Human Terrain & Anthropology (merged thread)

[Billy Ruffian]

Library of Congress has been amazingly (for a gov't agency) helpful. A copy of the Margaret Mead document is on the way. I'll be receiving it as a hardcopy, but will be more than willing to share for academic purposes.

The practitioners of the Librarian's craft are always helpful or else we execute them at our Free Mason/Library meetings.

[Steve the Planner]

Or, like the uber-librarian, Mao, they schedule us for re-education.

Steve

Disclosure: Married to a librarian.

[slapout9]

The practitioners of the Librarian's craft are always helpful or else we execute them at our Free Mason/Library meetings.

J. Edgar Hoover was a Librarian at the Library Of Congress (I think) the original FBI Intelligence system was based on the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System.....then they went to computers and have been going down hill ever since

[Steve the Planner]

Sometimes, organizing information on a systematic basis creates its own insights and connections.

I was just looking back to an issue for the on-going Iraqi drought. Seems like the best reports and recommendations assemble and organize the work of expert, rather thanbeing the work of the experts themselves.

Rory Stewart's group estimates that there are 5,000 foreign Afghan experts in Kabul these days. Wonder how to orchestrate them?

Ain't it grand.

Steve

[marct]

Hi Steve,

Sometimes, organizing information on a systematic basis creates its own insights and connections.

And other times it creates its own reality where none existed before .

I'm putting the finishing touches on a presentation that goes into this, but we just had an interesting short article show up that illustrates it nicely (see here). Still thinking about that one, but there are some extremely interesting points coming out of it.

Cheers,

Marc

[Rex Brynen]

Panel Criticizes Military’s Use of Embedded Anthropologists

By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times
Published: December 3, 2009

A two-year-old Pentagon program that assigns social scientists to work with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan has come under sharp criticism from a panel of anthropologists who argue that the undertaking is dangerous, unethical and unscholarly.

The committee, which released the report on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, the discipline’s largest professional group, has been studying the program since its inception in 2007.

The panel concluded that the Pentagon program, called the Human Terrain System, has two conflicting goals: counterinsurgency and research. Collecting data in the context of war, where coercion and offensive tactics are always potentially present, “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology,” the report says.

The full 73 page report of the AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities can be found here.

[davidbfpo]

I am sure anthropology was around in the World Wars and since 1945, did anthropology have no relevant use then? I suspect not, the subject has not changed, just the people. This type of comment annoys me.

[Van]

David,
Read Anthropological Intelligence by David H. Price. He does a good job of explaining the history of the antipathy between the military and academic anthropologists, and how it goes back to WW I, based on events going back to the 19th Century British Empire.