, its mission is to provide analysis and data on “emerging and asymmetric threats, regional military and security developments, and other issues that define evolving operational environments around the world”. There is some question about FMSO’s relationship with the Army’s Human Terrain Studies (HTS) program—the relationship is close enough that several sources have claimed HTS is part of FMSO (e.g. Mychalejko 2009), where the program apparently originated before being transferred to another office of the Army.

Whatever the relationship, FMSO is directly involved in the development of human terrain as a military paradigm. Which is why Dobson approached FMSO’s IberoAmerican researcher, Lt. Col. Geoffrey B. Demarest, requesting a half-million dollars in funding for México Indigena —part of a hoped-for $125 million for Bowman Expeditions’ proposed worldwide human terrain mapping. In his proposal, Dobson justified his project by explicitly citing their usefulness for state ends, particularly military action:

The greatest shortfall in foreign intelligence facing the nation is precisely the kind of understanding that geographers gain through field experience, and there’s no reason that it has to be classified information… The best and cheapest way the government could get most of this intelligence would be to fund AGS to run a foreign fieldwork grant program covering every nation on earth (Dobson, in Mychalejko and Ryan 2009).

[I]nformal property ownership in either rural or urban settings is the breeding ground for criminal or insurrectionary activity…. He specifically cites concerns about the criminality of large areas of the dispossessed, as they become separately governed autonomous zones….

Demarest asserts that the privatization of property is the key to stability, prosperity, progress, and security in Latin America, and that formal land titling leads to effective government control [and] existing property of real value must be made secure… through a phenomenon he describes as the “architecture of control” (Sedillo 2009).

As if that weren’t troubling enough—and somewhat at odds with the stated goals of Dobson and Herlihy, to explore the implications of privatization in indigenous communities—there is the question of FMSO’s official interest in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. What is the operational function of this kind of data, and why would the US Army pay so richly for it?

Pre-emptive counterinsurgency

FMSO’s interest in Oaxaca makes more sense in the context of the Merida Initiative, or as critics call it, “Plan Mexico”, after its similarities with the US government’s disastrous Plan Colombia. Merida is a program of long-term military support for Mexico to help stem the production and transfer of illegal drugs in and through Mexico.

Overlapping as it did with the 2006 uprising and seizure of the city of Oaxaca by the Oaxacan People’s Popular Assembly (APPO) and its seven-month occupation as the Oaxaca Commune, the collection of human terrain data on behalf of the US Army has particularly sinister overtones. Demarest’s two interests—democratization through privatization and suppression of insurgency through culturally-informed military action—seem to come together all too nicely in Oaxaca, which is why I’ve started to think of this as a program of pre-emptive counterinsurgency, combining two of the darkest aspects of the Bush-era military: pre-emptive warfare and human terrain-based counterinsurgency.

México Indigena raises hard questions about the relationship between the military and the social sciences, and about the uses of cultural knowledge. Communities in Oaxaca have complained that the project’s members never made clear that their research was funded by the US military, which has raised concerns over what local activists have termed “geopiracy”—given Demarest’s thoughts on communal property, the idea that the collection of GIS data in this region, collated with communal property holdings, could be used to sustain a large-scale appropriation of land by the Mexican state and apportionment to private interests—likely corporate interests—does not seem so far-fetched.

Neither does the fear that this data would be used as part of counterinsurgency efforts to undermine local radical leadership and prevent the kind of wide-scale organizing Mexico has fought in neighboring Chiapas. Under the guise of the War on Drugs, local political opponents of the Mexican state could well find themselves branded “insurgents” and targeted by a military force—one the Mexican government has not been at all averse to using in place of regular police—informed by up-to-date GIS data. The rising drug production and trafficking in Oaxaca, as well as the recent drug-related violence across the US-Mexico border, make this all the more troubling – especially when coupled with the notion that communal and informal land tenure fosters “criminal and insurrectionary” behavior.

Dobson’s argument that the data collected is available to everyone, including the local communities, rings somewhat hollow, especially the use of the phrase “open source” to describe the project. As an advocate of scientific transparency and open access to cultural data, I find myself highly conflicted by the use of the phrase “open source” to describe research funded by the FMSO, which houses the Army’s Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) training program. According to FMSO’s training document (http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/OSINT-Training.pdf),

In addition to offering alternative sources to validate or challenge classified sources, OSINT can provide essential foundation knowledge for operational and decision-making requirements. This can include historical background, political developments, socioeconomic and demographic context, cultural insight, geographic, and technical and critical infrastructure data. OSINT can be used to monitor foreign events and perspectives. OSINT is also particularly useful for independent application in the training environment, to include “red cell” studies and threat analysis. OSINT proffers the widest dissemination capability of any intelligence discipline while generating the least political risk, benefiting inter-agency and international cooperative efforts.

Taking sides

Of course, many will say that if this information is available, there’s nothing that will stop the military from using it, and I agree with that. What concerns me here is not the military using this information so much as the military commissioning and funding the collection of this information—and future plans to collect much, much more. Already Bowman Expeditions have begun a similar mapping program in the Antilles, with a third project planned (and possibly already underway) in Colombia (Dobson 2009). We have to ask not only what this data will be used for—a consideration that does not seem to have been impressed nearly adequately enough on the people of Oaxaca—but how those goals shape the data, both in what is recorded and what is not.

More importantly, we have to ask about the moral and practical effects of social scientists actively working to provide information intended to better equip the US military for warfare in the regions they study. While I have been somewhat skeptical of arguments about “blowback” endangering anthropologists in the field, programs like México Indigena make it quite hard to dismiss the likelihood that future American researchers will be taken for agents of the US military. More importantly, in equipping governments not only for war against our research subjects but to conduct assimilative projects aimed to “democratize” indigenous peoples by targeting communal landownership and other collective behaviors, we violate a primary ethical tenet, to do what is in our power to assure that our research does not harm the people we have studied.

As an internal disciplinary matter, there is already an uproar among geographers and an investigation into the matter of compliance with a code of ethics that’s not to different from anthropologists’. Like us, geographers worry about informed consent – and reports of information about US Army funding being withheld from Oaxacan communities suggest that the “informed” part my have been paid less than it’s due in this case. But whatever move(s) geographers take or don’t take, this use of social science, whatever its disciplinary origins, raises a lot of uncomfortable questions for all of us.

Among them – first among them, I would think – is how complicit social scientists want to be if and when this kind of data is applied in a military setting, whether by our own military in the context of a counterinsurgency or the great American umbrella of the War on Drugs (apparently due for rebranding by the Obama administration), or by other governments in partnership with ours? This is not a question of personal moral choice – how can it be? It’s also not a question of “defrocking” social scientists “gone bad” – this is a question of overall disciplinary direction and, ultimately, of our commitment not just to our own research but to the people who make it possible. Where – and how – do we draw the line where that commitment becomes irrelevant?

Work Cited

Mychalejko,Cyril and Ramor Ryan. 2009. U.S. Military Funded Mapping Project in Oaxaca: Geographers used to gather intelligence? Z Magazine 22(4). URL: http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/21044 (last accessed 4/19/09).

Sedillo, Simon. 2009. The Demarest Factor: The Ethics of U.S. Department of Defense Funding got Academic Research in Mexico. El Enemigo Común (website). URL: http://elenemigocomun.net/2255 (last accessed 4/19/09).

“I Can Log Off Any Time.”   Daniel Lende at neuroanthropology has been posting his students’ final projects for a class he taught on the anthropology of substance abuse.  One of the projects on Internet addiction is a pretty interesting synthesis of how increasing online use is changing behaviors as well as normative attitudes towards internet use (like the potential inclusion of Internet addiction in the upcoming DSM V).  In other news, Jon Witt at Sociocultural Images wrote a small piece on the Oregon extension, a one-semester college sequence where students and faculty form an unwired intellectual community.  (But that doesn’t mean it can’t have a facebook page).  

Gifts in Our Times: Claudia Dreifus at the  New York Times interviewed Pauline Wiessner about her 30-year research relationship with !Kung communities and the changing patterns of !Kung social networks in a globalizing world. When asked if she saw any contemporary analogues to !Kung storytelling and gift exchange, Weissner answered, “Facebook.”  She continues:

One constantly hears stories of people finding jobs and business opportunities through these sites. Hey, and what does a blogger do? Tell stories! The videos and snapshots that people post echo the exchange gifts of the !Kung. They are a kind of token that says, “I’ve kept you in my heart.” 

New at the Institute:  Eugene Raikhel at Somatosphere commented on Didier Fassin’s appointment at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.  Raikhel ponders whether this will encourage more of Fassin’s work to be translated into English, and if this appointment and Ian Hacking’s election to the College de France marks the beginning of a new intellectual cosmopolitanism.

New Works: Lorenz at anthropologi.info found this recent online interview with Benedict Anderson on Anderson’s recent work on the forgotten body of work of Chinese-Indonesian journalist Kwee Thiam Tjing, the uneveness of power, cosmopolitanism from below, and the value of theory.  

To me, theorizing is like watching a drop of water: you can see the water and that’s all it is, a drop of water. But the minute you actually bring a microscope in, it’s completely different. Theory is really good at a sort of long-distance framing, but how people live their lives is something else, and I’m personally more interested in that than abstract theorizing.

Open Secrets: Maximilian Forte posted the panel paper (both in text and audio) he recently gave at the CASCA annual meeting. The paper is an eloquent and prescient warning about military data mining open source articles to collect ethnographic information, making anthropologists part of their intellegence gathering, whether we like it or not.

Truth and Soul: John L. Jackson posted John Legend’s commencement day address at the University of Pennsylvania.  Jackson takes one of the key lines of Legend’s address, “searching for the truth is like searching for your soul,” and makes an appeal for us to understand truth and soul as a way of recognizing and valuing the everyday moments and ‘ordinary affects’ of life.

For Your Viewing Pleasure: I just came across the University of Cambridge’s Social Anthropology catalog of video-taped interviews. The list shows 474 posted files, with the most recent editions posted this year being Keith Hart, Jean and John Comaroff, Paul Rabinow, and McKim Marriott, among others. My only warning is that the files are big. Two mp4 files are still downloading to my computer, preventing me from saying more about the quality of the files or interviews.

The Zen of Changing Course: Recent Political Science PhD Matthew Crawford’s first book is not a revised version of the dissertation. Rather, as Slate reports, Crawford’s book traces his path after grad school, getting bored at the think tank where he was working, and opening a motorcycle repair shop. More than a tale of the grad student who decided to get real, the slate article discusses Crawford’s career choices against the backdrop of an increasingly mobile job market and what services stay local in the Internet age. [Thanks to arts and letters daily for first picking up this post.]