Navigating the 'Human Terrain'
Moderator's Note
This thread contains a number of previously stand-alone threads and seven small ones were merged in today. I have left RFI threads on terrain alone. The thread has been re-opened to enable a new post and capturing the announcement recently that the programme was being ended (Ends).
7 Dec. Los Angeles Times op-ed by Max Boot - Navigating the 'Human Terrain'.
Quote:
The U.S. Armed Forces have a problem. They have the technical capability to hit any target on the planet. But which targets should they hit? Unfortunately, our enemies in the war on terrorism don't operate tanks or warships that we could blow up. They lurk in the shadows and emerge only briefly to set off bombs. Rooting them out requires getting inside their minds. But there's no machine that can pull off such a feat, at least not yet.
We need smart people, not smart bombs — Americans who are familiar with foreign languages and cultures and proficient in such disciplines as intelligence collection and interrogation. Yet these are precisely the areas in which the U.S. government is the weakest.
The Iraq war has brutally exposed the cost of these shortcomings and led to a belated recognition by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that his "transformation" agenda needs to incorporate the skills needed for peacekeeping, nation building and related tasks — what the Pentagon calls stability operations...
Army Human Terrain Teams: Were they deployed to Iraq/Afghanistan?
I was reading an old article from Sept-Oct 2006 Military Review titled "The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century", and saw that five HTTS were to be deployed from Fort Leavenworth to Afghanistan and Iraq beginning in the fall of 2006. Does anyone know if they were and if so how successful they were?
Blog by Iraq-bound Anthropologist
The Danger Room over at Wired Magazine tips readers off to a new blog by one Marcus B. Griffin, Ph.D. He's headed to Iraq to develop the Army's Human Terrain System. Some interesting reading, including this post:
Quote:
Going Native
Going “native” in anthropology is a fairly common strategy to gain a better understanding of the people with whom one is working. I am about a month away from deploying to Baghdad as part of the US Army’s new Human Terrain System and have almost gone completely native.
...
By going native, I am better able to see social life from the viewpoint of the people I am working with. I did this as a child among the Agta of northeastern Luzon, the Philippines by wearing a loincloth. As I got older I wore beads and arm bracelets. Today among soldiers, I am looking and more often acting just like them. There is an old Native American saying not to judge another person’s actions until you have walked two moons in their moccasins. That is what going native is all about: walking in someone else’s shoes in order to know what their life is like and therefore why they do what they do. This is called acquiring an emic point of view.
My apologies if this is a repost, but this blog looks promising.
The Stake and the Petition
It is more serious than I surmised if the excesses of the witchcraft trials are coming to your mind. Come to think of it, I have come across more than one blog author who went the anonymous route because of their Conservative bent and fear of 'in-house retaliation' by those of the Liberal persuasion, not that peer reviews and issues of tenure and budgeting would ever be impacted by such things. No! I will not be the one to pee on the foundations of the ivory tower in such a manner and say it's true. Hope does float however. It hasn't been that long since I saw where a former Soc. Prof. of mine had signed a petition against the petition to boycott Israeli scholars and said Prof. is a raging Liberal if ever one walked our earth.
I'm sticking with Wagner as a theme by the way, though a couple of Elvis songs have been nominated already.
Driving Scholars to Their Bunkers
Excellent choice, Wm. There was a Jimmi Hendrix nomination which I felt might give 'Nam vets on hand flashbacks so I scratched it. I'm waiting for Stan's theme nomination. What has our world come to when scholars feel they are in the figurative gun sites of colleagues? I recall in one blog a couple years back the author telling me if she ever spoke her true feelings about the war and terrorism, she would be ostracized by most of her colleagues and the one's sympathetic would be afraid to even speak up on her behalf. I vividly recall her words, "I would be sitting alone in the faculty lounge". Weeping Jesus! Have we reached the apex of evolution already? I think Marct was not jesting when he said this petition business causes him think of the witch hunts of medieval times.
social scientists and "armed social science"
I think there are two issues here.
The first is the petition, and its explicit assumption that anthropologists supporting COIN in Afghanistan are engaged in a fundamentally immoral activity. Here much depends on one's view of legitimacy (and in both cases, one would have thought that the fact that the missions are endorsed by both the local elected government and the UN Security Council ought to count for something).
The second issue is the tensions that arise from one's professional responsibility as a social scientist, and one's potential function as a counter-insurgent. Academic social scientists are suppose to live by a series of research ethics that, for example, require disclosure research project to most interviewees, disclosure of data and findings, informed consent, and very stringent safeguards for interviewing involuntary subjects (such as prisoners) or those otherwise unable to give informed consent. HUMINT collection, IO, PSYOPS, etc all work rather differently, as does providing professional advice in these areas. There are some potentially troubling professional and ethical implications of moving back and forth between both worlds.
I suspect most SWJ readers would take it as a given that I shouldn't divulge TS/SCI information in the classroom, even if it assisted in the noble enterprise of teaching. Also problematic, however, would be using data gathered confidentially, for particular academic purposes, and passing it on in rich detail to military/government actors with whom the interviewee would not have willingly shared it. Doing so not only violates professional ethics, but potentially endangers later academic researchers.
Frankly, its probably a good idea that professional organizations (and the military) reflect on this--and how any potential conflicts between the universes be dealt with.
...she turned me into a newt!
To be frank, I think the witchcraft analogies here are rather overblown. The petition (which I certainly wouldn't sign were I an anthropologist) doesn't suggest any restriction or sanction upon anthropologists who do work with the military--it merely represents a statement by its signatories that they personally won't do so. It is hardly a threat to professional, academic freedom.
Teaching in a department where faculty opinions have run from very conservative to Marxist, I don't think (in general) we're in anyone sights, or hunkered in anyone's bunkers.
Finally, let me once more disengage the politics behind the petition from the very real issue of managing research ethics. While Marc is right that professional ethical standards (and research ethics boards) serve as a kind of ritualized inoculation against criticism, they are also vitally important. Especially for those of us doing research in conflict zones, failure to maintain ethical standards can hurt, even kill, people. Issues of source anonymity are important where research interviewees are at personal risk (I've had three of them assassinated after interviews, although I hasten to add there was no connection!). Credibility is essential, since researchers do their work without PSDs (I've been taken on car rides to unknown destinations by armed insurgents, had guns pointed at me by nervous conscripts, been arrested and shaken down by secret police, had my belongings searched by security services trolling for data on my research contacts more times than I can count, and have even been accused of being a spy once--and it sure helped that my reputation was clean and well documented). I've also had to warn colleagues that their research might put subjects at risk if they fail to maintain interviewee anonymity, or where detainees were involved and might be being abused by their jailers as a consequence of interviews.
The development of appropriate ethical guidelines for social scientists--or more especially for those social scientists moving between the academic and military worlds--would, I think, be a rather useful thing for all concerned.
Anthropologists and the Military’s Human Terrain System
The Human Terrain System - An intriguing article from Ethnography with a hint of support.
I feel certain Marc will have a few comments, so let the games begin :cool:
Quote:
One anthropologist that is a member of the HTS project is
Marcus Griffin, on a year long leave from his job teaching anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Marcus has been blogging about his experience working with the army. It’s rare that anthropologists get this kind of insider look at what it’s like to work directly with the military.
Surprise! Despite what all your teachers have told you, working with the military is NOT evil….
Posted by Mark Dawson on September 16th, 2007
One Response to “Anthropologists and the Military’s Human Terrain System”
Quote:
Mark, this is another interesting coincidence with the content of the Anthropology Newsletter for Sept (table of contents and some
content links here). There is a particularly nuanced examination by Greg Starrett of whether AAA should publish announcements from intelligence and military agencies.
He argues, in part, that we anthropologists are all grown-ups, and don’t need to be sheltered by our organization from the Big Bad Whatever. He further points out that depriving military and intelligence agencies of anthropological knowledge is not for the greater good. I tend to agree–think how much worse things would be if we didn’t have anthropologists involved! Laura Nader’s comment is that of the idealist–we should only publish the announcements, or get involved with those agencies as researchers, if we can have complete control over our data and the circumstances of our research (obviously, I am paraphrasing and interpreting here).
To which I say: when do we ever have complete control? Funding agencies, logistics, everyday life, all of these things serve to constrict the circumstances of our research. We do the best we can, given what we know at the time. If we were to wait for perfect circumstances, we’d never get anything done.
Goesh, I dunno which song would be better. WM's primate with a bone is pretty far fetched, but just might be the ticket. Perhaps we could work the monkey in somewhere with a 70's tune or two :D
Regards, Stan
On the continuing (musical) post scripts...
My vote is for "White Rabbit" - Jefferson Airplane, 1967