Anthropology (catch all)

[Stan]

Marc’s response to this was calculated and dead on.

Although half of me wanted squealing pigs and mud flyin' (one of Tom’s more famous quotes), I immediately recognized the sometimes ‘not so subtle’ differences between refined gentlemen and mere scholastic achievers.

What a true shame…So much intellect and anger in just two people and the best that they come up with are spelling errors.

With that, it’s 1700 my time and I think I’ll have a beer before Anthro lessons

Marc, a job well done !

[marct]

Hi Stan,

Marc’s response to this was calculated and dead on.

Although half of me wanted squealing pigs and mud flyin' (one of Tom’s more famous quotes), I immediately recognized the sometimes ‘not so subtle’ differences between refined gentlemen and mere scholastic achievers.

What a true shame…So much intellect and anger in just two people and the best that they come up with are spelling errors.

Well, after I got very my initial anger at the pettiness of their response, I was feeling somewhat depressed. I mean, after all, David is probably the best scholar in the area and this is what he comes up with?!?

With that, it’s 1700 my time and I think I’ll have a beer before Anthro lessons

Marc, a job well done !

Thanks Stan . Enjoy the beer!

Marc

[John T. Fishel]

Marc, your very gentlemanly and substantive response is clearly within the traditions (recent though they are) of the Small Wars Council and SWJ.

I have been reading some of David Price's comments on various sites including CounterPunch. What I found particularly interesting is his citation of Phillip Agee and John Stockwell. He certainly could have added Frank Snepp's Decent Interval. Consider the publication dates - the 1970s. One should also note that these are different kinds of books. Both Snepp and Stockwell address policy issues and wrote to focus the debate on policy. Agee, in contrast, wrote about his experiences as a case officer in the Clandestine Service and went out of his way to reveal the identities of some of his colleagues who were operating under light cover. The result was the murder of the CIA Station Chief in Athens by non-governmental terrorists. But that is old news. I cite the case only to highlight that Price's world is that of an era long past - not that we can't learn from that era.

I would also point out that in his writing Price fails to make a distinction between intelligence analysts and operators. Analysts are not covert, operators are. Certainly, there is some degree of overreaching in making all members of the CIA's operations directorate covert and a tendency varying with the times to not identify the employer of some analysts (making for some silly statements by intelligence employees as "I work for the government.") but this does not make for clandestine infiltration of the academy under the guise of intelligence related scholarships.

Indeed, the opposition to the intelligence scholarship programs on the basis that they are hidden, require prior security clearances, and a payback either in work (for which the analyst is well paid) or cash is illiberal in the true sense of the word. In the name of protecting unsuspecting and naive stuents from wage slavery for the big bad intelligence machine, those who hold these views would deprive some students of having their education paid for and the government of analysts who would be better prepared for the kind of research required to protect the government and the nation.

Oh, BTW, in the interests of full disclosure, I was a US Army Military Intelligence Officer for 28 years who served for some 8 years in active and reserve capacity as an analyst at the national level.

Cheers

John

[Steve Blair]

Very good response, Marc. Now we'll see if they bother to come out and play...

What got to me was their very disingenuous attempt to resurrect the old "ROTC is evil" saw (can we say 1960s?) with the clip of their own article. Personally it doesn't strike me as a bad deal to get your education paid for and then get paid again for four years of work (with higher wages than most of the private sector can pony up), and in many cases ROTC is the only option open to some of our cadets when it comes to financial assistance for school.

I honestly don't think they were interested in responding to your article. That struck me more as the academic version of "Witch! Burn the Witch!" than anything else.

Which of course leads into the almost obligatory "Can she float?" references from Monty Python and the Holy Grail....which in turn leads me to look under desk for the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch...

[marct]

Hi Steve,

Very good response, Marc. Now we'll see if they bother to come out and play...

Thanks . I guess we will just have to wait and see.

What got to me was their very disingenuous attempt to resurrect the old "ROTC is evil" saw (can we say 1960s?) with the clip of their own article. Personally it doesn't strike me as a bad deal to get your education paid for and then get paid again for four years of work (with higher wages than most of the private sector can pony up), and in many cases ROTC is the only option open to some of our cadets when it comes to financial assistance for school.

Technically, they are correct about the debt-servitude model. Still and all, that same model is also the basis of capitalism and, unlike almost every other model of human societies (barring some of the Hunter-Gatherer groups), it at least has the "Right of Departure" built in (as in "Take this job and..." ).

On the whole, it doesn't strike me as a bad deal either, especially since there are increasing difficulties for new graduates to actually find jobs. I now that in Canada, for instance, someone with a newly mined 4 year BA will, on average, take about 13 months to find a job that uses any of those skills. Being able to start one without a crushing load of student debt is, to my mind, quite useful.

I honestly don't think they were interested in responding to your article. That struck me more as the academic version of "Witch! Burn the Witch!" than anything else.

And, since I did my MA on modern Witchcraft, you can bet I picked up on that pattern !!

Marc

[marct]

From Special Dispatch—Syria/Reform Project
May 18, 2007
No. 1590

Syrian Liberal Nidhal Na'isa On the West, Pan-Arabism, Islamism, and Al-Jazeera

"In Our Totalitarian Societies... Leaving [the Fold of] Collective Thought is Considered Error, Heresy, and Atheism"

When asked about the phenomenon of increasing religiosity in Syria, Na'isa said that it was part of "the spread of the culture of the herd and 'group' thinking, which means the negation of the individual and the individual's importance in creation, development, and originality."

He continued: "Western civilization was founded on unleashing individual initiative and glorification of individual reason – and not collective reason, which is generally emotive and not of sound judgment.

"In our totalitarian societies, the collective 'I' prevails over the individual 'I,' and all become equals under the podiums of the [Islamic] jurisprudents. Leaving [the fold of] collective thought is considered error, heresy, and atheism..."

[John T. Fishel]

Hi Marc--

Is an antropologist (or other social scientist) who joins the Clandestine Service of his country unethical? Just because I have a PhD doesn't mean that I define myself always and for all time as an academic. Professionally, I have been a military officer, an intelligence officer, an academic, and a consultant - some of those during the same time periods (interesting what a Reserve Officer can do). The ethical issue, for me, is one of role. As a scholarly researcher I have to be open and transparent with both the subjects of my research and my discipline. As an intelligence analyst, I have an obligation to keep secret information that I receive in that form. But what if, in the course of my research, I discover information that would be both useful and of interest to my and the host government - and, it would be helpful to society to see that the governments in question received that information. Should I report it or not? In the real world case - which was the diversion of legal coca into the illegal drug trade - I saw no ethical problem with reporting it so long as I protected my sources, which I did. Some might well disagree with my choice but it seemed the ethical one to me. In other cases, I have used my academic skills to support my other roles but I have not tried to say I was in an academic role at the time, rather I was in one of my other professional roles. For those of us on all sides of this issue who are blogging away, clearly we are using our academic and other training to make points and enter the debate. Are any of us being unethical - including David Price? I think not. And BTW, Price and Gusterson are to be commended for their willingness to join this debate on what to them must seem "hostile ground."

Cheers

John

[marct]

Hi John,

Marc, your very gentlemanly and substantive response is clearly within the traditions (recent though they are) of the Small Wars Council and SWJ.

Thank you. I must say that, on the whole, the traditions at SWC /SWJ are, to my mind, much more in keeping with both the forms and the intent of civility as it was practiced in the academy 100 years ago; something I, personally, find much more comfortable than the current version of academic "debate".

I have been reading some of David Price's comments on various sites including CounterPunch. What I found particularly interesting is his citation of Phillip Agee and John Stockwell. He certainly could have added Frank Snepp's Decent Interval. Consider the publication dates - the 1970s. ... I cite the case only to highlight that Price's world is that of an era long past - not that we can't learn from that era.

One of the things that I have noticed about different professional disciplines is the time horizons inherent in them. On the whole, out of all of the social sciences, I think that Anthropology has the longest time horizon, probably because of paleo-Anthropology. Just as an example, I can think of numerous times at conferences (or in bars ) where illustrative examples would get tossed out from 5 million years ago up to the present. For years, many of my first year students would remember that I used to talk a lot about Sumeria in my courses...

I would also point out that in his writing Price fails to make a distinction between intelligence analysts and operators. Analysts are not covert, operators are. Certainly, there is some degree of overreaching in making all members of the CIA's operations directorate covert and a tendency varying with the times to not identify the employer of some analysts (making for some silly statements by intelligence employees as "I work for the government.") but this does not make for clandestine infiltration of the academy under the guise of intelligence related scholarships.

I agree, and I think that it is an absolutely crucial distinction that needs to be made in the debate within Anthropology. Personally, I wold consider Anthropologists acting as analysts to be perfectly ethical, but acting as covert operatives to be unethical. While I didn't really touch on this too much in my article, the reason why I would consider covert operations to be unethical is fairly simple: it's effects on the Anthropologist (I have a somewhat different definition of "ethics" than most - I view them as "right action" in accordance with natural laws rather than as inter-subjective agreements).

When I was talking about verstehen vs. erklaren in the article, this is really what I was driving at. If one internalizes a verstehen model of research and then "betrays" that internalized model, you have acted "unethically" and will degrade both yourself and the discipline. I think that a good analogy is in the debate over the use and/or constitution of torture by the military - use it and you degrade both yourself and the military as an institution.

Because of how I define "ethics" and "morality", I would say that the emphasis on following the forms of an ethical code (e.g. informed consent) are really moral conventions that, as David himself has shown many times, are quite mutable. I think that some of the "fear of infiltration" (e.g. that one question - "Are faculty right to fear that PRISP scholars may be covertly compiling dossiers on them?") is actually inherent in how they have accepted a definition of "ethics" as being an inter-subjective convention.

Indeed, the opposition to the intelligence scholarship programs on the basis that they are hidden, require prior security clearances, and a payback either in work (for which the analyst is well paid) or cash is illiberal in the true sense of the word. In the name of protecting unsuspecting and naive stuents from wage slavery for the big bad intelligence machine, those who hold these views would deprive some students of having their education paid for and the government of analysts who would be better prepared for the kind of research required to protect the government and the nation.

I agree with you on this. I have certainly seen a pattern developing and about the only parallels I can find historically are from failing ideologies: the development of the Inquisition, the state of Communism in the mid-1980's and NAZIism in about 1945. The consistent pattern is one of outright attack on anyone who disagrees with a particular perception of reality. Hans Holzner talked about this as one of four possible reactions to a phenomenological "breach in reality".

Marc