Anthropology (catch all)

[Dominique R. Poirier]

Marc,
it’s all right. I didn’t enquire on the way he professes anthropology; I do not have the required academic background for, so far.

Instead, and when I said patterns, I was looking at the way he introduces and advocates his point, no matter what his field of expertise or profession is. If this person was a trained true activist aiming at doing agitprop or similar in the frame of organized and collective works, then he would not act the way he does, between other little things.
Even though he is Ph.D. and, as such, supposed to be an intelligent person, he expresses himself too bluntly to be, say, a shrewd specialist in the other field I’m making allusion to.

All this suggests to me that he is certainly a person acting entirely by his own and that he is unlikely to have been, say, suggested to write what he wrote. At best, some ones somewhere must consider him as a useful idiot who acted so unwisely already that he lost a sizeable part of credibility likely to provide him with authority when addressing to a broad audience.

The last but not the least, he managed to be published by some media which seem to be more involved in agitprop than in anthropology or science in general. But that fact doesn’t make him the suspect I was looking for.

Now, I do not neglect the possibility that, perhaps, I was looking for something else you were not interested in.

"I just wish that he had extended that analysis to look at his own actions within the American Anthropological Association."

I also believe so, at least.

[Tom Odom]

This on the ebird if you have access. WSJ requires access as well

Tom Hayden is back. Who's next, Hanoi Jane?

Wall Street Journal
August 17, 2007
Pg. W11

Professors On The Battlefield

By Evan R. Goldstein

Marcus Griffin is not a soldier. But now that he cuts his hair "high and tight" like a drill sergeant's, he understands why he is being mistaken for one. Mr. Griffin is actually a professor of anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. His austere grooming habits stem from his enrollment in a new Pentagon initiative, the Human Terrain System. It embeds social scientists with brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they serve as cultural advisers to brigade commanders.

Mr. Griffin, a bespectacled 39-year-old who speaks in a methodical monotone, believes that by shedding some light on the local culture -- thereby diminishing the risk that U.S. forces unwittingly offend Iraqi sensibilities -- he can improve Iraqi and American lives. On the phone from Fort Benning, two weeks shy of boarding a plane bound for Baghdad, he describes his mission as "using knowledge in the service of human freedom."

The Human Terrain System is part of a larger trend: Nearly six years into the war on terror, there is reason to believe that the Vietnam-era legacy of mistrust -- even hostility -- between academe and the military may be eroding.

[SWJED]

Professors on the Battlefield...

[selil]

Nearly six years into the war on terror, there is reason to believe that the Vietnam-era legacy of mistrust -- even hostility -- between academe and the military may be eroding.

No freaking way.... Nobody would trust academics. Egg head idealistic clue missing theorists. And the military YAH RIGHT.... Bunch of knuckle dragging trigger happy boom stick drivers.

I'm a former military current academic who don't trust anybody I can't shoot first.