Human Terrain & Anthropology (merged thread)

[SteveMetz]

Because people like Price wouldn't listen...and don't listen. They have their own agenda.

"Fair Use" is in fact a damned fluid concept at times...I've seen it quoted for photocopying purposes as up to 25 pages. Notice that this is for PHOTOCOPYING an existing, printed work. What it translates to in terms of "how much can you use without citations" varies depending on the academic community you're working from. As others have pointed out, the scientific academic community has different standards (hard science journal articles may contain only a handful of citations, while those in the biological sciences will contain hundreds in some cases) and theirs are also different from the social sciences community (to which Price belongs) and those are again different from the historical community.

In short, Price is flogging what could be a dead horse to advance his own ideological viewpoint. And I still contend that the best "solution" for this is to make the actual citations for 3-24 available through the University of Chicago press as a downloadable file (assuming that they can be recovered...which I would assume is possible). That way those of us who WANT to look through them (and I'm one of them...just for the historical backtrail) can do so.

I think you'd be disappointed if you had the "withheld" citations. It's not like every idea is cited and someone is just holding them out. In doctrine development, things get in if they are approved by the various people who vet the document, not because there is a citation pointing to something else.

I'll be honest with you: while I understand the theory behind citations in academia, I'm leery of the process as a means of establishing validity. I've just seen too many instances where someone simply pulls an idea out of their butt (to put it in GI terminology) and somehow gets it included in a published article. Then someone else repeats that point, citing the first source. Then someone else repeats it citing the second source. And so forth.

As one example of this, I was reviewing a manuscript that simply stated as fact that the U.S. military was killing journalists it didn't like in Iraq. The statement footnoted another academic article. I followed the trail back about four levels without finding anyone that had hard information before I decided I had much better ways to waste my time.

The moral of my story is that doctrine writers don't have a bunch of citations to academic material sitting around somewhere because they generally don't think it adds to the validity of the doctrine to have them.

Ultimately what we have here is cultural dissonance. In academia, the validity of something is determined, in part, by where it is published and by whom. Military doctrine writers don't give a toot if an idea is published in the most prestigious academic journals; if it doesn't match their experience (and that of their bosses), it isn't going in.