ethics | antropologi.info

How the Human Terrain System people think

Published on September 22, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, ethics, Middle East, Northern America, politics, Us and Them

“They’re natural born killers. They’re good, they’re lethal, they’re fantastic. I love working with them”, says Major Robert Holbert. He was part of the first Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan in 2007 and tells his story in a fascinating interview with Lisa Wynn at Culture Matters.

The interview gives insight in the way HTS-people (“cultural advisors” for the US-army) think. And it uncovers that their way of thinking only works within their own cosmology – only as long as you accept that it is okay to colonize / occupy Afghanistan or Iraq:

Lisa Wynn: OK, well let me ask a hard question, the kind of question I can imagine opponents of HTS posing. Yes, you’re saying this saves lives, and probably that’s true. But at the same time, it facilitates a military occupation of another country. You say it’s about winning a war. But talking about winning, it takes the war for granted. In the end, you’re facilitating the U.S. occupation of another country. How would you answer that?

Robert Holbert: [sighs] I’m not going to completely disagree, it’s not… God. It is what it is. OK, you say we’re an occupying army, we’re an occupying army. If that’s how you look at it, that’s how it is. What else do you call it when you’re not from the country and you’re in it? But if you’re going to fight it, then you’re there. This is an opportunity to change the culture of the military, this is our golden hour as progressives, and yeah, we’re in a country, we’re occupying it, but I’m trying to work myself out of a job, you know.

>> continue reading at Culture Matters

It reminds me of what Kerim Friedman wrote three month ago in his post The Myth of Cultural Miscommunication (Savage Minds, 26.6.08):

Treating the military’s lack of respect for local cultural knowledge as a cultural problem which can be solved by hiring anthropologists ignores the very real ways in which the military itself operates as a system for producing knowledge about the world, and the role of local knowledge in that system.

I haven’t written about military stuff recently, so in case you’ve missed some earlier posts on this issue in the anthrosphere, you might be interested in reading that The Human Terrain System spreads to Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean (Open Anthropology, 7.9.08) , about resistance against Pentagon’s Minerva project (military-social science partnership) (Culture Matters 5.8.08) and a review of an article by embedded journalist Steve Featherstone about the HTS entitled “Human Quicksand” (Culture Matters 29.8.08). Culture Matters provides also an annotated bibliography on HTS, Minerva, and PRISP

Anthropology and CIA: “We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work”

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

"They’re natural born killers. They’re good, they’re lethal, they’re fantastic. I love working with them", says Major Robert Holbert. He was part of the first Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan in 2007 and tells his story in a fascinating interview…

“A well-informed critique of wartime anthropology for the military”

Published on July 11, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, ethics, history, politics

Approximately half of all anthropologists in the United States contributed their expertise to the World War II effort. In his new book Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, anthropologist David Price explores the wide range of roles they played through dozens of accounts profiling their work.

In a review in Anthropological Quarterly that today was published in Red Orbit, Roberto J Gonzalez writes:

Price’s work reveals that even in a “good war” like WWII, anthropologists often stood on ethically shaky ground when working for military and intelligence agencies, and some of them came to regret the long- term consequences of their participation.

In addition, the book reveals that the during the war, military officials had a tendency of “selectively ignoring and selectively commandeering social scientists’ recommendations” (p. 198). All too often, anthropologists had little impact on policy making and functioned as cogs in large bureaucracies with clearly established goals.

Anthropologists were involved in many doubtful projects. But only “few anthropologists had second thoughts about the ethics of applying anthropology to warfare” according to Price’s book.

The Office of War Information employed nearly a dozen anthropologists, who among other things designed propaganda custom made for Japanese audiences for the purpose of convincing them to surrender.

(…)

Still others were recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (established in 1942), a spy agency that was the precursor to the CIA. For example, Gregory Bateson carried out clandestine missions in South Asia; Carleton Coon used his anthropological knowledge to train assassins and kidnappers in North Africa

(…)

Among the most shocking sections is a description of “social engineers” such as Henry Field (p. 127). Field and several other anthropologists were deeply involved in the “M Project” initiated by President Roosevelt in 1942. The goal was to search the globe for regions where millions of wartime refugees could be resettled.

Declassified documents reveal that “library bound bureaucrats [were] designing contingency plans to move tens of millions of people thousands of miles away from their native lands. Field and his staff appear[ed] comfortable planning to move inventoried people about the globe like fungible commodities” (p. 126).

Even more disconcerting is that fact that “in almost every case, the peoples identified for relocation were victims of the aggression of others (e.g., the Roma, Jews, etc.), as if the reward of being victimized was being moved so that the aggressor could live in peace” (p. 127).

Price concludes that anthropologists’ efforts might have helped defeat the forces of fascism. But at the same time, they unleashed other forces that could potentially be used for harm.

Gonzales has written a quite enthusiastic review. Price’s book is an “extraordinarily powerful and well-informed critique of wartime anthropology for the military”, he writes.

When I’m not very comfortable with the review, it’s because of the connections between the two anthropologists. Gonzales and Price are among the founding members of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and have written several texts together, i.e. When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents

>> read the whole review

There is also a short review in The Olympian

David Price seems to be a fan of open access anthropology. He has put online lots of articles, including about World War I & II and Anthropology

More and more anthropologists are recruited to service military operations

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

Anthropology and CIA: “We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work”

Protests against British research council: “Recruits anthropologists for spying on muslims”

American Anthropologists Stand Up Against Torture and the Occupation of Iraq

Cooperation between the Pentagon and anthropologists a fiasco?

Published on April 16, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, ethics, Middle East, University / Academia

The collaboration between the U.S. military and anthropologists has been criticized for both political and ethical reasons. According to a recent article in Newsweek, the whole project could end as a fiasco: The implementation of the $40 million project has fallen short, according to more than a dozen people involved in the program that were interviewed by Newsweek.

Recruitment appears to have been mishandled from the start, with administrators offering positions to even marginally qualified applicants:

Several team members say they were accepted after brief phone interviews and that their language skills were never tested. As a result, instead of top regional experts, the anthropologists sent to Iraq include a Latin America specialist and an authority on Native Americans. One is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on America’s goth, punk and rave subcultures.
(…)
Of 19 Human Terrain members operating in five teams in Iraq, fewer than a handful can be described loosely as Middle East experts, and only three speak Arabic. The rest are social scientists or former GIs who (…) are transposing research skills from their unrelated fields at home.
(…)
Most team members admit they are hampered by an inability to conduct real fieldwork in a war zone. Some complain that the four-month training they underwent in the States was often a waste of time.

Matt Tompkins, who returned home in January after five months in Iraq, said he thought his team provided helpful input to its brigade, but the contribution was more superficial than planners of the program had conceived. “Without the ability to truly immerse yourself in the population, existing knowledge of the culture … is critical,” he said in an e-mail. “Lacking that, we were basically an open-source research cell.”

Actually, language skills and the fact that you have been to Iran to attend academic conferences can make you suspicious – as it was the case with Zenia Helbig, a 31-year-old doctoral student at the University of Virginia with a concentration in Islamic studies and proficiency in both Farsi and Arabic. She had according to Newsweek one of the more impressive résumés of all the recruits.

She says:

“The running joke was that I was clearly a spy and the only question was which country I worked for.”

The articles continues:

The banter turned ugly when, over beers one night, team members began speculating whether the U.S. military would eventually be called on to invade Iran. In the jocular spirit of the moment, Helbig made what she now describes as a careless remark: “I said, ‘OK, if we invade Iran, that’s where I draw the line, hop the border and switch sides’.” In an academic setting, the comment might not have been particularly shocking. Her supervisors settled for a rebuke. But an officer in the program complained to security officials at Fort Leavenworth whose investigation led to her dismissal.

>> read the whole story in Newsweek

According to Wire, “Human Terrain Teams are hopping mad about the Newsweek article” and anthropologist Montgomery McFate, one of the main architects of the human terrain teams, wrote a lengthy response >> read the letter

UPDATE: The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has also responded to the Newsweek article. >> read the letter to the editor on AAAs website

Furthermore, Maximilian Forte has written several related posts recently, see Reviewing the AAA’s Report on Anthropology and the Military and American Anthropologists against Counterinsurgency: Part Two.

Anthropology and CIA: “We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work”

Protests against British research council: “Recruits anthropologists for spying on muslims”

Oppose participation in counter-insurgency! Network of Concerned Anthropologists launched

Savage Minds: The Fate of McFate – Anthropology’s Relationship with the Military Revisited

“Tribal Iraq Society” – Anthropologists engaged for US war in Iraq

Military spies invade anthropology conferences?

“Arabs and Muslims should be wary of anthropologists”

San Jose: American Anthropologists Stand Up Against Torture and the Occupation of Iraq and AAA Press Release: Anthropologists weigh in on Iraq, torture at annual meeting

“War on terror”: CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information / see also debate on this on Savage Minds

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

Military spies invade anthropology conferences?

Published on February 6, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, ethics, University / Academia

The U.S. military is not only interested in employing anthropologists. Now, they have started attending anthropology conferences. Anthropologist Caroline Osella from the University in London and one of the editors of Social Mobility In Kerala, is worried.

In a post in the ASA Globalog (run by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth) she tells us about her recent experience from a conference at the Exeter Gulf Studies Centre where she met people from the U.S. military both in the bar and in the conference:

Bad enough to have to check oneself and what one says in conferences…but to have to be on your guard in the bar afterwards in case you say something of interest about the Gulf-connected Muslim Indians you work among is surely one step too James Bond for an anthropologist?

A week before, she had attended a conference on south Asian studies in Leiden and “also found some of these security types there, listening in on the panels on south Asian Muslims – and even presenting papers themselves!”

Do we have to tolerate this?, she wonders:

I still maintain that this is a worrying trend and that effectively, academic freedom and decent research is jeopardised if all our conferences are gatecrashed.

Conferences are places where we try out ideas and present first drafts of our work; we may later decide to alter some things before going to publication in order to protect the people we work with.

By letting security personnel or academics form the military into conferences then effectively our work is going into the public realm before we are ready for it to do so.

Washington and whoever else is welcome to read the published versions of my and Filippo’s work, like any other members of the interested public. But they can download it and read it in their offices.

They can please keep away from academic conferences, where I want the freedom to try out my ideas, decide which details I might want to keep confidential for ethics’ sake, and feel free to engage in discussions which are not monitored or where the information I may pass on is not feeding into any policy agenda. And I want to be able to go and drink and talk shop in the bar in the evening without wondering who is listening.

(…)

We teach our undergrads about our shameful past with regard to colonialism. Are we going to find the next generation of anthropologists teaching about us and our pathetic accommodations to state power and our polite refusals to speak out?

>> read the whole blog post on the ASA Globalog

>> more posts on counterinsurgency on the ASA Globalog (quite a lot actually!)

On the website of the Network of concerned anthropologists (NCA), Hugh Gusterson tells a related story. During a panel at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting featuring three NCA members, witnesses saw two U.S. Army personnel writing down the names and institutional affiliations of anthropologists who had signed copies of the NCA pledge of Non-participation in Counter-insurgency circulating during the panel.

Final report launched: AAA no longer opposes collaboration with CIA and the military

The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

“Arabs and Muslims should be wary of anthropologists”

Anthropology and CIA: “We need more awareness of the political nature and uses of our work”

In a post…

New media and anthropology – AAA meeting part III

Published on December 10, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, ethics, internet, media, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, technology, websites

While new media can foster participatory ethnography and enhance access, one also has to reflect on the implications of the Internet’s openness and availability. This was one of the lessons of a session at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association about new media and anthropology according to Inside Higher Education.

Kate Hennessy, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, described an online exhibit on the indigenous culture of the Doig River First Nation that she helped to develop for the Virtual Museum of Canada. It makes songs, photographs and video of the Dane-zaa people freely available to the general public, in what Hennessy described as “a form of repatriation” — the term for returning objects and artifacts to the cultures from which they came, although here the term was used in a virtual sense.

(…)

Over the course of several meetings with community elders, the team came to realize that, according to the Web site, “it is not appropriate to show Dane-zaa Dreamers’ drawings to a worldwide audience on the Internet. Even though the drum is central to this website, in order to ensure that the Dreamers drawings are treated properly and with respect, no images of Dreamers’ drawings or the drum that we describe here are shown.”

(…)

(T)he online exhibit project extended discussions about when the display of cultural heritage crosses the line into appropriation, and how giving communities access to digital tools can provide a means for self-representation.

>> read the whole article in Inside Higher Ed “Downloading Cultures”

How to save Tibetan folk songs? Put them online!

New website helps save Kenai Peoples language (Alaska)

“A new approach to the collection of traditional Aboriginal music”

Multimedia Music Ethnography of Yodelling and Alphorn Blowing

How Media and Digital Technology Empower Indigenous Survival

Book review: Claiming the Stones, Naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of Identity

Book review: Who owns native culture – A book with an excellent website

For more news on the AAA meeting see Circumcision: “Harmful practice claim has been exaggerated” – AAA meeting part IV, “The insecure American needs help by anthropologists” – AAA-meeting part II, and Final report launched: AAA no longer opposes collaboration with CIA and the military – AAA meeting part I