Iraqi Insurgents Capture Human Terrain Team Member: Issa T. Salomi

by John Stanton

Sunday, 07 February 2010

Steve Fondacaro and Montgomery Carlough, senior program management of the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), were warned as early as 2007 that Human Terrain Team members in Iraq and Afghanistan would become prey for insurgent groups. They were advised repeatedly that training must emphasize the dangerous environment HTS employees would be operating in. That training needed to  focus on  practices and procedures for handling life threatening situations to include kidnapping.

Issa Salomi, a 60 year old HTT member operating in a combat zone, was taken in January 2010 by an Iraqi insurgent group and a video of him was released on the Net in February 2010 by the same group. This tragic event drives home, once again, the core failings of the Human Terrain Team System: the inability to find qualified personnel, to train them properly and to, quite simply, take care of them. Some allege that many team leaders and HTS management itself have no clue where many of their teams are. “Some HTT members disappear for days and then return.”

“They will tell you they are addressing this in the curriculum redesign but it’s too little too late. The students currently in training are not been thoroughly briefed on the situation on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan . There does  not  appear to be any attempt to implement anything in training regarding kidnapping. This is criminally negligent,” said observers.

Observers also indicate that those in charge of revising the HTS curriculum and training new batches of HTS students are not qualified to do so as their expertise is in private sector organizational behavior.  Some have had no military or field experience and, what’s more, hardly understand the US military culture they are embedded in. Yet they are offered contracts that extend, in some cases, close to one month at $1200 per day.  Some allege that conflicts of interests abound within HTS with one of them centered around the outlay of $2 million to a group called Cornerstone.

How much more will it take until the word “accountability” becomes relevant to the US Army’s HTS program? Where are the IG’s or the US Congress? Secretary of Defense Robert Gates may have held accountable the program manager for the Joint Strike Fighter whom he recently fired but no one died in that program.

Who in HTS, and those that command above it, will be held to account for the deaths,trauma and lives ruined for a military/sociological experiment gone wrong? Those below, and their families, deserve much more than a mention on the HTS.mil website or in court/medical records for their efforts. [MF: Note that the website for HTS has been down for at least several days now.]

Michael Bhatia, Nicole Suveges, Paula Loyd, Don Ayala (and the Afghan National murdered), Wesley Cureton,  Scott Wilson, Issa Solomi, and  those unidentified US soldiers wounded in their company.

John Stanton is a Virginia Based writer specializing in national security and political matters. His recent book is General David Petraeus’ Favorite Mushroom: Inside the US Army HTS. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com

UPDATED — MORE NEWS:

• IRAQ MOQAWAMA WEBSITE
• Story/Video on Iraq Moqawama –> Translated into English
• “Missing US contractor Issa Salomi paraded by terrorist group,” Times Online, 08 February 2010
• “Shiite Militant Group Posts Video of Abducted American in Iraq,” FOX News, 06 February 2010
• “Video Of US Hostage Held In Iraq Released,” Sky News, 06 February 2010
• “Officials confirm kidnapping of U.S. contractor in Iraq,” Washington Post, 06 February 2010

From the NETWORK OF CONCERNED ANTHROPOLOGISTS, 27 January 2010:

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,

………………………………………………

The New Face of the Human Terrain System: Goin’ to Kansas City on 1 April 2010.

by John Stanton

US Army Human Terrain System (HTS) principals recently produced a number of briefings adding up to a total of 133-pages of MS PowerPoint slides (pdf 3.6 Mb). For convenience’s sake here, we’ll use the title of the first presentation titled The Future: Training Directorate Executive Overview, 08 January 2010 (The Future) as the overall title for the series. The presentations contain a dizzying array of information, mostly in living color.

They are audacious and excellent documents whose purpose seems to be to convince command and funding sources that HTS principals have been working since at least 2008 to improve recruiting practices (rigid check of qualifications), training methodologies (going Socratic, modular and phased) and logistics practices (housing, deployment, transport, move to Kansas City).

Once past the hypnotic affects of the 133 slides that induce a “this is great” feeling, the realization comes that the same people who destroyed the US Army program concept in the first place are the same ones that now claim they can reconstruct it and expand HTS operations to all combatant commands.

Montgomery Carlough and Steve Fondacaro still remain at the program’s helm in spite of two year’s worth of allegations–from former and current HTS employees–that fraud, waste and abuse have been common place throughout the life of the HTS.  Further, the substance of The Future is early-collegiate, not professional military/academic pedagogy. Financial figures are presented with no work breakdown structure/allocation. And worse, there is no mention of any academic/university review of the social science effort. This is troublesome given that management’s experience in the field is limited. In short, the effort seems somewhat disingenuous.

There is Very Little Accountability

Before getting into The Future, other developments of significance have taken place over the past month with Carlough and Fondacaro in charge.  Scott Wilson a social scientist on a HTT working in Kandahar, was wounded and evacuated back to the USA. His condition is unknown at this time. Georgia Tech, according to some, may lose its contract ($7.2 million) to McNeil Technologies, an aggressive contractor that boasts on its website about the influence of its Board of Directors.

According to one observer,

“It sounds like HTS will still have to prove itself for a while especially in Afghanistan. That said, because of past problems with BAE, the US Army already appears to be taking greater responsibility for HTS training — the design and how it’s managed. It certainly needs to be evaluated, because there is very little accountability. There is an enormous amount of data being collected, though. My impression is that the brigade commanders find the HTS stuff most useful when it turns into operational or even tactical intelligence for them. That would be their natural inclination. Whether this will form part of a serious CORDS-style rural pacification program is anyone’s guess. I think that’s the intent, certainly, and could be a source of great controversy. But the longer term justification is for the post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction phase, and that may help sell it to Congress more convincingly. Not that most of Congress, to say nothing of Obama and his team, seems averse to a revival of counterinsurgency at this point.”

On that note, the HTS Independent Assessment that was to be conducted by the House Armed Services Committee over a six month time frame may now have to be completed in one or two months due to the requirements of the Quadrennial Defense Review.

Crawl-Walk-Run: Why Not When the Program Started?

According to the The Future, “the HTS Curriculum Design OPT conducts collaborative planning and curriculum design on 25 January 2010, at Ft Leavenworth, KS, in order to facilitate the development and implementation of a curriculum that prepares and certifies candidates for successful service as members of deployed HTS teams.”

HTS has adopted a 28 part integrated modular concept for training with three distinct phases.

“Through Socratic methods, the Crawl Phase teaches and trains the individual knowledge, skills and attributes each student must master in order to perform as a Human Terrain Team member.

“The Walk Phase bridges individual and collective skills.  This phase consists of case studies driving small group interaction culminating in a series of vignette driven practical exercises that enable teaching, coaching and training team performance dynamics.

“The Run Phase bridges collective skills and the operational environment. This phase consists of a local Capability Exercise (CAPEX), followed by participation in a CTC rotation where students perform collective tasks in support of a BCT under simulated theater-like conditions.”

Students must also be adept at using the feared MS PowerPoint program to report on efforts/findings in each phase. For example, a section titled Social Science Concept Instruction with Practical Exercises requires that each individual build a PowerPoint on the social structure in their hometown, 2 hours.”  Another section, “Final Product Instruction with Practical Exercises requires that: sub-groups of 5 produce a Socio-cultural Situational Awareness PowerPoint and deliver it to the class, 3 hours.”

$16,870 for Each Student: Finally Some Financials

The Future contains some interesting financials worth noting.  Some highlights are listed below and are taken directly from The Future. Annual costs under the BAE contract (being phased out) for student lodging, housing and transport were approximately $11.8 million (US) per year.

By 1 April 2010, the HTS Consolidated Training Directorate will be moving to 7310 Tiffany Springs Parkway, Circle Building IV in Kansas City, Missouri.  The proposed student housing complex will be at The Crossing at Barry Road, 7831 NW Roadridge Road, Kansas City, Missouri, 64151.

The move to Kansas City, a more expensive location, will evidently save close to $3.8 million. Part of that savings comes from contracting with Direct Housing, Inc under GSA Schedule 48. Further savings on build-out for the new HTS home is realized through DA PAM 420-11 (Oct 1994) p. 5, pp C: Construction: Any work done that converts or modifies space, changing the purpose of utilization is considered “construction” for fiscal purposes. Following this Plan overcomes this MilCon requirement by a Lease that contains a build-to-suit single-tenant agreement.

The average amount of time a student is in the training base is 6 months.  (5 months are spent as civilian contractors and 1 month as a DAC for a total of 110 training days.)  Not including student salaries, the training budget is $13.5 million a year.  (Included is $5 million for DMLI’s Weston Resolve, $455k per exercise times 11 exercises a year equals $5.005 million), and $2 million for CareerStones’s Team Dynamics Training.) Class sizes are projected at 35 students per cycle.  Given 11 training cycles, this equates to 385 graduates a year.  Not including Weston Resolve , CareerStone and student salaries, the training budget is $6,495,000.  This figure divided by 385 equates to $16,870 to graduate one student.

At present, $500,000 is budgeted for anticipated operations and maintenance costs for computer site licenses (JMESL); computer hardware repair and replacement; software and routine GSA office supplies. This figure is a placeholder.  As the OPT finalizes future curriculum requirements, this estimate will be refined.

Annually a civilian contracted TL or SS make $100k, a RM makes $90k, and a HTA makes $80k.  (These salaries are estimated as the exact figures are not available for this informal analysis.)  This equates to approximately $8300, $7500, and $6600 a month respectively.  Given the above, the 5 month salary paid to these students while in training is $1,816,667.  Given the $1,816,667 paid in contractor student salaries multiplied by 75% for employer overhead expenses, the Legacy training approach incurs an additional cost of $1,382,500. Contractor student per-diem is $931,500. This includes $135 a day (Hotel $70 / Rental Car $45 / Gas $10) x 30 days a month x 5 months x 46 students For the one month these 46 students are paid as DA Civilians, the salary costs which include locality pay are $382,333.  This figure includes the number and type by pay scale.

The annual operating costs for the Exercise Division are $10,235,500.

DA Civilians (DAC) Costs.  The Exercise Division will employ 16 veteran Team Leaders, 16 Social Scientists, 4 Research Managers, and 10 Human Terrain Analysts totaling 46 DAC personnel. Calculated at the 2009 pay scales and locality pay of 13.86%, the annual cost for Exercise Division DACs is $4,588,000.

Contractor Costs.  The Exercise Division will employ 30 ex-military contract personnel who are experts in planning and executing collective training.  Total base salary costs are projected to be $2,666,000 a year.  Include $1,999,500 in overhead and the projected annual contractor cost is $4,665,500 a year.  The following methodology was used to develop a contractor salary cost estimate.

Assuming the Exercise Division was a military organization, what would be the rank / grade required to perform the duties as outlined in the Exercise Division position descriptions?  To answer this question, TRADOC’s Battle Command Training Program was used as a model.  The BCTP exercise planning, coordination, and execution functions closely parallel the Exercise Division.  Therefore, the military rank structure associated with the BCTP TDA was proposed to answer the above question.  Analysis then proceeded to a comparison of military rank to the corresponding DAC pay scales. Using the 2009 DA Civilian pay scales, competitive contractor salaries were then developed as the basis for projecting this cost.

Troubles in the SSRA World

According to a US Army posture statement, Social Science Research and Analysis (SSRA) personnel provide operationally relevant, empirical, qualitative, and quantitative social science research conducted in the area of operations, generally in support of HTAT and operational-level commands. On July 1, 2008, HTS deployed Social Science Research and Analysis (SSRA) capability to Afghanistan in support of the theatre and deployed HTTs. On November 1, 2008, HTS deployed SSRA capability to Iraq.

Are SSRA personnel doing what they are contracted to do? Who manages their efforts?

Observers had this to say about SSRA’s.

“SSRA’s contractors do not work; i.e., they have an office in Kabul where they might sit during office hours but they do not conduct research themselves, or task sub-contractors to conduct surveys for them. With the exception of one product, no one could remember an SSRA product over the preceding ten months. The one product which was produced was described as “weak” and “basic stuff everyone knows.”  There was criticism of SSRA as a body which (paraphrased) ‘could not be up-to-date on AF because they (sic) never go to the field (as the HTT’s do).’  No one could remember a visit by an SSRA contractor to a FOB or COP in his/her time in AF, or a mention in a briefing about SSRA having a person/team in the AO and an Army unit having to support that person/team in the field. The claimed ability of SSRA to conduct surveys of the civilian population in AF has to be questioned.

The SSRA contract apparently pays SSRA a flat annual fee for services rendered.  There is no stipulated number of products per year to be produced. SSRA apparently does not have to solicit research/survey projects from HTS elements, or suggest them to HTS, IOT be paid.  The amount HTS has paid to SSRA over the past few years has to be in the millions of dollars.”

Lastly, comes this comment from the field. “SSRA Qualitative Assessments are at this point more dangerous than they are useful. They are dangerous because people who don’t understand research (and I include most people reading the assessments in this number) will draw inferences concerning the whole population that are unwarranted.

John Stanton is a Virginia-based writer specializing in national security and political matters. His book on the Human Terrain System is available at Amazon and Wiseman Publishing. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com.

While the Zero Series of essays was (and still is) intended to be the mode by which this blog comes to a close (so that I can move on to other projects, more below), it seems that will take much longer than expected. Though the series is based on lecture notes and readings assigned for a graduate course that I taught, writing the materials up into essay form can take up to three days in some cases, usually lengthier than most conference papers, and time is lacking right now. It is more likely that the closing series will be resumed in May.

Between now and then, a number of posts will appear dealing with the Human Terrain System (HTS), and doubtfully anything else in terms of subject matter. A special “gift” is also being prepared for readers interested in the relations between anthropology and the military and intelligence agencies, HTS, and the Minerva Research Initiative. Otherwise, there is an abundance of current developments, from news of the war in Afghanistan, to the militarization of American aid to Haiti, that under ideal circumstances numerous posts would have already been published by now.

At present I am devoting my energies to related areas that in some ways were shaped by experience with this blog, and knowledge gained in part from preparing its various postings. One is a new course I am currently teaching, The New Imperialism, and another course, Political Activism and the Internet. All of these will come together in some new writing projects that I am to begin this summer, or as soon as my current publishing backlog has been overcome.

After this blog I am planning a very different, and perhaps more ambitious online project that is more in line with the two courses identified above, and more in line with my next research and writing goals. That will have to wait until August. (That project will be very different especially in the sense of no longer orienting itself toward anthropology, or forming an unmistakable part of an online anthropology ‘community’.)

In the meantime, I am very much engaged in the “same thing” as here, just in different arenas and with different participants and interlocutors.

As I am almost ready to resume winding down this blog, as I keep promising to do soon, here is a sample of what 2009 looked like on this blog, in terms of the ten most viewed essays. Unfortunately it seems that WordPress only counts on-site page views, when posts viewed by various feed readers are usually twice to three times as many in this blog’s case. The total number of on-site views for this blog, since its inception on 11 October 2007, stands at 307,653 as of this moment.

1. America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution – 6,200
2. M. Jamil Hanifi: Engineering Division, Instability, and Regime Change with Naheed, Neda, and Allah – 5,693
3. The Unreported Death of Staff Sgt. Paula Loyd of the Human Terrain System: Third Researcher to Die – 4,775
4. Some Breaking News on the Human Terrain System: Death Threats Against Female Colleagues – 4,378
5. A Minor Bun Engine Made Benny Lava, May He Poop on My Knee: Cross-Cultural Translation Under Conditions of Contemporary Electronic Globalization – 1,928
6. Frantz Fanon: “Concerning Violence” – 1,912
7. Whitewashing a U.S. War Crime in Afghanistan: The Trial of Don Ayala, “Human Terrain” Mercenary – 1,712
8. Anthropologist Under Attack: University of East London Punishes Chris Knight Over His Public Speech – 1,368
9. The Deafening Silence of the “Milbloggers”: Inconvenient Truths? – 1,290
10. Professor Richard Antoun, murdered Fri. Dec. 4, 2009: We Will Miss You, May God Bless You – 1,164

The top search terms in 2009 that brought readers to this blog were:

1. paula loyd – 4,730
2. open anthropology – 2,330
3. idi amin – 2,181
4. national geographic – 1,506
5. human terrain system – 1,279
6. national geographic photos – 830
7. don ayala – 716
8. benny lava – 707
9. gaza live cam – 637
10. shelby lee adams – 542

I think some of the best posts remain for the end of this blog, although, as is often the case, what I think is the best and what viewers find most interesting often differ considerably.

I will have a more complete roundup of the statistics for the cluster of sites that formed part of the Open Anthropology Project, at the close of this blog.

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.”

On 15 December 2009, John Stanton reported the following:

“the US Army HTS had suffered a fourth non-fatal casualty. Sgt. Wesley Cureton was wounded and has lost the use of one eye and has suffered from other head trauma. He is currently at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. HTS management apparently felt no need to report the incident publically. When contacted, Robert Mueller, HTS spokesperson, indicated that he had no information on the matter and that “you should go through the hospital” to find out Sgt. Cureton’s status.”

On 12 December 2009, John Stanton reported that Sgt. Cureton (AF1 in Afghanistan) had suffered an injury to his eye caused by shrapnel from a mortar round, about one month ago. He had already suffered a brain injury while in Iraq. HTS has chosen not to report on this matter publicly.

John Stanton has reported on several injuries suffered by HTS employees in Afghanistan and Iraq that, once again, were reported neither in the mainstream media nor on the website of the Human Terrain System. Without confirmation, we are unable to determine exactly how many casualties the program has had in the past three years, beyond the three reported deaths of Bhatia, Suveges, and Loyd.

UPDATED: 05 Dec. 2009 – 3:19pm, 3:26pm, 3:36pm, 3:40pm, 3:50pm, 6:37pm, 10:03pm — 06 Dec. 2009 – 3:05am, 10:21am, 11:04am — 09 Dec. 2009 – 12:20am, 12:38am

DR. RICHARD ANTOUN

I am utterly distraught by the news that. Dr. Richard Antoun, a very dear former professor of mine in Anthropology at Binghamton University, died yesterday afternoon after having been stabbed multiple times in his office by a graduate student. I am in disbelief. Professor Antoun was a blessing to all of us who took his courses. He was exceedingly gentle, soft spoken, and took an active interest in our research. It is to him that I owe thanks for endless brilliant little tips on doing ethnographic research, down to how to ask questions, and for sharing some of his wealth of knowledge on the Middle East and Islam. It is to him that I owe thanks for his course on Reinterpreting Tradition, so memorable that since I took it back around 1996, it feels like I was just sitting in his class, remembering individual lectures, his extensive notes occupying all the boards in his seminar room next to his office.

I was still new to anthropology when I met Dr. Antoun, and his work on tradition — a focus of my work in Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs — was vital to me, as was his material on the “social organization of tradition” that underpinned my own concept of “reengineering indigeneity.” He was the one to introduce me to the concept of “culture brokers” and how to use it, which I did, considerably. It is now my burden to say this here, never having taken the time to express my thanks to him directly, when he was still alive.

Dr. Antoun did not just mark essays. He called me in to meet with him in his office, where he devoted considerable time going over all the fine points, pulling books from the shelves of his massive office library, and fishing for old copies of journal articles in one of his numerous filing cabinets packed with them, so as to recommend resources that always proved helpful and had an important impact on the development of my own work. He was a model scholar, whose professionalism and commitment to teaching and research are an inspiration to all of us who knew him.

I cannot imagine what about him could inspire hateful thoughts from a student, let alone murderous thoughts, so much so that his attacker came to his office with a kitchen knife, suggesting premeditation. I want to know his motivations for such excess.

Dick Antoun will be warmly and lovingly remembered by generations of students, a number of whom are also professors currently, and by his family. His pains with this rubbish world are over, he is in peace. It’s the rest of us who are left to suffer his absence.

▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬ ▬

Richard Antoun’s memorable books include:

Understanding Fundamentalism: Christian, Islamic and Jewish Movements

Documenting Transnational Migration: Jordanian Men Working and Studying in Europe, Asia and North America

Muslim Preacher in the Modern World: A Jordanian Case Study in Comparative Perspective

Religious Resurgence: Contemporary Cases in Islam, Christianity and Judaism

Low-Key Politics: Local-Level Leadership & Change in the Middle East

See also:

Scholar helps define “fundamentalism” – Binghamton University Research News

“Fatally Stabbed BU Professor Was Fulbright Scholar and Accomplished Author.” WBNG TV, Saturday, Dec. 5. 2009.

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Some local and national news about the murder of Dr. Antoun:

WENY-TV News – Local News

• “Prof. Richard Antoun remembered as gentle man dedicated to dispelling stereotypes about different cultures.” By George Basler and Tom Wilber, Star Gazette, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009.
• “Fatal Binghamton University stabbing of professor leaves trail of unanswered questions.” By Doug Schneider, Press Connects, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009.
• “Richard Antoun: Binghamton University Stabbing Kills Professor.” By Amy Judd, Now Public, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009.
• “Updated 5:45 p.m., 12/4: Prof stabbed to death.” By Melissa Bykofsky, BU Pipe Dream, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009.
• “Professor stabbed to death at Binghamton University.” By Charles McChesney, The Post-Standard, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009.
  
• “Binghamton professor stabbed to death.” Associated Press, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009.
• “Suspect named in fatal stabbing of Binghamton University professor.” By Doug Schneider, Press & Sun Bulletin, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009.
• “Professor Dies After Stabbing at Binghamton University.” WBNG News, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009.
• “BREAKING NEWS: Professor stabbed on Binghamton University Campus, Confirmed Dead due to Wounds Suffered.” WHRW News, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009.
• “Student fatally stabs Binghamton University professor.” By Doug Schneider, Press & Sun Bulletin, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009.
• “Prof. Emeritus Richard T. Antoun stabbed, killed at Binghamton University by grad student: cops.” By Leo Standora, NY Daily News, Saturday, December 5th 2009.
• “Friends remember slain BU professor.” By Janelle Burrell, News 10 Now, Saturday, December 5th 2009.
• “Richard Antoun’s widow: Society has lost a wonderful peacemaker.” By Evan Drellich, The Ithaca Journal, Saturday, December 5th 2009.
• “Student Held in Killing of Binghamton Professor.” By Al Baker, The New York Times, Saturday, December 5th 2009.
• “Student charged in Binghamton U. professor’s death.” Associated Press, Saturday, December 5th 2009.
• “Richard T. Antoun ‘53, RIP.” EphBlog, Saturday, December 5th 2009.
• “Grad student allegedly killed professor.” UPI, Saturday, December 5th 2009.
• “Campus in shock over professor’s murder.” By Tricia Cruz, WIVB, Saturday, December 5th 2009.
• “Student kills prof.” By Cynthia R. Fagen, New York Post, Sunday, December 6th, 2009.
• “Muslim Community Reacts to Slaying.” FOX 4O WICZ (no date).
• “Friends Remember Antoun as Selfless Man.” FOX 4O WICZ (no date).
• “Meeting of Faiths Dedicated to Slain Professor.” Fox 40 WICZ, Sun., Dec. 6, 2009.
• “Binghamton Campus Grieves for Slain Professor.” By Michael S. Schmidt, The New York Times, Mon., Dec. 7, 2009.
• “Professor spent career seeking peace.” By Aaron Nicodemus, Telegram & Gazette, Mon., Dec. 7, 2009.
• “Grad Student Charged With Murdering Cultural Anthropologist.” By Constance Holden, Science Insider, Mon., Dec. 7, 2009.
• “Saudi student accused in US professor’s murder.” By Barbara Ferguson, Arab News, Tues., Dec. 8, 2009.
• “Binghamton University officials critical of media coverage of stabbing.” By Debbie Swartz, Press & Sun Bulletin, Tues., Dec. 8, 2009.
• “Vigil to be held on Friday.” By Ashley Tarr, BU Pipe Dream, Tues., Dec. 8, 2009.
• “Calling hours, service planned for professor.” Press & Sun Bulletin, Tues., Dec. 8, 2009.
• “B.U. Learns To Cope With Tragedy.” Fox 40 WICZ, Tues., Dec. 8, 2009.

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Statement from Binghamton University President Lois De Fleur, Fri., Dec. 4, 2009

“This afternoon, in an act of senseless violence, the Binghamton University community lost one of its long-time faculty members. Richard Antoun, professor emeritus of anthropology, died from wounds sustained as a result of a stabbing.

Our hearts go out to the Antoun family and we will provide them with as much assistance as we can in this time of sorrow.

The suspect is in custody, and the University Police and the New York State Police continue to investigate. Science I will remain closed until noon Saturday, at which time access to the building will be allowed except in the area of the investigation.

If you are a member of the University community and are personally impacted by Professor Antoun’s death, I urge you to take advantage of the services offered through the University Counseling Center. Counselors will be on duty at the center until 8 p.m or will be available at 607-777-2772. Counselors will also be available throughout the weekend by calling 777-2393.

I commend the quick action of the University Police and Harpur’s Ferry in their response to this tragic incident, and I want to assure everyone of the continued safety of our campus.”

Broome DA’s Press Release on BU Murder

Source, Sat. Dec. 5, 2009

Early this morning the New York State University Police, at Binghamton University arrested and charged Abdulsalam S. Al-Zahrani, age 46, with the crime of Murder in the Second Degree, alleging that the defendant intentionally caused the death of Professor Emeritus Richard T. Antoun, Department of Anthropology, by stabbing him to death in Science I building of Binghamton University on the afternoon of December 4, 2009.

The defendant is a Saudi national who is a graduate student in Anthropology at Binghamton University.

The defendant and Professor Antoun knew each other through the defendant’s work in the graduate program.

The defendant was arraigned before Town Justice Joseph Meagher in the Town Court of the Town of Vestal and was remanded to the Broome County Correctional Facility without bail.

No further arrests are expected.

There is no indication of religious or ethnic motivation.

The accusatory instrument is merely an accusation. The defendant is presumed to be innocent unless and until he is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

The New York State University Police at Binghamton University were assisted in this investigation by the following agencies: New York State Police, Vestal Police, Binghamton Police, Johnson City Police, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Broome County District Attorney’s Office. The investigation is ongoing. It is requested that any person who might have information related to this crime, or who has had recent contact with the suspect or the victim, please contact the New York State University Police at Binghamton University either through telephone number 777-INFO (4636) or e-mail at policeinfo@binghamton.edu.

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Dr. Richard Antoun being taken away on a stretcher, from the Dept. of Anthropology in the Science I building at SUNY-Binghamton

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Early reports about the murderer, Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani:

THE MURDERER: Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani, 46, graduate student.

“Binghamton University killing: 46-year-old grad student charged in professor’s death.” By Debbie Swartz, Press & Sun Bulletin, Sat. Dec. 5, 2009:

Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani was charged early Saturday morning with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of BU anthropology professor emeritus Richard T. Antoun, according to police.

Antoun knew Al-Zahrani, a Saudi national, through his work in BU’s anthropology graduate program, according to a statement released Saturday by Broome County District Attorney Gerald Mollen.

“There is no indication of religious or ethnic motivation,” according to Mollen’s statement.

Mollen would not reveal a motive for the killing.

“Suspect identified in fatal stabbing of Binghamton University professor.” By Doug Schneider, Ithaca Journal, Sat. Dec. 5, 2009.

“3 Muslim students say they tried to avoid Al-Zahrani.” By Doug Schneider, Ithaca Journal, Sat. Dec. 5, 2009.

“Al-Zahrani’s Roommates React to Stabbing.” WBNG News, Sat. Dec. 5, 2009.

“Binghamton University killing: Apartment-mates say man accused of killing professor was confrontational and ‘acted like a terrorist’.” Press & Sun Bulletin, Sat. Dec. 5, 2009.

Conspiracy theories?

Email Sent By Murder Suspect Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani Binghamton NY, 10/21/2009:

Professor Richard T. Antoun was a convert to Judaism (see this section from his Preface to Understanding Fundamentalism). For his part, Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani, a Saudi national, wrote with particular venom against Israel, and Arab leaders — a fact that some sites, such as the one linked above are tying to Antoun’s conversion already as a possible motivation for the murder of Antoun, on religious or political grounds. These are emails sent by Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani to the Israeli newspaper, Maariv:

Abdulsalam Alzahrani:
aalzahr1@binghamton.edu
I completly agree…even if these statements are made by the ugliest soul on earth, the soul of a quintessential sick animal-without-a-tail israeli orientalist…why should we be upset…we are people ruled by the most corrupted blood-sucking, sadomasachistic (sadist with us and masachist with their overseas lords), demented, ignorant and incapable gangs, deprived in body and mind, deformed in consciousness (we must erase this word from the Arabic dictionary…it is superfluous without a referent in the real world…our world)…

Abdulsalam Alzahrani:
aalzahr1@binghamton.edu
Now I have to say something to this idiot who said the Arabs are the grossest fuilure in the history of human beings. No failure equals the Israeli…your were f… up under a tolitarian rule in europe and the rule failed and you want to replicate it!!! how stupid is this? what failure is this?

Einstein himself refused to join you doomed enterprience and Freud himself thought that you were theafts sealing even the moral innovatons of other people even the hummus you have stolen, the land, the water, resources of Palistine…you are a bunch of psychopath theaves and murdurers…everyone is against you because of your unethical immoral criminal actions…you killed children!!! what else you want to be convinced that you are shame of humanity.

For more, see this.

“Muslim Student Murders Dissertation Chair.” The Jawa Report, Sat. Dec. 5, 2009:

Sudden jihad syndrome or just the crazy? I’ll remind my readers that the two are not mutually exclusive categories.

In fact, Aaron over at SOFIR has a pretty interesting typology of the “terrorist continuum” in which he posits that the more rational the terrorist the more likely they will be to need organizational help. At the other end of the spectrum are “lone wolves” who are characterized by a high degree of “internal disquiet”.

I’ve no idea if the grad student/murderer named Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani was motivated by Islamic extremism. I throw it out there because it can’t be discounted at this point….

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.

The intellectual heritage of European expansion that we inherit as anthropologists – certainly not without modification and criticism – is again the subject in this series. If Immanuel Wallerstein explained which agendas became dominant with the institutionalization of the social sciences, with some notes on why they became dominant, Pierre Bourdieu provides some explanation as to how they became dominant.

What Science?

One of the recurring features of some comments, on this and other blogs, surrounding anthropologists’ criticisms of the Human Terrain System, has been that we critics are not being “scientific” and “objective,” but rather “ideological” and “biased.” As I have held throughout, the dichotomy is an extremely crude and simplistic one. Now we will see how we can take that further: the dichotomy itself is pure artifice, the by product of low grade propaganda that has been popularly consumed in North America, based on views of science that very few even in the natural sciences would any longer dare to defend. The idea that anthropology should be “scientific” and “objective” is also derivative of the Eurocentric foundations of anthropology, as was discussed in previous posts in this series.

The Domination of “Scientific Reason”

As with the opening quote on the “cultural imperialism” of universalism in the last post, Pierre Bourdieu had a similar line of argument on the topic of scientific reason, reminding us that “reason, which thinks itself free from history, also has a history” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 4). Stating matters more loosely, one can think of Bourdieu as placing scientific production within the context of academic politics:

“Even in the ‘pure’ universe where the ‘purest’ science is produced and reproduced, that science is in some respects a social field like all others–with its relations of force, its powers, its struggles and profits, its generic mechanisms such as those that regulate the selection of newcomers or the competition between the various producers.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 5)

Scientific production is neither disconnected from the wider society in which it occurs, but it is also not totally reflective of it either. What Bourdieu draws attention to is the quest for authority in science, which is like a game, with established rules, and with competition. What he rightly dispels is the simplistic, popular notion that the science we know, and its products, are there simply because scientific production is true, objective, correct, and proven, without competition from rivals.

The capital of social authority that is influential in science, is capital “which rests upon delegation from an institution, most often the educational system” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 7). Scientific success can, with time, be converted into social success, in heightening the profile of the university for example, or a unit within it. With more success, and the enhanced profile of the institution, it can happen that an institution acquires status as a leader, as a “prestigious institution,” so that in the future that fact will play a role in judgments of the merits of the science that institution produces – and of course, that does not mean that what is actually produced is entirely and solely deemed important on the basis of abstract scientific principles alone. What Bourdieu calls “strictly scientific authority” (derived from peer reviewers attesting to the legitimacy of solutions to problems that are also held to be legitimate) can also be converted into social authority, and that can impact on the science that is actually produced:

“Strictly scientific authority tends to convert itself, over time, into a social authority capable of opposing the assertion of a new scientific authority. Further, social authority within the scientific field tends to become legitimized by presenting itself as pure technical reason, and also the recognized signs of statutory authority modify the social perception of strictly technical ability.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 7)

Part of the reason for this is the fact that membership within the scientific community is predicated on learning, and becoming familiar with, the way knowledge is orchestrated, so that certain problems are defined as true, and others as false, some knowledge is authentically scientific, and other knowledge is fake science, that some methods are legitimate and others are not (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 8). Bourdieu speaks here of a very fundamental form of censorship that plays out in the minds of both orthodox and heterodox adversaries in a scientific game, where both agree to certain rules and schemes, having learned them, internalized them, and now utilize them with little conscious thought (1991, p. 9).

Going further, Bourdieu argues that every “scientific choice” — whether it is a choice of research area, a choice of methods, a choice of where to publish, or when to publish (or whether to quickly publish partially verified results) – is a choice that cannot be understood apart from the relationship between the dispositions acquired by a researcher as a member of a scientific community, and that researcher’s position within the scientific field (Bourdieu, 1991, pp. 9-10). Attention is then drawn to how dominance is achieved in a field, how choices are restricted, and how scientific actors are unevenly endowed with resources accumulated from the past. In addition, Bourdieu argues, the science that is done, and how it is conceived, is itself a product of power:

“Stated more concretely, they [scientific actors] try to impose the definition of science that best conforms to their specific interest, that is, the one best suited to preserving or increasing their specific capital.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 13)

Applied Knowledge: Playing the Game of Power

There is a demand for the “applied techniques of rule or instruments of legitimation” so that the requirements for the social reproduction of the powerful can be better assured (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 19). In facing the powerful that rule society, scientists can take different routes, and what happens here is by no means “purely scientific” – one finds it just as easily in the fields of literary and artistic production.

One route is for scientists to restrict their production to what some now call pure or “basic research,” one that does not cater to any outside market, one that markets only to itself. Another is for scientists to offer their services to the dominant powers. A third route allows scientists to avoid confrontation with their competitors by instead addressing themselves to a broader public of nonprofessionals. From that link with the public, they can derive a form of symbolic power which they can then attempt to bring back into play in the realm of scientific debate itself (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 19). As Bourdieu concludes:

“Claims to scientific validity can no doubt hide claims to symbolic domination, and scientific debates can no doubt conceal, underneath the confrontation between statements and reality, the struggle for power of those who put them forward.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 20)

The History of Scientific Reason in Anthropology: The Myth of Primitive Society

The victory of science in the rise of early anthropology was manifested in the “comparative point of view,” a view that, “rests on a recognition that there are physical and cultural differences among human populations which must be taken into account in any attempt to generalize about mankind” (Rowe, 1974, p. 61). Generalizing about humanity meant that humanity first had to be ordered and categorized, in order for there to be a science of humanity. As Rowe explained, “it is anthropology’s recognition of the scientific importance of such differences which chiefly distinguishes it from other disciplines concerned with man and human behavior” (Rowe, 1974, p. 61). It was a science primarily rooted in European expansion, the voyages of discovery, and Renaissance archaeology, a science that demanded perspectival distance in order for difference to be perceived and then “explained” (Rowe, 1974, p. 76).

Demonstrating some of Bourdieu’s propostions above, Adam Kuper (2005) provides us with a short  history of scientific reason in anthropology, noting its contending fields of origin, with the early anthropology of the mid-1800s emerging from law, philosophy, and (speculative) history. As an emergent discipline, anthropology made use of Darwinian evolutionism as capital, even if the appropriation was often superficial. Anthropology’s ancient ape was the idea of a universal, primitive other, the bedrock of all human existence. It is a myth, a “scientifically” validated myth, validated by men who took bits and pieces of the theory of evolution – meaning that the myth has been held by scientific anthropological and social authority as a legitimate answer to what were deemed legitimate questions (within the framework of evolutionism). The problem here is that Kuper appears to rely on the idea that there is a pure science somewhere from which one can criticize those “myths” that are in fact held to be scientific by its upholders. This is not really then about science versus myth, but emergent science versus subsequent science, or, following Bourdieu, between orthodox science and heterodox science.

To begin with, Kuper takes special aim at a construct of cultural evolutionism, whose influence has been pervasive throughout anthropology and multiple forms and theories, that being “primitive society”:

“The whole conception is fundamentally unsound. There is not even a sensible way in which one can specify what a ‘primitive society’ is. The term implies some historical point of reference. It presumably defines a different type of society ancestral to more advanced forms, on the analogy of an evolutionary history of natural species. However, human societies cannot be traced back to a single point of origin. Nor is there any way of reconstituting prehistoric social forms, classifying them, and aligning them in a time series. There are no fossils of social organization.” (Kuper, 2005, p. 5)

Kuper emphasizes that “the history of the theory of primitive society is the history of an illusion. It is our phlogiston, our aether” (Kuper, 2005, p. 10). And why is it that “anthropologists have busied themselves for over a hundred years with the manipulation of a myth” (Kuper, 2005, p. 10)? First, Kuper explains that,

“A common way of accounting for the persistence of a myth is to suppose that it has political functions. Certainly the idea of primitive society could and did feed a variety of ideological positions. Among its most celebrated protagonists were Engels, Freud, Durkheim and  Kropotkin, men with very different political programmes.” (Kuper, 2005, p. 10)

Secondly, important political events in the colonial world also impacted on anthropologists’ need to devise certain politically suitable scientific explanations:

“British and American commentators on primitive society were also reacting to a variety of political events. The Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, and the Civil War in the United States revived earlier debates on slavery. Arguments about slavery in turn raised the great question whether human beings all had a common origin, or whether the races were separate species, with different ancestors. These issues divided Victorian anthropologists, and they formed two warring associations, the Ethnological Society of London and the Anthropological Society of London. The development of the Indian Empire and the colonisation of Africa raised further fundamental questions, about the nature of government, and of civilisation itself, which were heatedly debated in anthropological circles. In Germany, speculations about national culture and the Volksgeist fed the common belief that societies were based either on blood or on soil, but these romantic ideas were contested by liberal anthropologists in Berlin. In short, while the idea of primitive society was relevant to a number of great political issues, it was not necessarily associated with any one political position.” (Kuper, 2005, pp. 10-11)

On the Anthropological Society of London: Science and Race

Applying elements that we can see in Bourdieu’s approach, with the discussion of the history of the Anthropological Society of London, we can discern the creation of scientific authority, and the importance of social authority, in the invention of anthropology as a science. In 1863, the Anthropological Society of London was formed and “joined the ranks of England’s scientific institutions” (Rainger, 1978, p. 51). As Rainger tells us, that society was founded “with the object of promoting the study of Anthropology in a strictly scientific manner” (1978, p. 51). Unlike its predecessor, the Ethnological Society of London which Rainger claims avoided discussion of religious and political issues, “the Anthropological Society consciously mixed science and politics” (Rainger, 1978, p. 51). In particular, the Anthropological Society’s apparent fixation with race, and its justification of racist policies through racist theories, reflected the influence of the founder and president, Dr. James Hunt. (While Rainger says the ESL avoided politics, the fact remains that it was itself an offshoot of a political organization, the Aborigines Protection Society – see here for more details.)

[You can download a public domain volume of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of London published in 1869, or view it online. There is an excellent comprehensive collection of publications of the Anthropological Society of London that have been digitized by Google, and are all free to download from this page, consisting of The Anthropological Review, The Popular Magazine of Anthropology, and Memoirs Read Before the Anthropological Society of London.]

Hunt’s “personal scientific and institutional ideals” marked the influence he had on the development of the Anthropological Society of London (Rainger, 1978, p. 53), reminding us of Bourdieu’s observation that the struggle for power is imbricated with claims to scientific validity. He imposed his particular scientific definition of anthropology to suit his specific interests, using scientific authority to bolster his social authority. His work in relation to the wider society seems to blend two of Bourdieu’s approaches to applying anthropology, one by providing the supporting rationale for campaigns of conquest, and the other by trying to speak to a broader public in attracting interest to his Society, in its own campaign for primacy. In its explicit “scientific” racism, the ASL was the British counterpart of the American School of Ethnology, a society for which Hunt had obvious respect.

Let us keep in mind that the ASL was not a marginal, fringe organization in the founding of what later become institutional anthropology. Edward Burnett Tylor, who became the first Professor of Anthropology at Oxford, was a foreign secretary for the Anthropological Society of London. (Online, see his Primitive Culture and Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization.) Moreover, the ASL and ESL were later fused in what became the Royal Anthropological Institute that we know today, now a professional body for institutional anthropologists, for the most part.

In defining anthropology, Hunt declared that it is,

“the science of the whole nature of Man. With such a meaning it will include nearly the whole circle of sciences. Biology, anatomy, chemistry, natural philosophy, and physiology must all furnish the anthropologist with materials from which he may make his deductions. While Ethnology treats of the history or science of nations or races, we have to deal with the origin and development of humanity. So while Ethnography traces the position and arts of the different races of Man, it is our business to investigate the laws regulating the distribution of mankind.” (Hunt, 1863, p. 2)

With an eye on supplying “practical benefits,” Hunt even proposed an early version of military anthropology:

“How many thousands of our soldiers’ lives would be saved annually if we studied temperament in the selection of men suitable for hot and those for cold climates?” (Hunt, 1863, p. 3)

The luster of science, at the very start of anthropology’s climb toward professional status, and its initial dependence on the good will of the public to achieve its climb, is evident in Hunt’s remarks:

“Let us, then, show that we too can be earnest in our study, as well as the geologists or the astronomers. But let it be known we are as yet only groping in the dark, and know not yet what to study, or hardly what facts we want to get, to found our science. We have not only to found a science of Anthropology, but we have to do what we can to form some anthropologists….We have faith in the thinking public, and know that we shall be supported as long as we keep faith with them.” (Hunt, 1863, p. 19)

What the ASL also achieved, that was enduring in anthropology beyond the life of this particular society, was to imprint the discipline with a belief that indigenous peoples were destined to extinction, either in biological or cultural terms – and now that their expected disappearance is a grand failure, some of us elaborate theories to explain why they should not even be called indigenous (see for example, Kuper, 2003). One small sample of what the ASL published in the extinctionist vein can be found in T. Bendyshe, “On the Extinction of Races,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London, 1864 (pp. xcix-cxiii). “The higher races are destined to displace the lower,” said a Professor Waitz, quoted by Bendyshe,

“This extinction of the lower races is predestined by nature, and it would thus appear that we must not merely acknowledge the right of the white American to destroy the red man, but perhaps praise him that he has constituted himself the instrument of Providence in carrying out and promoting this law of destruction. The pious manslayer thus enjoys the consolation that he acts according to the laws of nature, which govern the rise and extinction of races.” (quoted in Bendyshe, 1864, p. c)

Museumizing the World: The Luster of Science, the Quest for Capital, and Service to the State

Anthropology as the pre-professional, public practice of a budding science, would succeed in legitimizing itself in part by imposing order on chaos. “Rare, abnormal, bizarre” freaks and curiosities collected by travelers would be stabilized in an ordered scheme of understanding. This is better explained by Jenkins (1994, pp. 242-243):

“In contrast to these fragmentary collections, emerging natural history museums in the late nineteenth century functioned to sort the world systematically into drawers, glass-fronted cases, bottles, and filing cabinets. This represented a shift from delighting in the world’s strange offerings and the appeal of subjective involvement to an attempt to master and control the world’s diversity through new forms of conceptualization….Based on scientific notions of classification, spurred by the Darwinian reorganization of evolutionary theory, and increasingly connected to universities and government surveys, natural history museums abandoned many of the aesthetic and mystical criteria that had previously determined the arrangement of objects. Instead, these museums began to emphasize the summary relationships among objects, the sense that this or that specimen metonymically suggested a larger and coherent whole, and the idea that a general understanding of the world could be inferred adequately by a collection of things removed from their context of origin.”

Some museums mounted public displays, presumably for public education, but also for profit, and either deliberately or indirectly provided a testing ground for an emerging anthropology, as a “proof of concept” program one might say. In Wondrous Difference, a superb book on world’s fairs, ethnographic spectacles, and the rise of visual ethnography, Alison Griffiths details the negotiations that took place between anthropology, popular culture, and commerce in attempting to strike the right balance between education, spectacle, and profit (2002, p. 47). Franz Boas himself, the “founding father” of institutional anthropology in the U.S., was also involved in putting natives on display at the Chicago World’s Fair, the Columbian Exposition, in 1892-1893, his first fieldwork conducted under the auspices of a museum. In the sense of Bourdieu’s three routes to power for scientists, early anthropology was “applied” to begin with, by catering to a broad public as it then began to claim scientific status in search of a permanent home:

“If world’s fairs served to launch the public face of anthropology to a vast popular audience, they also evoked anthropology’s uncomfortable doppel­ganger, popularized exhibits such as ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show’ and other for-profit spectacles that, to the untrained eye, may have looked no different from the officially sanctioned displays of native peoples.” (Griffiths, 2002, p. 47)

Other prominent anthropologists were tied to world’s fairs, such as Harvard’s

“Peabody Museum anthropologist Frederick Ward Putnam…designated director of Department M (which included anthropology) at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and his job involved overseeing exhibits housed in the Anthropology Building (including mannequin life groups, photographs, material artifacts, and anthropometric equipment) as well as the ethnological exhibits and concessions found on the Midway Plaisance.” (Griffiths, 2002, p. 49)

One observer went as far as asserting in 1902 that “World’s fairs are necessary to the proper study of mankind” (Griffiths, 2002, p. 49). To some degree, anthropologists acted as entrepreneurs, seeking the attention of those who would fund them, and provide them with a stable home in a university.

The rhetoric of anthropology was first employed for commercial advantage, while making the public more familiar with the emerging field of anthropology (Griffiths, 2002, p. 48). “Some mid-nineteenth-century museums, such as P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City, were run solely for profit,” Jenkins (1994, p. 243) tells us, “catering to a popular taste for the exotic and curious.” Indeed, P. T. Barnum, the founder of the circus company, put on shows such as the “Congress of Nations” and the “Ethnological Congress” (Griffiths, 2002, p. 55). The early American museums of natural history and ethnology “sought to collect, order, and display objects of the world….part of a general trend to objectify and, hence, dominate on a grand scale the world and its inhabitants” (Jenkins, 1994, p. 243). What Jenkins also notes is that the “search for profit and knowledge…found a similar institutional form” (Jenkins, 1994, p. 243). “Sanctioned by science but designed by commerce,” as Griffiths puts it (2002, p. 61), ethnography was a hybrid at the intersection of “scientific research” and popular amusement, producing a spectacle that reinforced white supremacist ideals.

One could develop a genealogy of early institutional forms of anthropology. This would connect early freak shows in London and Paris, to subsequent world’s fairs and commercial ethnographic exhibitions, to museums, and then only lastly, actual departments of anthropology. Likewise, one may find family resemblance in a variety of spectacles:

“Comparable places of spectacle such as zoos, botanical gardens, circuses, temporary or permanent exhibitions staged by missionary societies and museums of natural history, all exhibited other races – other species — and testified to the imperialism of 19^th-century nation-states.” (Corbey, 1993, p. 338)

Thus a number of studies link social Darwinism with imperialism, nationalism, commerce and science, through the nexus of categorization and display. Jenkins’ approach to this subject links colonialism and classification, science and display, in a discussion of American anthropological practices that developed in the late 19^th century. What I took to be his most poignant, summarizing statement from his survey was this:

“At stake in the physical arrangement of objects was the relationship between knowledge and power, between an interpretation of the world and the means to justify that interpretation. By offering visible evidence–a ‘theater of proof’–of the natural progress from savagery to barbarism to civilization, for example, museums and expositions linked science with the concerns of American imperialism. In this way, ethnological displays validated the utopian projections of many late-nineteenth-century elites–those who, in concert with federal funding, supported by government surveys, and backed by the prestige of science, produced an interpretation of social reality dependent upon theories of racial development, national progress, and, in some instances, the ultimate disappearance of native peoples.” (Jenkins, 1994, p. 257; emphasis added)

One question we need to ask ourselves is to what extent we have really shed the history of collecting, organizing, and displaying others, both for profit and to buttress our theories of the world. Not even the argument that we no longer put on commercial spectacles in public is a safe one, to the extent that we sell anthropology through our own specialized retail outlets: universities. For others, the way to exhibit ethnography to the paying public is via the ever more popular medium of ethnographic film. (And there is no moral superiority here: I write this as someone who is as much a player as anyone else.)

References:

Bendyshe, T. 1864. “On the Extinction of Races.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London: xcix-cxiii.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. “The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason.” Sociological Forum 6 (1): 3-26.

Corbey, Raymond. 1993. “Ethnographic Showcases, 1870-1930.” Cultural Anthropology, 8 (3): 338-369.

Griffiths, Alison. 2002. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York : Columbia University Press. (Ch. 2, “Science and Spectacle: Visualizing the Other at the World’s Fair,” pp. 46-85.)

Hunt, James. 1863. “Introductory Address on the Study of Anthropology.” The Anthropological Review, 1 (1) May: 1-20.

Jenkins, David. 1994. “Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays: Museum Exhibitions and the Making of American Anthropology.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36 (2): 242-270.

Kuper, Adam. 2003. “The Return of the Native”. Current Anthropology, 44 (3): 389-402.

Kuper, Adam. 2005. The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth. 2^nd ed. New York: Routledge. (Ch. 1, “The Myth of Primitive Society,” 3-19)

Rainger, Ronald. 1978. “Race, Politics, and Science: The Anthropological Society of London in the 1860s.” Victorian Studies, 22 (1): 51-70.

Rowe, John Howland. 1974. “The Renaissance Foundations of Anthropology.” In Regna Darnell, ed., Readings in the History of Anthropology, pp. 61-77. New York: Harper & Row.

Cultural imperialism rests on the power to universalize particularisms linked to a singular historical tradition by causing them to be misrecognized as such. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 41)

If the social sciences are Eurocentric, does this also mean that they are imperialist?

Where Immanuel Wallerstein finds liberalism as the underpinning of the geoculture of the capitalist world-system, rooted in Eurocentrism, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) find their counterparts in the hegemonic theories current in academia. They speak of commonplace notions and theses with which one thinks, but about which one does not think (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 41). And why not?

these presuppositions of discussion which remain undiscussed, owe much of their power to convince to the fact that, circulating from academic conferences to bestselling books, from semi-scholarly journals to expert’s evaluations, from commission reports to magazine covers, they are present everywhere simultaneously, from Berlin to Tokyo and from Milan to Mexico, and are powerfully supported and relayed by those allegedly neutral channels that are international organizations…and public policy think tanks. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 41)

The work of “theorization” not only abets but furthers the universalization of certain texts, while obscuring their historical origins. Bourdieu and Wacquant are here essentially in agreement with what Wallerstein argued in terms of the Eurocentrism of the social sciences, taking it deeper and linking it to a form of epistemic colonialism. As they explain it,

these commonplaces of the great new global vulgate that endless media repetition progressively transforms into universal common sense manage in the end to make one forget that they have their roots in the complex and controversial realities of a particular historical society, now tacitly constituted as model for every other and as yardstick for all things. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 42)

It’s not just the theories, or philosophical fashions that are globalized, as the origins of these are fairly easy to spot. Instead, what Bourdieu and Wacquant note really escapes scrutiny is the sudden, apparent globalization of seemingly technical terms and single concepts such as “multiculturalism.” We all end up on the same page either way, speaking an international lingua franca that is historically and ideologically situated within the authorized mindsets of a dominant world power (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, pp. 43-44). Here they move us from Eurocentrism to its more contemporary and specifically American variant.

The American Mecca (“By the way, will you be in Philadelphia?”)

Innocently and just out of curiosity, I was asked by a colleague if I would be in Philadelphia. I asked in return: “Why? What’s in Philadelphia that should interest me?” Of course my colleague was simply referring to the upcoming annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, when whole departments in Canada lose their faculty to this annual pilgrimage to the centre of anthropological power, to catch some of the light of the American luminaries, and (unintentionally?) massaging the ego of the monster. When I try to reverse the question, for fun, with American colleagues – “Will you be at CASCA this year?” – I get mild expressions of surprise at the question. We all travel to the AAA, it’s the centre; we don’t all go to CASCA, it’s the periphery. If one does not see the geoculture of the world-system at work in the political economy of academia, then one is just not looking.

Turning their attention specifically to the United States, and dominant theories there for discussing race and ethnicity, Bourdieu and Wacquant find the emergence of a globalized sociological orthodoxy, “one of the most striking proofs of the symbolic dominion and influence exercised by the USA over every kind of scholarly and, especially, semi-scholarly production, notably through the power of consecration they possess and through the material and symbolic profits that researchers in the dominated countries reap from a more or less assumed or ashamed adherence to the model derived from the USA” (1999, pp. 45-46). Where Wallerstein spoke of the original Eurocentrism of the social sciences, Bourdieu and Wacquant find this has particularly developed into contemporary Americanization, the Americanization of the Western world, and the Americanization of the universal. The products of American research, they say (quoting Thomas Bender), acquire “‘an international stature and a power of attraction’ comparable with those of ‘American cinema, pop music, computer software and basketball’” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 46). If the analysis of this as a simplistic form of imperialism, of violent imposition, does not work, it does not mean that a more subtle, more “collaborative” form of imperialism is not at work:

Symbolic violence is indeed never wielded but with a form of (extorted) complicity on the part of those who submit to it: the ‘globalization’ of the themes of American social doxa, or of its more or less sublimated transcription in semi-scholarly discourse, would not be possible without the collaboration, conscious or unconscious, directly or indirectly interested, of all the passeurs, ‘carriers’ and importers of designer or counterfeit cultural products (publishers, directors of cultural institutions such as museums, operas, galleries, journals, etc.) who, in the country itself or in target countries, propound and propagate, often in good faith, American cultural products, and all the American cultural authorities which, without being explicitly concerted, accompany, orchestrate and sometimes even organize the process of collective conversion to the new symbolic Mecca. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 46)

However, that is not sufficient for explaining the domination of American academic research products. What we need to pay attention to, Bourdieu and Wacquant argue, is the role of research granting agencies and philanthropic foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation (1999, p. 46). We could go further and point to a bevy of other granting foundations, from the Ford Foundation, to the Fullbright Scholar Program, and Wenner-Gren, all of which could be seen as performing the academic equivalent of the U.S. military’s former School of the Americas (known now as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). Aside from these foundations, internationally scholarly publishing tends to reinforce the conceptual priorities of the dominant (Anglo-)American centre, and here Bourdieu and Wacquant single out Basil Blackwell in particular, for imposing titles that are more in accord with “planetary common sense” (such as the existence of an “underclass”), even with texts that not only debunk the concept, but whose authors and editors vigorously protest the imposition. Similarly, though “cultural studies” does not exist as an entity in French universities, this did not stop Routledge from publishing a compendium on French Cultural Studies (1999, p. 47).

Back to Anthropology and Imperialism

As has been set forth so far, the imperialism of anthropology is not simply based on the role of anthropologists in the service of this or that colonial administration. If that was the mere extent of the relationship, then that would be good news. Instead the relationship goes much deeper, one that is more structural, and less a collection of individual tales from the field. Anthropology was born in the Western world and institutionalized in a specific manner, in particular universities, at a critical point in capitalist world history. Interestingly, for those who study imperialism in the media, and the rise of visual anthropology, this was the same period that marked, as Shohat and Stam (2002, p. 117) put it, “the giddy heights of the imperial project, with an epoch where Europe held sway over vast tracts of alien territory and hosts of subjugated peoples.” Like cinema, institutionalized anthropology also emerged at the end of the 1800s, as the U.S. conquered the Philippines in a bloody war that some say killed at least 200,000 people in outright fighting, and as many 1.5 million people in the first four years of occupation; born around the same time as the American massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890; at roughly the same time as the 1884 Berlin Conference, when European powers agreed on the division of Africa into colonial possessions; again, in the same period as the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, and the Battle of Rorke’s Drift between the British and Zulus in 1879. The leading cinema-producing countries, were also the leading imperialist countries, and the leading seats of anthropology: Britain, France, Germany, and the U.S. Imperialism provided the subject matter, the supporting structures, the dominant conceptual concerns, and the motive for anthropology.

Institutional anthropology has been located within one particular centre, specifically a North American and northwestern European one. In terms of the continued dominance of American anthropology in particular, one has to bear in mind the sheer quantitative dominance in terms of number of scholars, number of university departments, associations, conferences, journals and research funds, a dominance that is so massive in quantitative terms that it acquires a qualitative value.

The very fact of “world anthropologies” makes reference to this domination, and is supposedly, presumably, an answer to it. More on that in later posts.

References:

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1999. “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason.” Theory, Culture & Society 16 (1): 41-58.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 2002. “The Imperial Imaginary.” In Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk, editors, The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, pp. 117-147. Oxford: Blackwell.

Professional Knowledge Creation in the World-System

Building an anti-imperialist “anthropology,” plus an anthropology that studies imperialism, and that studies itself as a received invention of imperialism, means much more than just analyzing and questioning how anthropologists served this or that colonial venture. It means totally unthinking anthropology as a social science; more than that, it means totally unthinking social science. For whatever discussions of “decolonizing anthropology” have achieved, this ground was never covered in those discussions.

In the previous posts the discussion was centered on opening questions in a critique of the relationship between anthropology and imperialism, along with questions concerning the terms and concepts that, initially, appear to be central to the debate. Here we focus on the wider intellectual and geopolitical context of anthropology’s institutionalization, and the received baggage of 19^th century European social science. In particular, I resort to Immanuel Wallerstein for his analysis of the institutionalization and formalization of the social sciences, and how the very process of institutionalization created the knowledge boundaries, categories, and concepts we use today. Not least among these received conceptual boundaries, fundamental to the division of knowledge into “social sciences,” is the arbitrary construction of “society,” “economics,” and “politics.” Moving beyond the Eurocentrism of the social sciences also means getting past the false divisions in knowledge created by these institutionalized conceptualizations.

The particular works by Immanuel Wallerstein to which I will be referring, or that shape the overall discussion in some way, are:

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. 2006. European Universalism: The Rhetoric of Power. New York: New Press. (Ch. 2, “Can One Be a Non-Orientalist? Essentialist Particularism,” 31-49)

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. 1999. The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Ch. 11, “Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science,” 168-184)

Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. 1996. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Ch. 1, “The Historical Construction of the Social Sciences, from the Eighteenth Century to 1945,” 1-32)

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. 1991. Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press in association with B. Blackwell. (Ch. 8, “A Comment on Epistemology: What is Africa?” 127-129; Ch. 9, “Does India Exist?” 130-134)

I strongly recommend these for a start. One really cannot “do” or “write” anthropology innocently any more after reflecting on these works.

The Institutionalization of the Social Sciences

In Open the Social Sciences, the Gulbenkian Commission led by Wallerstein, highlighted the main historical trends that led to the institutionalization of knowledge in universities. “The need of the modern state for more exact knowledge on which to base its decisions,” they observe led to the emergence of new, though still uncertain, categories of knowledge already in the 18th century. The university was until then a largely moribund institution, at least since the 16^th century, having been too tightly linked with the Church. In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, however, the university was largely revived as the primary locus for the creation of knowledge (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 6).

The revival of the university was not actually led primarily by the natural scientists, but rather those who stood to lose most from the development of a hierarchy of a value emerging from the split between science and philosophy (see the “two cultures” below). Instead, it was “historians, classicists, scholars of national literatures…who did most to revive the universities in the course of the nineteenth century, using it as a mechanism to obtain state support for their scholarly work” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8). They sought the alliance of natural scientists in promoting the new university structures, in order to profit “from the positive profile of the natural scientists,” and in the process reinforcing the distinction, and the tension, between the humanities/arts and the sciences (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8).

“The intellectual history of the nineteenth century is marked above all by this disciplinarization and professionalization of knowledge,” the Commission argued, pointing to “the creation of permanent institutional structures designed both to produce new knowledge and to reproduce the producers of knowledge” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 7).

In the wake of the French Revolution, and especially in Great Britain and France, the pressure for political and social reorganization were felt strongly by the powers that be. In place of a belief in the “natural order” of things, many now recognized the normalcy of change, and argued that,

the solution lay rather in organizing and rationalizing the social change that now seemed to be inevitable in a world in which the sovereignty of the “people” was fast becoming the norm, no doubt hoping thereby to limit its extent. (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8).

“But if one were to organize and rationalize social change,” the Commission points out, “one had first of all to study it and understand the rules which governed it” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 8). Hence the proclaimed need for a “social science.” Social science was charged with developing “systematic, secular knowledge about reality that is somehow validated empirically” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 2). The classical premise of science at this point was two-fold: one, the Newtonian vision of a symmetry between past and future, and two, Cartesian dualisms of humans and nature, mind and matter, and so forth. Accompanied by notions of progress, and a finite, knowable world, the aim was to “facilitate the explorations and exploitation demanded by progress, and to make practical and realizable Western aspirations to dominion” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 4). Exploration, exploitation, and rapid social change, all pointed to the need to investigate order, and for that Newtonian physics offered the most useful support.

It was especially in the period from 1850 to 1914, when we witness a university boom in Europe, North America, and Australia, with many new universities being founded in that very period, that we also see the disciplinarization of knowledge in the form of the social sciences as we know them today (Gulbenkian, 1996, pp. 12-13). The five primary social sciences were history, economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Owing to the struggle between science and philosophy, and the social prestige of science, the primary emphases of these “social sciences” were the “emphasis on the existence of a real world that is objective and knowable, the emphasis on empirical evidence, [and] the emphasis on the neutrality of the scholar” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 15).

Between 1850 and 1945, the new social science disciplines were institutionalized: “This was done by establishing in the principal universities first chairs, then departments offering courses leading to degrees in the discipline” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 3). “Training” was institutionalized as was “research”: “the creation of journals specialized in each of the disciplines; the construction of associations of scholars along disciplinary lines (first national, then international); the creation of library collections catalogued by disciplines” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 3). Of course one of the key elements in this institutionalization was for the social sciences to stress the differences between them, what made them unique, and thus what required that a special place be made for them in the new universities. Institutionalization, disciplinarization, expanding world capitalism, and rapid social change thus all combined to create and shape the social sciences as we have known them. Each of these is tied into the others.

The Eurocentrism of Social Science

Wallerstein’s core argument is that the creation of the structures of knowledge, specifically the institutionalization of the social sciences, is a phenomenon that is inextricably linked to the very formation and maturation of the capitalist world system (or what others might loosely, and less comprehensively, refer to as imperialism or capitalist hegemony). There is nothing that is either natural, logical, or accidental about the institutionalization of the social sciences. The structures of knowledge are accepted ways of producing knowledge of the world. In particular, the universalism-particularism dichotomy, and all framings of knowledge that fit within or between that polarity (of especial relevance to anthropology’s intellectual mission, and central to the revival of cosmopolitanism), is part of the intellectual double bind of the capitalist world system (see Wallerstein, 1991, p. 128).

In broad terms, “social science has been Eurocentric throughout its institutional history,” Wallerstein explains, “which means since there have been departments teaching social science within university systems” (1999, p. 168). There should be no surprise here, he adds, since social science “is a product of the modern world-system, and Eurocentrism is constitutive of the geoculture of the modern world” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168). In particular, “as an institutional structure, social science originated largely in Europe (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168).

By “Europe,” Wallerstein means primarily western Europe and North America. One could broaden that, using native studies discourse, to mean Europe and European settler states. Even with that more expansive definition, Wallerstein observes that  “the social science disciplines were in fact overwhelmingly located, at least up to 1945, in just five countries – France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the United States” (1999, p. 168). “Even today,” he continues, “despite the global spread of social science as an activity, the large majority of social scientists worldwide remain Europeans” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168). Penetrating deeper, Wallerstein argues that,

Social science emerged in response to European problems, at a point in history when Europe dominated the whole world-system. It was virtually inevitable that its choice of subject matter, its theorizing, its methodology, and its epistemology all reflected the constraints of the crucible within which it was formulated. (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 168)

The Eurocentrism of social science has come under increasingly vigorous attack, especially in the period since 1945 with the formal decolonization of Africa, Asia, and much of the Caribbean, and Wallerstein sees this attack as “fundamentally justified.” Moreover, he argues, that “if social science is to make any progress in the twenty-first century, it must overcome the Eurocentric heritage that has distorted its analyses and its capacity to deal with the problems of the contemporary world” (Wallerstein, 1999, pp. 168-169). To do this, we must understand what constitutes Eurocentrism and its “many avatars” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 169).

There are at least five distinct yet overlapping ways that social science is Eurocentric, as Wallerstein explains. The Eurocentrism of social science is expressed in “(1) its historiography, (2) the parochiality of its universalism, (3) its assumptions about (Western) civilization, (4) its Orientalism, and (5) its attempts to impose the theory of progress” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 169).

While “institutionalized social science started as an activity in Europe,” Wallerstein’s argument is about much more than this important historical and cultural recognition. The problem with Eurocentric social science is that it has been “charged with painting a false picture of social reality by misreading, grossly exaggerating, and/or distorting the historical role of Europe, particularly its historical role in the modern world” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 177). “Whatever Europe did,” Wallerstein affirms, “has been analyzed incorrectly and subjected to inappropriate extrapolations, which have had dangerous consequences for both science and the political world” (1999, p. 178).

The Received Baggage of the 19^th Century

The “two cultures” division is one of the most fundamental bases for the modern world-system’s structures of knowledge. By the “two cultures” Wallerstein is drawing on the work of C.P. Snow, and referring to the division between the sciences and the humanities. “No other historical system has instituted a fundamental divorce between science and philosophy/humanities,” Wallerstein observes (1999, p. 183). It took about three centuries for this rupture to become triumphant in Eurocentric thought, and to become institutionalized. Now that this has taken place, the “two cultures” is “fundamental to the geoculture and forms the basis of our university systems” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 183).

It is this very split, between the two cultures, that enabled “the modern world to put forward the bizarre concept of the value-neutral specialist, whose objective assessments of reality could form the basis not merely of engineering decisions (in the broadest sense of the term) but of sociopolitical choices as well” (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 183). Indeed, one of the central foundations of the Eurocentric social sciences is this very idea of “objective science”:

The idea that science is over here and sociopolitical decisions are over there is the core concept that sustains Eurocentrism, since the only universalist propositions that have been acceptable are those that are Eurocentric. Any argument that reinforces this separation of the two cultures thus sustains Eurocentrism. If one denies the specificity of the modern world, one has no plausible way of arguing for the reconstruction of knowledge structures, and therefore no plausible way of arriving at intelligent and substantively rational alternatives to the existing world-system. (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 183)

With the split between the two cultures, the alternative to “science” was seemingly plagued by “a lack of internal cohesiveness, which did not help its practitioners plead their cause with the authorities, especially given their seeming inability to offer ‘practical’ results” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 6). This story should be very familiar to anthropologists, in their drive to create “applied anthropology” and anthropology in the service of military, intelligence, and colonial administration. The opinions of the authorities, especially those promising funding, and demanding practical benefits, have weighed heavily. From early on, “it had begun to be clear that the epistemological struggle over what was legitimate knowledge was no longer a struggle over who would control knowledge about nature (the natural scientists had clearly won exclusive rights to this domain by the eighteenth century) but about who would control knowledge about the human world” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 6).

One can sum up in this way the key dichotomies that arose from the 19^th century institutionalization of the social sciences, dichotomies that are vital to sustaining the Eurocentrism of the social sciences:

• science versus philosophy/humanities
• discontinuity-continuity
• state-centrism in analysis
• idiographic versus nomothetic
• determinism versus agency
• objectivity versus subjectivity
• politics versus economics

In review:

Anthropology’s Baggage

The Gulbenkian Commission devoted attention to each of the five social sciences. What follows is their description and analysis of the emergence, institutionalization and disciplinarization of anthropology. At the most basic level, the expansion of the modern world-system involved the European encounter and usually conquest of the peoples of the rest of the world. In particular, those people who were organized in social structures that Europeans classed as small, without written records, and not part of a geographically wide ranging religious systems, were classed as “tribes” or “races.” They became the domain of what would later be called anthropology. Anthropology had largely begun as a practice of explorers, travelers, and officials of the colonial services of the European powers, and then subsequently became institutionalized as a university discipline (Gulbenkian, 1996, pp. 20-21).

Anchored within the structures of the university, anthropologists were constrained to maintain the practice of ethnographic fieldwork “within the normative premises of science” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 21). Some were of course attracted to ideas of a universal natural history of humanity, with assumed stages of development, but their discipline was one pressed into studying particular peoples, requiring a very specific methodology, that of fieldwork. Consumed with the ostensible interest in human difference, and the particulars of non-European modes of being, anthropologists largely adhered to an idiographic epistemology, with some lingering desires for developing nomothetic propositions (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 22).

Anthropology’s special baggage then – in the preliminary type of analysis offered by the Gulbenkian Commission – was idiographic research, focused on the non-West, and in particular focused on tribes (not the non-Western “high civilizations” that were more the domain of the Orientalists). As we go further, this analysis will be deepened significantly, but it will be useful to remember some of the broad historical forces at work, as presented in this essay.

Phrases such as “decolonizing anthropology”* and “anthropology and the colonial encounter” have become salient in anthropology especially since they are the titles of two of the better known, most widely quoted books on the subject. What subject? That is what is lacking clarity, because presumably the phrases above are meant to mean something, and if so, then one has to wonder: why not “anthropology and imperialism” or “de-imperializing anthropology”? What choices are we making when we choose the term colonialism, rather than imperialism?

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).

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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* 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.

Introduction

On 26 February 2009, a report by John Stanton was published on this blog (Some Breaking News on the Human Terrain System: Death Threats Against Female Colleagues). At the time it caused some uproar, was discussed on several other blogs, and perhaps no other story on this blog received so many comments as that one (200 comments to be exact). The story was followed up with this one: US Army 101st Airborne Investigative Report on Human Terrain System. In the midst of the furious commentary, many allegations were made about the person at the center of the story, Dr. Marilyn Dudley-Flores. Now, for the first time, Dr. Dudley-Flores presents her own story to the public. The text that follows was first sent to me by Dr. Dudley-Flores as an e-mail message earlier this week, and it is of course reproduced here with her permission and approval.

One last point before we proceed: as we know, the U.S. Congress is conducting an assessment of the Human Terrain System (see: John Stanton: U.S. Congress to Assess Human Terrain System [29 September 2009]; U.S. Congress and the Human Terrain System [04 October 2009]; and, John Stanton: US Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harm’s Way [10 October 2009]). It may be useful for all parties to send as much information and analysis as possible to the U.S. House and Senate Armed Services Committees, in order to assist them in their review.

It may be for naught, as the same U.S. Congress has supported HTS generously. Indeed, one HTS blogger, “Caleb” (who of course blocked access to his blog, Always Under Way, as soon as it started to get attention) was already celebrating the Congressional review in his post for Wednesday, 30 September, 2009, “H.R. 2647“:

“This will be an opportunity for this amazing program to gain even greater buy-in by Congress, the Department of Defense, and the Obama Administration – all of whom have expressed their support for the program….That’s right, support the expansion of the HTT concept, including to other combatant command areas of responsibility!! We’re worldwide!” [his emphasis]

Well, Caleb was totally wrong about the play, “Anthropology–Or How to Win Friends and Influence Afghans,” thinking it was a prestige-making event that would applaud HTS, rather than criticize and mock it. He is very cheerful, and while his gushing optimism may be correct when it comes to Congress supporting HTS further (I think it will), the idea would be to make it as difficult as possible for them to accept a positive assessment without producing a tortuous, labored explanation.

From Marilyn Dudley-Flores:

[originally directed primarily to Christian Caryl at Foreign Policy]

I have just seen your piece entitled “Reality Check: Human Terrain Teams” over the Foreign Policy website dated 8 Sep 2009 ( http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/08/reality_check_human_terrain_teams ).

I have no major argument with your piece, but I do feel you unfairly cast me in a “feuding” role with soldiers in the field in Afghanistan. You wrote that writer John Stanton “included excerpts from an internal investigation by the 101st Airborne Division that harshly criticized failings in training and administration that contributed to a disastrous feud between one of the HTT scientists, Marilyn Dudley-Flores, and regular Army troops in the field in Afghanistan involving allegations of sexual harassment and death threats against the professor.”  Who were these regular Army troops?

I wanted to let you know that at no time was I locked in a feud with anyone at all in Afghanistan. There is a clear difference between a feud and a systematic running assault. One implies something along the lines of a more or less equal conflict that proceeds over time; the other has one or more perpetrators attacking a victim or victims.

FYI. I was sent out from Stateside to Afghanistan, spending 7-8 days in transit. Upon my leaving Fort Benning, Georgia was the only prior “heads-up” that was given to my team that I was being sent to them to co-lead and to provide counterinsurgency research services for the division-level Human Terrain Analysis Team (HTAT) on Bagram air base. The HTAT was then wired up to the 101st Army Airborne, although how we were wired up was not clear, because none of the women were allowed by the HTAT team leader to make briefings to or go to meetings with the senior staff officers of the 101st Army Airborne, as we were supposed to do. On Bagram, I almost immediately found my SECRET clearance only “pending,” although official documents on me do not reflect that, indicating that by 1 Sep 2008 I had an unfettered SECRET clearance. Having only a “pending” SECRET meant that I could not be badged to work in my own office on Bagram. This was a mystery (and still is in some respects) until HTS management “worked the issue” and got me badged somehow.

After about two weeks waiting to be badged, when I was able to get into my office in the day-to-day, after some time, I saw the female complement of the HTAT (three women) working in the office under such a regime, as if they were POWs, hectored around by, evidently what turned out to be two phony PhDs, a former Special Forces man with an apparent learning disorder and a lot of muscle, and an immature 30-year-old 1LT in the Puerto Rican National Guard. The “muscleman,” our HTAT’s deputy team leader, had formerly worked for the subcontractor company that had recruited and hired me for the HTS through an American Sociological Association ad. Present on our team was a decent young man with good credentials, a military veteran, and a criminal justice background, but he was due to rotate back Stateside soon after I arrived. With him gone, we were at the entire mercy of the others as I would go on to experience with the other women.

In the meantime, my subcontractor company, stopped paying me. About a month on the scene, in early December, the day after they began to catch my pay up, they inexplicably fired me from my position as a key asset to the Army Human Terrain System in the war zone. This is a little like a soldier in the foxhole saying to his mates, “Sorry, guys, I’m off the clock, my pink slip has been handed to me.” HTS managers apparently didn’t know anything about it.

HTS managers scrambled to turn this new fiasco around. That is when the managers discovered some sort of communication between Bagram and the little hiring company exuding false information about the fit of my body armor and my ability to get in and out of humvees. Even after this was laid to rest, a company spokesperson was talking to authorities on Bagram about my having been fired. HTS managers had to go to extraordinary steps to make it clear that the 101st was supposed to be communicating about HTAT personnel with them and no one else.

This situation might not have existed except that the phonies had been “empire building” and covering their lack of ability to perform our mission with one or more Reserve Information Operations officers on the 101st’s senior staff who were jones’ing to hook up with the HTS program and make the large amount of money that HTS’ers did. That element covered for their inadequate performance, as well as contributed to the information ops that was devised against me while I was in transit to Bagram. (Read: a weapon of war was used against me before I set foot on Bagram.) I was not a welcome addition to the team because the baddies already figured out that I had a substantial background from Googling on me. (They did not previously know me from training, although one of the women recalled seeing me around Fort Leavenworth. Several hundreds or thousands of hits will come up if you Google on “Dudley,” “Dudley-Rowley,” or “Dudley-Flores.”) They evidently feared exposure as posers and they found a lot of fodder with which to propagandize me.

Not able to zing me back Stateside within a few days, the real slagging began. While sexual harassment was present, and had been before I had arrived, that was the least of our problem. All of us women were in fear of physical intimidation, as had been used on us. And, a major biggy: the “Rev. Dr.” Sturgis, the team leader, was ramping up the immature 1LT to view us as traitors. Outside the wire, in the field in Ghazni Province, in December 2008, he had the 1LT trying to maneuver us into specific villages where we knew specific Taliban military commanders had re-infiltrated. We already had enough data we needed about those villages to know they were red hot and no purpose was served by going there for more interviews, us women unarmed. We would, in fact, have been going off mission as previously briefed if we would have gone to those areas. The three of us women on that mission knew what the story was on that note. The 1LT was following directions from Sturgis to position us to get attacked and killed. (At no time was anyone “just trying to scare us.”) And, the 1LT was so vapidly enamored with Sturgis with his promises of Dubai vacations, good officer evaluation reports, cherry postings, etc. that he would have been dumb enough to drive us over an IED-strewn road if Sturgis had told him to do it. None of the HTS managers back Stateside changed words with me when I turned to them for advice and told them that I was not taking the women into those places. The 1LT was crestfallen when he heard from higher-ups on the FOB where we lived on-mission that those places were too hot. But, he really was fit to be tied when he saw John Stanton’s story in December that tagged on a paragraph about us women’s difficulties in the field (that did not disclose any information from the scene that could not be found over Wikipedia). And, in any case, I was not the one to leak that news to Mr. Stanton.

But, Sturgis and his buddies likely thought that I was the leaker since they were obsessed with targeting me. So, next thing we knew, we were being hustled away from FOB Ghazni back to Bagram. Come to find out, Sturgis, himself and/or through the 1LT, communicated to the CO of the FOB that we were in violation of operational security and needed to come back to Bagram to be called to account. We were greeted to a sign in the office about being traitors (as seen over http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/02/26/some-breaking-news-on-the-human-terrain-system-death-threats/). No one ever debriefed us about any OPSEC violation. The 1LT’s behavior worsened.

On the 31st of December 2008, Sturgis and the 1LT tried to get me off alone on a part of the Joint Operations Compound on Bagram that we never used, but we women foiled that attempt. In the meantime, while the 1LT had a pistol and a rifle, the civilian men (except one of the posers who had gone on vacation) were buying long guns in the bazaar and trying to get them operational. One of the women, a civilian who was a Army Reserve captain, but not in uniform on this tour of duty, was hard over to obtain a weapon. Her husband from Stateside was demanding that she buy a gun if push came to shove. When military women in my sleeping hooch on Bagram found out what was happening to me, they lent me a rifle to keep in my sleeping cubicle in case they had to step out and would not be able to defend me. (One of the women’s superiors had previously barred the 1LT from their workplace on Bagram because of his inappropriate behaviors.)

I began carrying my combat knife at all times. On the 2nd of January 2009, we discovered the death threat written in Spanish on a dry erase board in the office. After five days’ trying to get advice from a silent HTS management back Stateside, at the behest of friends, family, and the other women, I asked my Member of Congress to get a message to the Commanding General about what was happening to us. A few hours’ later, HTS Deputy Program Manager, retired Army Colonel Steve Rotkoff phoned and told me to come back Stateside to report on what had been going on.

I did so and fully expected to re-deploy from the verbal and gestural responses I was getting from HTS managers who heard my three-and a-half-hour report. But, instead, afterwards, I was left for about four weeks in a Kansas City hotel room until I received a firing notice in the e-mail from the subcontractor that recruited me and hired me for the HTS. They claimed that BAE and the government authorized them to fire me for inadequate performance. Pinging HTS managers to confirm that this was, indeed, a genuine firing this second time around, met with silence. Two days later, John Stanton had the first of his stories up online about what happened to me and the other women.

It is interesting to note that in the timeframe that we women were trying to get help, and as subsequent events played out, HTS salesmen were selling the program to President Obama for the cornerstone of the civilian surge in Afghanistan: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/03/27/afghan_plan_adds_4000_us_troops?mode=PF

How we were treated suggests that our concerns were covered up so as not to blemish the sales pitch to the President. For, in the case of the only Afghanistan HTAT, it demonstrated that the HTS was easily sabotaged from its internal “bugs” contradictory to its mission as a warfighting system.

In the meantime, Sturgis was recalled around the same time as myself and fired or forced to resign. However, he almost immediately found work with some facet of Glevum Associates and I would not be surprised if he found his way back to Afghanistan: Kabul or back on Bagram — by June 2009. (Glevum was a subcontractor in service to MPRI-L3 that was on contract with the government to provide various media assessment support services in the region to HTS, the 101st Army Airborne [now to the 82nd Army Airborne], and another client.)

I was fired before the 101st was able to complete their “window dressing” investigation that involved no Criminal Investigation Division authorities. Two-thirds or more of the report given to my Member of Congress is a tissue of lies. The pictorial evidence meant they had to cop to the fact that sexual harassment was going on. Some parts of the report are actually revealing, however. Like, how the 1LT acted in ways to make his death threat credible. Like, (and I learned this later from more information sent my Member of Congress) how the Special Forces “muscleman” had his Joint Ops Compound badge revoked for his failure to lead as “deputy team leader.” Like how the “Rev. Dr.” and the muscleman were blacklisted for contract hire in connection to any 101st capacity ever again.

When I FOIPA’d for the background materials that went into the 101st’s “investigation,” I obtained Sworn Statements from three Army lieutenant colonels on the senior staff of the 101st and an Army Reserve LTC working for an HTS unit near ours. The 101st’s investigation lasted from about mid-January to late March. In the last week of their investigation, they pulled these Sworn Statements out of these LTCs. All of them would be viewed as “false official statements” under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Recall that by this time I had already been fired. In that final week of the investigation, statements were sought from these men to the tune that I told incredible stories about famous people I knew, about my prior military and other background, about poor alleged production that came from me (Sturgis blocked all of us women from briefing any senior officers about the operationally relevant data that we had uncovered in our counterinsurgent activities as we were supposed to do). Additionally, these Army field-grade officers made whopper statements about my being so fat that I had to come through doors at an angle and could barely walk and stand upright on a level floor or fit into a tactical vehicle. One of these men claimed that I was in the central Joint Ops Compound building all the time complaining about living conditions, etc. The fact is, the whole time I was in Afghanistan, I was only in the office part of that closely neighboring building for a grand total of two hours, about one and a half hours spent with an Army Inspector General LTC explaining what was happening to me and the other women just prior to being sent outside the wire to FOB Ghazni. A FOIPA procedure revealed that the man didn’t even file a report on my visit.

As I have said elsewhere, I think the whole debacle started out small with the posers and their buddies not wanting to be found out to be posing and/or inadequate to the mission, along with such facts that they had probably, in toto, been paid about one million federal dollars for not doing the work of the HTAT and instead spending a good portion of their time abusing the HTAT women. Yet to be discovered is what, if any role, Sturgis and one of the Info Ops officers played in diverting or causing to be misused (if indeed the case) a federal money train of perhaps as much as five million dollars from federal contractor MPRI-L3 to Glevum Associates where the HTS and the 101st Airborne and another party were clients. It will also be revealing to find out who all among the 101st senior staff were in on the active perpetration in the overall affair, who were passive perpetrators, and just how widespread was any sort of “social contagion” from Sturgis et al.’s mythmaking among the 101st senior staff officers. Whomever all were in uniform who participated in these events should be held to account just for giving the 101st a black eye on the “Duty, Honor, Country” front. So far, my FOIPA’d information suggests that almost all the 101st’s senior staff officers were ultimately involved in some way. If that is so, where is the 101st’s Army Airborne’s honor?

After I was fired…. When John’s 26 February 2009 article made the international online media, I began to be “counterblogged” over the Open Anthropology website (now Zero Anthropology). The blogger was an Army lieutenant colonel I did not know, LTC Robert Bateman. He was found to be counterblogging on me from his Pentagon computer during duty hours from his work in a DoD think tank close to the SECDEF. Besides Dr. Max Forte’s publicized data, I also FOIPA’d the proof right out of Bateman’s machine. In his blogs, he made crazy statements to make it sound like I never worked with Dr. Louis Dupree on the rescue and relocation of Afghans (a theme that the Bagram HTT LTC would hype in his Sworn Statement riddled with falsehoods). Bateman went on that I might be a fake veteran, and that “Mata la vaca” means “The Cow Kills.” I and my supporters’ analysis later found out that one of his associates is close to the HTS and has a history in opposition research. That person was Sean McFate, Dr. Montgomery McFate’s husband. I had to be separated from Dr. Dupree, now seen by a wider audience as the stellar Afghanistan scholar that he always was, because how crazy would it be seen in the media if a Dupree associate on a substantial project involving Afghans was removed from Afghanistan and the HTS (amid public accusations that very few scholars with any Afghanistan credentials are in the country with HTS)?

I did not engage in a disastrous feud with soldiers in the field, but I most assuredly am doing my best to let Congress and federal executives know what happened to me and the other HTAT women in Afghanistan in detail. Because, it is our story that is the “poster child” of what has gone wrong with the Army’s Human Terrain System. There are many stories like ours from among our “big tent” teammates from former and currently serving HTS’ers. Ours was just more egregious in many ways. However, in the aggregate, there is a clear signal in the noise, a pattern that reveals the raging flaws in the HTS program and who all are/have been those who create and/or duplicate those flaws. In many respects I have been making a human terrain analysis of the Human Terrain System. My abilities are not so much from my intermittent 30-year background as a professor, as from the other things I have done to put food on the table during that same time span, like having been a soldier, having been an investigative news reporter, having done criminal justice research for real live drug and human trafficking cases, and having sought grants and contracts for scientific studies outside of Academe in which I partnered. It is, in fact, this background in addition to my academic PhD that made me a logical asset for the HTS.

What has not been widely mentioned in the media thus far has been my prior background at the forefront of “human terrain analysis” in the organization of social structural concepts and analytical techniques for a victimization and property damages assessment for Kuwait toward the end of the Gulf War. This effort that created a body of methodology and some other features, like a hybrid team for insertion into a war-torn area and a reachback-like cell preceded Mitzy Cybele Carlough’s (aka Montgomery McFate’s) 1994 dissertation by at least three years, her bar napkin epiphany by 10 years, and the 2006 Army and Marine Field Manual on counterinsurgency by 15 years. (By the way, the other HTAT women did not even know this until I told them at supper in the chow hall the night before I was flown off of Bagram in January. So much for my bragging on myself and talking about “famous people.”) I only mention it now to show how dysfunctional the HTS was/is.

It is the height of craziness that I was not re-deployed with the HTS. What is more, though I have been in demand for other programs requiring a SECRET clearance, I can’t be hired for the jobs because Sturgis and collaborators screwed my clearance up. I call them collaborators in every sense of the word because they not only sabotaged me, but the functioning of a warfighting system in Afghanistan. At the end of the day, what was done was sabotage and not merely “grab assing” among bored field-grade officers and sophomoric pranksterism with civilian “good ol’ boy” buddies. And, it is a national shame that HTS higher-ups thanked me for my role in bringing it to their attention, my life on the line, by firing me to cover up the facts. We Viet Nam Era vets call such treatment the “f**k you very much for your service” phenomenon. The more things change the more they stay the same.

To date, I have pulled together 600+ pages of evidence, analyses, and narrative. This packet is in the hands of members of both the Senate and House Armed Services Committees and other interested parties. I can forward a copy to you, Mr. Cary, if you are interested.

In the meantime, please know that I was not a party to a “disastrous feud.” I and my female teammate were victimized by “snakes in our foxhole” while attempting to perform our duties. We tried to get help as best we could, and at other times, we kept our heads down to survive. Other than that note, thank you for writing about the HTS. It is important to keep it in the media eye and to discuss its issues.

Many Kind Regards,

Marilyn “Stryker” Dudley-Flores, PhD

Almost one year ago we celebrated the remarkable 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Today we learn that his body has died. In the meantime, we continue to work with what he has left us, as can be seen in the latest posts on this blog concerning his vision of a future anthropology, as seen back from the 1960s. One of the statements he produced at the time continues to be one of the leading mottos behind this project. I look forward to continue grappling with his work. No goodbyes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, rather à la prochaine fois.

Claude Lévi-Strauss obituary
French anthropologist whose analysis of kinship and myth gave rise to structuralism as an intellectual force. Obituary by Maurice Bloch, The Guardian, Tuesday 3 November 2009.

Image:
Sketch of Claude Lévi-Strauss, 20 August 2007, Edward Drantler: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Levi-Strauss.jpg