Initial Reactions to AAA Report on Anthropologists & Counterinsurgency

by Maximilian Forte

ETHICS CONCEDE TO POLITICS 

Following the submission on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007, of the report of the Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with Security and Intelligence Communities, the American Anthropological Association presented a panel discussion and invited commentary from those assembled for its annual meeting.

Engagement of Anthropology with Security and Intelligence Communities

by Maximilian Forte

On Wednesday, November 28th, 2007, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association received the report of the Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with Security and Intelligence Communities. The complete report, with appendices, is 63 pages long and will be the subject of further discussion in the coming weeks on this blog.

 

 

 

Sotheby's To Auction Miraculously Recovered Stolen Masterpiece by Artist Rufino Tamayo; Rufino Tamayo, Tres Personajes, 1970.

Guantanamo Manual Leaked Online

by llwynn

Wired is carrying the news that Wikileak.org, a website that encourages corporate and government whistle-blowers to post documents online anonymously, has last week published the U.S. government manual for Guantanamo detainees, the Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures. It’s not a classified document, but unlike the publication of the military’s Counterinsurgency Manual by the University of Chicago Press, this one was not intended for public consumption.........

 Chávez’s Vision Shares Wealth and Centers Power In a sweeping revision of the constitution backed by President Hugo Chávez, Venezuela seems likely to start an extraordinary experiment in centralized, oil-fueled socialism

How the American public is thinking about the world. The first was a press conference to unveil research sponsored by the UN Foundation and the second was a small working group organized by the Stanley Foundation.

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The

Strange Story of their Curious Relationship

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship
by Montgomery McFate, J.D., Ph.D.

Something mysterious is going on inside the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Over the past 2 years, senior leaders have been calling for something unusual and unexpected -- cultural knowledge of the adversary. In August 2004, retired Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr., wrote an article for the Naval War College's Proceedings magazine that opposed the commonly held view within the U.S. military that success in war is best achieved by overwhelming technological advantage. Scales argues that the type of conflict we are now witnessing in Iraq requires "an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation." In October 2004, Arthur Cebrowski, Director of the Office of Force Transformation, concluded that "knowledge of one's enemy and his culture and society may be more important than knowledge of his order of battle." In November 2004, the Office of Naval Research and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored the Adversary Cultural Knowledge and National Security Conference, the first major DOD conference on the social sciences since 1962...............

  Anthropologists in a War Zone: Scholars Debate Their Role

Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) - USA
Before he left Cuba, he decided to switch his major to anthropology. Four years later, Mr. Damon was working as a bar bouncer and taking courses at the ...

Fieldwork is like going to a Discotheque

by michael

Anthropologists go to the field/disco alone and engage in different activities depending on her/his character. We usually dance alone but often, if not always, near others while only occasionally singling out individuals to talk to, dance with, and maybe spend a few moments with in the bath or back room. We might drink [...]

 

Fieldwork: Not an Inalienable Right, but an Expendable Rite

by Maximilian Forte

Over on the AAA blog, one might get the sense that those anthropologists who support being embedded with US military units in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the counterinsurgency campaigns, have developed some notion of “entitlement”–that is, that they are entitled to do this kind of work because it is the patriotic thing to do, the heroically altruistic thing to do, or the lack of jobs in anthropology means that their only option is to become part of these Human Terrain Teams. They react against what they perceive as the AAA Executive Board’s opposition to the war as if that opposition were somehow ludicrous, the view of a fringe minority. The pro-HTS camp seems to be in entirely out of step with the majority of American public opinion, let alone international opinion.

“Alleviating Harm”: Which Side are Anthropologists Supporting?

by Maximilian Forte

When I ask, which side are anthropologists supporting, I am specifically referring to those anthropologists who support involvement with Human Terrain Teams in Iraq, for example, and who condemn the statement by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association for its opposition.

 

Open Letter to Richard Shweder

by Maximilian Forte

November 11, 2007

Dear Professor Shweder,

The op-ed page of the New York Times is one of the loudest megaphones in American intellectual life.  Those who are privileged to use it have an obligation to do so with care.  Your recent op-ed (”A True Culture War“) contained serious omissions and mischaracterizations in its depiction of both the Pentagon’s use of anthropologists in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ campaign against those uses.  These omissions and mischaracterizations will distort public debate about the use of social science in the war on terror and will mislead anthropologists sincerely trying to make up their minds about these issues.

The Political Economy of Academia

by Maximilian Forte

Anthropology News, the newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, has issued a call for papers (the deadline has passed) for a special issue on the political economy of academia. The outline for this is very interesting:

Paths Ahead, 3: Decolonization and Open Knowledge

by Maximilian Forte

In conjunction with my last post, decolonizing anthropology must at the same time involve a breakdown of barriers between the so-called disciplines and faculties of a the typical university. The typical university, as Wallerstein and others have amply demonstrated, derives its fundamental structure from the nineteenth-century European fragmentation and classification of knowledge into the distinctive disciplines that we know today (excluding more modern aberrations). Anthropology was the most obviously colonial discipline in the bunch since it was outward oriented, a way of knowing about peoples who were located in colonies.

Paths Ahead, 2: Questions about “Academic Colonialism”

by Maximilian Forte

The notion of academic colonialism that is used to refer to the extraction of information from one place, which is then repackaged, reconstructed, and published in another (often at a cost that proves prohibitive for buyers in the place from which the information was extracted) is something I have found to be both useful and problematic as a concept. Ultimately, this discussion should show us how decolonizing academic knowledge production and open access (even open source) are intimately tied into each other.

 

Conversation on Journals and Open Access Publishing

by Maximilian Forte

Several months ago, the Media Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, was the site of an informal discussion on journals and open access publishing. It was a wide ranging debate, involving issues of delays in the peer review process, to the nature of peer review, the origins of peer review, the question of anonymity in the review process, issues of prestige, independent publishing, etc. One of the questions I raised was whether open access publishing–and here I mean free, full text access managed independently by academics themselves–might “solve” a number of the problems raised by the participants in the dialogue.

 

Harvard Business on Corporate Anthropology

by Jovan

Tom Davenport has written an article on “The Rise of Corporate Anthropology”. He seems particularly supportive of anthropology as a corporate research technique because of its emphasis on “systematic observation”. I can’t say my own fieldwork experience felt all that systematic, but maybe that was because I wasn’t in a corporate environment. Davenport writes:

 

Ethnography in Human Computer Interaction

by stephencox

I thought you might be interested in an recent presentation given by Paul Dourish on the use of Ethnography in Human Computer Interaction. It’s a bit of a follow on from his much discussed comments from an earlier Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference, where he suggested that you couldn’t just simply translate enthographic research into a series of design implications.

More on culture, the military, and “counterinsurgency”

by llwynn

For those of you who aren’t utterly sick of the whole topic, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, a Chicago-trained anthropologist and tenured professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, has just published an essay, “On the Uses of Cultural Knowledge,” on the Strategic Studies Institute website (an army publication). Jager makes points that are not dissimilar to the arguments of Kilcullen in the New Yorker profile of 2006: essentially, divide and conquer using culture as the key way of distinguishing between enemies:

 

Now open access to 39 years of the journal Folklore Forum

by Lorenz

Folklore Forum, a journal that is produced by graduate students at the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Department of Indiana University, has gone Open Access. From now on, 39 years of scholarship, debate, and exchange of ideas are freely accessible for everybody in the freshly digitized archives of Folklore Forum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Take care of the different national traditions of anthropology"

by Lorenz

In attempts to globalize anthropology, it is a good thing to translate into Chinese textbooks such as William Haviland’s Anthropology, but it is also desirable to hold on to what is distinctive in local disciplinary history, Chris Hann suggests in Anthropology Today (December 2007).

 

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

by Lorenz

(post in progress) The American Anthropological Association (AAA) sounds quite diplomatic in its final report on the growing ties between the military and anthropology. The report was released yesterday at the annual AAA meeting and says:

Is this a weapon of the weak?

by Strong

Two James Scott references in one week!?? With the AAA meetings just around the corner, the issue of the academic job market is probably on the minds of many.?? One major characteristic of the job market for many job seekers (and potentially for many employers) is its utter lack of transparency.?? ‘Information’ about what is going on in the market is perhaps a more important commodity than are the people actually looking for work.?? Certainly, not knowing what is happening can be frustrating for the job seeker.?? I am probably not the only one who has applied to jobs and then never ever heard anything back.?? Some employers fail to acknowledge applications… some never send rejection letters, so you are just left hanging, etc.?? The lack of information can lead to a feeling of dis-empowerment and anxiety.?? What are those on the job market who are (kept) in the dark about the status of various searches to do?

 

Mass Exercises, Today and Yesterday

by Strong

Something I read today lead me to searching YouTube for visuals. James Scott on mass exercises at the turn of 20th century:

Set in huge stadiums or on parade grounds, they involved thousands of young men and women trained to move in unison. The more complicated their maneuvers, which were often set to rhythmic music, the more impressive the spectacle. In 1891, at the Second National Congress of Sokol, a Czech gymnastic and physical fitness organization promoting nationalism, no fewer than seventeen thousand Czechs gave an elaborate display of coordinated movement. The whole idea of mass exercises was to create a striking exhibition of order, training, and discipline from above, one that would awe participants and spectators alike with its display of disciplined power. Such spectacles assumed and required a single centralized authority, which planned and executed the display.

 

Anthropologist’s Code

by Kerim

BoingBoing recently posted a list of “ten rules for proper mafioso etiquette” found during a police raid in Italy. They also list Gene Autry’s Cowboy Code (from 1930). With all the recent talk about Anthropological ethics, I was wondering if we could come up with a simple ten-point list with the same clarity evidenced by these lists.