Well, each of the services very clearly has its own culture. Partially derived from the environment in which it operates, and partially from its history. So, as I’ve said before, to understand “the military” means (as any social scientist would likely agree) getting to know those different cultures. I like to tell my students a joke which illustrates the point.

If you tell a Marine officer, an Army officer, a Naval officer, and an Air Force officer to “secure that building”, this is what you will see…

The Marine will take his entire command, they will coordinate for an airstrike and artillery support which will crash into the building, then while half of his force suppresses with rifle and machinegun fire, the other half will burst into the building, clearing each room with grenades and bursts of fire, until they get to the top of the building, where they will plant a flag and then radio back to you that the smoldering wreckage is now “secured.”

On the other hand…the Army officer will take his command into the building. They will set up a base inside and immediately start knocking out the windows and replacing them with sandbagged revetments. They will encircle the building with barbed wire and defensive command-detonated mines, and they will plan for a ring of artillery to come down around the building if the enemy attacks. After 24 hours the building will be a fortress that it would take a force at least five times larger to take away. That officer will then call you and tell you the building is “secured.”

Tell a Navy officer to “secure the building” and he’ll walk inside, spin the dials on the safes, make sure the lights are turned off, and then lock the front door on his way out to report “building secure.”

And an Air Force officer? Well, his first act would be to go to the local ReMax real estate agent and take out a 10 year lease with an option to buy.

So you see, we can’t even “hear” the same thing the same way among ourselves.

I am, in my comment, talking about an evolution over time just within the Naval culture. Though you see similar changes in other services. The Army has come the furthest, the Air Force the least.

Does this help? Gotta go prep for class now.

Bob Bateman

It’s good to get back to discussions of greater interest and relevance, compared with what has transpired the past few weeks.

The question I had is how much of this transformation is well received within the military itself? It seems to be “normal” to read in interviews with the media that U.S. officers in Afghanistan are saying they were trained to fight, and not to do all this other stuff, like HADR or even COIN and “protecting civilians” — I am not sure if they are complaining, or simply stating a fact, or both. On the other hand, there are those who enlisted to further their educational goals, and not to go to war (some posted on this blog in that vein a while back) — and getting to practice dentistry in the Caribbean would seem a lot happier than dealing with IEDs in Afghanistan (and I am not implying anything about their courage). In other words, there is no clear picture of what the dominant tendencies are within the military itself (at least not in the mainstream media).

Just a small digression: they had excellent photographers on the Kearsarge, and the development of military media seems to be growing and improving at what some would say is an “impressive” rate.

Ten years ago you could not get a naval officer to so much as cede the slightest point that there might be other, non-warlike, uses to which we might put their massive capabilities (especially the so-called “gators”, which is Navy slang for ships with an amphibious capability, such as the Kearsage). Now they regularly talk about it, think about how they might do it better, imagine different ways that they might group resources to be even more efficient, and a host of other things I never imagined I’d see.

Bob

Thanks also for the historical notes above. Clearly there is little that is new, especially when we come to counterinsurgency and “winning hearts and minds”, what we have is policy reruns. Even the defense of HTS as an innovation is made by way of references to past programs and the activities of a very old generation of anthropologists.

If we are witnessing a type of cyclical pattern, then it seems that we are around the apex of the newest boom in soft power, public diplomacy, WHAM, COIN, etc. I did not mean to convey the impression that what is happening now is all new, but rather that this is what is all happening right now. Indeed the very first part of the title is (Re), which again makes reference to the rerun aspect.

I can also understand that the civilian side of government and foreign policy has been undernourished, while the military side has been beefed up. There are, of course, plenty of consequences to that, as you can see in the near universal African rejection of AFRICOM, which is a giant Kearsarge of sorts, but with greater lethality perhaps.

Yes, I agree, anthropologists have had long standing relationships with states, with their foreign policy agendas, and their broader imperial ambitions. Anthropology has been the mode of knowledge gathering for white Westerners to consume the outside world, and reproduce it for the authorities that fund them. In this regard, people like McFate are guilty of no original sin, except to be brutally frank about the history of this discipline and its uses, something she has not invented.

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time available to get caught up on your site, and when I finally do, you have a vast amount for me to digest all at once, which slowed me.

Anyway, a few points for you to consider.

– “Soft Power” is merely the most current term for something that the US military has been used for over at least the past 60 years. It’s been in the quiver for that long, but the degree to which it has been deployed has gone up and down over the decades. So what you were seeing with, for example, the Kearsarge is really not that different from similar efforts in, say, South Korea in 1947, or Central American nations in the ’70s. The difference was often in the “who” (was doing it). So, for example, a lot of people our age, serving in the US Army’s National Guard (of various states) would find themselves in, for example, Guatamala, building small bridges or running a dental/health clinic in a remote area for their “one month in the summer” training. In the past 8 years the greater weight has been picked up by the Navy, in no small part because they’re not fully committed elsewhere (as the Army and the Marines are), and also because more people in uniform have come to see it as viable.

– “Why use the military”: That one is simple, at the top level, but more complex the deeper you get. The bottom line, for some situations today, is “because the military is the easiest, fastest, and most potent answer to fast-breaking situations” (think: tsunami or hurricane or earthquake). We have a budget, capabilities, and the resources to deploy 20,000 people halfway around the planet on a day or three of notice, and when a ship like the Kearsage arrives it comes with helicopters (useful when the coast is destroyed), hundreds of tons of food, the ability to make tons of pure clean water per day, and advanced medical facilities. (A ship like the Kearsage has a full-up operating suite, a 17 bed ICU, and space for up to 250 or 300 in recovery.) That’s not inconsiderable, and in all of the rest of the world, no nation anywhere has created a civilian ship that can do anything like that for use in disaster relief situations.

But at a deeper level (putting my historian’s hat on for the moment), I subscribe to Andrew Bacevich’s thesis from his book The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford University Press Inc, USA, 2005) ISBN 0-19-517338-4, which I stongly recommend. Over the past 40 years at least, and probably since 1939, this nation became increasingly militarized at the domestic level, and then that became exacerbated due to domestic US politics. The byproduct is circular. It became impossible, politically, here to criticize my profession. (That is also why so few generals have been fired the past 50 years as well.) That, in turn, tied to the Cold War as well, meant that we had ever more capabilities…many of which, as I pointed out above, have dual uses.

– Finally, I also think you’re underestimating how long and how deeply the military and academia have been intertwined. I’d place that startpoint somewhere back in the 50s at the latest. HTS and Minerva, as programs, are merely the most recent incarnations of an interaction which stretches at least back to 1941. (Prior to that, at least for the “soft sciences” the armed forces of the US in general, and the Army in particular, were much more insular.)

Bob Bateman

i agree with you about “the field,” which is a strangely accepted term. interesting how the rest of the world is seen as a field site, and books are written about what can and cannot be located or defined as the field.

meanwhile, these very places are not populated with subjects, but with real people who have real lives and concerns.

this discussion about ethnography and anthropology is an important one to me. i have some similar field experiences as stacie (field schools in mexico) and came away from them with a serious mass of doubts and questions. i am sure that i never want to “run a field school,” in which i drop a whole bunch of students on some people as a practicum for learning ethnographic methods.

a lot of these questions have been going through my mind lately, about the basic patterns of anthropology, about the assumptions, and about the possibilities. i have remained ambivalent and skeptical from day one, but also think there is great possible value in ethnography (especially when compared with the ways that economists and policy makers go about making their decisions). at the same time, there is incredible room for abuse and misuse of people and data.

i think about this stuff all the time though. what am i doing with this? why am i in anthropology? what am i trying to accomplish? what right do I have to do the things that i am doing?

“In the fall of 1963, Homer Bigart, a reporter from the New York Times, visited eastern Kentucky, and by late October a series of front-page articles appeared about the poverty of coal mining communities. These articles caught the attention of John F. Kennedy, who revived the dormant President’s Appalachian Regional Commission and promised to set aside $45 million for immediate relief efforts – thus began the famous War on Poverty of the middle sixties. In response to the spirit of the times, Life magazine devoted its January 1964 issue to poverty in Appalachia. Soon food and clothing from the rest of the country began pouring in. Harry Caudill describes several contributions as follows: “An overwhelmed wholesaler sent 12,000 pairs of shoes to Letcher County – ‘Two pairs for every child,’ he specified – and the town of Harlan was blessed with an entire cartload of cabbages for several days on a side track while the cargo rotted, and the Louisville and Nashville – which touts itself as ‘Old Reliable’ – promptly discarded it on a riverbank. The ten tons of decaying vegetables sent an odoriferous pall to plague the county seat and raise serious doubts about the whole idea of Christian charity” (284-5).

The book Why America Lost the War on Poverty and How to Win It, by Frank Stricker, says it the program was initially proposed as a limited set of experimental field studies and president Johnson broadened it. They also took into consideration how the program would sound politically, which is why it’s not called the “war on inequality,” “redistributing wealth,” etc.:

Sometime in October or November 1963 Kennedy approved a full-blown program against poverty. He was assassinated on November 22. One day later, Heller got President Johnson’s agreement to “move full speed ahead.” Anti-poverty planners floundered until David Hackett presented a thirty-nine-page plan on December 1. Hackett assumed that they did not know how to solve poverty; they could discover how to do it by listening to the poor. Hackett proposed that a limited number of task forces conduct field studies in urban and rural areas . . . .Once sold on the idea, Johnson ran with it. . . . he wanted something big. In his first budget message to Congress (January 21, 1964), Johnson announced that any community that wanted a program could have one. The hope of scholars and funders that antipoverty efforts would be part of a controlled social science experiment was doomed. . . . Nor would the War on Poverty include direct efforts to equalize incomes. People who had other ideas suppressed them. Economist Lapmann decided that a politically acceptable program must avoid terms like “inequality” and “redistribution of income and wealth.” The same went for cash handouts. . . . ” (source, 48-9).

Incidentally, about the “war on poverty” in West Virgina — isn’t that a very old war now? Isn’t the program called that, and taking place there, something from the 1960s or earlier?

(1) Summer field school, Guatemala. For funding, I had to specify the agenda beforehand: landslide relief following hurricane Stan. For the first couple of weeks, all went well. Then, a comment from an older man at the docks, who was otherwise very friendly and a person I respected, changed my attitude. I was with two other students at the time:

“… On finding that we were students, he proceeded to tell us what he thought was most important to study in the town. He told us of Maximón, and pointed out where some Mayan ruins were located across the lake. . . . I asked him, after a little while, if he knew anything about the aid after Hurricane Stan. I wasn’t expecting too extensive of a response, just that he might have known someone of interest. In fact, his whole demeanor changed. He said that help is bad, very bad, because the people in Guatemala, they see Americans and think how much money they have and business they bring. They ask for money, ask for help, and this is not good because then they become accustomed to not working. Panabaj has become a place of many ladrónes, many thieves, because they’re used to not working, and only getting aid. He said that he knows that all Americans aren’t rich, that there are problems in the U.S. too, that we should focus on those problems rather than on other countries.”

That wasn’t the end, but it gets to the point. Whether his analysis was right or wrong didn’t really matter to me at the time. More important was the sense: I may not be welcome. Would I want to live in a town where, every summer, students come and sit in public places and take detailed notes on what everyone is doing? Then, the students ask questions but don’t have the experience in Spanish to understand complex answers. I’m not doing anyone any good. Maybe I shouldn’t be here at all. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I should be doing something in the U.S. One day, I finally decided to quit the field school, and left. I told myself I shouldn’t be doing anthropology after that, but I also had the lingering feeling that I was just going about it wrong.

2) One year later, I was working at the Natural Bridge, VA, Monacan Indian Village, giving informal tours and taking notes for an ethnographic methods class. The other historical interpreters, two women of the Monacan Nation, insisted many times that anthropology was too political. One, analogous to a tribal historian, as far as I could tell would have been happiest if I had I simply helped organize the information she gave me and laid it out in a report. Eventually she was planning on writing a book and had amassed all sorts of research that she hadn’t had time to put on paper. Instead, my professor wanted me to stick more closely to anthropological themes: representation, identity, a lot from studies on Colonial Williamsburg. I wrote the report, turned it in to both, but felt that I’d wasted the other interpreters’ time because what I’d written wouldn’t be useful to them.

3) Now, in West Virginia, I’m having a very positive experience working with a community, but with no ties to anthropology. I’m paid by the government, as part of the “war on poverty,” but with a highly flexible job description, making locals my “bosses.” In the beginning I did quasi-ethnographic work, talking to community members about the museum and town and the directions they’d like to see the place take. Suggestions in mind, I then worked with the museum governing board, who are also local representatives, to form a common vision/strategic plan. Now, it’s my job to help them implement it, occasionally bringing in outside experts and other community members to give them new ideas. Instead of feeling unwelcome, I have board members suggesting I should stay as director or at least extend the job 7 or 8 more months and neighbors trying to find me a suitable boyfriend. I can say fairly certainly that I’ve contributed work that they value. What for me now is more elusive is how ethnography and anthropology fit into all of this, if at all – definitely not in the traditional sense. . . .

not really feeling better (the fever actually went down for a few hours, and only now is it starting to climb back up), but I need to start by at least getting some notes down since this seems to be a can of many worms.

Some of the discussion will revolve around whether we think ethnography is just a tool, without any values embedded in it, or a medium that is built on certain assumptions and tends to reproduce certain patterns. Some might say, “innocent until proven guilty,” and my answer is that we have piled up enough “convictions” to begin from the other end: “Guilty until proven innocent.”

I tend to see ethnography as a medium and as a mode of knowledge production. I recognize that there are a great many studies done by people who claim to have adopted an ethnographic approach, and that in some cases it is barely different from telephone survey research, travel writing, or journalism. What I find to be especially problematic is the following model of ethnography:

* a researcher decides on his/her own where (s)he will do the research;
* the researcher is trained in certain theories, trained to ask certain questions in a particular way, and trained to locate his/her work within a wider anthropological tradition;
* the researcher writes a research proposal, in combination with the guidance of supervisors (if the researcher is a student), later defended in-house in front of teachers and sometimes other students;
* the researcher was not invited to enter a particular body of people, but seeks to “negotiate entry,” “gain access,” and “establish rapport” — sometimes it is painfully transparent that what they are talking about is pretending to be friendly for the purposes of data extraction, a routine duplicity as Fabian spoke of it;
* if it is a MA or PhD ethnography, it will contain a considerable amount of descriptive material;
* often the research project is utterly meaningless to a given body of people, it is clearly meant to advance the career of the researcher, and the people in question are cajoled into thinking that their contribution of knowledge is for the greater good of humanity (hard to believe that if one skims the articles published in journals such as the American Ethnologist);
* then some of us say, “we don’t pay for information” (as if everything else we did was honest), thereby denying people whose knowledge we borrow even minor crumbs from our table;
* we then become the speakers for a given body of people in the “academic literature” (which itself is the product of arbitrary exclusion and fortification), as if their knowledge, that they gave to us, is somehow of less value or credibility than our rewriting and reinterpretation of that knowledge.

To the extent that “ethnography” follows that model, I think that its internal epistemological and methodological axes are fundamentally colonialist ones.

I am not even addressing the many flaws of ethnography as a way of gathering knowledge, its microscopic view of the world, its truth claims, or its tight association with anthropology so that the latter reduces to the former.

I can also think of the many pluses of ethnography; it’s just that I cannot get past the fact for each one I can find several minuses.

http://blog.operator-speaking.com/2009/09/21/gaydar-human-terrain-mapping/

In bits and pieces at different times on this blog, and more in my cyberspace ethnography course, do I speak of the surveillance opportunities, mostly here:

http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/imperializing-open-access-and-militarizing-open-source-whats-yours-is-ours-whats-ours-is-ours/

although it also came up in the discussion of the so-called Iranian “Twitter Revolution,” that Iranian authorities were successfully using Twitter and FB for surveillance and eventual capture of some protesters. They also resorted to “crowd sourcing,” posting photos of protesters and asking Iranian to identify them.

I agree that the digital human terrain is one fraught with dangers to users. The so-called dystopic visions of cyberspace from the early 1990s are gaining greater credibility than ever. It no longer looks like abstract, conspiratorial, paranoid fear-mongering that was more appropriate for sci-fi novels.

That is another reason why we not only need to be extra careful with what we put online, but that we should also think of “unhelpful” material to put online to frustrate the authorities. Few anthropologists would consider open misinformation, and completely invented data, and this takes us back to the need to get past anthropology as we know it.