I would expect at some point that we might see equivalents of the NCA in the UK and perhaps Australia, at which point we should definitely form an international network.

In the meantime, the work that you and others have done individually and as part of the NCA has clearly been a major source of inspiration, and I along with many others have to thank you a great deal.

I’m a fan of Anne Irwin’s ethnographic work and see her project as being one that can be used to draw important distinctions between the fundamental and irresolvable problems with programs like HTS and other forms of work/engagement with the military. Her work clarifies many of the key ethical distinctions between doing anthropology “of” and “for” the military (though as with all of us doing anthropology “of,” myself equally included, there remains possibilities that the “of” can be transformed into “for” by others).

Personally, I think the idea of a Canadian NCA is a great idea. While not speaking for the NCA steering committee or others, I know that last year when a group of grad students showed an interest in starting a NCA branch, everyone thought it was a great idea, and my own view is that different constituencies may want to take on the problems of the militarization of anthropology in different ways, and the more voices involved in the critique the better.

One set of related questions is: How easy do you want to make it for those who will mine your work regardless of the format it is in? Do you want to eliminate all costs and all barriers? Do you want it in a format that makes it easy to mine electronically? If the answers are: very easy, yes, and yes…then what possibilities are left for “resistance”?

There is of course a whole array of material that can be put out in public that, far from serving the purposes of the national security apparatus, very much collides with it and causes it some headaches. Sider’s, and many indigenous scholars’ notions of research as resistance become very valuable here.

Yes, peer review attends to all sorts of things, except perhaps the kind of problems we are speaking about here. I don’t think the lessons of Vietnam were learned very well…and I say this as someone who has been pressed by anonymous reviewers to reveal more and more and more intimate details about my collaborators in Trinidad, to personalize my story, to delve into personal disputes, something that I found shocking (especially when a certain publisher endorsed the reviewers’ requests), and I did the exact opposite: more arid, less personal, more detached. However, in a discipline that prides itself on displaying the “intimacy” it has achieved with interlocutors, that dwells on “everyday lives”, that manifests this through dense detail that only an ethnographer can manifest…then we are really setting ourselves up as the targets we have been, and are.

Until anthropological consciousness can be deepened on these accounts, I think we need to think about what we are saying, and where we are saying it. Now is definitely not the time to take the approach of, “keep saying what you are saying but at least let’s make it ‘open’ in the meantime.”

Your last question: No, absolutely not. The key point here is that what’s ours is theirs, and what’s theirs is theirs. OSIS, WBIL, etc., do not make available their data and how they use that data — it wouldn’t be good intelligence work otherwise, and I doubt that a Freedom of Information request could be used to override what is defended as in the interest of “national security.” All we know, in part, is what information they do use, and they already mine EbscoHost.

I agree with you, that simply shutting down open access publishing is not really addressing a whole range of deeper problems. What worries me is rushing for greater exposure.

To target Open Access, which applies only to peer reviewed publications, is probably the wrong approach to take – because there are many who do not want to publish Open Access for other reasons (supporting editors, tradition, prestige, not knowing its allowed, etc…).

I would have liked to see more about what kinds of information are being mined, so that authors can think more about what they are saying, instead of thinking about where they should say it.

Does it really help to distinguish OA publishing from publishing in this debate? Data mining Anthro Source is just as easy as that of an OA journal…

Ethnographic websites however are a whole new mess and I agree 100% with what you are saying in that regard, but I would really like to find a way to clarify the difference between blogging ones research, and publishing Open Access.

Isn’t the act of publishing something, a way to have it vetted by the discipline (okay, maybe by some grad students for you realists out there). It sounds like the big argument is that peer review isn’t working well enough to protect the communities involved in anthropological research, and not so much that Open Access is a problem…

Especially if these issues were big in Vietnam as well…

btw: can you recommend any good readings that might be more specific about the kinds of information that are being used by intelligence groups?