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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

Protests at Yale: When Walmart’s management principles run an anthropology department

Published on November 7, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Northern America, politics, University / Academia

Generally, anthropologists support social justice, but in their own department, they fire colleagues like David Graeber who publicly supported graduate students’ right to form a union. “In increasingly corporate universities, the gap between one’s scholarship and one’s university politics is increasing”, Nazima Kadir writes in a commentary in Anthropology News November (not online, for AAA-members access via AnthroSource).

Kadir is PhD candidate at Yale’s anthropology department and an organizer for GESO, the graduate employees and students’ union.

The non-renewal of David Graeber’s contract, she writes, has received widespread attention as a sign of the conflict between ideology and engaged practice. But, she continues, it is rarely viewed in the context of union-busting. An avowed anarchist, Graeber publicly supported graduate students’ right to form a union. When the director of graduate studies attempted to expel an organizer, Graeber was the only faculty on her committee to defend her.

Weeks later, senior faculty voted against renewing Graeber’s contract, demonstrating with clarity the consequences for faculty who break ranks to support the union, Kadir writes.

More anti-union activities included another attempt to expel an organizer; the firing of David Graeber for defending this student; a series of aggressive emails sent by an anti-union faculty member to her; and the director of graduate students threatening to void the qualifying exams of several third-year students (all union activists).

Taken together, the administration and faculty’s actions constituted a pattern of systemic, organized abuse and created a fearful, anti-intellectual climate.

Following Yale’s lead, during the joint Yale/Columbia strike in 2005, Columbia’s provost (a noted labor historian) advised faculty to withhold grants and teaching fellowships from strikers. His memo was leaked and published in The Nation.

Background: In 2004, the Bush-appointed National Labor Review Board (NLRB ) reversed the Clinton-appointed board’s decision of 2000, which recognized graduate students’ right to organize at private universities. Current decisions “reflect the current administration’s anti-labor polices”. At public universities, it’s a non-issue, she clarifies: Berkeley and the University of Michigan have recognized their graduate student unions for decades.

For Union membership is a democratic right:

I’ve began organizing for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization when I realised the academy was in crisis. With 40% of all teaching being conducted by adjuncts, it is clear that the “casualization” of academic labor is not the future but the present. If I want to have job security, health benefits, gender equality and anything as banal as pregnancy leave, I have to fight for it as a graduate student before even considering having it as an adjunct.

I refuse to accept that Walmart’s management principles should also run a university setting. While Yale demonstrates another vision, I am encouraged by the efforts of the graduate students who organize to make the academy into a forum for democratic possibilities, and not corporate interests.

For those of you without access to Anthropology News, Nazima Kadir mentions most of her points in her paper The Challenges of Organizing Academic Labor (pdf)

The website of the graduate employees and students’ union is quite informative, see among others their reports.

Solidarity with David Graeber website

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

Blogging and Public Anthropology at Yale: When free speech costs a career

USA: Censorship threatens fieldwork – A call for resistance

Censorship of research in the USA: Iranians not allowed to publish papers

Generally, anthropologists support social justice, but in their own department, they fire colleagues like David Graeber who publicly supported graduate students' right to form a union. "In increasingly corporate universities, the gap between one's scholarship and one's university politics is…

Why borders don’t help – An engaged anthropology of the US-Mexican border

Published on October 31, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, globalisation, migration, Northern America, Us and Them, websites

“Anthropologists Should Participate in the Current Immigration Debate” was the title of an earlier entry. Josiah McC. Heyman is one of the engaged anthropologists. He wrote several newspaper articles about the US-Mexican border where he showed that more border enforcement will not deter people from coming to the United States, but rarther make them more likely to settle and less likely to return home.

In his op-ed The Border Control Illusion (MS Word document!)he writes:

What can we do when our current ideas don’t work? We can question our assumptions. In this case, the assumption is that BAD THINGS come from outside of the country and that WE inside the U.S. have nothing to do with them. The border could be a safe protective wall that keeps all danger away, if we could just make it big, tall, and tough enough.

(…) Migration is woven into the interior of the United States. It is part of the construction, agriculture, and services we all use, directly and indirectly. It is part of family reunification and community consolidation. Migration cannot be stopped by the border because it is already on the inside–not just the immigrants living among us, but part and parcel of our own culture and economy. We must think differently, very differently.

>> visit his homepage (incl. several articles)

Elsewhere on the web:

Josiah McC. Heyman: Class and classification at the U.S.-Mexico border (Human Organization, summer 2001 / FindArticles.com)

Josiah McC. Heyman: The Anthropology of Power-Wielding Bureaucracies (Human Organization, winter 2004 / FindArticles.com)

Visual anthropology: Documenting the economic exodus from Mexico

Ethnographic Research: Gated Communities Don’t Lead to Security

For free migration: Open the borders!

"Anthropologists Should Participate in the Current Immigration Debate" was the title of an earlier entry. Josiah McC. Heyman is one of the engaged anthropologists. He wrote several newspaper articles about the US-Mexican border where he showed that more border enforcement…

Interview: Anthropologist studied poor fast food workers in Harlem

Published on September 25, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, books, Northern America, poverty

The Gotham Gazette has interviewed Urban anthropologist Katherine S. Newman about her research and the situation of the urban poor in New York.

Newman has written No Shame In My Game, an ethnography of fast food workers in Harlem. In October the follow up called Chutes and Ladders will come out.

First, a few words about No Shame In My Game:

Her major findings are the strong work ethic among these minimum-wage workers and the value they place on personal responsibility; to blame their difficulties on personal shortcomings would be too simplistic.

(source))

An excerpt from a review in The Progressive:

In No Shame in My Game, she argues that social science research has disproportionately focused on the plight of the unemployed ghetto-dweller or mothers on welfare. The media, too, depict welfare dependency as the natural state of poverty, while neglecting the majority of inner-city poor people who work.
(…)
She writes, “The nation’s working poor do not need their values reengineered. They do not need lessons about the dignity of work. Their everyday lives are proof enough that they share the values of their mainstream, middle class counterparts.”

She talks in very positive way both about the workers and the employers (“Newman sees everyone she meets in a similarly flattering light, as if she is afraid to make any judgments”, The New York Times remarks). She is asked if there have been conflicts between “illegal” immigrants and native-born Americans at the work place. She answers that the work created both tension and friendship:

But the thing that I found most striking was that people created a community of friends out of the people they worked with. Workers had friendships or relationships with each other; they went to the movies together. The workplace is a great generator of cross-racial contact and friendship.

The employers, she writes, were “more honorable people than most readers would ever think”:

Now, I don’t want to say that they were saints. They were business people, and they were looking to make a profit. But they were much more invested in the lives of their workers then most people realize. They helped people get eyeglasses; they helped people get ID; they cosigned leases; they were offering young people money if they got good grades; they paid for their schoolbooks. (…) Very often these employers were the only ones who were paying a good deal of interest in the school performance of these kids.

So one of the things that I argue in the book is that really contrary to common wisdom school and work are not antithetical to one another. These young people were doing better in school than the young people who weren’t working, because the discipline that they learned on the job and the oversight the business owners and mangers exercised over them was having a positive effect on their school performance.

(…) I must say that I was surprised at what I found in the businesses that I did study. And that has taught me as a social scientist that you shouldn’t prejudge anything. It’s all open for investigation.

>> read the whole interview

The blog A Constrained Vision quotes from another interview with her:

It was also important to me to show how qualitative research could give us a deeper understanding of the daily lives and real values of inner city workers. Most of the information we have on labor markets and the workforce naturally comes from economists or sociologists who work with large data sets.

That research is crucial, especially for explaining the big picture. But it doesn’t help us understand how ordinary people in poor communities view their lives, their options, or how they put the resources together to survive, to raise their kids, to balance going to school and keeping a job.

You need a different approach for that and it seemed to me that anthropology has something important to add to the picture. Besides, a good anthropologist can communicate with a larger audience that won’t sit still for statistical arguments, but will listen to a well-crafted account of real lives.

MORE ON “NO SHAME IN MY GAME”

An unusual view of poverty- Review in The Progressive

Flipping Burgers – Review in The New York Times

Pennies From Hell – Review in The Village Voice

The Gotham Gazette has interviewed Urban anthropologist Katherine S. Newman about her research and the situation of the urban poor in New York.

Newman has written No Shame In My Game, an ethnography of fast food workers in…

Home Ethnography?

Published on August 27, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, history, Northern America, websites

I’ve received an email by Bill Jackson, the webmaster of www.storyofmyhome.com/ He hopes that this website will become a resource for academics and historians. On www.storyofmyhome.com people can submit their stories about the houses they’ve lived in:

The Story of My Home lets you become your own historian. You can document your life and leave a record for old friends, family and even historians to use when piecing together a history of your life, or of your neighborhood’s development. This is a cultural preservation tool that lets a family’s experiences live on even if a home becomes a teardown or infill development candidate.

(…)

Students of history understand that 90% of real history goes unrecorded.
A home has a singular importance in the life of a person and a family: it is WHERE their history occurs.

>> visit The Story Of My Home

I've received an email by Bill Jackson, the webmaster of www.storyofmyhome.com/ He hopes that this website will become a resource for academics and historians. On www.storyofmyhome.com people can submit their stories about the houses they've lived in:

The Story of My…