For as much serendipity as conventional, on the ground, ethnography is known to entail, the “approach” discussed here is barely an approach at all: it was unprovoked, unplanned, without coordination, being neither methodical nor systematic.  It became a collaboration, out of mutual interest, from distinct and separate positions, but there was no agreement about the direction it would take. And, it was public from start to finish, hence the claim to “open source.”

Ignoring Johannes Fabian’s argument for ethnography as commentary, and fixing attention on the lack of systematization, some will want to argue that there is nothing “ethnographic” about this, and I am even prepared to concede the point because it costs me so little. The real story here is not about ethnography, which is simply a vehicle, but rather the intended destination: understanding neocolonialism today. Had the intended destination been an ethnographic approach to understanding ethnography, rather circular, the likely motivation would have been yet another defensive validation of “the anthropological contribution,” something that interests me almost not at all, given its paralysis-inducing, conservative introversion.

This Moment Was Brought to You by Twitter

Let me add a few more notes about Twitter (to the dread of former students who went through my “Twitter course”). The primary venue for this encounter was Twitter. These days I am probably more active on the Twitter parallel to this site, writing more and more regularly than on this site (our other parallel sites, on MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, are considerably less noisy, for now). The commentary and exchange of views and information is also much more intense and regular in Twitter than we find here. In addition, the wide ring of interlocutors is a different one, corresponding mostly with journalists (independent or professional), activists, and others, primarily in the Middle East, India, Africa, and Latin America, many of whom have provided materials and other assistance to ZA. It’s a place where I can freely switch to writing in Italian, or Spanish, and continue dialogue (or shouting matches) with others. My video remixes continue even there, pulling as needed short video segments to illustrate different points in a debate. So in the debate about the rape allegations against Julian Assange of Wikileaks, I would insert a humorous clip to make a critical point about the Swedish police, which appears to be led by Frank Drebin of Police Squad (video clip), or in the personal smears against Assange and excessive deference to his accusers, I was reminded of this scene from A Passage to India (video clip). Had I wanted, I could have waited several weeks to mount another satirical video collage to present on this site, more complete, less spontaneous, and the original motivations and context obscured.

The message here is a simple one: you can do some things with Twitter that you cannot do with ordinary blogging, not to the same effect, with the same audiences and partners, and not in the same context of spontaneous collaboration. Twitter, like blogging, is not something that I recommend to all anthropologists–not at all. You have to know what you are doing with these tools, and why you want to use them.

Happy Independence Day?

The “story” begins like this. On the blog of a friend and past collaborator with ZA, Guanaguanare: The Laughing Gull, Guanaguanare posted this cutting music video by Fela Kuti, “Colo-Mentality,” as a tribute to Trinidad & Tobago’s Independence Day (celebrated 31 August)–along with the transcript of the words which you can view there, for a post appropriately titled, “Independence?…Whatever“, and I recommend listening to this song:

I related the disenchanted, been-around-twice attitude to recent events in Trinidad, since the new regime of Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar came into office in late May of this year. Among her first acts? Importing two Canadians, under very dubious circumstances, to lead the Police Force with highly inflated salaries, and even more inflated promises that these two foreigners would, by some magic of their northern superiority, put an end to a crime wave that Trinidadians themselves have never defeated. For those following the story, the racism and self-deprecation embedded in the story is astounding, and yet normal. It is a classic piece in a tale of neocolonialism, of self-rule self-defeated by those who serve their selves to alien others.

Also, I related this to other videos and transcriptions posted by Guanaguanare in recent months, of direct relevance (full transcriptions available there), each of these posted to Twitter by me. The first two are by a rare phenomenon, a Trinidadian punk band I have had the pleasure of corresponding with on YouTube and Twitter, Anti-Everything, breaking the extant colonial laws with their repeated use of the word “fuck,” a word banned in Trinidad. The third is by Trinidad’s leading living legend of social and political commentary in calypso:

THE OPPOSITION
The opposition says, “Vote for change.”
But we know better, because they’re just the fucking same
They have no new ideas, all the policies will remain
Words are only rhetoric, they’re spoken all in vain
And this is [they are] doomed to fail. [Repeat]

I can sound just like you, if I really wanted to
It’s really quite simple, if you follow this principle
Take a few key words strung together in a speech
Which you then preach like you care – education, heath care
Take a long……dramatic pause.
And vaguely criticize the laws
That you say will be rejected, if you get elected
Never mention strategy to move forward from here…continued

TRINIDAD SUCKS
1,2, …forged from the love of
liberty. In the fires of gas and oil.

There’s been no real democracy since colonial history,
When the campaign platform is a fete.
So salute to the illusion that we’re free
Vote for the motion because…

The government is corrupt
And the opposition just a bunch of crooks
And in case you did not realize
…our whole country is fucked

So make this your new anthem, and burn your national flag.

You take a few racist pigs and you put them in a race,
While the cost of living rises everyday.
They couldn’t balance a budget on their heads,
All the citizens of the country suffer when…continued

THE MADMAN’S RANT
Vote for we and we will set you free!
Anywhere you turn somebody chanting to we
Somebody promising jobs for all
Some renting gun to make other people bawl
But somebody promising more police car
Somebody going to take de country far
Somebody putting all de bandits away
We say, “If dey do the crime, dey going to damn well pay!”
But somebody promising human rights
While somebody threatening to put out yuh lights
The mortuary full with little Trinidad boys
A bullet start to whine and put an end to their joy
Now dey lying tall fuh dey Mama to mourn
Dey Nike gone, dey gold teeth gone
You see dey, dey want dey pocket full with blue, blue silk
Dey want dey statue drinking full cream milk
The little red silk is not dey true friend
De blue one had two extra nought on de end
So ah tag on dey toe is now dey ticket to hell
But look where we reach, well, well, well, well, well, well.

Ah hear a madman bawl as he spread out on a wall
He say, “Dis is it, dis is it, dis is it, I’ve been hit!
No time to give up brother, no time to quit!”…continued

The disillusionment with the imported, transplanted, imposed, ossified Westminster system, where elections…like in most liberal democracies, have become a game with outcomes favouring the elites and continuing the same system of oppression. That feeling, that analysis, is out there. I didn’t invent it…that’s one point about this open source ethnography.

Neocolonialism: The Twitter Exchange

The story began in Trinidad, now we see how it continued into Twitter, and then involved two more Caribbean speakers–another Trinidadian (TriniWarao) and a former boxer in Curaçao (SablikaTriumph)–an Afghan living in Australia (Hameed), and two more Canadians (Wayne Borean and “Not Prime Minister Harper”). In the list below, I am “1D4TW” (One Day for the Watchman–from a Trinidadian proverb).

1D4TW: “Fela Kuti – Colo-Mentality” (linking to Guanaguanare) ( http://bit.ly/bAvYRS ) 9:07 PM Sep 1st

1D4TW: Neo-colonialism: where governance becomes a mere mechanism for adjusting one’s nation to foreign demands #Independence 9:08 PM Sep 1st

1D4TW: Neo-colonialism: where elections are about selecting the next local manager to answer to foreign trends and impositions. #Independence 9:09 PM Sep 1st [auto retweeted by _the_mad_hatter] [auto retweeted by pmoharper]

1D4TW: Neo-colonialism: who wants “food sovereignty”? What matters is prices, not local production. Eating shit now. #Independence 9:09 PM Sep 1st

•••••••

manual retweet by sablikatriumph: “@1D4TW: Neo-colonialism: who wants “food sovereignty”? What matters is prices, not local production. Eating shit now. #Independence” #cur10 about 22 hours ago

•••••••

1D4TW: Neo-colonialism: when we get to be in charge of law and order, and beating up little black boys is now our charge. #Independence 9:10 PM Sep 1st

1D4TW: Neo-colonialism: the colonizer withdrew because he was fully confident that we could now continue colonizing ourselves. #Independence 9:11 PM Sep 1st [auto retweeted by hameed_a]

1D4TW: …and yet some academics cling to this fad label “post-colonialism” while taking possession of anti-colonial writers, like Fanon, etc. 9:13 PM Sep 1st

1D4TW: When you go back to calling it what it is, neo-colonialism, imperialism, and post-independence, give me a call… 9:13 PM Sep 1st

•••••••

TriniWarao: @1D4TW If “little black boys” includes disadvantaged “easy targets” of all ethnic backgrounds, I agree. http://tinyurl.com/28yf5ym 11:00 PM Sep 1st

TriniWarao: @1D4TW Couldn’t have said it better. http://tinyurl.com/26bzhww 11:04 PM Sep 1st

TriniWarao: @1D4TW It’s downright depressing but neo-colonialism leaves us believing that imitation flatters the mimic. http://tinyurl.com/27m33po 11:11 PM Sep 1st [auto retweeted by 1D4TW]

TriniWarao: @1D4TW Yes, neo-colonialism is when someone else’s destiny is your master. http://tinyurl.com/2d558g5 11:17 PM Sep 1st [auto retweeted by 1D4TW]

TriniWarao: @1D4TW Neo-colonialism is being condemned to repeat kindergarten ad infinitum…and liking it. 11:18 PM Sep 1st [auto retweeted by 1D4TW]

•••••••

manual retweet by sablikatriumph: “@TriniWarao: @1D4TW Neo-colonialism is being condemned to repeat kindergarten ad infinitum…and liking it.” #Curacao #cur10 about 22 hours ago

•••••••

TriniWarao: @1D4TW X agric chemicals, X mega-farms. Go 4 increase in ecologically sustainable, diversified, smaller holdings. http://tinyurl.com/2cgl9m4 about 24 hours ago

TriniWarao: @1D4TW Neo-colonialism is never having to say you’re sorry. Without real ownership there is no responsibility. about 23 hours ago [retweeted by 1D4TW]

TriniWarao: @1D4TW Neo-colonialism? CCJ [meant 2 replace London-based Privy Council as region's final court] is under threat. http://tinyurl.com/27d5nfl about 23 hours ago [auto retweeted by 1D4TW]

TriniWarao: @1D4TW Neo-colonialism: Conclusive diagnosis can be made post mortem. Autopsy reveals skull contents of 2 popsicle sticks & a rubber band. about 23 hours ago [auto retweeted by 1D4TW]

TriniWarao: @1D4TW Neo-colonialism = linguistic insecurity. Example: Insert ‘h’ where none exists. IndHependence?? THechnically, yes. THruthfully? NO. about 23 hours ago [auto retweeted by 1D4TW]

•••••••

1D4TW: @TriniWarao Great tweets, we should have started #neocolonialism about 24 hours ago

•••••••

TriniWarao: @1D4TW Thanks. See the results also in myself obviously and thankfully cannot pretend to be completely blind to it. #neocolonialism about 22 hours ago

TriniWarao: @1D4TW Kwame Nkrumah: The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state. #neocolonialism about 22 hours ago [auto retweeted by 1D4TW]

•••••••

1D4TW: @TriniWarao Thanks, that last one was great. #necolonialism about 23 hours ago

•••••••

sablikatriumph: @1D4TW Big UP slaying #neocolonialism all day everyday about 15 hours ago

It’s About Neocolonialism

We all struggle with these overlapping, mutually complementing cognate terms that refer to mutually reinforcing processes, terms such as imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. We’ve been through this already, in the first part of the Zero Series (to be continued, I promise). The sense one gets of neocolonialism from all of the above, scattered across blogs, YouTube, and Twitter, and spread among commentators and repeaters from Canada, Trinidad,  Curaçao, Afghanistan, and Australia–is that neocolonialism is internalized and localized, a variant and complement of global imperialism. It’s what makes imperialism work, at the local level, a way of articulating two distinct arenas and fields of interest. The prime actors in the neocolonial setting are not necessarily foreign (though they can be, in the case of imported experts, visiting IMF delegations, and over-sized foreign embassies), nor are the nation-states in question any longer formal political colonies (in terms of tissue thin charters and conventions). They are now post-independent, in more ways than one. The critique of neocolonialism is about a vision of self-rule that is more like management of locals on behalf of foreign interests, with some locals of course benefiting immensely from such arrangements. Ultimately it is about the continuation of colonialism by other means, a force felt, observed, and spoken about worldwide.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

A few days ago, an article was published that really contained many facts related to the oil spill that occurred 105 days ago.

President Obama had authorized the drilling of that well, trusting in the capacity of modern technology to produce oil, which he wished to make abundantly available, thus freeing the United States from its dependence on foreign supplies of that product vital to current civilization. Its excessive consumption of oil had already given rise to energetic protests from environmentalists.

Not even George W. Bush had dared to take that step given the bitter experiences suffered in Alaska with a tanker that was transporting extracted oil there.

The accident was caused in the search for that product so desperately needed by the consumer society, which the newer generations inherited from preceding ones, the difference being the unimagined speed at which everything moves these days.

Scientists and environmentalists have presented theories related to disasters that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago with the so-called methane mega-bubbles responsible for colossal tsunamis that swept across a large part of the planet, with winds that reached twice the speed of sound and waves that rose to 1,500 meters in height, wiping out 96% of living species.

They have expressed the fear that, in the Gulf of Mexico – which for some cosmic reason is the region of the planet where carsic rock separates us from the vast layer of methane – that layer could be perforated in the desperate search for oil with the cutting-edge technical equipment available today.

With respect to the BP oil spill, news agencies are reporting:

“…The EPA (Environment Protection Agency) has officially stated is on record that Rig No.1 is releasing methane, benzene, hydrogen sulfide and other toxic gases. Workers there now wear advanced protection including state-of-the-art, military-issued gas masks.”

Events of enormous significance are occurring with unusual frequency.

The first and most immediate is the risk of a nuclear war in the wake of the sinking of the sophisticated flagship Cheonan which, according to the government of South Korea, was the result of a torpedo fired from a submarine of Soviet make – both manufactured more than 50 years ago – while other sources inform the only possible and non-detectable cause: a mine placed by the intelligence services of the United States on the Cheonan’s hull. The government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was immediately blamed.

Added to this strange event, some days later came Resolution 1929 of the United Nations Security Council, ordering the inspection of Iranian merchant ships within a time limit of no more than 90 days.

The second, which in part is already producing its devastating effects, is the progressive advance of climate change, the effects of which are even worse, giving rise to the condemnation contained in the documentary Home, directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand with the participation of the world’s most eminent ecologists; and now the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a few miles from our homeland, which is generating all kinds of concerns.

On July 20, a cable from the EFE news agency referred to a statement by the now well-known Admiral Thad Allen, coordinator of and responsible for the battle against the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, who “stated that he had authorized BP, owner of the well and responsible for the spill, to continue for another 24 hours with the tests that it is conducting to determine the solidity of the ‘Macondo’ structure after the installation 10 days ago of a new containment dome.”

“According to official data, there are close to 27,000 abandoned wells on the Gulf seabed…”

“Ninety-two days after the accident on the BP platform, the U.S. government’s principal concern is that the underground structure of the well is damaged and that crude is leaking via the rock and will end up flowing out at multiple points of the seabed.”

It is the first time that an official statement has mentioned the fear of oil beginning to flow from wells that are no longer productive.

Readers interested in the issue are setting about sifting the sensationalist aspects from the scientific data. For me, there are events that do not have a satisfactory explanation. Why did Admiral Allen state that “the government’s principal concern is that the underground structure of the well is damaged and that crude is leaking through the rock and will end up flowing out at multiple points of the seabed?” Why did BP state that it cannot be blamed for the crude that appeared 15 kilometers from the damaged well?

We would have to wait for another 15 days that it would take to perforate the auxiliary well, which has an almost parallel trajectory to the one that originated the spill, at a distance of less than five meters from the other one, according to the Cuban group that is analyzing the problem. Meanwhile we must wait like well-behaved children.

If they are so confident about the parallel well, why didn’t they implement that measure earlier?

What will we do afterward if that measure fails like all the rest have?

In a recent interchange that I had with a person who is extremely well informed about the details of the accident, due to his country’s interests, I learned that, given the characteristics and the situation around the well, in that case there is no risk there of a methane emission.

July 23: no news whatsoever appeared on the problem.

The 24th: the DPA agency affirmed that, “a prominent U.S. scientist has accused the British BP oil corporation of bribing experts investigating the black tide in the Gulf of Mexico to delay the publication of data, according to the BBC television network,” but did not relate that immorality to any damage to the structure of the seabed and emissions of oil and unusual methane levels.

July 26: the principal London press media – the BBC, Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and others – reported that “a BP board meeting would make a final decision today on whether its CEO, Tony Hayward, is to go, for his mismanagement of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.”

For their part, Notimex and El Universal, of Mexico, published that BP “had not made any decision on changes among its directors, and adds that a directors’ meeting is planned for this afternoon.”

The 27th: news agencies informed that the executive president of BP had been dismissed.

July 28: Twelve cables and 14 countries, including the United States and a number of its most important allies, drew up embarrassing statements given the divulgation, by the Wikileaks organization, of secret documents on the war in Afghanistan. Although “Barack Obama admitted that he was ‘concerned’ about the leak… he noted that the information is old and does not contain anything new.”

That was a cynical statement.

“The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, said that the documents are evidence of war crimes committed by the U.S. forces.”

They so accurately evidenced them that they have shaken U.S. secretiveness to the foundations. They talk of “civilian deaths that were never made public.” It has created conflicts among the parties involved in those atrocities.

On the risks of methane gas emanating from wells that are not in production, total silence.

July 29: an AFP cable informs on the unimaginable: Osama Bin Laden was an agent of the U.S. intelligence services: “… Osama Bin Laden appears in secret reports published by Wikileaks as an active agent, present and adulated by his men in the Afghan-Pakistani area.”

It was known that, during the Afghans’ fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Osama cooperated with the United States, but the world supposed that, in his fight against foreign invasion, he accepted the support of the United States and NATO as a necessity and that, once the country was liberated, he rejected foreign interference by creating the Al Qaeda organization to combat the United States. Many countries, Cuba among them, condemn his terrorist methods that do not exclude the death of countless innocent victims.

What a surprise for world public opinion now to discover that Al Qaeda was a creation of the government of that country.

That was the justification for the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and one of the motives, among others, for the subsequent invasion and occupation of Iraq by the military forces of the United States. Two countries in which thousands of young Americans have died and a large number of them have been mutilated. Between the two, more than 150,000 U.S. soldiers are committed for an indefinite period and together with them, members of units of the militaristic NATO organization, and other allies like Australia and South Korea.

On July 29, a photo was published of a 22-year-old U.S. citizen, Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst, who leaked 240,000 classified documents to the Wikileaks website. There has been no statement as to his guilt or innocence. However, nobody can touch one hair of his head. The members of Wikileaks have sworn to make the truth known to the world.

The Brazilian theologian Frei Betto published an article datelined July 30, titled “Cry of the earth, clamor of the peoples.”

Two paragraphs express the essence of its content. “The ancient Greeks had already noted: Gaya Earth, is a living organism. And we are the fruit of her, engendered in 13.7 billion years of evolution. However, in the last 200 years we have not known how to take care of her, but have transformed her into merchandise, from which it is hoped to obtain the maximum profit.”

“Today all forms of life on the planet are threatened, including the human race (two-thirds of the world population is surviving below the poverty line) and Earth herself. Avoiding the anticipation of the Apocalypse demands questioning the myths of modernity – as market, development, uninational state – all of them based on instrumental reason.”

For its part, that same day AFP published: “The People’s Republic of China ‘does not approve of the unilateral sanctions’ adopted by the European Union against Iran, Jiang Yu, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, stated today.”

Likewise Russia delivered an energetic protest condemning the sanction of that region, closely allied to the United States.

July 30: an AFP cable notes that the Israeli defense minister stated: “The sanctions imposed on Iran by the UN… will not make it suspend its uranium enrichment activities in search of the atomic bomb.”

August 1: an AFP cable notes “High-ranking military chief of the Guardians of the Revolution warned the U.S. today against a possible attack on Iran.”

“Israel did not discount military action against Iran in order to halt its nuclear program.”

“The international community, headed by Washington, recently intensified its pressure on Iran, accused of seeking to equip itself with nuclear weapons via a covert civil nuclear program.”

“Javani’s affirmations preceded a statement from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Michael Mullen, who assured this Sunday that a U.S. plan of attack on Iran is in place to stop Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

August 2: an AFP news report similar in content to those of other news agencies informed:

“’I have to travel to New York in September to take part in the UN General Assembly. I am prepared to sit down with Obama, face to face, man to man, before the media in order to find the best solution,’ Ahmadinejad affirmed during a speech broadcast by state television.”

“But President Ahmadinejad warned that the dialogue will have to be based on mutual respect.

“’If they believe that they can wave a wand and tell us that we have to accept everything that they say, that will not happen,’ he added. The Western powers ‘do not understand that things have changed in the world,’ he added.”

“’You are backing a country that has hundreds of nuclear weapons but you are saying that you want to stop Iran, which could possibly have them some day…’”

The Iranians have stated that they will fire 100 rockets against every one of the U.S. and Israeli ships that are blockading Iran, as soon as they inspect any Iranian merchant ship.

In that way, when Obama gives the order to comply with the Security Council resolution, he will be decreeing the sinking of all the U.S. warships in that area.

Never before has such a dramatic decision fallen upon a president of the United States. He should have foreseen that.

On this occasion, for the first time in my life, I am addressing United States President Barack Obama:

You must know that it is in your hands to offer humanity the only real possibility of peace. Only on one occasion can you make use of your prerogatives by giving the order to fire.

It is possible that later, on the basis of this traumatic experience, solutions might be found that will not lead us once again to this apocalyptical situation. Everybody in your country, including your worst adversaries of the left or the right, will doubtless be grateful to you, and also the people of the United States, who are not in any way guilty of the situation created.

I ask you to deign to hear this appeal that I am conveying to you in the name of the Cuban people.

I understand that a rapid response cannot be expected, nor would you ever give one. Think it through well, consult your specialists, ask your most powerful allies and international adversaries for their opinion on the matter.

I am not interested in honors or glories. Do it!

The world really can be liberated from nuclear weapons and also conventional ones.

The worst of all the variants will be nuclear war, which is already virtually inevitable. PREVENT IT!

Fidel Castro Ruz

August 3, 2010
6:00 p.m.
Translated by Granma International

Dear Fellow Anthropologists,

The US Congress is currently evaluating and considering the expansion of the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System (HTS) program, in which anthropologists have been recruited to assist with counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq [see here, here and here for more background]. Please join us in expressing our firm opposition to the program and any expansion by agreeing to add your signature to the attached “Anthropologists’ Statement on the Human Terrain System Program.” Modeled after a well-publicized 2008 statement written by economists to oppose the Bush administration’s first TARP program, this statement aims to clearly and concisely state the factual grounds for our opposition.

Unlike our previous year-long effort to compile signatures for the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ “Pledge of Non-participation in Counterinsurgency,” we want to collect the signatures of as many professional anthropologists as soon as possible so that our voice can be heard in the debate about HTS.

To add your name to the statement [see the statement below], please EMAIL your NAME, TITLE, and AFFILIATION to NOHUMANTERRAIN@GMAIL.COM. Include the subject line “Anthropologists’ Statement.”

Please encourage other professional anthropologists to sign as well. Thank you very much for your support.

Sincerely,

The Network of Concerned Anthropologists Steering Committee

(Catherine Besteman, Andrew Bickford, Greg Feldman, Gustaaf Houtman, Roberto Gonzalez, Hugh Gusterson, Jean Jackson, Kanhong Lin, Catherine Lutz, David Price, David Vine)

January 26, 2010

ANTHROPOLOGISTS’ STATEMENT ON THE HUMAN TERRAIN SYSTEM PROGRAM

To the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President pro tempore of the Senate, and the Chairs and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees:

We, the undersigned anthropologists, want to express to Congress our profound opposition to the Human Terrain System (HTS) program and its proposed expansion. We are heartened and encouraged by the Pentagon’s interest in expanding its cultural knowledge, and we believe that anthropologists have an important role to play in shaping military and foreign policy. However, we believe that the HTS program is an inappropriate and ineffective use of anthropological and other social science expertise for the following reasons:

1) There is no evidence that HTS is effective. There is no evidence, as some supporters have claimed, that the program saves lives. In fact, a special commission of the American Anthropological Association (AAA)—the largest professional anthropology society in the US—concluded in December 2009 that “there exist no publicly available independent evaluations of the effects of HTS’s activities, either positive or negative. Whether, or how, HTS might reduce conflict, in short, has yet to be evaluated.”

2) HTS is dangerous and reckless. To date, three embedded social scientists assigned to Human Terrain Teams have been killed in theaters of war. According to the journal Nature, “some scientists who have joined the program have complained about inadequate training,” while some military personnel reportedly complain that protecting Human Terrain Team members puts the lives of their soldiers at risk.

3) HTS wastes taxpayer money. In addition to its human costs, HTS has been costly. According to one report, approximately $250 million has been allocated to HTS since its creation in 2006.

4) HTS is unethical for anthropologists and other social scientists. In 2007, the Executive Board of the AAA determined HTS to be “an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.” Last December, the AAA commission found that HTS “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology” given the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice. Like medical doctors, anthropologists are ethically bound to do no harm. Supporting counterinsurgency operations clearly violates this code. Moreover, the HTS program violates scientific and federal research standards mandating informed consent by research subjects.

For these reasons, we ask Congress to halt further appropriations to the HTS program, to cancel plans for expansion of the program, and to carefully consider alternative courses of action for securing peace in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

Signed,

………………………………………………

Dedicated to my colleague and comrade, John Stanton, and to myself. “Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?”

This comes from David H. Price, “Anthropologists as Spies,” The Nation, November 2, 2000:

Archeologist Joe Watkins, chairman of the ethics committee, believes that if an anthropologist were caught spying today,

“the AAA would not do anything to investigate the activity or to reprimand the individual, even if the individual had not been candid [about the true purpose of the research]. I’m not sure that there is anything the association would do as an association, but perhaps public awareness would work to keep such practitioners in line, like the Pueblo clowns’ work to control the societal miscreants.”

Watkins is referring to Pueblo cultures’ use of clowns to ridicule miscreants. Although it is debatable whether anthropologist intelligence operatives would fear sanctions imposed by the AAA, it is incongruous to argue that they would fear public ridicule more. Enforcing a ban on covert research would be difficult, but to give up on even the possibility of investigating such wrongdoing sends the wrong message to the world and to the intelligence agencies bent on recruiting anthropologists.

More on the Pueblo clowns comes from a synthesis of Elsie Clews Parsons, Ralph Beals, and Conrad Hyers, via Google Books and Wikipedia:

often their behavior is comic, lewd, scatological, eccentric and alarming. Among the Zuni, to enter the Ne’wekwe order, one is initiated “by a ritual of filth-eating”; “mud and excrement are smeared on the body for the clown performance, and parts of the performance may consist of sporting with excreta, smearing and daubing it, or drinking urine and pouring it [on] one another.”

Consider the value of “sporting with excreta” — especially in the absence of a professional association that, if one reads Price above, did so much to collaborate with the CIA and to help create the situation of political and ethical turpitude that made room for multiple McFates. This was without penalty or injunction, except in the case of Franz Boas, for declaring himself against anthropology as espionage — so many ironies there, given his paramount role in leading American anthropology, and the fact that he was right and yet continued to be censured until 2005. Shameful.

“Don’t you love farce?
My fault, I fear.
I thought you’d want what I want…
Sorry, my dear.”

John Stanton was quite correct when he wrote in a recent comment:

“Mrs. McFate-Sapone has broadcast herself around the world via the Net telling us all about her personal life.
http://montgomerymcfate.com/photos.html#
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/06/do-pentagon-stu/

She is the senior social scientist on a program that is central to COIN as defined by Obama/Petraeus. Fondacaro recently stated that HTS is right in line with the President’s objectives in Afghanistan, etc. She has a measure of responsibility for the personnel deployed.

She has also been the subject of many positive stories and some negative. For example:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/theres-something-about-mary-unmasking-gun-lobby-mole
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6240

She qualifies as a public figure.”

Indeed, but to be more clear, she qualifies as a public figure who has misrepresented the rest of us, who has realigned the public image of anthropology with American imperialism, and who has done so without any censure. Shameful. What is not shameful is the work of a few dedicated clowns who made sport of a societal miscreant’s excreta.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

“But where are the clowns?
There ought to be clowns…
Well, maybe next year.”

This interlude in the series is to finally introduce the work of Dr. Vassos Argyrou (Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull), specifically his book, Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: A Postcolonial Critique (London: Pluto Press, 2002) which I have referred to in the past on several occasions (a condensed version of his argument can be found in “Sameness and the Ethnological Will to Meaning” [full text PDF]. Current Anthropology, 40 (1), 1999: 29-41). This introduction is necessary since arguments and examples from chapters of that volume will appear in a number of the remaining essays. While my impression is that this volume has received little attention by anthropologists, I nonetheless strongly recommend it as a source of very sharp critiques of the western discipline, one that limits the import of post-modernism as a relatively safe branch of criticism, while showing that clearly anthropology has yet to face its day of reckoning.

Impossible Anthropology: Sameness

There is no need for any confusion about Anthropology and the Will to Meaning, no need to reconstruct its argument from between its lines, or to speculate about what it might really be about. Argyrou spells it out clearly and explicitly on the first page: “This book is about the impossible,” with his aim being, “to explain — contrary to those who foresee, foretell or call for an end to anthropology…why ethnographers, having repeatedly grappled with the impossible and failed, must nonetheless persist in their efforts to win a battle that is already lost” (2002, p. 1). And what it is that “impossible”? “In ethnological belief and practice, the impossible is the tenet of Sameness” (2002, p. 1).

[A lot of this argument takes us back to, and extends, what we encountered in an earlier post in the series, especially when speaking of Michel de Montaigne and Tzvetan Todorov, re-articulated in a subsequent post as the principle of ethnocentric egalitarianism.]

While anthropologists seem to celebrate cultural diversity, Argyrou argues that this masks an inherent attachment to sameness. Behind the applause for difference, anthropologists maintain “the ultimately unworkable idea that despite, or perhaps because of their differences, all societies embody the Same cultural value and worth” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 1). Moreover, in the very attempt to prove Sameness (which he always capitalizes, as with Same), anthropologists end up producing its opposite:

“Sameness can never manifest itself in the world. Indeed, every attempt to demonstrate that this elusive social condition exists and is real does nothing more than reproduce its contrary, namely, Otherness, which is to say difference understood as cultural inferiority.” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 1)

The opposite of this Sameness of putative equality is not “difference” as such, but rather racism and ethnocentrism. Argyrou in fact finds that there is not one single paradigm that divides the world between West and Other that has not been guilty of ethnocentrism (2002, p. 2).

What Crisis? What Critique?

There never was a crisis of representation in anthropology:

“the best guarded secret in the discipline is that there has never been a crisis in ethnological representation….No such crisis has ever befallen the discipline because the most fundamental ethnological representation — the representation without which there would be no anthropology — is questioned by no one….The representation is none other than Sameness.” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 3)

What anthropologists refer to as post-modern challenges to the discipline, Argyrou instead labels as generally heterodox, and certainly part of the game. He argues that because “heterodox discourse strives to uphold Sameness”: while ethnographic representations may be fictions, as in partial truths, that is not to say all representations – all, except Sameness (Argyrou, 2002, p. 3). Why, asks Argyrou, is not Sameness itself recognized as a fiction and a partial truth?

When it comes to post-colonial theory, this does not fare much better under Argyrou’s critical analysis. Speaking of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, Argyrou disputes the value of a post-colonial discourse that is “dependent on Europe itself for its effectiveness”:

“The West remains at the centre of the world even when, or rather because it decides to provincialize itself. It is still at the centre precisely because it is it that authorizes its own ‘decentring’.” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 6)

More than arguing that postcolonial discourse is a Western-centered activity, Argyrou argues that its objective ought to be “demonstrating the limits of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, of Western discourses in general” and not simply by writing “subaltern histories, native anthropologies, indigenous sociologies or philosophies,” that is, not by writing within “the discursive domain opened up and authorized by the powers that be” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 6). The aim ought to be “to write the history of history, the anthropology of anthropology, the sociology of sociology and the philosophy of philosophy” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 6). Once again, this leads us back, in part, to Wallerstein and the Gulbenkian commission’s analysis of the institutionalization of the social sciences and understanding their Eurocentric bases (see here).

In the meantime, as we develop these critiques, one has to understand that the academic game is in fact a game, and to expose it as a game.

Laughing at the West

“The academic game is the game of knowledge (and ignorance) which is inextricably, if not always intentionally, also a game of power. The only way to put an end to this game (…under conditions of domination…) is to play it better than the players themselves. The only way to undermine the power of Western definitions of the world that burden the rest of the world is to beat the powers at their own game….play enough or as much as necessary to expose it for what it really is — only a game — a game not because it is innocuous but because it is arbitrary and cannot be grounded anywhere.” (Argyrou, 2002, pp. 6-7)

It cannot be grounded anywhere, Argyrou tells us, and he explains:  “there is no Western discourse — not a single one — that can be grounded anywhere or in anything except in its own arbitrariness….there is no Western discourse that cannot be exposed in its groundlessness and arbitrariness — that cannot be disenchanted and demythologized” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 9).

One of the aims of Argyrou’s discourse is “to make the audience laugh at the grandiose claims of Western discursive power” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 8). Who is the audience? “Those who are at the receiving end of this form of power” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 8). His discourse strives,

“to expose the arbitrary nature of Western power and to remind Others what they already know: that it is naïve, to say the least, to think that one small group of societies, in an insignificant part of the world, during an infinitesimal (in the wider scheme of things) time-span has reached such a level of enlightenment as to decide for all of us what it means to Be.” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 8)

Don’t Go There?

As I mentioned on other occasions, Argyrou’s volume is a required text for my course in Decolonizing Anthropology, the same course that I taught for the first time as I launched this blog. Inevitably I credit/blame Vassos Argyrou for some of the inspiration behind this project. I also acknowledge my thanks for our email correspondence in the past. For their part, students had mixed feelings: some were seething, openly disdainful of the book; others felt depressed by it; and some rather enjoyed it. It depends in part on the self-awareness and goal orientations of graduate students themselves: they do not often like to ask themselves the question of what the hell they are doing in anthropology, because it could unravel their hastily, partially made plans, or cast into doubt poor advice that they had trusted as wise and offered without self-interest. One would think they should be grateful for the opportunity to ask themselves what they are doing in anthropology, what they wish to do with anthropology, or what they will allow anthropology to do to them…while they can still choose alternatives, or commit themselves to fashioning something new. What we really do not need are more Malinowskian repeaters who deceive themselves into paths that take them into permanent academic underemployment as adjuncts, forever bitter and worn. That only means that anthropology is still an adventure – yay! – but keep in mind that in some real life adventures people do fall off cliffs, freeze to death, get eaten by bears, and so forth.

I want to say a little more about another adventure, the game of which Argyrou speaks. Agyrou is careful to say, in the opening quote I used, “contrary to those who foresee, foretell or call for an end to anthropology” (Argyrou, 2002, p. 1). On one level, I think that I might understand him: if you call for an end to anthropology, you remove yourself from the game by essentially declaring that there is no game to be played, even before the game plays itself out. On another level, I don’t like being told where I cannot go (and most in fact tell me where to go, which I also don’t like, but for other reasons). Argyrou says that anthropology is impossible, but it’s important to keep trying…and I am not so sure that is the best answer.

It seems to me that calling for an end to anthropology is a major taboo, the touch stone of just how radical a critique aims to be. Dr. Wendy Wilson-Fall, an associate professor in Pan-African Studies at Kent State University, wrote here recently to say: “At times I wonder that we are at least as involved in writing about anthropology as in doing anthropology, and that writing must be presented as validation of anthropology and other anthropologists.” As a validation of anthropology, and other anthropologists – must this always be the predetermined happy ending? Is it to be expected of those with secured jobs in anthropology that, ultimately, they will have to defend their field? If so, can one ever really trust such critiques for being really critical? Because it would seem to me that the way you go about the game of objectivity is to write as if you had no interest vested in your position, to write as if you had nothing to lose, to write like no one would reasonably expect you to write. Anything else is predictable, and it too brings the game to a very quick end, if you are playing smart opponents. The other option is to call for an end to the game, so that you can steal the ball.

Am I calling for an “end to anthropology”? I would think that on some level this was already clear. On an institutional level, and in agreement with Wallerstein (a former teacher by a choice of mine), supporting the notion of opening the social sciences, to one another, and to reunify the science and the humanities, effectively means the end of anthropology as a discipline. On a different level, and depending on how one defines anthropology, it can never end as an expression of human interest in other humans – which is an interest that has been pursued for millennia, without institutional barricades, ramparts, bulwarks, and pulpits. A zero anthropology then is not no anthropology at all – that is a matter left to the curiosity of humans – but an anthropology that ceases to pin itself to power, that ceases to mystify us to its origins, its social position, and its vested interests. Well, let’s see, we have not reached zero just yet.

Some Reviews:

Harris, Mark. 2006. “Review of: Anthropology and the will to meaning: a postcolonial critique – Argyrou, Vassos.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12 (1): 259-260.

Robbins, Joel. 2003. “Review of: Vassos Argyrou. Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: A Postcolonial Critique. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Vi + 129 pp., notes, references, index.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45 (3): 640-642.

Throughout the course of this blog, “imperialism” and “colonialism” have frequently been used interchangeably, especially with reference to anthropology. I have written about “re-imperializing” anthropology, as I have about “re-colonization,” and “decolonizing anthropology.” Aside from anthropology, dealing with the two phenomena can lead to choices of when to use one term and when to use the other: the choice of terms can depend on the historical setting that one has in mind (whether writing about actual colonies, or the exertion of force at a distance); the ultimate intentions of the given forms of intervention (the effective inhabiting of another society and efforts to remake it to suit the desires of the intervening power, or, the effort to exert and monopolize power in a given space); or the proximity of the actors (colonialism usually being an “up close and personal” kind of relationship). Abstracting these ideas to the epistemic and methodological level (“methodological colonialism”) would seem to create even greater ambiguity around the choice of terms. It also seems, at first glance, that “imperial anthropology,” “imperialist anthropology,” and “anthropological imperialism” are not all the same “thing” necessarily. Before proceeding to the next in this series of lectures/essays, that will situate the institutionalization of anthropology within expanded and renewed Euro-American imperialism in the late 19^th century, it seems necessary to spend some time on the question of terminology.

One of the persistent themes in this essay will be the fact that colonialism/imperialism should not be treated as solely academic concepts to be defined and circumscribed by analysts (usually within imperial institutions that we call “universities”), or to see colonialism as solely something that is done to others. The colonized’s “decolonization” (at best, a work in progress), will always only be a truncated “achievement” as long as the colonizers have not “decolonialized” themselves as well (I use these two different terms to refer to distinct sides of anti-colonialism).

In this piece I refer primarily to two items (there are many more, but these are the simpler and more condensed pieces I use for teaching purposes). One is Ronald J. Horvath’s “A definition of colonialism” (Current Anthropology, 13 (1), Feb. 1972: 45-57) – the first article about colonialism to ever be published by that journal, and even at that late stage we did not have an article by an anthropologist as such (Horvath was a professor of geography). The second is from a large production, that opens with a decent review of the histories and theories of colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism. That is  Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An historical introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

*******

Colonialism

Young begins by sounding very concerned about the careless use of distinct concepts such as colonialism and imperialism, as if they were simply synonyms:

The use of the term ‘postcolonial’ rather than ‘post-imperial’ suggests that a de facto distinction is being made between the two, yet a characteristic of postcolonial writing is that the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘imperial’ are often lumped together, as if they were synonymous terms. This totalizing tendency is also evident in the way that colonialism and imperialism are themselves treated as if they were homogeneous practices. Although much emphasis is placed on the specific particularity of different colonized cultures, this tends to be accompanied by comparatively little historical work on the diversity of colonialism and imperialism, which were nothing if not heterogeneous, often contradictory, practices. (Young, 2001, p. 15)

There is also basic confusion about if or when the terms, colonialism and imperialism, should be separated from one other: colonies constitute an empire, but imperialism does not necessarily require colonies. That the terms are often used synonymously can also be seen in the work of Edward Said. Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre also tended to speak of colonialism as a single formation, a single system (Young, 2001, p. 18). Quoting Said, Young reminds us that his conception of colonialism was centered on a fundamentally geographical act of violence employed against indigenous peoples and their connections to the land.

On the other hand, Young offers some useful ideas about why the terms have been understood by some as referring to distinctly different phenomena:

The term ‘empire’ has been widely used for many centuries without, however, necessarily signifying ‘imperialism’. Here a basic difference emerges between an empire that was bureaucratically controlled by a government from the centre, and which was developed for ideological as well as financial reasons, a structure that can be called imperialism, and an empire that was developed for settlement by individual communities or for commercial purposes by a trading company, a structure that can be called colonial. Colonization was pragmatic and until the nineteenth century generally developed locally in a haphazard way (for example, the occupation of islands in the West Indies), while imperialism was typically driven by ideology from the metropolitan centre and concerned with the assertion and expansion of state power (for example, the French invasion of Algeria). Colonialism functioned as an activity on the periphery, economically driven; from the home government’s perspective, it was at times hard to control. Imperialism on the other hand, operated from the centre as a policy of state, driven by the grandiose projects of power. Thus while imperialism is susceptible to analysis as a concept (which is not to say that there were not different concepts of imperialism), colonialism needs to be analysed primarily as a practice: hence the difficulty of generalizing about it. (Young, 2001, pp. 16-17)

As many others observed previously, Young also recognizes that if we restrict discussion to colonialism alone, then one has to be mindful that historically there has been immense diversity in colonial forms. There have been colonies of settlement (for example, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.); colonies of exploitation (where no large European settlement was the aim, as much as the extraction and export of local resources); and various dominant colony-like enclaves, such as military bases on islands, in harbours or other strategic points, that sometimes forged commercial relations with a nearby mainland. There is the added fact that colonies could allow for limited forms of local rule, while in other cases they were administered directly from the colonial metropole (sometimes the very same colonial power could use both strategies, at different times). Some colonies were governed through native intermediaries, while others implanted officials from the “mother country.” Some colonial powers tried to effect cultural assimilation, while others did not. Some stationed their armies in the colonies, and others instead preferred to rely more on locally recruited armies. Thus, as Young argues, a “general theory” of colonialism is more than just a challenge. Young prefers to see “imperialism” as referring to a “global political system,” but that too begs the question as to why he would leave out the economic dimension, and whether there has not also been a diversity of global political systems.

The very interesting question that Young raises (2001, pp. 18-19), is whether this discussion in the end boils down to (a) a rather sterile and abstract academic discussion, and, (b) one that is meaningful mostly from the perspective of the colonizers themselves:

the apparent uniformity or diversity of colonialism depends very largely on your own subject position, as colonizing or colonized subject. From the position of the ruling colonial power, its administrators, and from the perspective of historians of British colonial history such as John MacKenzie, Britain’s different colonies do indeed look, and were, different in the ways in which they were acquired and administered….From the point of view of the indigenous people who lived their lives as colonial subjects, however, such distinctions have always seemed rather more academic. As far as they were concerned, such colonial subjects lived under the imposition of British rule, a view not discouraged by the imperial ideology of Pax Britannica. Anti-colonial practices of cultural resistance to the dominant ideology of imperialism encouraged the critical analysis of common forms of representation and the processes of knowledge-formation. At another level, the links established between Irish, South African and Indian nationalists at the end of the nineteenth century were developed to share knowledge of anti-colonial techniques and strategies. An attack on a police station in Ireland functioned in a very similar way, and with very similar objectives, to an attack on a British barracks in India. The differences in colonial history, in administrative practices, or constitutional status…made for very little difference as far as anti-colonial revolutionary strategies were concerned. From the point of view of anti-colonial political activists, the British Empire looked much the same everywhere….Postcolonial critique tends to take the same point of view because it identifies with the subject position of anti-colonial activists, not because of its ignorance of the infinite variety of colonial history from the perspective of the colonizers.

*******

Imperialism

Imperialism as a term became current in English only in the second half of the nineteenth century (Young, 2001, p. 26, drawing on Hobsbawm). As Young explains, while originally referring to direct conquest and occupation (nation-states develop empires by making colonies, becoming imperial states whose action over others is imperialist), thanks to Marxism the concept usually became one that referred to a general system of economic domination, with or without direct political domination (i.e., there could be imperialism without colonies). Why “post-colonialism” ultimately makes sense, Young suggests, is that those subjected to it have most often used the term colonialism to refer to previous systems of domination they suffered under the British and French, for example, while using the term imperialism to refer to American domination – essentially a distinction between “old” imperialism and “new”. As Young says, “history has not yet arrived at the post-imperial era” (Young, 2001, p. 27).

Imperialism became a target of anti-colonial struggle, and understood as a general concept of domination, probably with the advent of the Communist International of 1919 (see: archive of the Communist International, 1919-1943; Comintern archives; League Against Imperialism). Reverting to his position as an analyst, Young situates imperialism in a way that it pertains to rivalry between expansionist states, seeking to enhance national prestige and domestic political and social stability, and finding outlets for expanded capitalist production and consumption (Young, 2001, pp. 30-33).

While saying that imperialism is never static, he does seem to find comfort in trait-listing imperialism, which is fine for historical sketches that provide broad characteristics of imperialism at different times, but not so useful for the purposes of contemporary critique. In fact, it can be very counterproductive. The problem, apparently not within the scope of Young’s overview, is that of imperialism denial, which often resorts to ironically static and simplistically empirical historicist analogies. If any traits between “alleged” imperialism today do not square with those of other powers of yesterday, some imperialism deniers seize this as “evidence” that today’s imperialism is not imperialism at all, and that only sinister “biased” characters would insist on using the label. Curiously, given that imperialism denial is today a primarily American phenomenon, few Americans who deny imperialism on the grounds of historicism would be willing to perform the same mental operations when it comes to their own nation: since America of a century ago is little or nothing like America today, then there is no America today. Moreover, denying that America was ever imperialist, is denying that America was ever America.

*******

Neo-colonialism

Neo-colonialism has come to refer to a system of formal political independence, with direct economic control exercised by foreign power. If we were meant to have clear definitional boundaries between “colonialism” and “imperialism,” the concept neo-colonialism would seem to merge the two: “Neo-colonialism is…the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress (Kwame Nkrumah, 1965, p xi)” (quoted in Young, 2001, p. 44). The first and most prominent theorist of neo-colonialism was not a Western academic, but rather the Ghanaian independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah saw neo-colonialism as the American stage of colonialism, of an empire without formal colonies (Young, 2001, p. 46).

*******

Anthropological Correlates of Imperialist Theories?

Regarding imperialist theories of indigenous cultures, Young’s synthesis is one of the more useful ones. On the one hand, the French mission civilisatrice “assumed the fundamental equality of all human beings, their common humanity as part of a single species, and considered that however ‘natural’ or ‘backward’ their state, all native peoples could immediately benefit from the uniform imposition of French culture in its most advanced contemporary manifestation” (Young, 2001, p. 32). This shares the identical assumptions of cultural evolutionism and more recent international development theory. It is also an unstated premise of the “spreading democracy” thesis of American imperialism today. To the upholders of the idea of essential sameness, critics appear to be denying the humanity of humans: all humans want freedom, so the story goes, and if you don’t believe that Iranians “deserve democracy,” and want to live like us, then you are denying their essential humanity. If you do not want “democracy” for Iranians, then it is probably because you think “they aren’t good enough” to have it. As Young argues, the “very assumption [of equality] meant that the French model had the least respect and sympathy for the culture, language and institutions of the people being colonized – it saw difference, and sought to make it the same – what might be called the paradox of ethnocentric egalitarianism” (Young, 2001, p. 32).

The irony is that the alternative was no less imperialist. British imperialism from the mid-1800s onwards assumed a radical, racially-based difference between the British and their subjects. Assimilation, strictly speaking, would be impossible: assimilating Africans would make as much sense as putting suits on chimps, or trying to teach table manners to dogs. As Young explains, “the British system of relative non-interference with local cultures, which today appears more liberal in spirit, was in fact also based on the racist assumption that the native was incapable of education up to the level of the European – and therefore by implication required perpetual colonial rule. Association neatly offered the possibility of autonomy (for some), while at the same time incorporating a notion of hierarchy for the supposedly less-capable races” (Young, 2001, p. 33). Today, in fact, it might appear less liberal, with the revival if liberal interventionism under the banner of the “responsibility to protect.”

Both forms of imperialism are arguably variations of liberalism. One, ethnocentric egalitarianism, promises to open the doors of empire to all subjects willing (or not) to undergo cultural transformation, which serves to spread empire into the hearts and minds of the dominated. The dominated are thus “liberated” – liberated from the “burden” of being themselves, of being different. The other variant, a racist “respect” for difference, substitutes tolerance for equality. Both equality with the other, and, tolerance of the other, are vaunted as lofty and noble liberal values. Both are equally imperialist. One understates difference, the other overstates it. Both, arguably, recognize difference only to the extent and in the manner that suits the particular goals of power.

Anthropology seems to have had its own “Dual Mandate” of “protection” and “exploitation” with regards to the peoples at the focus of its mission as a university discipline (when anthropology, by definition, was that which you never did at home). Protection came in the form of salvage ethnography, cultural resource management, and some forms of advocacy. Exploitation: by recruiting natives to transcribe their cultures, for academic projects, and by lifting cultural artifacts and even human remains and amassing them in academic institutions. This is not to mention various types of “applied anthropology,” in service of corporations, development, international lending agencies, and military and intelligence communities.

Ethnographic Colonialism, Anthropological Imperialism, and Incorporationism

Back to the terminological problem underscored at the very start. It turns out that even some imperialists could be anti-colonialist, because maintaining colonies was expensive and inefficient where economic dominance and hegemonic political power were concerned. This poses a problem for us then, in our choice of terms: it seems one could be in favour of “decolonizing” anthropology while defending anthropological imperialism (hypothetically). That is meaningful only if we intend to use these terms in order to associate anthropology with (a) certain academic activities that resemble colonialism and imperialism on an intellectual level, and/or, (b) actual policies and practices of states and corporations.

Colonialism may be better coupled specifically with ethnography, in analytical terms, since both require physical presence, in person, and a form of settling within someone else’s home – entering their territory, and setting up camp. This is what we might call “ethnographic colonialism” and it seems to make more sense than calling anthropology colonial, unless one is focusing on anthropologists working in colonial settings. Otherwise, it would seem to be better to couple anthropology as a broad endeavor, with another equally broad endeavor, imperialism. “Anthropological imperialism” could then refer to institutionalized, professionalized, theoretical practice, where anthropologists speak about what is humanity, “on behalf of” all of humanity.

Is there an “anthropological neo-colonialism”? One could argue, as we will see later on, that various national anthropologies, instituted in (few) universities in Africa and Asia following formal political decolonization, were in fact neo-colonial in their political positioning with respect to the state and its nation-building mission, and with respect to its content which was focused on national development.

Ultimately, however, the plethora of concepts (empire, imperial, imperialist, colonial, colonialist, neo-colonial, etc.) can be see as variations, fluctuating in time and space, of a much broader phenomenon that encompasses them all, that renders them means toward and end. That end would be what I refer to as incorporationism. Neither imperialism nor colonialism make sense by themselves, until one relates them to their fundamental premises, ideals, and goals: to make use of others by various means of exploitation, drafting others into one’s sphere in order to extract from them whatever is valued.

The purpose here has been to signal the understandable confusion that can arise in discussing the relationship between anthropology and empire, at the very least on a conceptual level – that is, if we omit the discussions to follow, which should deepen this discussion much further.

▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬

* The phrase, “decolonizing anthropology,” when entered as a search term (retaining the enclosing quotes), produces 3,530 results in Google, and 230 citations in Google Scholar. For a phrase that we are told is prominent in anthropology, or that refers to an important concern that has been the subject of much writing, one will note two things: (a) in the first set of results, my own web pages dominate the top listings, with the others pertaining to Faye Harrison’s edited collection; and, (b) that both Harrison’s volume is out of print.

“A Revolutionary Discipline”

By Stanley Diamond
Current Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 5 (Dec., 1964), pp. 432-437

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2740001

Anthropology: “off the mainstream“

Although careerism and slick professionalism have made their inroads among us, we are still largely self-selected to study people off the mainstream of contemporary civilization (p. 432).

We speak for others:

we speak for societies that cannot speak for themselves (p. 432)

Only the civilized outsider can document, create the idea of the primitive:

it is only a representative of our civilization who can, in adequate detail, document the differences, and help create an idea of the primitive which would not ordinarily be constructed by primitives themselves. (p. 433)

There is, then, no final or static or exclusively objective picture of primitive society. We snap the portrait, using film of different sensitivity for different purposes. Moreover, there is no really sophisticated portrait of primitive society which can be transmitted to us by an actor from within the system, precisely because it is our experience of civilization that leads us to see problems (for us) where he perceives routine, and to pose questions that the primitive person is unlikely to ask about his own culture. (p. 433)

“Anthropology: Its Achievements and Future”

Author(s): Claude Levi-Strauss
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Apr., 1966), pp. 124-127

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2740022

Anthropology = the study of always disappearing primitives

The day will come when the last primitive culture will have disappeared from the earth, compelling us to realize only too late that the fundamentals of mankind are irretrievably lost. (p. 124)

It has become the fashion in certain circles to speak of anthropology as a science on the wane, on account of the rapid disappearance of its traditional subject matter: the so-called primitives.  (p. 124)

It is precisely because the so-called primitive peoples are becoming extinct that their study should now be given absolute priority. (p. 125)

the physical disappearance of populations that remained faithful till the very end to their traditional way of life does, indeed, constitute a threat to anthropology (p. 125)

Human nature is singular, the expressions are diverse (or how differences are superficial)

enlarging our narrow-minded humanism to include each and every expression of human nature (p. 124)

it is already certain that the outer differences conceal a basic unity (p. 127)

we may never again be able to recognize and study this image of ourselves (p. 127)

The futility of a native anthropology

The suggestion has been made that in order to render anthropology less distasteful to its subjects it will suffice to reverse the roles and occasionally allow ourselves to be “ethnographized” by those for whom we were once solely the ethnographers. In this way, each in turn will get the upper hand. And since there will be no permanent privilege, nobody will have grounds to feel inferior to anybody else. At the same time, we shall get to know more about ourselves through the eyes of others, and human knowledge will derive an ever growing profit from this reciprocity of perspective.

Well-meant as it undoubtedly is, this solution appears to me naive and unworkable, as though the problems were as simple and superficial as those of children unaccustomed to playing together, whose quarrels can be settled by making them follow the elementary rule: “Let me play with your dolls and I shall let you play with mine.” (pp. 125-126)

Having natives do anthropology, does not change anthropology

if native cultures are ever to look at anthropology as a legitimate pursuit and not as a sequel to the colonial era or that of economic domination, it cannot suffice for the players simply to change camps while the anthropological game remains the same. Anthropology itself must undergo a deep transformation in order to carry on its work among those cultures for whose study it was intended because they lack a written record of their history. (p. 126)

Anthropology: an outsider’s science

anthropology is the science of culture as seen from the outside and the first concern of people made aware of their independent existence and originality must be to claim the right to observe their culture themselves, from the inside. (p. 126)

Anthropology in the future might not be “Anthropology”

Anthropology will survive in a changing world by allowing itself to perish in order to be born again under a new guise. (p. 126)

And within a century or so, when the last native culture will have disappeared from the Earth and our only interlocutor will be the electronic computer, it will have become so remote that we may well doubt whether the same kind of approach will deserve to be called “anthropology” any longer. (p. 127)

Anthropology might look it came to us with a dual consciousness. On one side, a consciousness influenced by ideals of science and objectivity, driven to developing a commanding knowledge about human others. On the other side, a consciousness of itself as a creature of imperialism, guided by a scientific paradigm that imperialism made possible. Does this mean that anthropology effectively has two personalities? Or is there more in common between the above two “sides” than one might think?

Imperialism: Making Scientific Anthropology Thinkable

An article that I like to refer to in my opening sessions in Decolonizing Anthropology is one by Joseph G. Jorgensen and Eric R. Wolf [(1970) Anthropology on the warpath in Thailand (a special supplement). The New York Review of Books, 15 (9), November 19]. In that article the two authors speak of a problem that has “dogged anthropologists from the inception of the discipline”:

European conquest and colonialism had, after all, provided the field for anthropology’s operations and, especially in the nineteenth century, its intellectual ethic of “scientific objectivity.” But “scientific objectivity,” we believe, implies the estrangement of the anthropologist from the people among whom he works.

Jorgensen and Wolf draw some heavy support for this thesis from Claude Lévi-Strauss [(1966) Anthropology: Its achievements and future. Current Anthropology, 7 (2): 124-127]. There is nothing dispassionate about anthropology, Lévi-Strauss argues, it is not mere contemplation of things at a distance. Anthropology is the outcome of

an historical process, which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered, their institutions and beliefs destroyed while they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence. (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, p. 126)

Like Jorgensen and Wolf, Lévi-Strauss finds the imprint of colonialism in anthropology’s very epistemology: “Its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as an object.”

Turning to Stanley Diamond at the end of their article, Jorgensen and Wolf hammer home the point about the dominant epistemological method of anthropology:

it is precisely the objective study, the reified examination, which is proving to be an illusion. In this situation, there can be no more students of Man studying men as fixed specimens in fixed environments. This was a privilege that the Western world preserved for itself as a consequence of domination. There can only be men who learn to bear witness to each other. In the struggle for the creation of culture against collective and dehumanizing forces, no matter [what] their ideological pretension…there can only be partisans. [Stanley Diamond. (1964). A revolutionary discipline. Current Anthropology, 5 (5): 432-437]

The relationship between imperialism and anthropology, therefore, runs very much deeper than a mere bureaucratic relationship with colonial administrations and the provision of reports, data, and advice. That kind of superficial relationship to imperialism can be changed much more easily than the foundational paradigm that makes the doing of anthropology doable and thinkable.

Anthropology as Anti-Colonial Protest?

In the same critical spirit of Lévi-Strauss, Jorgensen and Wolf point out that anthropology has another side to it. They argue that,

in the tradition of Montaigne and Rousseau, [anthropologists] radically questioned the pretensions to superiority of Western civilization, while seeking alternative visions of man. This latter aspect of the anthropological consciousness has always been recognized in the United States, to the enduring credit of such men as Franz Boas, Robert Redfield, and Paul Radin. Throughout the history of the profession anthropologists have condemned the assault of the American government on American Indians (although the “solutions” they suggested were not, and perhaps could not have been, better than those from any other source); and the Association has defended the social and cultural rights of minority peoples, and taken early and unequivocal positions against fascism and racism. The Nazis, it should be noted, understood this aspect of the discipline in Europe and systematically sought to cut the heart out of German anthropology, reducing it to a reflex of the regime.

Jorgensen and Wolf thus raise the relativist tradition in anthropology, and they specifically refer to Montaigne and Rousseau. I will to turn to a discussion of the former in the next section.

Jorgensen and Wolf end their article by stating, “Admittedly, anthropology was ambiguously conceived.” It’s not very clear to me that in its conception there is notable ambiguity, especially given the strong mark of polygenesis and scientific racism both in the Anthropological Society of London, and in the American School of Ethnology, during the mid-1800s, as anthropology was being conceived before it became fully professionalized. Any ambiguity there may have been, at the very least, is the basis for the “big question” behind this post: how much of a schism is there, in the end, between science and racism on the one hand, and cultural relativism on the other?

Thinking about alternatives, Jorgensen and Wolf state that, “in our view, [anthropology] must disengage itself from its connection with colonial aims or it will become intellectually trivial.” For me this is both a positive goal and a subtle shift in their message. By this point in their article they have completely dropped any discussion of the epistemology of the discipline, how the structures of thought inherent to anthropology and its “credibility” (their word) are rooted in an objectivity that is itself rendered operational by the colonial experience. They certainly do conceive of an altered role for anthropology, however, which I support even if I am not clear as to the extent to which they took up this role themselves: “Anthropologists must be willing to testify in behalf of the oppressed peoples of the world, including those whom we professionally define as primitives and peasants.” Expert witnesses, speaking in defense of the oppressed: a critically important role. This still leaves some questions open: from where does their expertise spring? What marks their expertise as “anthropological” as different from the testimony of others? And why do “we” need experts to mediate when the oppressed often do, can, and want to speak for themselves?

An Anti-Imperial Tradition?

Jorgensen and Wolf raised the figure of Michel de Montaigne, speaking to the roots of cultural relativism in anthropology, and the radical critique of Western superiority that they believe they saw resting within anthropology. In the past I have had occasion to read and use Montaigne’s famous essay, “Of Cannibals” ([1578-1580] the complete text is freely available online). I was especially impressed by his introduction of Brazilian indigenous commentary on French society, thanks to three Brazilian Indians brought to France. They provide a rare commentary for the colonial epoch, and a strong critique of imperial society, noting first that it was amazing that the men they met submitted to a monarch who was little more than a child, and then this: “they had observed, that there were among us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, while, in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean, and half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses.”

Richard  Handler has written [(1986). Of cannibals and custom: Montaigne's cultural relativism. Anthropology Today, Vol. 2, No. 5 (Oct), pp. 12-14] a very relevant critical, yet sympathetic analysis of some of the contradictions within the work of Montaigne, which could in fact not only undo Montaigne’s own theses, while providing support for criticisms of cultural relativism, but they also betray one critically important approach marking all anthropology and subjected to a withering critique by Vassos Argyrou (which I shall raise fully in later posts). Montaigne’s argument is, in Handler’s words, that “we justify what are necessarily relative ideas – that is, those that come to us via custom – as absolutes” (Handler, 1986, p. 12). Handler quotes at length from Montaigne’s essay, Of Custom. I will quote the same passage from a translation different than the one available to Handler, simply because it is freely available to all interested readers:

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom; every one, having an inward veneration for the opinions and manners approved and received among his own people, cannot, without very great reluctance, depart from them, nor apply himself to them without applause. In times past, when those of Crete would curse any one, they prayed the gods to engage him in some ill custom. But the principal effect of its power is, so to seize and ensnare us, that it is hardly in us to disengage ourselves from its gripe, or so to come to ourselves, as to consider of and to weigh the things it enjoins. To say the truth, by reason that we suck it in with our milk, and that the face of the world presents itself in this posture to our first sight, it seems as if we were born upon condition to follow on this track; and the common fancies that we find in repute everywhere about us, and infused into our minds with the seed of our fathers, appear to be the most universal and genuine: from whence it comes to pass, that whatever is off the hinges of custom, is believed to be also off the hinges of reason; how unreasonably, for the most part, God knows.

As Handler explains, what Montaigne is doing here is arguing what has become a central thesis in relativist anthropology: that people naturalize arbitrary cultural constructs, mistaking the relativity of customs for absolutes of “nature” or “reason.” According to Handler, Montaigne argues that “humans do not easily recognize the element of bias that inevitably accompanies a culturally particular worldview – that is, that humans more frequently defend, with whatever arguments are at hand, than criticize or relativize their customary orientation to the world” (Handler, 1986, p. 12).

The first ambiguity, if not outright contradiction that Handler finds, lies in Montaigne’s retention of an assumption of an absolute and universal reason. As Handler explains, “to say that people unreasonably mistake ‘what is off the hinges of custom’ for ‘what is off the hinges of reason’ is to suggest that despite the natives’ confusion of custom and reason, there nonetheless exists some absolute faculty of reason by which, if they appealed to it, they could avoid their confusion” (Handler, 1986, p. 13). Thus, despite Montaigne underlining the power of custom to shape reason itself, “he refuses to relinquish a notion of reason understood as a culturally neutral faculty capable of impartial judgment” (Handler, 1986, p. 13). There is yet another way of explaining this “contradiction,” and it will come up again when we talk about Argyrou, and that is simply this: where does Montaigne stand that is pure reason and unaffected by the arbitrary power of custom?

Without Any Difference

As Handler points out, Montaigne’s thinking gives weight to the Enlightenment belief in universal reason, reason that is the same for all persons and all cultures at all times: “In Montaigne, reason similarly takes on universalistic implications, since in spite of his insistence on the diversity of custom, he reserves a place for reason – at least for ‘reasonable’ reason – above and beyond custom, a reason that can transcend custom and judge it” (Handler, 1986, p. 13). The crucial point to observe here is that when your logic guarantees such universal human unity, your interpretation of cultural differences is that they are mere surface phenomena: same contents, but different form. In this regard, the relativist position melts into the universalist one, and anthropology becomes an exercise not in “understanding” or “explaining” difference, but rather just explaining it away. (Again, more of this from Argyrou later.)

Tzvetan Todorov [(1984). The conquest of America. New York: HarperCollins] also takes issue with depictions of Amerindian cultural difference as rooted in a basic, pristine human nature that existed before the development of civilization. Handler says that Todorov’s argument is that this is a “superficially charitable view of exotic others [that] does no better than racism and ethnocentrism when it comes to inter-cultural understanding (Handler, 1986, p. 13). Handler reminds us of what Montaigne says above, that even in defending relativism he can only do so by way of an appeal to an absolute human “nature”: the reason that we suck in with our milk, that is infused in our minds by the seed of the father (Handler, 1986, p. 13).

What anthropologists know from cultural evolutionists as the thesis of the psychic unity of humankind found earlier expression in Bartolomé de las Casas’ idea of the Christian unity of humankind: every human can become a Christian (Todorov, 1984, p. 161). In the Papal Bull of 1537, Pope Paul III reissued the declaration to “go forth and make disciples of all nations,” because all are capable of receiving Christ. “Without any difference” becomes a critical component of las Casas’ defense of the humanity of the Amerindians (Todorov, 1984, p. 162). Christian universalism implies an essential non-difference among all humans, Todorov explains. He points to a quote from Saint John Chrysostom, used by las Casas in his debates at Valldolid: “Just as there is no natural difference in the creation of man, so there is no difference in the call to salvation of all men, barbarous or otherwise, since God’s grace can correct the minds of barbarians, so that they have a reasonable understanding” (quoted in Todorov, 1984, p. 162). It’s a position that helps las Casas to explain away difference, when seemingly defending it: though the Amerindians may appear to us to be “indolent” and indifferent to wealth, that is only because they still observe a basic Christian virtue that we have forgotten, which is to be content with no more than what is necessary for survival.

Todorov’s critique of las Casas’ document, Apologética Historia, is penetrating:

If it is incontestable that the prejudice of superiority is an obstacle in the road to knowledge, we must also admit that the prejudice of equality is a still greater one, for it consists in identifying the other purely and simply with one’s own “ego ideal”  (or with oneself). (Todorov, 1984, p. 165)

They may be different now, but they will not always be so. (It also seems apparent, Todorov tells us, that las Casas could not live up to his own universalist creed, as he “never shows the slightest tenderness toward the Muslims” [p. Todorov, 1984, 166].)

Handler adds that “in European history the emergence of an anthropological ability to understand others has not necessarily led to compassionate interaction with them” (Handler, 1986, p. 13). Indeed, relying on Todorov, he notes that cultural relativism can be enlisted in the service of individualistic pragmatism, where one uses one’s alleged understanding of others in order to better manipulate others (Handler, 1986, p. 13).

Handler’s key conclusion is that “a science of others’ customs should not blind us to the customary underpinnings of our own sciences” (Handler, 1986, p. 14).

Can Anthropology be Anti-Imperialist?

In “New Proposals for Anthropologists” [(1968). Current Anthropology, 9 (5): 403-435 – online here and here] Kathleen Gough comments on the institutional positioning of professional anthropologists (in Europe and North America presumably) and how this impacts on their place in a world experiencing momentous upheavals. She writes:

From the beginning, we have inhabited a triple environment, involving obligations first to the people we studied, second to our colleagues and our science, and third to the powers who employed us in universities or who funded our research. In many cases we seem now to be in danger of being torn apart by the conflicts between the first and third set of obligations, whiles the second set of loyalties, to our subject as an objective and humane endeavour, are being severely tested and jeopardized. (Gough, 1968, p. 405)

The passage could have been written forty years later in another crisis decade that presents so many reminders of her own. Some might argue about the order of her list, or that those elements should not even form discrete items in a list since they are all tied to one another: the funding of research tied to the research of the people we study tied to our colleagues who read our research or hire us to teach it. Even then, Gough and others were reflecting on what to do next in the face of worldwide crisis. In fact she quotes a 1966 paper by Peter Worsley, significantly titled, “The End of Anthropology?” Her suggested direction, given that specialization in small-scale societies is losing currency in a world of rapidly expanding scales of social interaction, is that we start to study large-scale social systems. Then we must be prepared for the fact that our work will resemble that of political scientists, economists, and sociologists. What we must do, Gough urges, is to study “modern society as a single, interdependent world social system” (Gough, 1968, p. 405). This leads us to the study of imperialism ultimately.

Why have anthropologists not been at the forefront of studies of imperialism, failing to study it as a unitary phenomenon? One reason Gough suggests is the impact of the process of specialization within anthropology, and between anthropology and the other disciplines. A second reason is the tradition of fieldwork in small-scale societies, which is simply the wrong methodological basis for contemplating overarching global phenomena such as imperialism. A third is our general unwillingness to offend the governments upon whom we depend for funding and access. A fourth reason is what she calls in the language of her time, “the bureaucratic, counter-revolutionary setting” in which anthropologists work in universities, contributing to a sense of impotence and reliance on machine-like models (Gough, 1968, p. 406). (Updating her terms, we would be speaking of the corporatization of the university, the spread of neo-liberalism, the chilling of academic freedom, and the push toward business-relevant research.)

In one broad sweep, Gough provides many useful clues about the relationship between anthropology and imperialism: (1) we do not study imperialism, so that “critiquing” it becomes more difficult, and unusual; (2) we cannot study imperialism, because we have the wrong methods; and, (3) we should not study imperialism, because it might offend sponsors and bosses, and could unseat us. Ironic then, that the discipline that is institutionalized in universities at the same time as Euro-American imperialism reached new giddy heights, in the late 19^th century, the discipline that was imperialism’s traveling companion if not scout, is the discipline that is disarmed from studying the context, causes and conditions of its own creation and current existence. Anthropology is about the study of others out of fear of facing ourselves? That would be rather depressing, a kind of inverted narcissism.

Propositions to Go

Thus far what we have encountered above are the following issues relating anthropology to empire:

(a)    the imperial nature of anthropology’s inherent epistemology;
(b)   the colonial positioning of anthropologists in the field;
(c)    the dependence on sponsorship by imperial powers;
(d)   a crisis of confidence regarding the nature and purpose of our expertise; and,
(e)    doubts about whether we ever have, or ever could, actually understand difference.

We already know that anthropology, as we know it, is a Western construct. Anthropology is a Western way of producing knowledge of the world, based on many, disparate, small parts of the world. It is also one Western way of consuming the world. But it’s not just like any other form of gaining knowledge of the world, not anthropology as we know it. Nobody – no students, no professors – can really say that the only reason or the most important reason that they entered anthropology is that they were interested in knowing more about other cultures. It is not an innocent quest for knowledge. One does not need degrees to learn about other cultures, and learning about other cultures does not lead to degrees (for most humans). You may have a thirst for knowledge, but something else is motivating you as well, and that something else is of critical importance. When one enrolls in a degree program, one is enlisting in an industrialized, professionalized, system of production, one of whose outputs is credentials, and another being power. Anthropology in institutions is not just there to teach the world about the world: it is there to teach a small club of members about the “right ways” of knowing that world.

Likewise, ethnography would seem to be the very last candidate on a list of preferred, sane, and humane ways of getting to know others. Getting to know other people does not mean that we intimately scrutinize them, document them in our notes, and lay out their lives (according to the accepted formulas) for an audience of specialist surveyors, inspectors, and guardians of the discipline. Wanting to share knowledge about others should not mean that we think that only we can explain others, and that we can even explain others to themselves, like expert demystifiers, above it all. Otherwise it would seem absurd: those who taught me about themselves, as I was ignorant about them, need me to explain them to themselves?

However, it is not absurd, it is functionally useful for maintaining the Westerner in the position of protagonist. Anthropology as a science is a way for the West to maintain its imperial centrality in explaining the rest of the world to the rest of the world. It teaches the world that all legitimate and valid interpretations of the world are to be made by Westerners. Our appreciation for science reflects our lust for influence and desire for rewards. Science sells. Science develops innovative means of control. Science offers us better means of efficiently managing the animals.

As we proceed we will look at a number of proposed alternatives: native anthropology; indigenous anthropology; anthropology at home; and world anthropologies. Some of the “big questions” to be asked are already familiar ones on this blog, and a number of persons have already offered their comments – nonetheless, here they are again, in one list:

• Can a decolonized anthropology exist as anthropology as we know it?
• Would not the real decolonization of anthropology mean its complete termination?
• Would a decolonized anthropology even be recognized as anthropology?

It is not because of its mental endowments that only the Western world has given birth to anthropology, but rather because exotic cultures, treated by us as mere things, could be studied, accordingly, as things. We did not feel concerned by them whereas we cannot help their feeling concerned by us. Between our attitude toward them and their attitude toward us, there is and can be no parity.

Therefore, if native cultures are ever to look at anthropology as a legitimate pursuit and not as a sequel to the colonial era or that of economic domination, it cannot suffice for the players simply to change camps while the anthropological game remains the same. Anthropology itself must undergo a deep transformation in order to carry on its work among those cultures for whose study it was intended because they lack a written record of their history. (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, p. 126)

Circle the Wagons!

If the “nativism” that Adam Kuper alleges was spawned by the marriage of American post-modernism and radical political engagement means that only the native can speak for the native, then Kuper will have none of it. More than that, in “Culture, Identity and the Project of a Cosmopolitan Anthropology” (Man, 1994, 29 (3): 537-554), Kuper warns us – anthropologists, to be specific – that nativism is an “obvious challenge.” At risk is the whole anthropological enterprise, and the situation is urgent. We must regroup and reconnoiter.

Kuper’s work serves a useful purpose as a favourite foil of mine, to open my course, Decolonizing Anthropology. The “nativism” Kuper tilts against in his article is one form of an anthropology that rids itself of colonial ambitions to occupy other people’s representational territory, having submitted them to close and intimate inspection and analysis in a manner that echoes the zoological and anatomical precursors of institutionalized anthropology. Some might call it, for greater precision, a “decolonialized” anthropology, as in the colonialists resigning and withdrawing from territories they had settled, rather than a decolonized anthropology which can mean many other things.

While Kuper argues for a “cosmopolitan anthropology” to rescue the collapsing discipline from what he sees as its hostile ethnic critics, he does not mention that for a century the American Anthropological Association had no section for indigenous anthropologists – ironic cosmopolitanism. The American anthropological discipline, built on the backs of Native Americans, finally afforded them a distinct space within the AAA, a century after it was founded. Indigenous anthropologists won approval from the AAA to form a section, on 05 December 2007, with their section now named the “Association of Indigenous Anthropologists.” This development would have possibly complicated matters for Kuper, because what if the allegedly nativist native is also an anthropologist, is anthropology still in danger? And when a native becomes an anthropologist, is this not a concrete example of cosmopolitanism? More to the point perhaps, the formation of the AIA may be too little, too late, as indigenous studies programs have grown and spread across North America, and the AIA is easily rivaled in size and prominence by independent associations such as the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

Kuper appears to be rather unhappy that there has been any debate about the “authority” of anthropologists to represent others, his intervention thus forming part of a conservative, indeed reactionary, backlash against “post-modernism,” a reaction shared by many anthropologists of all political stripes. In particular, Kuper takes time to emphasize that the debates that have taken place, are American debates:

The recent debates have been dominated by American scholars, and it is necessary to make explicit something they take for granted. The project of anthropology that is in dispute in their work is the American project of cultural anthropology, one quite distinct in the second half of the twentieth century from the dominantly European project of social anthropology. Moreover, the political spirit that often informs it has, again, a distinctively American character. (p. 538)

In order to help him make his case, Kuper then devotes several uninspired pages to reprising the history of American anthropology and the evolution of the culture concept (as if there was not an extreme overabundance of such material already), without ever really making the connection to the nativist threat that trips so many alarms for him. However, as we shall see, even his American premise is in jeopardy.

“Political Correctness”

Kuper thinks he has found a paradox. On the one hand,

The post-modernists preferred the image of a cacophony of voices, commenting upon each other and as they say somewhat mysteriously ironicizing. The ethnographic object is multifaceted, it can only be partially and fleetingly glimpsed from any one perspective, and cannot be analysed. The assertion of objectivity in traditional ethnography had been in reality a display, promoting a claim to authority political as well as intellectual. The rhetorical performance of the ethnographer was a trick, an exercise in persuasion, and the critic’s job was to unmask it. (p. 542)

Yet on the other hand,

There was a kind of truth to which the ethnographer was nevertheless obliged to bear witness: the natives had to be given their unedited say. This prescription was justified by a political argument against domination, and in favour of democratic expression (most explicitly perhaps, in Marcus & Fischer 1986). The ethnographer therefore had the duty to bear witness for the natives, but without imposing an editorial voice. There was increasingly a vogue for ethnographies in which the ethnographer simply acts as a facilitator for a native autobiographer, or for oral histories. The ethnographer is a medium, translating and publishing texts (an enterprise which, interestingly enough, can be traced back to Boas). (p. 542)

Perhaps I do not understand what Kuper means by “paradox.” The definitions of which I am aware emphasize “self-contradictory,” “absurd,” a “false proposition.” I do not see a contradiction here. On the one hand, there is a cacophony of voices, of anthropologists speaking for themselves and about each other…and on the other hand, natives also being “allowed” to speak, or more accurately, acknowledged as doing their own speaking. As no native authority edits the anthropologists, no anthropologist edits the natives. This seems to be balance, not contradiction.

The apparent confusion masks Kuper’s real concern, namely that: anthropologists should resume taking each other’s ethnographies as valid, authoritative accounts, and they should continue to occupy a dominant position where there is any discussion of native people. In an article that preaches the values of cosmopolitanism, Kuper is reviving a monopolist ethic that seizes the terrain for the non-native expert on the natives. Maybe, once again, there is no real contradiction. The cosmopolitanism advocated by Kuper is a familiar one, averse to encouraging radical political involvements: “This is, inevitably, a cosmopolitan project, and one that cannot be bound in the service of any political programme” (p. 551). Without commenting much, Kuper leaves me with the impression that the following is problematic from his standpoint (which is not, of course, any kind of demonstration that the following actually is problematic):

It is the voices struggling to articulate a message of liberation that the ethnographer must strain to hear. The ethnographer should therefore convey the messages of progressive forces to sympathizers abroad. Rosaldo, for instance, advises us to pay particular attention to ‘social criticism made from socially subordinate positions, where one can work more toward mobilizing resistance than persuading the powerful,’ and he cites approvingly as one example of what he has in mind ‘Fanon’s uncompromising rage’.” (p. 543)

I think that such a position, as Rosaldo’s, is a valuable formulation that provides the basis for an engaged, public anthropology, that also opens itself to genuine collaboration with a host of non-anthropologists, and I certainly share his appreciation of Fanon. Kuper, on the other hand, is more ambiguous to say the least, and lest we spend too much time reflecting on this, he returns our attention to what he calls “the nativist challenge.” Again, Kuper performs a valuable service: in telegraphing his calls for emergency assistance, he indicates the presence of bleeding wounds. I wonder how many others smell the blood in the water.

“The Nativist Challenge”

Kuper is aware that indigenous critiques of anthropology were not invented by either post-modernists or politically correct anthropologists:

To be sure, a native protest against metropolitan ethnographers had been articulated long before post-modernism swept into anthropological discourse. African intellectuals – and others – were making a nationalist case against foreign ethnographers, and sometimes against ethnography altogether from the 1960s onwards. (p. 544)

Then it becomes very unclear as to why he spent the first half of his article writing as if nativism was primarily a fabrication of overly sensitive, self-doubting, post-modern Americans.

Kuper also concedes that there was a relationship between anthropology and colonialism:

To begin with, to be the subject of foreign, metropolitan, exoticizing ethnography is equated with the experience of colonialism. Certainly the two did often go together. (p. 544)

This is by no means a major concession – not making it would have been very adventurous, considering the labour that would have been required to write out the history of British anthropologists serving colonial administrations, and American ethnologists and ethnographers serving the causes of scientific racism, westward American expansion, and the administration of captive American Indian populations. Not to mention the presence of anthropological entrepreneurs at freak shows and World Fairs.

Having made these concessions, Kuper returns to a slightly more sarcastic mode: “Everywhere the dominant Westerners do the ethnography, marginalizing the natives, packaging their way of life for exploitation (if only in the economically rather unprofitable business of academic life)” (p. 544). The bracketed comment, I take it, is meant to elicit chuckles at the idea that we can be exploiters, especially if one limits and reduces exploitation to exclusively materialistic appropriation and gain. Unfortunately for Kuper, not even that argument will work, for those of us who have made careers and earned salaries in return for our ethnographic adventures among the natives.

Kuper does a very good job of outlining a number of critical points of view with which he takes issue.

First,

The foreign ethnographer, imprisoned in a culturally-constructed mind-set, cannot truly understand the native, or master the inwardness of the native language. American intellectuals had been told for some time that white people could never appreciate what it meant to be black, that men could not understand women, and that only the ill or disabled could understand those similarly afflicted. Some believed it. Few argued publicly to the contrary. These American gospels penetrated anthropology, and some were led to the conclusion that only the native can understand the native, only the native has the right to study the native. (p. 544)

Second,

The nativist can also appropriate the premiss – mysteriously taken for granted in much of the recent literature – that the only reliable knowledge is self-knowledge. The native ethnographer can claim an intuitive understanding of the native. This may be taken to confer a natural and exclusive right to be the spokesperson of all natives. (p. 544)

Third,

Some would go further, and argue not only that the native should speak for the native, but that the native ethnographer should address himself or herself not to the foreign scholar but to a native audience; and should, indeed, write up the ethnography in the native language. This would avoid the distorting compromises that result from translation into one of the colonizing, metropolitan languages; and, moreover, would protect the confidences of the family from prying eyes. (p. 544)

In response, what is Kuper’s lead point? “These debates have had consequences for access to the field” (p. 545). He adds, “The seventies spawned a whole library of books about the ways in which anthropology inspired and legitimated colonialism. I am sceptical about some of these historical claims” (p. 545). He understates his skepticism, as we shall see in later posts, and overstates the magnitude of literary production on the subject of anthropology and colonialism.

Researchers versus Ethnicity

The view that only natives should study natives, Kuper asserts, is an absurd orthodoxy. This has “potentially dangerous implications for the practice of anthropology today” (p. 545). We must beware, he says, “lest the question of whom we should study, who should make the study, and how it should be conducted is answered with reference to the ethnic identity of the investigator” (p. 545). Beware, indeed, given that he raises the Nazi specter in his next paragraph.

Kuper does make one surprising concession. Having insisted and repeated that the phenomenon he is attacking, nativism, is American – even if he later mentions that, yes, yes, sure, Africans and what not pioneered the critique – he then tilts against nativism in the Greek academy, after pointing out that nativism dominated Nazi German ethnology, survived in Eastern Europe, and currently flourishes in some universities in contemporary Spain (pp. 545-546). Perhaps the theme here is that “we are all Americans” after all, except that the Nazi phantom Kuper invokes means we are all Nazis too.

Regardless, Kuper does raise very important questions: “We must remember that there are alternative definitions of our project available. What does the process of ethnographic work really involve? Is the ethnographer analysing and composing ‘texts’ that are on a par with literary texts? And who reads the ethnographies, and for what purpose?” (p. 547).

How Does Ethnography Matter?

Having raised these questions, Kupers lead himself, and his readers, down a very interesting path, one with a trap pit for ethnography itself. In a discipline that has flaunted its ethnographic-ness, it is precisely this that Kuper lets fall onto the sharpened stakes in the pit. What anthropologists really contribute that is of value, is not a range of insider perspectives (which he patronizingly calls “folk models”), but rather that which is not developed through any fieldwork at all: “an analytical, historical and comparative perspective” (p. 549):

Folk models serve as ways of thinking and as guides to action, but they do not address the comparative and more abstract project of the ethnographers. (p. 549)

Indeed, like raw materials extracted from colonies and exported to the metropoles, the real production of ethnographic value does not occur in the site where ethnographic research was undertaken:

The ethnography – before and after publication – is subjected to critical, collegial examination by other ethnographers, and also by geographers, historians, economists and so on, themselves engaged in local research and equipped with overlapping and complementary expertise. This is a conversation that today decisively shapes ethnographic production, and, of course, it may often include both local scientists and a variety of foreigners… (p. 549)

Anthropological Cosmopolitanism?

Kuper emphasizes that “ethnographers should write for anthropologists” (p. 551). Leaving aside the fact that this means we must largely confine ourselves to writing journal articles, given that even academic book publishers prefer books that can sell to broader audiences, it raises a troubling realization. While seeking to push aside “ethnic” restrictions, the fact remains that when ethnographers write for anthropologists, those anthropologists are still primarily white, Euro-Americans. Such an anthropology, that arrogates to itself the label “cosmopolitan,” is merely a nativism with universalist pretenses. It is an ironic cosmopolitanism, that defines and defends itself as cosmopolitan precisely by leaving out the native except as a provider of curious folk models to be subjected to the theoretical manipulations of the anthropological expert. The aim is a plain and familiar one: “We should once again address social scientists, and aspire to contribute a comparative dimension to the enlightenment project of a science of human variation in time and space” (p. 552). Kuper’s choice of the word “science” is not accidental: he uses it in opposition to the humanities, and anthropology has no place in the humanities in his view.

But who are the creators of that enlightenment project after all? What happens to anthropology if or when “the natives” say no to being studied by anthropologists? What kind of system would support a profession studying “human variation”?

In the next post, I raise some other questions about anthropology and colonialism, questions that cannot be dispelled by simply re-labeling colonialism as “cosmopolitan.”

This is the only presentation I have made at a conference where those attending and participating found it to be “shocking,” “chilling,” and “extremely depressing,” in the words of three different participants. The vast majority of those participating and attending the conference were not anthropologists.

The second of only two conference papers I have presented thus far that involve the Human Terrain System was presented this past May in Vancouver: “Useless Anthropology”: Strategies for Dealing with the Militarization of the Academy.

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Smart, Soft and Long: Propaganda Abroad and at Home

In promoting a “long war” against so-called “extremism,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has spearheaded initiatives to assimilate social scientists into the so-called “global war on terror,” with culture and ethnography being the two most salient areas of interest that drive the renewed military creep into universities, coupled with the expansion of military activity into areas previously dominated by civilian efforts, such as relief work (also see this, this, this). The result is a realignment of academic research with the imperatives of the national security state. Canada is by no means immune to this, it is merely a latecomer, as I will discuss later.

For the past two years the Pentagon has actively sought to recruit anthropologists, and now other social scientists, in its twin wars of occupation and counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking the form of the Human Terrain System and now the much broader Minerva Research Initiative. The Human Terrain System, or HTS, embeds academics with military units, with the purported aim of mapping local cultural formations so that U.S. military can better understand who the local power brokers are, the prevailing customs, and material needs that can be satisfied to win local loyalty and collaboration with U.S. forces. HTS claims that its aim is to save the lives of U.S. troops first and foremost, and to lessen the need for directing firepower at local populations. Critics have argued, among many points, that social scientists are being used to better refine targeting, given that the Assistant Undersecretary of Defense, John Wilcox, noted: “the human terrain enables the global kill chain.” The embedded academics wear American military uniforms and carry weapons if and when they conduct interviews.

My belief is that it was created above all for domestic consumption, as part of a domestic propaganda effort and a public relations war conducted through the mainstream media. The aims include, in my view, quelling the homegrown intellectual insurgency of critical academics, by luring academics with salaries up to $300,000 when they are in the field, while at the same time promoting a new image for increasingly unpopular wars by emphasizing that smart people [and smart power] are replacing smart bombs, that a new intellectual elite is at the helm as personified by General David Petraeus, and that wars are now winnable because they are being fought within the cultures of the occupied. Ethnography is the shiny new tool in the armory of intellectual counterinsurgency. While the Pentagon takes over civilian developmental efforts elsewhere, it is bringing in more outsourced civilians into the war zone, contracted by British Aerospace in the case of HTS, and celebrating their counterinsurgency effort as an increasingly civilian affair.

Moreover, the principles and mechanisms behind the Human Terrain System have been incorporated in newly expanded designs for the U.S. military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), which came into being on October 1^st, and its Latin American and Caribbean Command (SOUTHCOM), to better penetrate local cultures and expand the nature of U.S. military presence in those regions, in part with the aid of social science research. The aim is to get U.S. troops used to the climates, cultures, and so-called human terrain of these various zones, through so-called humanitarian, development, and relief work, so as to maintain a regular presence and a higher sense of familiarity should more forceful action be required. Here too Canada is directly involved once more – at this very moment, Canadian military personnel are part of the crew of the USS Kearsarge, a US Marine aircraft carrier and amphibious assault vessel, currently docked in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The Kearsarge has been touring Central America and the Caribbean since August, as part of this expanded Pentagon mission and the reconstitution of the 4^th Fleet that has alarmed both Brazil and Venezuela.

U.S.S. Kearsarge

ARIMA, Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 26, 2008) Lt. Cmdr. Kathaleen Sikes, a Navy nurse embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), gives a young girl a routine check-up at the Arima District Health Facility as part of the partnership between Continuing Promise (CP) 2008 and Trinidad-Tobago. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 08, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Joshua Adam Nuzzo/Released)

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 30, 2008) 1st Lt. Lindsey Maddox, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), reads to children from the All in One Child Development Center, a local daycare where engineers embarked aboard Kearsarge are making renovations supporting Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 08, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gina Wollman/Released)

COUVA, Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 29, 2008) Lt. Cmdr. Kathaleen Sikes, a Navy nurse embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), listens to a young woman during a routine check-up at a medical clinic at the Couva District Health Facility during the humanitarian/civic assistance mission Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of CP, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Joshua Adam Nuzzo/Released)

BELMONT,Trinidad and Tobago (Nov. 3, 2008) Information Systems Technician 2nd Class Andrew Bryson, assigned to the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), teaches Sister Helena of the Carmelite Sister Convent how to use the Internet. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise 2008. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Joshua Adam Nuzzo (Released)

(See Operation Continuing Promise 2008; the blog for the mission; its extensive photo gallery; note from the U.S. Embassy in Trinidad, the operation as a form of “soft power;” more on Kearsarge as soft power; the main operation page from SOUTHCOM, and a short overview/summary of the mission; and, concerning the Canadian presence, a note from the Dept. of National Defence, a photo gallery of the Canadian military personnel on the Kearsarge mission, and “Ahoy, eh! From the Canadian Medical Contingent in KEARSARGE!“)

Anthropology: Sucker for Power

Where the employment of anthropologists in HTS is concerned, this is a repeat or continuation of the long history of anthropological service to expansionist states, colonial management, and imperial domination, a history with which institutional anthropology has yet to come to terms, if the relative paucity of literature on anthropology and colonialism, or the rarity of courses on decolonizing anthropology attest. This is not say that anthropology does not contain within it a significant critical and even activist tradition, especially since the 1960s, as much as it is to suggest that anthropology has no real core, as David Price argues, with which to either align or collide with state power. Primary motivations and compulsions within anthropology, that pre-date its institutional birth and continue into the present, include:

• the constant perceived need to promote the relevance and usefulness of anthropology;
• policing its proprietary claims over ethnography;
• bemoaning the lack of attention from other disciplines and the wider society;
• the drive to develop applied anthropology;
• self-promotion as a science that should be valued by those in power;
• the desire for a higher public profile and engagement with the world;
• the goal of helping to do good; and,
  
• selling knowledge of the other.

All of these varying emotional, intellectual and political strains within the discipline contribute, individually or collectively, to propel some into the folds of the Pentagon, to keep many others silent, and to provoke the visceral critiques of a few, such as myself.

Research in the National Security State

Both HTS and the Minerva Research Initiative (Minerva or MRI from now on) are additions to an already existing array of programs that meld the national security state with academia in the U.S. These programs include the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), formed with the guidance and active support of an anthropology professor (Felix Moos) at the University of Kansas, as well as the National Security Education Program (NSEP), the Intelligence Community Scholars Program (ICSP), and the National Academic Consortium for Homeland Security (NACHOS), and an array of private think tanks that link social science research to the so-called “global war on terror” with some of these, like the Hoover Institution at Stanford, housed on campuses. One could also mention the presence of ROTC on many campuses, and the fact that as far back as 1988 a CIA spokeswoman publicly proclaimed that the CIA had enough professors on its payroll to staff a large university. Clearly, in addition to casting a critical and vigilant eye on anthropologists, we also need to be realistic of the many intertwining connections meshing American academia more broadly with the American national security state, and build a plan of action accordingly.

This past summer the National Science Foundation, with the support of the American Anthropological Association, successfully lobbied to administer $8 million of the Pentagon’s $75 million for Minerva, offering its seal of approval to projects by offering semi-independent peer review. The NSF boasted of its long service to the state: “To secure the national defense was one of the original missions we were given when we were chartered in 1950,” said David Lightfoot, assistant director of NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, “We’ve always believed that sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and other social scientists, through basic social and behavioral science research, could benefit our national security. In fact, we’ve always done so through various research projects.” Craig Calhoun, president of the Social Science Research Council, at a recent Minerva workshop organized and hosted by the Pentagon, went on the record cheerfully praising Minerva and calling for more ways of expanding the nature and range of academic collaboration with the military and intelligence communities.

The MRI has been accepting grant proposals, with the deadline passing on October 30 [2008], the results to be announced before the end of this year. Proposals are being accepted for projects that address any of the following areas: (1) Chinese Military and Technology Research and Archive Programs; (2) Studies of the Strategic Impact of Religious and Cultural Changes within the Islamic World; (3) Iraqi Perspectives Project; (4) Studies of Terrorist Organization and Ideologies; (5) New Approaches to Understanding Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation. The Pentagon will pay out awards to universities, and awards will range from $500,000 to $3 million (US) per annum, with the average award estimated at $1.5 million per annum.

One way in which this program can directly engage Canadian academics and universities is apparent from the fact that foreign universities are also encouraged to participate, as the Pentagon announced with the call for applications,

“This MRI competition is open to institutions of higher education (universities) including DoD institutions of higher education and foreign universities, with degree-granting programs in social sciences. Participation by foreign universities either as project lead or in a supporting role is encouraged”.

The Pentagon’s MRI calls on academics to themselves identify an organization or an ideology as “terrorist” without providing any guidelines or list of suggested organizations and ideologies, or even how it defines terrorist. The Pentagon announced in its call for research proposals that, “This effort will involve the development of models and approaches to study behavior networks, groups, and communities over time” — so surveillance is intended, over the long term, and anthropologists are specifically called upon, as “the relevance of context and situation may require field research”.

The Pentagon continues:

“there is an urgent need to be able to locate the points of influence and characterize the processes necessary to influence populations that harbor terrorist organizations in diverse cultures as well as individuals who identify with terrorist group figures”.

The Pentagon announcement states,

“Especially helpful…is understanding where organized violence is likely to erupt, what factors might explain its contagion, and how to circumvent its spread. Research on belief formation and emotional contagion will provide cultural advisors with better tools to understand the impact of operations on the local population. This research should also contribute to countermeasures to help revise or influence belief structures to reduce the likelihood of militant cells forming”.

In addition, Minerva’s “Iraqi Perspectives Project” involves the study of documents looted from Iraq by U.S. forces and private individuals and illegally relocated to the U.S., at such places as the Hoover Institution at Stanford. This is despite the repeated protests and calls for their return from the Director of the Iraqi National Library and Archives, and despite the fact that capturing and holding these documents clearly violates the 1954 Hague Convention. Academics are therefore being invited to violate international law and Iraqi sovereignty, in writing Iraqi history for the Iraqis, another classic act of colonial domination. In the meantime, no one can know which documents have been made to disappear or have been altered in the years that they have been in the hands of the Pentagon.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist of military industries and national security, recently wrote a compelling overview of the many dangers of Minerva and other programs for the social role of academia. He writes:

“When research that could be funded by neutral civilian agencies is instead funded by the military, knowledge is subtly militarized and bent in the way a tree is bent by a prevailing wind. The public comes to accept that basic academic research on religion and violence ‘belongs’ to the military; scholars who never saw themselves as doing military research now do; maybe they wonder if their access to future funding is best secured by not criticizing U.S. foreign policy; a discipline whose independence from military and corporate funding fueled the kind of critical thinking a democracy needs is now compromised; and the priorities of the military further define the basic terms of public and academic debate”.

Given the ambivalent and unsteady reactions of academic anthropologists, these developments are undoing the past thirty years of effort of some in decolonizing anthropology, thereby threatening to return the discipline to an adjunct in the service of imperial power. As I said, reactions have been varied, with the American Anthropological Association (or AAA) going as far as issuing an executive condemnation of HTS as unethical, to proposing to revise its entire code of ethics by 2010 in order to preclude such involvement from the military from claiming adherence to professional, ethical standards. At the same time, the current president of the AAA worries primarily about whether Minerva research can live up to professional standards of peer review. Absent is any questioning of why there ought to be any “terrorism” research whatsoever — indeed a letter this summer from AAA President Setha Low to the U.S. Office of Budget and Management states very simply: “We believe that it is of paramount importance for anthropologists to study the roots of terrorism.” In the name of pragmatism, there seems to be a lack of a consistent critical discourse for dealing with state power and imperialism, and perhaps one should not expect this from a professional association as such.

As mentioned, the Pentagon is inviting foreign researchers and their universities to participate in the Minerva program. Conditions in Canada seem ripe for its spread here, given Canada’s own intervention in Afghanistan and the government’s collaboration with the U.S.’ “global war on terror,” and the relative paucity of social science research funding. A minority can hope to win a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and even fewer will ever get a grant close to the maximum of $250,000 spread over three years. Canada Research Chairs, fewer in number but with more funding, still cannot compete with the massive amount offered by Minerva, whose maximum grant is 12 times higher than the maximum offered by SSHRC as a standard research grant, and perhaps three times higher than that offered to Canada Research Chairs. With greater pressure from university administrations to secure more and more research funds, from all possible sources, it is just a matter of time before we find Minerva advertised by our own campus research offices, and taken up by researchers here. As for the Human Terrain System, it too has already made an appearance in Canada, for now relying on the service of civilian employees of the government. Some of you may have read recently that Canadian forces operating in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province have employed so-called “white situational awareness teams” to reportedly help troops navigate the complex tribal landscape of southern Afghanistan. As Tom Blackwell of CanWest News reported earlier this week:

“Drawing on information from Canadian civilians and troops operating in Kandahar, local cultural advisers and NATO allies, the team is trying to map out the movers and shakers of the province and how they relate to each other”.

That is exactly the same as HTS, indeed human terrain mapping has also been referred to as “white situational awareness” by its proponents in the U.S. Also, an American infantry unit operating under Canadian command has its own “human terrain” team, Blackwell reports. Elissa Goldberg, who is in charge of Canada’s civilian officials in Afghanistan, says that the deployment of the team is “a recognition that you really have to understand the human terrain of the environment, so you do no harm.” Refined targeting, focusing on enemy Afghans, is also a stated purpose of gaining a sense of local dynamics. When results of this first month’s trial mandate it, we should not be surprised when the Canadian military comes knocking on the doors of universities, and you already know that university presidents hungry for cash will warmly welcome them, while firmly prodding us to get more money, always more.

Towards the End of the White Discipline

I have mentioned that Canadian forces work with the US’s SOUTHCOM, we know they participate in Afghanistan, that a Canadian HTS is being developed, and that Minerva is open to Canadians. Canadian anthropology is not insulated from its American partner either. Many Canadian anthropologists, if not most, also belong to the AAA, and travel to the U.S. for annual meetings of the AAA and/or its member associations. We share the same space on editorial boards of journals. We often jointly organize conferences between the Canadian Anthropology Society and the American Ethnological Society. Some Canadian departments are modeled on the American four-field system. Prominent faculty in anthropology have served both in Canada and the U.S. We have undergraduates from the U.S., and a good number of our graduates earning degrees in anthropology in the U.S. We use the AAA’s code of ethics and its case studies as part of our teaching materials. We read and adopt texts written by our American colleagues. Even if none of the preceding were true the fact of the worldwide dominance of American anthropology alone would ensure an eventual impact on how our discipline is reproduced, presented to the wider world, and received (if at all).

The military’s cultural turn has focused attention on ethnography, in what Derek Gregory calls the rush to the intimate. Anthropology has been a victim of its lust for influence as Satia put it, and of its own success, having sold itself as the owner and master of ethnography, often wrongly equating anthropology with ethnography. Having claimed it had much to offer, now the national security state wants it. I believe we need to consider the ways we can make ourselves toxic to power overall, while rethinking, or even unthinking many things, such as the value and role of “fieldwork” (a despicably colonial and scientistic term), open access publishing, the funding of research, and the meaning of academic freedom. Without any response, the fatal uses of anthropology will likely marginalize and perhaps terminate what is arguably academia’s whitest discipline.

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More Photos from the U.S.S. Kearsarge and “Operation Continuing Promise 2008″:

TUNAPUNA, Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 25, 2008) Chief Steelworker Gerald Wheeler and Air Force Sgt. Scott Boucher, both embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), conducts a site survey before beginning engineering operations at Cyril Ross Nursery as part of the partnership between Continuing Promise (CP) 08 and Trinidad-Tobago. Kearsarge is supporting the Caribbean Phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 08, an equal partnership mission between the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Columbia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class David Danals/Released)

ARIMA,Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 25, 2008) Medical personnel embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) unload supplies from helicopters, preparing to assist health clinic personnel with patients as part of the partnership between Continuing Promise (CP) 08 and Trinidad-Tobago. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 08, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Joshua Adam Nuzzo/Released)

ARIMA, Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 26, 2008) Capt. Fernandez "Frank" Ponds, mission commander for Continuing Promise (CP) 2008, greets a little boy at a local children´s home during a survey of the mission sites as part of the partnership between CP 08 and Trinidad-Tobago. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 08, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gina Wollman/Released)

ARIMA,Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 27, 2008) - Capt. Fernandez "Frank" Ponds, mission commander for Continuing Promise (CP) 2008 and Capt. Walter Towns, commanding officer, USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), discuss humanitarian operations with U.S. Ambassador Roy Austin and Administer of Health Jerry Narace as part of the partnership between CP 2008 and Trinidad and Tobago. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 2008, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Erik Barker/Released)

ARIMA,Trinidad and Tobago (Oct. 27, 2008) - Capt. Fernandez "Frank" Ponds, mission commander for Continuing Promise (CP) 2008 and Capt. Walter Towns, commanding officer, USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), discuss humanitarian operations with U.S. Ambassador Roy Austin as part of the partnership between CP 2008 and Trinidad and Tobago. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian/civic assistance mission CP 2008, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Erik Barker/Released)

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The Canadian Presence with the U.S.S. Kearsarge during “Operation Continuing Promise 2008″:

TERRE DE NEGRES, Haiti (Sept. 24, 2008) -- Canadian Forces Cpl. Eva-Marie Rogerson, ‎currently attached to USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), talks with locals during a medical assessment ‎survey to determine what aid will be needed for future relief efforts. Kearsarge embarked ‎personnel from the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard, along with medical ‎personnel from the U.S. Public Health Service, Canadian Army, Air Force and Navy, Brazil, ‎Project HOPE and International Aid are working together to conduct disaster relief operations in ‎Haiti. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Erik C. Barker/Released)‎

TERRE DE NEGRES, Haiti (Sept. 26, 2008) - Lt. Sophie Levoie, Canadian Forces Health Services Centre, currently attached to USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), meets with a local child before starting medical and veterinary aid at a neighborhood church. Kearsarge completed its humanitarian assistance/disaster relief mission in Haiti Sept. 26, delivering more than 3.3 million pounds of food, water and other supplies to communities devastated by several tropical storms and Hurricane Ike. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class (SW) David Danals/Released)

PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti (September 18, 2008) - Canadian Army Lt. Stephanie Lavoie, ‎embarked aboard USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), speaks with members of the Haitian Red ‎Cross regarding medical care for citizens of Haiti who were displaced by recent storms. ‎Kearsarge is utilizing helicopters and amphibious landing craft to reach storm victims in ‎areas of Haiti where the roads are inaccessible. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass ‎Communication Specialist Seaman Ernest Scott)‎

BETANIA, Nicaragua (Aug. 17, 2008) Canadian Air Force Pvt. Tabitha Beynen, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), uses a syringe to give de-worming medication into a child at the Betania medical clinic. Kearsarge is deployed supporting the Caribbean phase of Continuing Promise 2008, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Christopher Lange/Released)

PALMIRA, Colombia (Aug. 29, 2008) Air Force Tech. Sgt. Karen Merrow, right, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), comforts a Colombian child as Canadian Army Capt. Ian Thornton extracts a tooth during dental services provided during the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is supporting the Caribbean phase of CP, an equal-partnership mission between the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Ernest Scott/Released)

SANTA MARTA, Colombia (Aug. 29, 2008) Canadian Army Capt. Maximilian Callahan, left, speaks with patients at a Candeleria medical clinic with the help of translator Aviation Machinist Mate 1st Class Emilio Trujuillo, assigned to the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), during the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is supporting the Caribbean phase of CP 2008, an equal-partnership mission between the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gina Wollman/Released)

SANTA MARTA, Colombia (Aug. 29, 2008) Canadian Army Capt. Kim Templeton, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), gives a sticker to a young boy at a neighborhood clinic during the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is supporting the Caribbean phase of CP 2008, an equal-partnership mission between the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Gina Wollman/Released)

BAYAGUANA, Dominican Republic (October 5, 2008) - Canadian Air Force Capt. Jolene Cook, a medical augmentee embarked aboard USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), gives a local man a general medical examination at the El Deporte y Recreacion Derecho de la Poblacion during the humanitarian/civic assistance mission Continuing Promise (CP) 2008. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of CP, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, France, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class (SW/AW) William S. Parker/Released)

SABANA GRANDE, Dominican Republic (Oct. 15, 2008) Canadian Army Pvt. David Pivato, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), administers an anti-parasitic medication to a young Dominican boy. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise 2008, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, France, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Apprentice Joshua Adam Nuzzo/Released)

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (Oct. 16, 2008) Canadian Air Force Lt. Col. Roger Scott, embarked aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), examines a patient at the 27 Febrero medical site during the humanitarian assistance mission Continuing Promise 2008. Kearsarge is the primary platform for the Caribbean phase of Continuing Promise, an equal-partnership mission involving the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, France, Nicaragua, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class William S. Parker/Released)

“It just hasn’t come,” he said, “and I’ve been looking for it.”

On one level, it appears to be another of the very many preposterous expressions of a self-serving, selective view of reality, another in a series of expedient, studied misperceptions designed to miss the forest for the trees. He cannot find anything about working in a counterinsurgency campaign that might endanger local people. It’s all ethical, leaving the war aside. Research support for one side in an armed conflict is ethical, leaving the armed conflict aside. In addition, even if we were to assume that the Taliban are entirely and utterly disconnected from the population centres in which they are embedded, one could certainly never doubt that they are local, and certainly far more local than a member of a military occupation such as Slaikeu.

Then there is the additional fact that many foreigners who have never been to Afghanistan before their employment in the occupation, people such as Slaikeu, do not really know who the Taliban are. Slaikeu does not know that some of the villagers with whom he has amicable relations during the day, may well be Taliban fighters at night. Private contractors have gone as far as putting weapons in the hands of Taliban fighters they unwittingly employed, and paid them a salary (see “The Cowboys of Kabul“). Even locals themselves, in a government allied to the foreign occupation, hire Taliban to work in the civil service (as reported by the BBC, “Afghanistan’s ‘weekend jihadis’“).

To add to the list of ironies, Slaikeu’s apparent interest in doing no harm to locals is submerged by his rehash of old Vietnam-era counterinsurgency doctrine, specifically the “oil spot” strategy — see Slaikeu’s paper, “Winning the War in Afghanistan: An Oil Spot Plus Strategy for Coalition Forces.”

However, on another level, Slaikeu’s apparent selective vision is quite common in social science research with human subjects, where the notion of ethical research is minimalist at best. “Ethics” is frequently reduced to a formality, an exercise designed to get clearance from a university board that wishes to simply limit the legal liability of the university, otherwise its insurance costs would be too high if it shouldered the blame for a researcher’s malpractice. “Ethics” is often a short statement appearing in a section of a research proposal, normally separated from theory and methodology. “Ethics” in most cases reduces to simple acts designed to address questions such as: How long will you store confidential data? Will you store that data in a secure location? How will you obtain informed consent? Will participants in your research be allowed to withdraw from the research? Ethics is this reduced and restricted to short discussions of basic research procedures. It is an obstacle, a hurdle to jump over, so as to dive into the research. It is then outstanding if a researcher becomes preoccupied, more than once, with questions of ethical research practices. Here I recall a recorded presentation by anthropologist Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, speaking at the Watson Institute at Brown University as a member of an ad hoc commission investigating the relationships between anthropology and the military, who said that in her research in Sudan she frequently had to think about ethics, even many times during a day.

In such conceptualizations of ethics, extracted from their moorings in moral philosophy, distanced from reflections on “the right and the good,” rendered utilitarian, practical, and composed of discrete instances, there is then little room for a view of ethics as a relationship of responsibility between human beings in a broad, all pervading sense. In speaking of research ethics, there is rarely mention of  doing good, of principles of social beneficence, which goes well beyond the minimalist “do no harm.” Few would be able to articulate whether they stand on the side of consequentialism or deontology. A commitment to humanity is largely replaced to momentary commitments to select humans, for short periods of time, constructed by the researcher as participants within a context defined by the researcher’s questions. Taking a minimalist approach, ethics never opens up to larger issues of morality and politics — having said that, is it any wonder that so many steadfastly hold to the minimalist postion?

Speaking of his own role in the American Anthropological Association’s commission to study the relationships between anthropology and military and intelligence communities, David Price recently wrote:

we had to artificially separate “political” issues from “ethical” issues, and then set aside the larger political issues of how anthropological engagements with military/intelligence/national security sectors relate to larger issues of US foreign policy, neo-colonial military campaigns, the Global War on Terror and a growing military reliance on anthropologically informed counterinsurgency.

There is indeed an artificial separation, as Price notes, between what some call “politics” and what they choose to call “ethics.” It is one of the reasons that we speak past each other, since we speak on two very different levels: one group says “we got informed consent” (without considering how that is conditioned by their being in military uniform, holding a gun, and part of an occupying force), while the other group says “you should not be there in the first place.” In fact, there are at least three positions: doing good “science,” doing “no harm,” and doing “good.” Doing good, and doing good science are not only entirely separate, they can be very much opposed — surgical experimentation on living detainees may be “good science,” and a war crime.

Going back to Slaikeu, the larger problem that shapes his vision of what is ethical is that he, like many others, has normalized and naturalized the war. The war is beyond question, and so is the presence of U.S. forces, and his presence with them. So one effectively removes that from the picture. That leaves two constants and one uncontrolled variable: the two constants being that there are U.S. forces and there are Afghan civilians, the “local population.” The variable is the Taliban. They stand out. In standing out, they are placed aside, as if they could be treated as separate from the artificially narrowed category, “local population.” This allows one to convince oneself that even when the natives are fighting back, and shooting at you, that you still have the consent of locals to be there.

An ethical commitment to the other should mean that if one is committed to one’s ethics, one should be prepared to forego one’s research project entirely. If you are against the war, you are against research support for the war. Some anthropologists are quick to assuage critics that “we have been decolonizing anthropology for decades” (taking credit for the work of a marginal minority, with virtually no courses on the subject anywhere, and publications primarily dedicated to this concern would not fill up half of a library shelf). Yet, the question is this: taking an expansive view of ethics, if anthropology were truly to be decolonized, would it be anthropology as we know it? Would it even exist as a university discipline? Should it exist?

Discordia

Ben Addelman, Samir Mallal, 2004, 68 min 40 s

On September 9, 2002, a scheduled appearance by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked heated debate at Montreal’s Concordia University. By the end of the day, the “Concordia riot” has made international news, from CNN to Al-Jazeera. This film documents the fallout from that eventful day, following three young campus activists as they negotiate the most formative year of their lives. Filmmakers Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal jump into the fray with street-smart bravado and a handheld camera. Buoyed by the songs of hip-hop artist Buck 65, this film offers a tonic reflection on the current state of Canadian student activism and the enduring value of tolerance.

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I could not be at a better place at a better time. As it happens, I work in the very same building at the centre of this movie’s action, and at the centre of the 1969 riot and occupation that had a profound impact on the Black Power revolution in the Caribbean. One of the leading student activists back then became the Prime Minister of Dominica. News of the event spread quickly, and led to demonstrations in Trinidad & Tobago, with a pronounced anti-imperialist, anti-Canadian orientation. Canadian banks in Trinidad & Tobago were subsequently nationalized, and the practice of hiring only “lighter” skinned and non-Africans in banks came under severe scrutiny. I was happy to see Noam Chomsky in this film, speaking with one of the Concordia student activists about the riot to block Benjamin Netanyahu from campus. Subsequent plans to bring Ehud Barak were scuttled as well. A final note of flattery: Concordia University has since 2002 been called by some, “Gaza U,” “Concordistan,” and the ever inflamed Alan Dershowitz says it is “not a real university.” It has become the darling of various “campus watch” and “jihad watch” websites. I could not be at a better place, at a better time.

Source: Middle East Journal, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Spring, 2002), pp. 329-332

Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, by Michael Griffin. London: Pluto Press, 2001. xxi + 257 pages. Notes to p. 277. Index to p. 283. Map. Chron. $27.50.

Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia, by Ahmed Rashid. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. xi + 216 pages. Appends. to p. 247. Notes to p. 265. Index to 279. $27.50.

Reviewed by M. Jamil Hanifi

The Taliban movement is intimately grounded in the Cold War, the Islamic Revolution of Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the decision of the United States to embarrass and dishonor its Cold War adversary and, when that was accomplished, to depart the region leaving behind a collapsed state structure in Afghanistan and a paranoid government in a destabilized Pakistan. After the Soviet army left Afghanistan in winter 1989, the United States government abandoned the country and the tens of thousands of Afghans and non-Afghans (mostly Arabs recruited by Usama Bin Ladin, a CIA conduit) whom it had recruited, trained, and armed for the so-called “jihad” against the infidel Russians. In April 1992, when these US-sponsored gangs entered Kabul, the state structure of Afghanistan collapsed, causing the disappearance of its weakened national market and the fragile center-periphery relationship.

The Taliban movement emerged in 1994 in Southwest Afghanistan in the context of a bloody civil war, devastation, lawlessness, and warlordism, conditions that made wide-spread smuggling a common feature of the Afghan landscape. By September 1996, the Taliban had captured Kabul, and, by early September 2001, they were on the verge of totally defeating the last pockets of resistance in Northeast Afghanistan. Had it not been for the tragedy of September 11, 2001, the Taliban would still be dominant in Afghanistan and the United States government would be negotiating with them on matters dealing with the construction of energy pipelines and curtailment of drug production. The reconstruction of Afghanistan and human rights would not be at the top of the agenda in these negotiations.

Michael Griffin and Ahmed Rashid, both journalists, provide useful accounts (each in 16 chapters and about the same number of pages) of the emergence of the Taliban in Southwest Afghanistan, and their rapid success and domination of the country. Both books start from the fall of the revolutionary government of Afghanistan in April 1992; Rashid’s coverage ends in mid-1999, before General Pervez Musharraf’s coup in Pakistan, while Griffin’s account runs to the end of 2000.

The books provide a brief sketch of the various US/Saudi-subsidized factions that opposed the Soviet presence and the Afghan central government. We read at length about the role of the Pakistani Intelligence Services (ISI) in creating and subsidizing these factions. The United States government was the major force behind the creation of the “freedom fighters” or the “mujahedin.” The CIA recruited tens of thousands of these would be terrorists from Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan in the 1980s and provided the ideology, funding, arms, and training for them. Frank Anderson of the CIA’s Afghanistan Task Force has recently stated that the Afghanistan “war was fought with our [US] goal and their [Afghan] blood.” Within a few years of entering Kabul in 1992, these groups and the devastation they wreaked on Afghanistan spawned the Taliban. Although Pakistan was the midwife at the birth of the Taliban, the authors provide some of the ample evidence of the approval of this role by the United States. And both governments nourished the baby to its feet before deciding to kill it.

The chaotic conditions surrounding the fall of the revolutionary government of Afghanistan in 1992 and the collapse of its soft state structure are narrated in both books. At every major turn in the narrative, the question comes up as to why the United States would encourage such a rag-tag collection of proven terrorist groups to take charge of Afghanistan? By then, the Soviet Union had been discredited and defeated; before the fall of Kabul, the government of Afghanistan had enjoyed a reasonable degree of popular legitimacy, was prepared to work with the opposition groups, was adamantly and openly in opposition to a Wahhabi presence in Afghanistan, and was even willing to allow Muhammad Zahir, the exiled king, to return to the country and assume power. All these elements, implicitly or explicitly, constitute the framework within which the Interim Government of Afghanistan was created by the United States in Bonn in December 2001. Soon after the disruption of the patron-client relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia and the various mujahedin factions, especially those led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Afghan center collapsed, creating a free-for-all in which every Afghan faction and its external sponsor attempted to acquire territory and advantage. Both books provide vivid descriptions of the predictably bloody cycle of violence between the various ethnic and sectarian groups operating in a framework of frequently shifting alliances. From April 1992 to September 1996, anarchy and lawlessness reigned throughout the country.

Out of this chaotic environment, the Taliban movement emerged in Qandahar in late 1994. Griffin and Rashid provide somewhat similar descriptions of the local political conditions from which the Taliban arose. Many in their upper ranks were veterans of the US-subsidized jihad during which several of them had lost eyes and legs (Rashid, pp. 5-6). Their supreme leader, Mulla Muhammad Omar, had lost his right eye while fighting with one of the freedom fighter bands. In both accounts, from the start, the Pakistani ISI emerges as the prime supporter and mover of the Talibs. From the outset, the Jama’at-i Islami party of Pakistan and the trucking interests of that country offered substantial ideological and material support. The Saudi-supported madrasa system of Islamic schools in Pakistan provided a continuous flow of manpower for fighting. Shortly after their birth, the Taliban found themselves hosting arrangements for Pakistan-sponsored truck convoys moving through Western Afghanistan to Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In due course, Afghanistan became a haven for international smugglers and the home for a “criminalized economy” (See Barnett R. Rubin, “The Political Economy of War and Peace in Afghanistan,” World Development, 28:10 (2000) pp., 1789-1803). In early 1995, Saudi Arabia and the United States had signed an agreement with the government of Turkmenistan for the construction of an energy pipeline in Western Afghanistan to connect Turkmenistan with Pakistan. In mid-March 1995, Senator Hank Brown, a member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, visited Qandahar and invited the Taliban to send representatives to the hearings his committee was to hold later that year (Griffin, p. 82). In April 1998, Bill Richardson, then-US Representative to the United Nations (three months later, confirmed as US Secretary of Energy) visited Afghanistan (Rashid, p. 71), ostensibly to iron out political differences between the Taliban and their local opponents. Subsequent to these talks, the American oil company UNOCAL undertook extensive negotiations with the Taliban for the construction of the pipeline through Western Afghanistan. (Zalmay Khalilzad, George W. Bush’s personal representative to the current US-installed Interim Government of Afghanistan, worked with UNOCAL in these negotiations).

Each book devotes a chapter to the introduction of thousands of non-Afghans, mostly Arabs, into the CIA campaign against the Soviet Union and the government of Afghanistan. The person who spearheaded the recruitment of these international terrorists was Usama Bin Ladin. Griffin’s treatment contains more detail about this “Nest of Vipers” in Afghanistan and the United States’ responsibility for creating it. There is an eerie premonition in the pages of these books about the dangers that lay ahead for Bin Ladin and his erstwhile patron who abandoned Afghanistan and let him and his recruits loose in the caves of Afghanistan.

Throughout both books, the United States appears as ignorant and uninformed about Afghanistan, and capricious, uncertain, and contradictory in its objectives in Central and South Asia. Likewise, both books suggest that exaggerated fear of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism deprived the United States of the confidence and clarity of purpose required to deal effectively with the Taliban and other regimes in the area. However, the authors say little about the objectives of Saudi Arabia. It can be reasoned, however, that the Saudis initially agreed to match United States’ dollars for the subsidy of the terrorist freedom fighters in the 1980s because they saw in Afghanistan an opening for the introduction of Wahhabism. Their continued support of Usama Bin Ladin was couched in the latter’s mentoring of the Taliban leadership in draconian Wahhabi doctrines. Now that Bin Ladin and Al-Qa’ida are being swept from Afghanistan, it is likely that the Saudis’ interest there will wane as evidenced by their cold reserve towards post-Taliban political developments in Afghanistan.

Griffin and Rashid should be judged as journalists, not as social scientists. Both appear unacquainted with the social science literature dealing with Afghanistan. However, both have spent time in Afghanistan and exhibit command of a vast and complex body of raw information. Occasionally, they both leap to conclusions that lack ethnographic and historical foundations. They both make the mistake of considering the Taliban as an exclusively Pashtun movement, overlooking the fact that the movement was Wahhabi inspired, had little to do with the Pashtun social structure, and contained large numbers of non-Pashtun Afghans as well as Punjabis and Sindhis from Pakistan, as well as thousands of Arabs and hundreds of Muslims from other countries. The Taliban appear to be truly an international multi-ethnic Sunni neo-fundamentalist movement. The authors uncritically accept the thesis that the pre-1978 rulers of Afghanistan were Pashtuns. The fact is that during this period the country was ruled by people who did not speak or practice Pashtu. The exiled King Muhammad Zahir, most of his family, and much of his governmental bureaucratic elite did not speak that language. Ahmed Rashid makes a crucial mistake in concluding that “[in] the past the (provincial) governors and senior local officials were usually drawn from the local elite, reflecting the local ethnic make-up of the population” (p. 99). In reality, it was the policy of past Afghan central governments to have non-local provincial and district governors. The Taliban did not break new ground in appointing outsiders as provincial governors.

The books under review are well written and contain extensive notes. It would have been appropriate to provide page numbers in the footnotes; why should one have to read a whole book or an article to find the specific page for an important quotation or idea? Overall, as journalists, Michael Griffin and Ahmed Rashid have produced two timely and informative books on a topic that is certain to fire the imagination of both scholars and elements in the news and entertainment media.

Reviewer’s Note:

In Western discourse the neo-fundamentalist Taleban (rendered Taliban in this journal) movement, its multitudes and individual members are awkwardly, often incorrectly, syntaxed. In Paxtu (Pakhto, and, in this journal, Pushtu) the movement is rendered da talebano ghorzang and in Dari (Afghan Farsi), jonbesh-e taleban. In Paxtu and Dari usage, the noun taleb (student, seeker of knowledge) is gendered, and the second vowel in the noun is the short e, not the long i. The correct local contexts use taleb for singular male, taleban for plural male and the movement and, theoretically, taleba for singular female, taleban (Dari) and talebanay (Paxtu) for plural female. In English renditions, it would be correct to say “Taleban” for the movement and plural male (as locally used), “Taleb” for singular male and “Talebs” for plural male. Thus, we can correctly say: The Taleban (or Talebs’) movement included thousands of Pakistani Talebs, hundreds of Tajiks, many Uzbeks, and one Taleb from the United States. Every Taleb was required to grow a beard. Some, not all, Talebs (Taleban) were Paxtuns. The movement’s Supreme Council included a number of one-eyed and one-legged Talebs. The Taleban are no longer in control of Kabul.

For those following the current conflict between the Open Anthropology Project (OAP) and the Open Anthropology Cooperative (OAC), outlined in these three posts (1, 2, 3) and the extensive commentary that follows them, readers will know that one of the key actors in this has been Keith Hart, who established the OAC and remains in control of its administration and policy. Noticed repeatedly by some readers in addition to myself, including at least one in the Moving Anthropology Student Network (which has actively followed debates about anthropologists supporting the military in the “war on terror”), is Keith Hart’s own positions on the use of his network, the OAC, by the members of the U.S. military in particular and their supporting academics.

While MASN has actively followed the biggest public debate of current anthropology, Keith Hart’s The Memory Bank returns the following result when searching for “human terrain system”: “Not Found. Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” The broader term, “military” also does not bring up results pertaining to the debate around the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), nor will you find a single mention of Montgomery McFate, the anthropology Ph.D. at the top of HTS, anywhere on Hart’s blog.

So when Keith Hart, in a discussion on “What is Open Anthropology?” on the OAC, writes, “Feelings run high on this issue and I know which side I am on,” some of us wanted to know: what side does he stand on, especially since he has essentially done what Johannes Fabian has done so far, and that is to effectively say: “no comment.”

Hart says, “There is a vigorous debate about the use of anthropology by the military and David Price hosts an active discussion group here on that topic.” David Price happens to be in the OAC because, to my regret, I invited him there, as well as Hugh Gusterson.

In a remarkably pointed display of his intent, Hart writes: “Max Forte was part of the founding group of OAC, but subsequently left in response to disagreement over the theory and practice of ‘open anthropology’. His site is one of the most prominent in our field. There is obviously room for argument about what ‘open anthropology’ is. How could it be otherwise?”

While Hart acknowledges the disagreement, and my leaving, Abimbola writing on behalf of the OAC seems to struggle with this recognition: now, it is that they were to derive their mission statement from the one to be found here, and Abimbola disingenuously adds, “We are not aware when this offer was rescinded or other conditions put on it” which suggests a lingering desire to link (my comment continues here). Let’s be clear: they have no intention of deriving anything meaningful from the purpose of the OAP, only in claiming the field — Hart calls it “our field” — and making it seem like an extension of “open anthropology,” which as a project gave rise to a phrase with a specific meaning that only came into currency thanks to this site. And no, it’s not all about “open access.”

The part of Hart’s intervention that I want the reader to focus on is this:

Recently there was some concern when a serving soldier in the US army joined the OAC. This was controversial in view of the advanced political argument in which Forte, Price and Marshall Sahlins (reprising his active role in contesting the Vietnam war) have taken the lead. We quickly decided that we would not exclude anyone on grounds of status alone, preferring to control anti-social behaviour when it occurs. We therefore advocate a network for the practice of open anthropology that, on the religious analogy, would be a broad church, not a sect.

First, note that my name appears in the list of critics, first even (even though I have done nowhere near the legwork of the other two). This tells us at what Hart is aiming. Second, ostensibly oblivious to concerns about being used for recruitment or propaganda purposes, Hart strikes an unusual note of tolerance — Hart has been, and continues to be, intolerant only with respect to those to the left of him politically in the network. Third, and this should read as a warning to radical critics, no “anti-social behaviour” will be tolerated, now that the military is part of the social. In fact, as we have seen over the last few days, ugly behaviour has been abundantly tolerated when aimed in ways that Hart finds pleasure with, thus presumably not anti- his social. Fourth, Hart then states that “the practice of open anthropology” is one akin to a “broad church, not a sect.” Leaving aside the dubious distinction between church and sect, Hart’s view is of a liberal democratic commons that is explicitly rejected on this blog.

You are welcome

Having never criticized the military, having never criticized the work of anthropologists in counterinsurgency, Hart is more than just a tolerant host to Eric R. Price and Don Smith of the HTS (who is also a co-author of “The Human Terrain System: A CORDS for the 21st Century“). He is a very welcoming host, when he writes to Price:

Welcome to the OAC! A former student, old friend and regular participant in my online ventures for 15 years is Charles Kirke, also a member here. He is a serving colonel in the British army and has recently published a book bringing his military experience and social anthropology together.

(Note #1: Price was also warned by Salzman about any lingering leftist anthropologists remaining in the OAC: “anthropologists tend to take a leftist view of the world, with all that that entails, including negative attitudes toward the military but not necessary toward their adversaries.” As I have argued countless times, I do not view the Taleban as my “adversaries”: neither I, nor the country I live in, was ever attacked by them. Rather, the reverse is true.)

(Note #2: Among Kirke’s specializations are: “working in electronic warfare, surveillance technologies, and human factors.”)

It is a curious fact that when Kirke joined the OAC, on the same day I did, right at its inception, that this “old friend” got no welcome from Hart, when virtually everyone else was personally and warmly welcomed by him. Perhaps the time was not right for playing his hand.

Anyone who has had any experience in the debate between anthropologists and the military will tell you that these are very insidious individuals. Not a single conference, not a single panel at a conference, that addresses them goes without their participation. Not even when the panel takes place in Canada do they fail to send someone from Fort Leavenworth (as noted here). These three persons in the OAC — Kirke, Price, and Smith — have also inserted themselves in some of the key groups and discussions of concern: what is open anthropology, resisting the militarization of anthropology, and the anthropology of Afghanistan.

What Open Anthropology is, and what it is not for

I said in my first post about this conflict that if Hart had deliberately planned this, I could not envision a slicker heist. After all, this was the same Keith Hart who, in response to my post about “Single-Cell Resistance” (no broad church there), heaped warm praises and flattery. He quickly acquired it for himself, devoting a post to it on his blog. Yet, there is this one sentence in that post of mine concerning the leaders of some resistance movements: “it is sometimes the higher ups who are the ones to worry about most.” I also wrote: “and once you get the notion into your mind that the leader of the movement may be a collaborator, you can almost never again work in an organized movement.” Silly me, forgetting my own words for a moment.

The very first sentence in my project description, to which I adhere as have my collaborators, reads: “OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY in its most basic sense is a project of decolonization…”. Really, you cannot miss it, it is the first sentence. I have also written about the project’s “pronounced anti-imperialist orientation” (link). I have gone out on a limb to put this into public practice. The current slanderous ire of milbloggers, who would like to see me fired, and three death threats so far this year, might also be enough to suggest that. (Also, show me another anthropology blogger who gets a veiled threat in writing on his blog from a Lt. Colonel in the Pentagon.)

One might begin to understand, if one has read and tried to follow, why I might be just a little defensive when it comes to having my project, the putative link to my project, and the identity of the project, sold out to my actual adversaries, from so-called “fellow” anthropologists. The problem with the title of this blog is not the word “Open;” it’s the word “Anthropology.”

What Open Anthropology is still about — like it or not I am still here and won’t let you ignore that fact — in the shortest summary ever:

(a) transcending disciplinary boundaries
(b) working outside of the walls of institutionalism and professionalism
(c) bringing anthropology out into public engagement
(d) bringing knowledge of alternative anthropologies, by non-anthropologists, back into the academy
(e) engaging in open source ethnography — collaboration, commentary, using materials freely available online and intended for public consumption. My partnerships with Guanaguanare, Leslie-Ann Brown, and Roi Kwabena have been examples of some of these aspects. My more recent collaborations with John Stanton and Jamil Hanifi, are other examples.

While I now think that the leading mistake has been to feature the word “anthropology” in the title, and to associate in various ways with anthropology bloggers, there is one thing that remains to be repeated:

Neither Keith Hart nor the OAC speak for this project, do not represent it and the people involved with it, and should not mislead anyone into thinking there is any kind of link whatsoever.

Cease and Desist

Please, I ask those commenting on this subject to take the time to inform themselves, ask questions (of themselves as well), and not immediately jump in and say this is all a debate about a “name” (in actuality, they mean “words,” but they have not thought of the difference), not about who owns “open” (no one does), or a pissing contest over “property.”

I have certainly made mistakes in this whole affair, I even noted some of them above. However, I mostly do not agree that I have made the specific mistakes that some think I have made, which are their perceptions based on putting words in my mouth. Yes, anthropologists do that, with remarkable ease and frequency it turns out.

The debate is about fraud, about misrepresentation, about political honesty and political responsibilities. Currently, members of the OAC are being duped into thinking that they are about to vote on a name, in a statement that first talks about linking to a project. They should be asked if they want to link to this project. If not, they would not want its identifying label. It’s simple — don’t confuse people who are too lazy to ask questions and investigate further.

Freedom Fighters: Taliban

One set of questions had to do with the origins of the Taliban, specifically in relation to the fight of the Afghan mujahidin against the Soviet occupation. In the mainstream media, not to mention “popular” commentary, one finds two extremes: one that suggests the Taliban are, as a whole, a direct offshoot of the same mujahidin funded, equipped and trained by the CIA, along with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China; the other suggests the opposite, that the Taliban bear little or no relation to those praised by Ronald Reagan as “freedom fighters” and celebrated by sections of the American media of the 1980s as gallant heroes — indeed, that is likely the reason for some of the denials: embarrassment, refusal to acknowledge blowback, and denial of the Orwellian nature of American foreign policy.

Instead, as Rashid points out, the reality is much more complex. The Taliban are not all mujahidin, and not all mujahidin became Taliban, which is not to say that there is no relation between the two. Indeed, very few people, on any side in Afghanistan, could still be classed as part of the anti-Soviet mujahidin struggle, since that ended 20 years ago. Surviving mujahidin from that struggle would now have to be, at the very youngest, about 35 (if they were child soldiers), or more likely over the age of 40.

What Rashid points out is that the core, founding leadership of the Taliban did indeed form part of the anti-Soviet mujahidin struggle. In particular:

• Mullah Omar
• Mullah Mohammed Hassan Rehmani, the former Taliban Governor of Kandahar, “a founder member of the Taliban…considered to be number two in the movement to his old friend Mullah Omar”
• Mohammed Ghaus, former Foreign Minister
• Nuruddin Turabi, former Justice Minister
• Abdul Majid, former Mayor of Kabul
• and to that list we can add, Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani, much in the news lately.

That is only a partial list which, with the exception of the last entry, was provided by Rashid. Of course, if anyone with expertise in this area would like to make the argument that leadership, authority, training, teaching and tradition are minimal features of life as a Talib, that would be interesting to hear. Also interesting would be more names to add to the list above.

Praise Freedom, and Pass the Ammunition…to the Taliban

Ronald Reagan meeting in the White House with Afghan mujahidin in March 1985

Going back, for a moment, to Ronald Reagan. In an earlier post I mentioned, and quoted, Reagan’s praises for Afghanistan’s “freedom fighters,” some of whom, as we know, went on to found and lead the Taliban. I shared these two quotes:

in Afghanistan, the freedom fighters are the key to peace. We support the Mujahadeen. There can be no settlement unless all Soviet troops are removed and the Afghan people are allowed genuine self-determination. (Applause.) (7th State of the Union speech)

“To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us a great lesson—that there are things in this world worth defending. To the Afghan people, I say on behalf of all Americans that we admire your heroism, your devotion to freedom, and your relentless struggle against your oppressors.” (March 21, 1983).

To which we can add this one, from Reagan’s “Proclamation 5034—Afghanistan Day, 21 March 1983“:

The resistance of the Afghan freedom fighters is an example to all the world of the invincibility of the ideals we in this country hold most dear, the ideals of freedom and independence.

Reagan was generous in his praise — in the context of a speech about the “freedom fighters,” he dedicated the space shuttle Columbia to the people of Afghanistan:

That is the same space shuttle you can see here, on 01 February 2003 over Palestine (Texas):

Beyond speeches and symbolism, Ronald Regan had much more than just a butterfly effect where the Taliban are concerned. Indeed, in a report in London’s Telegraph on 26 September 2001, by Toby Harnden, the Taliban themselves still had 50 of the 1,000 Stinger missiles provided by the Pentagon for the anti-Soviet war effort in the 1980s (mentioned for those who like to see “smoking gun” connections).

We do not know what Reagan thought of the Taliban proper, who seized national power in 1996, since by that time Reagan was already suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. However, we do have access to the words of one early protagonist who helped to aid the mujahidin (from as early as six months before the Soviet invasion): U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Speaking with specific reference to the emergence of the Taliban, enabled by his (Carter’s) administration’s support for the mujahidin, this is what Brzezinski had to say in 2001:

What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Hero Stories of the Taliban: They “Protected” Women and Children Too

In the first chapter of his book, Rashid helps us to also address the question of why the Taliban gained popularity in parts of Afghanistan. The answer, in part, is due to certain heroic stories told about the Taliban. Rashid says:

The most credible story, told repeatedly, is that in the spring of 1994 Singesar neighbours came to tell him that a commander had abducted two teenage girls, their heads had been shaved and they had been taken to a military camp and repeatedly raped. Omar enlisted some 30 Talibs who had only 16 rifles between them and attacked the base, freeing the girls and hanging the commander from the barrel of a tank. They captured quantities of arms and ammunition. ‘We were fighting against Muslims who had gone wrong. How could we remain quiet when we could see crimes being committed against women and the poor?’ [Mullah] Omar said later.

Then there is the account of the Taliban protecting boys who were to be sodomized:

A few months later two commanders confronted each other in Kandahar, in a dispute over a young boy whom both men wanted to sodomise. In the fight that followed civilians were killed. Omar’s group freed the boy and public appeals started coming in for the Taliban to help out in other local disputes. Omar had emerged as a Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against the rapacious commanders. His prestige grew because he asked for no reward or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to set up a just Islamic system.

This is an incomplete post for now, so if anyone has any notes to add, feel welcome to post them below. Hopefully what has been provided thus far helps to clear up at least few misconceptions and answer some questions.