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More and more anthropologists are recruited to service military operations

Published on May 28, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, ethics, fieldwork / methods, journal articles / papers, Northern America, University / Academia

The connections between anthropologists, military counterinsurgency experts and intelligence agencies are multiplying and deepening. It is well known that anthropologists work for the military. But government agencies may be only the tip of the iceberg. Contractors to the military are probably employing many more anthropologists as the privatization of the military grows apace, Roberto J. González writes in Anthropology Today June 2007 (to be published in a couple of weeks).

I quote his “small sample of military contractors currently recruiting anthropologists to service military operations”:

1. BAE Systems is advertising a ‘field anthropologist’ position for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan for what appears to be counterinsurgency support work. The job is ‘designed to dramatically improve the collection, interpretation, understanding, operational application, and sharing of local cultural knowledge… [it] facilitates the collection, analysis, archiving and application of cultural information relevant to the unit commander’s operational decision-making process.’

2. Hicks & Associates (a subsidiary of the multinational Science Applications International Corporation) is advertising a ‘research assistant’ position for a project that ‘investigates the evolution of subnational identities within and across states, and the implication of culture on attitudinal perspectives of other groups… [in] Tunisia and other North African nations… the position requires a background in anthropology… Arabic language skills are a plus.’

3. L-3 Communications is advertising a position for ‘cultural expert – Middle East’. Duties include ‘technical intelligence data gathering and analysis skills and abilities to manage, develop, implement, and administer intelligence analysis programs and policies for customer applications’. Candidate ‘MUST be fluent in Arabic, Pashtu, or Persian-Farsi… MUST have knowledge of prevalent Sunni and Shia tribes in the Middle East… US Citizens applying must hold PhD in History or Anthropology’.

4. Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) is advertising a ‘COIN operations specialist’ position in order to ‘provide Brigade Combat Team or Regiment, battalion and company-level leaders of Coalition units and brigade and battalion-level leaders of Transition Teams (MiTT/NPTT/BTT) and the Iraqi Security Forces (Iraqi Army and Iraqi National Police) with a fundamental understanding of COIN principles, lessons learned and TTPs required to execute full-spectrum operations in the Iraqi Theater of Operations… a Master’s Degree in Military Science, Psychology, Cultural Anthropology’ is preferred and military experience is a requirement.

5. Booz Allen Hamilton is advertising a position for a ‘war on terrorism analyst’ who will conduct ‘research into adversary and target country elements of power, including political, military, economic, social, infrastructure, and information (PMESII) systems to assist military planners… conduct evaluations of terrorist adversary and target country response to effects based activities… [and] work with joint military planners and the inter-agency community to determine planning options to achieve War on Terrorism efforts and objectives’. Qualifications include a BA or BS degree, with ‘knowledge of political science, economics, social anthropology, infrastructure, or information operations preferred’.

6. The Mitre Corporation is advertising a ‘sr. artificial intelligence engineer’ position ‘to play a role in applying modeling and simulation as an experimental approach to social and behavioral science problems of national significance… [and] to apply social sciences to critical national security issues.’ Desirable applicants will have a ‘PhD in a social science discipline (e.g. anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, medical anthropology, cultural geography, comparative social and cognitive psychology, cultural communication studies, science/technology studies, international labor/industrial relations, industrial/organizational psychology, comparative political science, public administration.)’

UPDATE:

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

Summary of another article in Anthropology Today June 2007: >> The dangerous militarisation of anthropology

Anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani: “Peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention”

Embedded anthropology? Anthropologist studies Canadian soldiers in the field

Fieldwork reveals: Bush administration is lying about the “war on terror” in the Sahara

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

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations

Bush, “war of terror” and the erosion of free academic speech: Challenges for anthropology

USA: Censorship threatens fieldwork – A call for resistance

Two Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

Mary Douglas has passed away

Published on May 18, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, persons and theories

(via Savage Minds) Mary Douglas has died aged 86. She was the most widely read British social anthropologist of her generation, Richard Fardon writes in an orbituary in the Guardian. If she had to be recalled for a single achievement, Fardon continues, “it would be as the anthropologist who took the techniques of a particularly vibrant period of research into non-western societies and applied them to her own, western milieu”.

Her book Purity and Danger “simply changed the way people saw their world and made sense of every day distinctions that we observed but failed to understand”, Daniel Miller writes in the blog Material Culture

A Sunday Times survey of “Makers of the 20th Century” in 1991 listed Purity and Danger among the 100 most influential nonfiction works since 1945; only four women and four anthropologists made the list, according to The Times

Mary Douglas and commercial ethnography

(via Savage Minds) Mary Douglas has died aged 86. She was the most widely read British social anthropologist of her generation, Richard Fardon writes in an orbituary in the Guardian. If she had to be recalled for a single achievement,…

Eight anthropology careers: Life outside the university

Published on May 14, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology

Where do anthropologists work outside the university? And how do you get a relevant job? Andreas Lloyd has been at the annual Career day at his old anthropology department (University of Copenhagen) and gives ut a great summary of eight presentations and eight ways to make an anthropology career.

He writes about both old and new careers. Inger Merete Hansen for example is now close to 60, has combined her anthropology degree with primary school teaching:

Anthropology gave her both a method and outlook which proved vital to her work, especially in order to work against the heavy-handed and indirectly racist school bureaucracy and work towards new ways of integrating immigrant children into the Danish society.

Kirsten Becker works to build relationships between the department and the “real world” outside. She told about the growing popularity of our discipline. Anthropology is being hyped at all of the conferences on innovation these days:

“Before, nobody really paid attention when I spoke at conferences, but now everybody shushes and listens to every word. Being an anthropologist is like being a shaman – the industry thinks we have some secret magic they need. My job is to maintain that impression.” Another grin.

Anne Weber is working as a recruiter. She argued that anthropology is just as much a way of personal development as it is an academic discipline. This is because anthropologists invest themselves so much in their work, learning new ways of being present, of observing and of being surprised. Thus, for an anthropologist, it is much more a matter of personality that it is about grades and recommendations when applying for jobs in the real world.

The most repeated and probably most important refrain was, Lloyd writes, mot offer up some easy and shrinkwrapped solution, but saying “I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know how to find out.”

>> read the whole text “Anthropology Careers” on Andreas Lloyd’s blog

Criticizes the “apathy of anthropologists toward the human rights situation in Balochistan”

Published on May 14, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, indigenous people / minorities, politics

“Anthropologists should shed light on the violence in Balochistan Province in Pakistan, anthropologist Hafeez Jamali writes in Anthropology News May 2007. Balochistan is presently the scene of a bitter and violent struggle. Multinationals are exploiting the region’s mineral resources. Hundreds of ordinary Baloch died, some 84,000 civilians predominantly have been displaced and hundreds of political activists have been arrested and tortured.

Jamali criticizes the “apathy of the discipline and of anthropologists toward the appalling human rights situation” there: There is hardly any effort by anthropologists who have worked amongst Baloch people to raise this issue in their ethnographic work, he writes. Most of the current work on Baloch people does not address current political issues:

Indeed (…) much of the past and recent anthropological work on the Baloch people has tended to focus on pastoral-nomadic aspects of Baloch social organization by employing concepts of ecological adaptation and kinship networks. These ethnographic works (…) give the impression that the Baloch are pre-modern beings living in bounded cultural groups which are relatively unconcerned with larger geo-strategic and political developments in the region and the world.

This approach is misleading because Baloch tribes’ resistance movements against colonial rule of the British Raj as well as against inequities of postcolonial states such as Iran and Pakistan were intrinsically linked to regional anti-colonial struggles. The present day struggle in Balochistan also draws inspiration from contemporary movements for self-governance in other parts of the world and in that sense is comparable to the struggles being waged by Palestinians, Kurds and other marginalized ethnic groups.

In view of this situation, it is important that anthropologists who work in and study Balochistan take the influence of regional geo-strategic politics as well as the intrusion of neoliberal globalization in the Baloch people’s lives and the response of the Baloch to such intrusion more seriously in their work.

>> read the whole article in Anthropology News

MORE INFO:

Hundreds missing in conflict-torn Balochistan (IRIN, 10.5.07)

Pakistan’s battle over Balochistan (BBC, 26.8.06)

By the way, in Anthropology News April 2007, there are several articles on the Oaxacan Rebellion (Mexico)

Engaged anthropologists beaten by the Mexican police

‘War on Terror’ Has Indigenous People in Its Sights

Riots in France and silent anthropologists

Anthropologists on the Israel-Lebanon conflict

"Anthropologists should shed light on the violence in Balochistan Province in Pakistan, anthropologist Hafeez Jamali writes in Anthropology News May 2007. Balochistan is presently the scene of a bitter and violent struggle. Multinationals are exploiting the region’s mineral resources. Hundreds…

AAA: “Open access no realistic option”

Published on May 14, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia

In an article in Anthropology News May 2007, Bill Davis, Executive Director of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) explains why he doesn’t embrace the arguments of open access advocates to make electronic versions of scholarly journals free to anyone.

He writes:

AAA’s publishing program financial structure is not unlike those of many scholarly society publishers in the social sciences and humanities. Library subscription revenues are critically important to maintaining the stability and viability of our publishing programs. Thus it is understandable that nonprofit society publishers fear losing library subscription revenue if their journal contents were available to all readers for free.

But Davis is no opponent of Open Access. He discusses several options:

Maybe there are options not yet widely discussed. For example, the proposed legislation requiring that any federally supported research be published through an open access repository could be accompanied by a requirement that every federal research grant include in its amount the costs of such publication. Another possibility would be for colleges and universities to provide supplements to faculty compensation to cover the costs associated with their faculty’s scholarly publishing work.
(…)
For all scholars, authors and readers, the challenge is to figure out how to provide as much content as possible free to those who we want to have access to it without losing our ability to continue to publish that content.

>> read the whole article in Anthropology News

In Anthropology News April, Alex Golub claimed that the pay-for-content model has never been successful and that we ought to move beyond the idea that our current reader-pays model is somehow more “realistic” than open access alternatives.

UPDATE:

Interesting comment by Peter Suber at Open Access News. In his opinion, Bill Davis is wrong in several points. The study that he refers to (that shows that Open access archiving will lead to journal cancellations) is flawed. And even when the AAA-Director discusses possible options he doesn’t seem to be well informed according to Suber:

But he misunderstands a key fact about OA archiving when he suggests that FRPAA (which would require OA archiving for most federally-funded research) “could be accompanied by a requirement that every federal research grant include in its amount the costs” of such OA archiving. OA repositories never charge deposit fees. There are modest upkeep costs for the repository but no costs for authors or readers.

Suber encourages anthropologists to publish their journal articles online – as it is already allowed:

Finally, the AAA is a green publisher (according to SHERPA). Its journals already allow authors to self-archive their peer-reviewed postprints. Hence, even if the AAA can’t find a way to convert its non-OA journals to OA, or to provide gold OA, authors should provide green OA on their own initiative and take advantage of the opportunity the AAA has already created.

>> read the whole comment by Peter Suber

American Anthropological Association opposes Open Access to Journal Articles

Open Access: “The American Anthropological Association reminds me of the recording industry”

Open Source Anthropology : Are anthropologists serious about sharing knowledge?

New Open Access Anthropology Website, mailinglist, chat and t-shirts!

In an article in Anthropology News May 2007, Bill Davis, Executive Director of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) explains why he doesn't embrace the arguments of open access advocates to make electronic versions of scholarly journals free to anyone.

He writes:…