Human Terrain & Anthropology (merged thread)

[William F. Owen]

NGA does geophysical mapping.

HTT does anthropology.

CAs do the folks in front of them.

DoD does military stuff.

Intel does spooky stuff.

Kind of implies that actually a lot of folks have no idea what they are doing in terms of overall purpose. Very brave and very committed, no doubt, but why five separate functions to do what the British did with two for 250 years? - and it worked.

I will not say that making "Anthropology" part of so-called COIN, or thinking in terms of "Human Terrain" were acts of gross stupidity, but I do believe them to extremely misguided, and now part of the problem.

[Backwards Observer]

From Wressley Of The Foreign Office (1888) by Rudyard Kipling:

If men had not this delusion as to the ultra-importance of their own particular employments, I suppose that they would sit down and kill themselves. But their weakness is wearisome, particularly when the listener knows that he himself commits exactly the same sin.
Even the secretariat believes that it does good when it asks an over-driven Executive Officer to take census of wheat-weevils through a district of five thousand square miles.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wressl...Foreign_Office

[Steve the Planner]

Backwards Observer:

Love the quote. Not to appear to overly reliant on prior hard-learned lessons of just the British, I bet the Russians learned or re-learned a lot, too.

William:

The big problem, as I see it, is the inter-reliance on uncoordinated and unverified components. NGA, for example, obtained some vague notion of Iraq's provincial structure in 1992---pretty inaccurate, but as good as it got then. This data was transcribed to the UN. Most sources then cited and relied on either the UN or NGA data, and it became memorialized as gospel.

Then, when it came time to create district and sub-district lines for these supposed provinces, somebody else (God knows who) created another set of lines that they thought looked OK, and in turn pushed them into the NGA/UN data sets---another gospel source.

Problem one: As with Afghanistan, provincial, district and sub-district lines in conflict areas are, in fact, a locally dynamic factor, as national and local actors vie for increased status, or seek to diminish an opponent's status. Unlike the US, where political/administrative lines are stable and consistent, these political/administrative boundaries are, in fact, highly dynamic parts of the conflict. Not stable, not set in stone, and, in many instances, highly contested.

Problem two: Factual basis of boundary changes is a source and evidence of conflict. Tracking native legislative history of formal governmental boundary line changes in conflict areas is, in effect, a forensic analysis of the gamesmanship preceding conflict. Some official did wrestle the controls to formally challenge another official's fiefdom by actually adopting a governmental change. Is the formally adopted present structure, therefore, a cause of the conflict which, if enforced, perpetuates it? How do we reconcile these boundary disputes and key conflict elements if we don't recognize them?

Problem three: Facts disagree with figures. If you obtain copies of the prior Iraqi census data, and attempt to reconcile it with more recent projections, you must follow the flow of changing boundaries and governmental relationships or you are just missing the point. In 1976, for example, Sadaam substantially restructured Baghdad, Kirkuk (Tameem), Diyala, Irbil and Ninewa Provinces by transferring districts, quaddas, and lesser units from one area to another. Thus, the census records for Ninewa (previously Mosul Province), may or may not include any number of different configurations (including the de facto later separation of Kurdish areas). What I routinely see in all US and derivative map sources, is, for example, an inaccurate arrangement of provincial and lesser units, which, in fact, means that US maps sources are incorrect, and cannot be reconciled with Iraqi census data, or other related political/admin civilian data. It doesn't take any speculation to know that profound mapping errors directly correlate to inaccurate collateral data, such as census and pop figures. Garbage in/Garbage Out.

So the question is, when is the US going to understand this? How can you hope to master the people, land and resources of an area when you don't even know where and what it is?

Geophysical accuracy, like remote drone-based intel, does not tell you what is going on down there, what the nature of conflict is, or how to plan and implement effective solutions. For that, the US needs to integrate a reliable and real-time data source with actionable information, which, to date, it does not have.

Steve

[Steve the Planner]

PS:

Against the context of egregiously deficient overall civilian mapping errors, and inaccurate/irreconcilable data, the inception of piecemeal anthropological studies, as currently applied, only adds to the confusion, blinding decision-makers from reasonable understandings of the relationship between more important levels of societal interaction across the conflict space.

Nice to know stuff, but no relevant context to incorporate it into.

Lost balls in tall grass. Unfortunately, as Defense Secretary Gates notes, the only way to know about the place is by being on the ground---but you have to know what you are looking for. Sending an accountant into the kitchen of a restaurant may give you a good handle on cost control but it is not going to improve the quality of the food.

[marct]

One of the truly frustrating things, for me at least, is the compartmentalization of "Anthropology" along extremely narrow lines. Some of us use the older definition of the discipline, which is much wider - The Science of Man [Humanity]. I'll admit, it has gone out of vogue with a lot of my more "post-modern" colleagues but, hey, I've always defined myself as a "pre-modernist". Back when I was teaching Intro to Anth, I would use one of the "modern" text books and, as a way of contrasting it, I would use a "textbook" written for the "intelligent layman" back in 1885 by Daniel Wilson (available here if anyone is interested).

[Steve the Planner]

Marct:

Same with planning.

If you are in the US, Canada or Europe, lights safely turn on in your house, garbage gets picked up, and roads function because of planning.

But most people never see it.

But their views come from perceptions of planning failures, conflict, and bureaucracy. Negative stuff.

What are you gonna do?

Steve

[Van]

... the older definition of the discipline, ...- The Science of Man [Humanity]. ..."post-modern" colleagues but, hey, I've always defined myself as a "pre-modernist"...

What the U.S. DoD wants and urgently needs is the nineteenth century ethnographers, rather than the twenty-first century, post-modernist cultural anthropologists. The XXIst Cent. folks are (mostly) so busy arguing how the mating habits of the Carjackistani indigenous peoples are a proof of the Neo-Post-Feminist-Gender-Roles relationship to Marxist revolutionary philosophy and ethnocentric hegemony when considered with a heuristic model, that they are unwilling to make themselves useful.

They appear a lot more concerned with what is "in vogue" than what is practical.

Keep fighting the good fight Marc!

[Steve the Planner]

Van:

I think what you are really talking about in earlier days is classical Geographers that were out mapping the world, its land, people and infrastructure. More the people/place side of Geology which, at that time, was scouring the rocks of the globe to find minerals and resources.

Even geography, in later years, evolved its own schools of Marxist Geographers, Economic Geographers, Demographers, etc... (Tower of Babel)

I agree with your point however, that what the military needs, is a consolidated source for the people, land and infrastructure information (classical people, place, thing geography) that drives the conflict zone. It is a product that has not been produced, to date in the areas that matter.

Prior to the 1960's when the State Department began to dissolve (budget cuts), every embassy had a geographic officer whose job was to scour his AO for maps, studies, reports, census data, tribal and religious affiliations, and send them home for consolidated study. It just doesn't happen any more, but the info is still needed for the same reasons.

Steve

[Van]

Steve,
I was being very specific, and thinking of colonial England of the Victorian era. Usually, "Victorian" is used as a derogatory term, but the ethnographers of the colonies often performed strategic intelligence collection, while aiming at an FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) or FRGS (...Geographical Society).

I'm still trying (not very hard right now, but it is on my 'to-do' list) to get a copy of Margaret Mead's proposal for regional ethnogeographical specialist training (saw a reference to it in Anthropological Intelligence). She outlined a two year course of training, and from the reference, it sounded exactly like what we need. And as important as regional specialists are, we must plan on guessing wrong about which regions matter, and keep a lesson plan for how to train soldiers to become ethnographers.

I say 'soldiers' because in the social sciences, American academia goes out of its way to present itself as anti-military. So they can go do something primative and ethnic with themselves while we train reliable people to use their tools the way we need them to. To quote Roberto J. Gonzalez in American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, "If at times my words carry traces of bitterness, it is unintentional", but from where I sit, the social scientists started the hostility (c.f. "Anthropological Intelligence"; discusses WW I era contention and hostility).

[Steve the Planner]

Oh, yeah. Margaret Mead's Training Manuals.

In Iraq, we used Amazon to track down the old British ag studies from the 1950s.

With the UN DIBS Team, we had folks going back and forth to the Cambridge Library for the British Colonial Records, although they are available on disk for about $3,000.

Maybe Amazon would get you Margaret Mead?

Steve

[Van]

I've tried Amazon, Google Books, and other web searches. As far as I can tell, I need to write to an institutional collection that holds the original.

The British Royal Society appears to have a lot of their stuff on line, might be worth checking for anthro material.

[Steve the Planner]

As I recall, there was like an East-West Institute in Hawaii, very sociological.

Maybe inter-library loan through an institution like East-West.

Steve

[marct]

Hi Guys,

(sorry, I'm on and off with my day jobs...)

I was being very specific, and thinking of colonial England of the Victorian era. Usually, "Victorian" is used as a derogatory term, but the ethnographers of the colonies often performed strategic intelligence collection, while aiming at an FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) or FRGS (...Geographical Society).

Back when I was teaching Anthro theory, I used to "request and require" that my students actually read Victorian Era work. Some of it is off, some is weirdly biased to our present views, and some of it is freakin' brilliant stuff. Despite the wide range of material, what is crucial about the era is the generalist or renaissance breadth of data collected and methods used.

I'm still trying (not very hard right now, but it is on my 'to-do' list) to get a copy of Margaret Mead's proposal for regional ethnogeographical specialist training (saw a reference to it in Anthropological Intelligence). She outlined a two year course of training, and from the reference, it sounded exactly like what we need. And as important as regional specialists are, we must plan on guessing wrong about which regions matter, and keep a lesson plan for how to train soldiers to become ethnographers.

If you've got the reference and where it is located, I can try and get a copy for you - shoot me an email....

I say 'soldiers' because in the social sciences, American academia goes out of its way to present itself as anti-military. So they can go do something primative and ethnic with themselves while we train reliable people to use their tools the way we need them to. To quote Roberto J. Gonzalez in American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, "If at times my words carry traces of bitterness, it is unintentional", but from where I sit, the social scientists started the hostility (c.f. "Anthropological Intelligence"; discusses WW I era contention and hostility).

Hmm, I'll reserve comments on first causes until we can sit down and chat over beers . You are certainly right that there is a fairly strong anti-military bias in North American anthropology and many other academic disciplines. I should point out, however, that that is often coupled with a fairly extreme political bias as well and the two are often confused by everyone including the academics .

Cheers,

Marc

[Van]

Hmm, I'll reserve comments on first causes until we can sit down and chat over beers .

Next time you're on Oahu, the first one is on me.

The citation from Anthropological Intelligence:

Mead, Margaret. 1943. "On the Use of Living Sources in Regional Studies: General Considerations." Suggested materials for training of Regional Specialists Army Program, prepared in collaboration with the Council on Intercultural Relations, n.d., MM, Box 25

MM= Margaret Mead Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Damn college professors! You offer to help and force me to figure out the answer. I hadn't chased down the "mm" acronym before.

But if you know of a PDF or other soft copy, that would be excellent.

Thanks!

[marct]

I'll see what I can find. No promises, but it's worth a shot.

Cheers,

Marc

[Van]

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.

[Surferbeetle]

I was being very specific, and thinking of colonial England of the Victorian era. Usually, "Victorian" is used as a derogatory term, but the ethnographers of the colonies often performed strategic intelligence collection, while aiming at an FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) or FRGS (...Geographical Society).

I'm still trying (not very hard right now, but it is on my 'to-do' list) to get a copy of Margaret Mead's proposal for regional ethnogeographical specialist training (saw a reference to it in Anthropological Intelligence). She outlined a two year course of training, and from the reference, it sounded exactly like what we need. And as important as regional specialists are, we must plan on guessing wrong about which regions matter, and keep a lesson plan for how to train soldiers to become ethnographers.

Van,

Maybe it starts early...Mrs B., my sixth grade home teacher, was very committed to her geography and she made it fun... Here are three references that might be of use to you:

• I have no financial interest in Biblio, however I appreciate their offerings and customer service. Here are their current Margaret Mead offerings.

• The East-West Center Library at UH-Manoa was always an enjoyable place, when I lived on Oahu.

• As an overview of the importance of geography/history The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes is a fantastic read.

[marct]

Hi Van,

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.

I'd definitely like a copy!

Cheers,

Marc

[Kivlonic]

Van,
Any way you could post the Margaret Mead doc, I really like a copy to.
Kivlonic

[Van]

Marc & Kivlonic,
The document is copyrighted material, and I don't have a copy yet. Let me see the paper and the copyright date before I go making promises. If you assure me there is academic purpose, I don't have a problem.