Anthropology (catch all)

[marct]

Hi JW,

Marc,

You are clearly not reading this with the enlightened perspective of independence from eurocentric, male dominated imperialism. In fact, your lack of post modern, reductionist analysis seems obvious.

Unfortunate, I will admit - SIGH.... My students complain that I still refer to Dominion Day rather than Canada Day, and I am one of the few people under 70 who seems to know several verse to Rule Britannia (to say nothing about Marching to Pretoria!). It's that old, colonial Imperialist past coming back to haunt me <sniff, sniff>.

[120mm]

I'm just a dumb Reservist, but I have a question: If FM 3-24 needs to have a substantial discussion on the "rightness" and "wrongness" of a particular war, does The Betty Crocker Cookbook need a substantial discussion on the ethics of baking of chocolate chip cookies?

I mean, what if the "reasons behind the cookies" are wrong?

[SWCAdmin]

I am contacting Anthropology Today in the hope that they will grant us some access to these works. If they do, I will let you know. Please respect their copyright.

[RJO]

(I just came across this thread. Apologies if it's expired and no longer of interest.)

Jonathan Shay in Achilles in Vietnam argues that one of the functions of Athenian theater was the reintegration of combat veterans into civil society. From his footnote on pp. 229-230:

The ancient Greeks had a distinctive therapy of purification, healing, and reintegration that was undertaken by the whole community. We know it as Athenian theater. While a complete presentation is beyond the scope of this book, I want to summarize my view that the distinctive character of Athenian theater came from the requirements of a democratic polity made up entirely of present or former soldiers to provide communalization for combat veterans.... The Athenians communally reintegrated their returning warriors in recurring participation in rituals of the theater. The key elements of my argument are: the notable military backgrounds of Aeschylus and Sophocles; the prominence of military matters in the processions and ceremonies held before and between theatrical events; the use of the theater (according to Aristotle) for military training graduations; ... the distinctively transgressive character of the actions of the powerful main characters, played against themis [rightness/justice] voiced by the disempowered chorus; and that the centuries-old controversy over what Aristotle meant when he said that tragedy brings about katharsis of compassion and terror can be resolved by reference to the experience of combat veterans. [etc.]

There is a stunning version of Aeschylus' Agamemnon now available online in ten parts.

RJO

[marct]

Hi Bob,

(I just came across this thread. Apologies if it's expired and no longer of interest.)

Jonathan Shay in Achilles in Vietnam argues that one of the functions of Athenian theater was the reintegration of combat veterans into civil society. From his footnote on pp. 229-230:

There is a stunning version of Aeschylus' Agamemnon now available online in ten parts.

RJO

Thanks for the reference and the link! I did a lot of research on theatre as a community integration tool in my MA and PhD (more in the MA). As a communal integration tool, it is really amazing, although somewhat tricky to use in the modern world.

Marc

[marct]

Our old friend Hugh Gusterson is at it again. In the latest edition of Anthropology Today (23.4, August 2007) he has written a response to David Kilcullens earlier comment. Those with access can get the entire article (it is only 1 page), but, I think, his conclusions define it fairly well:

What is advocated here amounts to a social science inspired approach to Empire, using ‘information warfare’, ‘ethnographic intelligence’ and culturally informed soldiers as a velvet glove around the brute fist of military might that Empire requires. Do anthropologists really want to be part of this sordid, neo-colonialist project?

[selil]

Why does elitist dilettante keep ringing any time Gusterson speaks?

[marct]

Why does elitist dilettante keep ringing any time Gusterson speaks?

Well, for me, I keep thinking of Domingo de Guzmán or Arnaud-Amoury. I'm just waiting to hear him say "Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius".

[Nat Wilcox]

Marc, it seems that Anthro has these heated, politically-wound-up spats fairly regularly...I remember the Chagnon/Tierney affair from awhile back. Searching the net, though, I don't find any sign that this particular spat has been picked up by the non-academic media as the Chagnon/Tierney biz was (and how).

In this respect, Econ is less noisy. URPE (the Union of Radical Political Economists) is at most the miniature schnauzer of Econ--noisy and annoying but ultimately small and inconsequential. Being running dog imperialist child-murderers has its advantages...but not many.

[Beelzebubalicious]

Using a sophisticated content analysis algorithim, I broke down Gusterson's conclusion and the underlying message behind the usage of terms like "velvet glove" and "sordid" clearly imply an excessive amount of intellectual, or other, masturbation....

[Nat Wilcox]

Using a sophisticated content analysis algorithim...

For me, that would be skimming it during the beer commercials.

[marct]

Using a sophisticated content analysis algorithim, I broke down Gusterson's conclusion and the underlying message behind the usage of terms like "velvet glove" and "sordid" clearly imply an excessive amount of intellectual, or other, masturbation....

For me, that would be skimming it during the beer commercials.

Far be it from me to comment about his sub-conscious (?) utilization of terms from Antonio Gramsci. I will note, however, that his initial point of contention with Kilcullen stems from his argument that there was no jus ad bellum for the war in Iraq based on our current understanding.

The US Congress voted to authorize military action in Iraq in response to arguments made by the Bush administration about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As we all know, there were no such weapons, and it is now widely believed in the US that the Bush administration misrepresented the evidence about them in order to secure Congressional authorization to invade Iraq.

This is an intriguing position since it relies on knowledge not in evidence at the time of the decision. It also de facto states that a jus ad bellum can only be decided after the fact in a state of complete knowledge. I wonder if he would extend this principle of a requirement of foreknowledge to other areas. For example, if it can later be shown that the HTTs would have made a material difference in the number of Iraqi civilians and US troops killed but an insufficient number of them were deployed due, in part, to Gusterson's actions, would he then becomes liable for charges of accessory to murder?

Something to think on...

Marc

[Tom Odom]

This is an intriguing position since it relies on knowledge not in evidence at the time of the decision. It also de facto states that a jus ad bellum can only be decided after the fact in a state of complete knowledge. I wonder if he would extend this principle of a requirement of foreknowledge to other areas. For example, if it can later be shown that the HTTs would have made a material difference in the number of Iraqi civilians and US troops killed but an insufficient number of them were deployed due, in part, to Gusterson's actions, would he then becomes liable for charges of accessory to murder?

Something to think on...

Marc

What I want to know is if this guy has a blog or Anthro Today has a comments blog that we can ALL go to and spew like sick buzzards all over his scribbling....

Tom

[Nat Wilcox]

"The US Congress voted to authorize military action in Iraq in response to arguments made by the Bush administration about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As we all know, there were no such weapons, and it is now widely believed in the US that the Bush administration misrepresented the evidence about them in order to secure Congressional authorization to invade Iraq."

This is an intriguing position since it relies on knowledge not in evidence at the time of the decision.

* This is "Decision Making Under Uncertainty 101:" The quality of a decision made under uncertainty cannot be judged by later outcomes that weren't known with certainty at the time of the decision.

Of course, there is an allegation here that "Bush really knew," but I vividly remember Jacques Chirac nodding affirmative and saying "oh probably, probably!" when interviewed by one U.S. journalist and asked point blank whether he thought Iraq had WMD. Some of this is no doubt hindsight bias, in a very formal sense.

There is a wonderful paper by the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff on this, for those of you who are interested. It appears that most of us are not even able to correctly recall our own past states of uncertainty--that is, how uncertain we were prior to events which removed the uncertainty. Baruch is (well, was) the foremost expert on this, and has a wonderful, non-technical discussion of it for historians here:

Fischhoff, Baruch. 1980. For Those Condemned to Study the Past: Reflections on Historical Judgment. New Directions for Methodology of Social and Behavioral Science 4:79-92.

At any rate, one can make that (*) principle sound so obvious. Yet in the real world, people find it nearly impossible to live by it. There are, of course, practical reasons for holding people accountable for the outcome of the decisions they made under uncertainty. But that is obviously not the same thing as holding them culpable or criminal.

[Dominique R. Poirier]

(....) Some of this is no doubt hindsight bias, in a very formal sense.

There is a wonderful paper by the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff on this, for those of you who are interested. It appears that most of us are not even able to correctly recall our own past states of uncertainty--that is, how uncertain we were prior to events which removed the uncertainty. Baruch is (well, was) the foremost expert on this, and has a wonderful, non-technical discussion of it for historians here:

Fischhoff, Baruch. 1980. For Those Condemned to Study the Past: Reflections on Historical Judgment. New Directions for Methodology of Social and Behavioral Science 4:79-92.

At any rate, one can make that (*) principle sound so obvious. Yet in the real world, people find it nearly impossible to live by it. There are, of course, practical reasons for holding people accountable for the outcome of the decisions they made under uncertainty. But that is obviously not the same thing as holding them culpable or criminal.

Little contribution to this information.

Robert Jervis too wrote interesting things about that in Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Princeton University Press, 1976.

[marct]

Hi Tom,

What I want to know is if this guy has a blog or Anthro Today has a comments blog that we can ALL go to and spew like sick buzzards all over his scribbling....

Here's their web site - http://www.therai.org.uk/pubs/at/anthrotoday.html
No commentary / blog that I can find.

Marc

[marct]

Hi Nat,

At any rate, one can make that (*) principle sound so obvious. Yet in the real world, people find it nearly impossible to live by it. There are, of course, practical reasons for holding people accountable for the outcome of the decisions they made under uncertainty. But that is obviously not the same thing as holding them culpable or criminal.

Thanks for the reference. You are quite right about the uncertainty issue and the question of accountability vs. culpability. A lot of it, on the culpability side, comes down to a question of foresee-ability along the lines of "could the person, as an intelligent actor in the social world, have foreseen the consequences of their action?" Basically a mens rea argument. On the accountability side, we have to ask both could they have foreseen the consequences and should they have foreseen those consequences.

I would argue that the jus ad bellum argument has to be split into two separate cases: at the time of the declaration of war and in the present. This would give us an interesting little 2 x 2 matrix for our decisions

Past Present
Just
Unjust

At the time of the declaration of war, the US government, as expressed by Congressional vote, believed the war to be just. Now a majority of that same government believes it to have been unjust (present understanding applied to the past). This present understanding, however, should not influence present analysis of the "justness" current situation. By declaring war, the US and some of its allies have accepted a burden to achieve particular outcomes. Furthermore, the war itself has set particular events in motion for which the US and some of its allies bear an ethical responsibility.

It's all well and good for Gusterson, and others, to complain "This is another fine mess you've gotten us into Georgie", but it is unethical, IMO, for them to say "therefore we will hamstring your attempts to clean up that mess". To my mind, their position is one that encourages corporate irresponsibility while, at the same time, relying on that same corporate body to provide them with certain advantages - like freedom of speech. If rights are not held in balance with duties, and the two kept in focus by a sense of ethics (both transcendent and immanent - another monograph sometime in the future ), then we are, to my mind, dealing with a person who is a "free rider" who encourages unethical and immoral behaviour in others to cover their own ethical shortcomings.

As a note, let me point out that I view morality as deriving from group codes and ethics as being both transcendent to and immanent within the individuals. I now, John, this is not the "normal" definition .

Marc

[Nat Wilcox]

This present understanding, however, should not influence present analysis of the "justness" current situation. By declaring war, the US and some of its allies have accepted a burden to achieve particular outcomes. Furthermore, the war itself has set particular events in motion for which the US and some of its allies bear an ethical responsibility.

I couldn't agree more, and moreover, I think one gets to this same conclusion from the standpoint of several different systems of philosophical ethics--both deontic ones that stress duties and responsibilities, and consequentialist, utilitarian ones. There is something of the sunk cost fallacy in the kinds of things people like Gusterson say, for instance, which is usually called a fallacy on the basis of a strictly consequentialist, utilitarian perspective.

Sometimes, I suspect that underneath the blustery illogic of these positions, there really lurks a judgment that some decison making apparatus has been shown to be not simply fundamentally untrustworthy, but to actually systematically make the wrong decisions...so that an empiricist ought to be betting against it all the time. I wonder if, really, what a person like Gusterson really wants to articulate is something along these lines:

"Look, this administration has shown itself over and over again to be incapable of making good decisions: In fact, its decisions in retrospect seem to be systematically bad ones. So, let's all commit the fallacy of induction like all good organisms in the real world, Hume notwithstanding, and draw the conclusion that whatever decisions this administration argues in favor of are probably the wrong ones. That is, let us always bet against it. This will be profitable in the long run."

I am not saying that I necessarily buy the facts that would make this a reasonable position for a "social bookie" (that one could "make money" so to speak by betting against the administration's decisions). But sometimes when I read or listen to people who argue like Gusterson, especially if they get a little hot, at some point they will announce something like: "Look these guys just screw up all the time...!"

Anyway, just a thought.

[Dominique R. Poirier]

I took a look at Gonzalez and was unable to find patterns suggesting that this person might be either an authentic and skilled “frontrunner,” or a thinker/strategist coming under the limelight.

Unless I overlooked something his views have been promoted, or, say, hijacked, by highly suspect online media twice only, and recently (from early 2007 to now).

So, the hypothesizes I found at this point are that he might be:

-an unconscious co-opted newcomer on the propaganda stage because he was spotted by the opposition as a potential who reached his required maturity;

-an “awakened;” or a thinker/strategist getting out the shadow for some unknown reasons (but his syntax and heavy style doesn’t match and is, say, “immature,” still in my own opinion).

It remains that this person unmistakably crossed the guidelines of science and those of objectivity to publicly engage into partisan political activism since, at least, early 2005.

Well, that’s a personal opinion.

My main sources:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...VGHLCL11V1.DTL

http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/b...-anthropology/

http://dialogic.blogspot.com/2007/06...-gonzales.html

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/June2007/go...607_print.html

[marct]

Hi Dominique,

I took a look at Gonzalez and was unable to find patterns suggesting that this person might be either an authentic and skilled “frontrunner,” or a thinker/strategist coming under the limelight.

....

It remains that this person unmistakably crossed the guidelines of science and those of objectivity to publicly engage into partisan political activism since, at least, early 2005.

I am not sure if I would agree with the "partisan" statement, although he is certainly involved in political activism. There is a long tradition within Anthropology of being engaged in popular political activism that goes back to Boaz. And, on the whole, I see nothing wrong with this at all in either a republic or a parliamentary democracy. Indeed, I would argue that attempts to hinder the free speech of individuals is both anti-democratic and treason against the Crown (for those of us who live in parliamentary monarchies like Canada and Britain).

I would also note that he has not crossed the guidelines of science or objectivity in the works you referenced; he has argued from a particular position within the science of Anthropology.

Having said that, I also have to note that I disagree completely with a lot of his conclusions and, on the whole, with the stance he has chosen. His argument that cultural information has been used for unethical purposes (i.e. torture) is quite true, but his conclusion that it must never be used for that, and that conclusions inevitable institutional corollaries, is, IMO, insupportable. It is based on the fallacious assumption that knowledge can be held as a secret by a select group of people who will a) never abuse it and b) never reveal it to the uninitiated. Both of which have proven to be impossible historically.

Then there are the corollaries of the attempt to create this idealized state: organizational secrecy, extreme methods of defining and maintaining the Us/Them boundary, and the inevitable necessity to silence "heretics" (from the Greek heresis or "one who chooses"). I documented some examples of this anti-heretical trend in my SWJ paper, and others have commented on it as well.

Let me return for a moment to his observations concerning the use of ethnographic information for use in "torture". Has this happened? Yes, it has. Should people be concerned about it? Yes, and also about attempts to circumvent the rule of law which Gonzales has also noted.

Let me make a couple of utilitarian arguments here.

First, "torture" and "abuse" are slippery terms that are culturally defined. For the individual who engages in them, as defined by their culture within their own psyches, these actions degrade the practitioner. As an example of this, I would point to the "cult deprogrammers" of the 1980's and 1990's who kidnapped and subjected their "victims" to repeated psychological manipulation in order to change their patterns of thought and perception. This action was viewed as "ethical" by the practitioners, but it is, when analyzed at the level of actions alone, quite analogous to the ethnographicaly informed, psychological torture Gonzalez is speaking of. On the basis of actions alone (the actus rea) it is "torture" under current definitions. For the deprogrammers, and the families who hired them, the actions were justified by an ethical argument that the individual in question, the "victim", had had their free will stripped from them and, thus, were incapable of making decisions. It was not, in their minds, "torture" since it served to free the individual from mental bonds that had been imposed on them.

Now, let's take another case - the CIAs use of extraordinary rendition. Baring the international scope of the kidnapping, the actus rea is similar to that of the cult deprogrammer, but the mens rea is totally different. The ethical justification is one based on protection of the group from those who disagree with the group. Furthermore, there is a clear and obvious intent to circumvent the rule of law, both US law and international law. Clearly, this is a case where the actus rea is culturally defined as torture, a situation that will lead to the individual degradation of the practitioner's psyche, and, also, a situation that will reduce the validity of any claims made by the organization that sponsored such torture to their adherence to and support of the rule of law. Thus this action degrades both he individual and the organization.

Where Gonzalez fails, in my mind, to make a valid argument is by not distinguishing between ethical principles, the mens rea as it where. He does not appear to be interested in making a distinction between individual growth and group protection. Then again, that lack of distinction is, perhaps, unsurprising given the corollaries I noted above concerning the "necessity" for protecting ethnographic knowledge from "profane" use .

The same lack of distinction between ethical principles is, to my mind, behind his stance in opposition to the use of ethnographic knowledge and Anthropological methodology in the prosecution of the current long war.

By opposing the ethical use of Anthropology in the current conflicts, he increases the toll of suffering and death of both civilian and military personnelle. This arises from his arguments for secrecy. First, he, and others such as Gusterson, employ a tactic of threats to the careers, livelihoods and reputations of any Anthropologists who work with the military. This tactic, I will note, is grounded in the same ethical principle of protection of the group from those who disagree with the group - the principle he decries in the CIA, he and his fellow travellers apply within Anthropology. Second, by threatening people whose actions could reduce suffering and death in combat zones, he is encouraging the existence of stereotypes and cultural misunderstandings amongst the people in those zone thereby reducing the chances of achieving workable solutions for all parties. In effect, he is encouraging a situation that reduces individual capabilities and free will, a position that is certainly in keeping with position of keeping Anthropology "pure" (not a quote, just used for emphasis).

While I personally find his position to be indefensible, I do believe that what he has to say needs to be said if for no other reason that to bring these concerns out in the open. I think that his analogic analysis of the similarities between the actions of the NAZI party in Germany and the Bush presidency are potentially quite useful for anyone who is concerned with civil liberties - not that it is exact of course, but there are some disturbing trends. I just wish that he had extended that analysis to look at his own actions within the American Anthropological Association.

Marc