Human Terrain & Anthropology (merged thread)

[marct]

From Philip Carl Salzman on the Middle East Strategy at Harvard blog

Uncle Sam Wants You
From Philip Carl Salzman

“He must be a spy,” said the visiting Baluch, bearded, turbaned, and baggy in long shirt and trousers. My fellow camp mates of the Dadolzai shrugged. They had accepted me and were past wondering exactly how I got there. “Sure,” I replied; “the government”—whether Iranian or American was left unspecified, “they are paying me big bucks to tell them how many rocks”—I point at rocks on the ground—”there are in Baluchistan. And they are very interested in how many of these”—goat turds—”there are in Baluchistan.” Camp mates shrug; visitor is now bored with the subject.

New locale: Rajasthan. The Brahman veterinarian from the Sheep and Wool Service who served as my guide, local expert, and traveling companion, assured me that everyone knew that so-called tourists who went to Jaisalmer, up near the Pakistan border, to ride the camel safaris in the sand dunes were really spies. “Why,” he said, “they went missing for days at a time, and we know what they are spying.” His trump argument: “No well-to-do, educated people would ever do anything so dumb as to want to ride camels in the desert, for fun.”

It is very common for anthropologists, and foreigners in general, to be regarded as spies, agents, dubious, and perhaps dangerous. So the oft-heard plea of researchers—”We can’t ever work for government or people will think all of us all the time are spies and agents”—seems at the very least naive, and, one cannot help thinking, disingenuous.

More...

[Rex Brynen]

...one of the advance/ground team for the July 2002 assassination in Gaza of Hamas military commander Salah Shehadeh was allegedly posing as a Canadian sociologist, and Palestinian counterintelligence services had suspicions that one of the advance/ground team for the 1988 Tunis assassination of Fateh military commander Khalil al-Wazir was posing as a Western graduate student. Whether either claim is true I don't know, although the former was substantive enough for Ottawa to pursue the issue with the Israeli government.

As for myself, while doing my own PhD research I was once accused of being an spy while in a safe house full of armed men belonging to one of the designated foreign terrorist organizations. My unfeigned outrage won me laughter, several cups of Turkish coffee, and a very good interview. (My interview subject was later assassinated in 2001.)

As to Phil Salzman's broader point on MESH, he's correct that scholars (and especially anthropologists) are very wary of excessively close connection with the government/military for both ideological and scholarly reasons.

Regarding the latter, I'm struck by the extent to which--despite all the hot debate on HTTs, Project Minerva, and so forth--there has been very little substantive analysis of the pluses and minuses of the relationship, how to address the ethical issues involved, and other practical issues. (SWJ and Savage Minds being, in general, relatively rare exceptions to this pattern.)

Instead, much of the commentary and discussion remains far too polemical to be useful.

[Mike Innes]

Regarding the latter, I'm struck by the extent to which--despite all the hot debate on HTTs, Project Minerva, and so forth--there has been very little substantive analysis of the pluses and minuses of the relationship, how to address the ethical issues involved, and other practical issues. (SWJ and Savage Minds being, in general, relatively rare exceptions to this pattern.)

Instead, much of the commentary and discussion remains far too polemical to be useful.

Hear hear!

[marct]

Hi Rex,

As to Phil Salzman's broader point on MESH, he's correct that scholars (and especially anthropologists) are very wary of excessively close connection with the government/military for both ideological and scholarly reasons.

I would add in "historical" as well and, possibly, metaphysical (I really don't want to get into that one here...).

Regarding the latter, I'm struck by the extent to which--despite all the hot debate on HTTs, Project Minerva, and so forth--there has been very little substantive analysis of the pluses and minuses of the relationship, how to address the ethical issues involved, and other practical issues. (SWJ and Savage Minds being, in general, relatively rare exceptions to this pattern.)

Instead, much of the commentary and discussion remains far too polemical to be useful.

On the whole, I agree with you on that. I could point out a few more, Marcus Griffin comes to mind but, on the whole, it tends to be here and SM (and a few private lists like MilAnthNet).

I've often suspected that part of the problem is some pretty basic different philosophical assumptions about "reality". In many ways, the position taken by a lot of the extreme anti-military crowd are on the extreme end of social constructivism - "reality is a social construct". This, at least in many of the forms it shows up in, is an extreme version of "nurture" (vs. Nature) or free-will vs. predestination and one that disregards many of the scientific discoveries of the past 20 years in the area of neuro-cognition, etc.

In this paradigm, conflict cannot be "natural" since "nature" is an illusion that is used as a rhetorical device to explain the complexities of social manipulation. Since conflict arises from the social, then we must look to the social for its causes and this can only be because of the US (okay, I skipped out about 10 intermediate levels in the causal chain, but, hey, this isn't a dissertation!).

I noted that Phil specifically excepted the behavioural and evolutionary crowd in Anthropology which, on the whole, doesn't surprise me at all since these are some of the few people who still look at "nature" (read biology and neuro-biology).

As an observation, it gets really hard to argue ethics when you are coming from totally contradictory metaphysical positions about the nature of reality!