ethics | antropologi.info

“War on terror”: CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information

Published on June 3, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, ethics, fieldwork / methods, Northern America, politics

“A CIA scheme to sponsor trainee spies secretly through US university courses has caused anger among UK academics, the BBC reports. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program pays anthropology students up to $50,000 (£27,500) a year. They are expected to use the techniques of “fieldwork” to gather political and cultural details on other countries. Britain’s Association of Social Anthropologists called the scholarships ethically “dangerous” and divisive.”

“Undergraduates taking part in the scholarship programme must not reveal their funding source and are expected to attend military intelligence summer camps.”

The CIAs activities are defended by an American anthropologist (Felix Moos, University of Kansas). He wrote according the BBC in Anthropology Today: “The United States is at war. Thus, to put it simply, the existing divide between academe and the intelligence community has become a dangerous and very real detriment to our national security at home and abroad.” >> read the whole article (BBC)

Let’s hope anthropologists say NO to the CIA!

This story reminds me on Montgomery McFate’s controversial article Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations where she urges anthropologists to cooperate with the military and Dustin M. Wax’s comments: “a functioning anthropology can never be on the side of U.S. forces”.

UPDATE 2 (6.5.05): More on the return of spies to college campuses in the Kansas City Star

PS: By the way. Check what kind of definition of anthropology the BBC uses on their website: “the study of esp. primitive peoples”…

The CIA’s Campus Spies. Exposing the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (Dave H. Price, Counterpunch, 12.3.05)

Anthropologists as Spies (David Price, The Nation, 20.11.00)

"A CIA scheme to sponsor trainee spies secretly through US university courses has caused anger among UK academics, the BBC reports. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program pays anthropology students up to $50,000 (£27,500) a year. They are expected to…

UPDATED: African village in the Zoo: Protest against racist exhibition

Published on May 27, 2005 by lorenz Posted in Africa, anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, ethics, Europe, Us and Them

Ethno::log

The zoo of Augsburg/Germany is planning to open a “African village” with people from Africa “situated in an unique African steppe landscape”, critically reports Norbert Finzsch in an email, professor of History at the University of Cologne. It’s remarkable, that scientists at our university are researching the historical dimension of the Völkerschauen in the 19th century while the zoo of Augsburg in about 80km distance is carrying on this tradition in the 21th century. >> continue

Kurt Jonassohn, On A Neglected Aspect Of Western Racism: From the beginning of the 1870s to the end of the 1930s – the exposition of so-called exotic peoples in zoological gardens attracted a huge public

Anthropological Days at the Olympic Games: ‘Great Fun for Savages’

UPDATE 20.6.05:
Radio interview on African Village/ “Germans & Japanese less sensitive about race”

UPDATE 14.6.05: In Detroit and London: More African Villages in the Zoo

UPDATE 10.6.05: Now the BBC starts to report on the African village

UPDATED UPDATE 2 By 2nd of June several German newspapers have written about the protest against this exhibition: Frankfurter Rundschau, Tagesspiegel, Jungle World, Neues Deutschland, while the conservative DIE WELT defended the arrangement and cites some Africans who consider the combination of zoo and african culture as perferct (for their business). >> continue to my post in German with more links in German

UPDATE 1:
The news spread extremly fast. Savage Minds provides a link to the original email by Norbert Finzsch. He writes:

“The way Africans and African Americans in Germany are perceived and discussed, the way they are present on billboards and in TV ads prove that the colonialist and racist gaze is still very much alive in Germany. This is the direct result of forty years of German colonialism and twelve years of National Socialism. People of color are still seen as exotic objects (of desire), as basically dehumanized entities within the realm of animals. This also explains why a zoo has been selected as site for the exhibit.”

“The African German community and concerned individuals like myself call to your attention the need to protest against the opening of the exhibit in the Augsburg Zoo. Please direct your personalized letters of protest to Frau Dr. Barbara Jantschke (Director Zoo Augsburg) at barbara.jantschke@zoo-augsburg.de .”

>> continue

Ethno::log

The zoo of Augsburg/Germany is planning to open a "African village" with people from Africa "situated in an unique African steppe landscape", critically reports Norbert Finzsch in an email, professor of History at the University of Cologne. It's remarkable, that…

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations

Published on May 19, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, ethics, fieldwork / methods, politics, Us and Them

Call you call it prostitution if anthropologists work for the military? Opinions are divided on this issue. As a pacifist, my answer is obvious. Others will stress that they’ve done their job as an anthropologist if they have succeeded in teaching soldiers cultural awareness and respect to other customs (as stated on a conference in Norway last year).

In a long article in Red Nova, cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate discusses anthropologists’ possible role in the U.S. military. She criticizes anthropologists’ “retreat to the Ivory Tower” after the Vietnam War. Does she want anthropologists to take up their questionable role they played role during the colonial era? It seems so. She writes:

“From the foregoing discussion, it might be tempting to conclude that anthropology is absent from the policy arena because it really is “exotic and useless.” However, this was not always the case. Anthropology actually evolved as an intellectual tool to consolidate imperial power at the margins of empire.”

On CENSA’s website we read that McFate “has spent the past few years trying to convince the Department of Defense that cultural knowledge should be a national security priority”.

>> read the whole article on Red Nova

UPDATE (20.5.05): I’ve only quickly scanned the article. Shortly after, Savage Minds’ author Dustin M. Wax has written a detailed review (!) of the McFate’s article:

“Her long article is a backhanded compliment to stubborn anthropologists whose knowledge and expertise is “urgently needed in time of war” but who, “bound by their own ethical code and sunk in a mire of postmodernism”, “entirely neglect U.S. forces”. I’ll cut straight to the chase: a functioning anthropology can never be on the side of “U.S. forces”. This is a practical as well as an ethical argument—it simply is not possible, even were there enough anthropologists who shared McFate’s priorities.

>> continue

Call you call it prostitution if anthropologists work for the military? Opinions are divided on this issue. As a pacifist, my answer is obvious. Others will stress that they've done their job as an anthropologist if they have succeeded in…

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

Published on May 11, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, ethics, persons and theories, Us and Them

The Chronicle of Higher Education

In her new book, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich, Gretchen E. Schafft, an applied anthropologist(George Washington University) explores how the principles of early-20th-century physical anthropology, were put to work by the Nazis. Several months after the invasion of Poland, Hitler’s aides established the Institute for German Work in the East, which employed scholarly anthropologists to complete such tasks as “racial-biological investigation of groups whose value cannot immediately be determined” and “racial-biological investigation of Polish resistance members.”

A few years after her discovery at the Smithsonian (75 boxes full of material produced in Poland by the Nazi anthropologists), Ms. Schafft was contacted by a physical anthropologist who wanted to use the Nazis’ data to shed light on “patterns of migration and population settlement.” She resisted, arguing that the information had been collected through cruel means and for evil purposes, and is in any case highly suspect.

Some related moral dilemmas are chewed over in Biological Anthropology and Ethics: From Repatriation to Genetic Identity (State University of New York Press), a collection edited by Trudy R. Turner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. >> continue (link updated)

SEE ALSO:
Murray L. Wax: Some Issues and Sources on Ethics in Anthropology (American Anthropological Association, Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology – Chpt 1)
Book review: Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (American Ethnologist)

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Gene Study Puts Indians on Guard

Published on April 28, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, ethics, indigenous people / minorities, Native American, Us and Them

IPS News

Scientists involved in the Genographic Project will go in search of the genes of indigenous communities worldwide in a bid to decipher the puzzle of how ancient peoples were disseminated around the planet. Negative experiences in the past, cultural resistance and the influence of global activism against ”biopiracy” have triggered suspicion among the Indians, who worry about their role in DNA studies, according to Latin American indigenous leaders consulted by Tierramérica.

But the bigger storm cloud, according to U.S. rights activists, is the controversial Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), dating to 1991. The initiative aimed to study human genetic variations to help design new medical treatments, among other purposes. Angry anthropologists, activists and Indians described the project as ”racist” and prevented it from taking place in its original form. >> continue

IPS News