Human Terrain & Anthropology (merged thread)

[marct]

Hi Steve,

In that case, the culpability lies with the University of Chicago Press, not the authors of the manual. The concern of the authors was saving the lives of soldiers and attaining U.S. national security interests, not meeting scholarly standards.

I've got to show you how to edit long quotes ! I agree totally that the "flaw", if there is one, does not lie with the authors. I'm not even sure if it lies with U of C press either - an historical document shouldn't be "corrected", so it is, IMO, open to honest debate. I do like the idea of either a "critical edition" or a fully referenced version being made available.

In some ways, it boils down to intended audience. Field manuals are aimed at soldiers - they are written in a specific genre and language style that has to be neat, clean, logically laid out and, above all else, easily translatable into do's and don'ts in the field.

The genres of academic writing don't really fit this bill. In some circles, "applicability" of an article in the non-academic world is a hindrance, and not only in Anthropology! (references provided on request!). One of the (many) conflations I see in the Price article (op. cit) is that he applies scholarly standards from one discipline to a multi-disciplinary work that was not targeted at a scholarly audience. I could as easily criticize his writing for not being accessible to the internet audiences he is writing for because he did not use the culturally appropriate symbolic form of communications - i.e. emoticons - and that would be an equally "valid" critique.

As I've mentioned, in my opinion it was a mistake to publish something that was never intended as a scholarly work with a university press. Knowing most of the authors of the manual, I myself think there are probably better uses of their time than trying to address the complaints of Dr. Price, et. al. As others have noted in this thread, though, his issue was not really the absence of citations. He was just using that as a trojan horse for his personal ideology.

Agreed. Then again, I would like to point out that he is also providing me with invaluable, open source (with full references made ), data for an article I am thinking of writing on the similarities in rhetorical strategies between the current extremist anti-military Anthropologists and Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Spenger (see here). The pattern of social interaction has so many similarities at the rhetorical level that I believe it would be an important piece of research drawing in, as it does, the confluence of rhetoric, professional knowledge and new technologies .

Marc