Armed Anthropologists

The idea that the Pentagon can win this bogus 'war on terror' by bringing anthropologists into the battlefield seems yet another indicator of the dementia that has permeated Washington since the Bush junta came to power (at least). Writing in this week's issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, my former comrade from Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab protests, Hugh Gusterson, discusses two new programs initiated by Robert Gates, Minister of War: the Human Terrain Team system and Project Minerva. According the Gusterson, the American Anthropological Association has already condemned the first of these and expressed reservations about the second being managed through the war department (as opposed to the National Federation of Scientists, which normally funds social scientists' work on behalf of the federal govt). Anthropologists are widely known to have collaborated with the military during the US-Vietnam war and certainly played a shameful role in the conquest of African and North American territories (et al.) - attempting to quantify savagery in support of colonialism or even genocide - so conceptually and in fact, this is hardly a new idea.... but putting them in military camo and arming them? i know what all my anthropology professors would have said about that: insane, immoral and intellectually infantile.

As Gusterson rightly points out, "Embedded anthropologists are on shaky ethical terrain because they cannot realistically get free consent from their interlocutors while dressed in camouflage and traveling with U.S. soldiers in Humvees. Similarly, they cannot control the use of the information they collect for the military, and thus, cannot ensure it isn't used to harm communities they study." In an illegal war, such activity should put the anthros in the same war criminal category as their counterparts in psychology who "monitor" the torturing of prisoners. It's not anywhere near as sexy as spying on people, which was what happened in Vietnam; imagining how any individual scientist could even consider this to be serious anthropological work on any level boggles the mind.

The Pentagon would be better served by sending anthropologists into AIPAC to gain an understanding of how decision-makers in Washington are so willingly and readily compliant with the zionist agenda. Certainly this falls within the purview of understanding the cultural roots of terror? Discussing terrorism with Arabs, i have always found Israel to be their starting point, and the US' support for israeli terror a close second in justifying the actions of Muslims opting to spread the violence into equal shares for all. That there's never been much equity/balance in this equation is also part of the cultural framework behind it. If i were an Iraqi anthropologist, i'd be very interested in studying how the american military has come to see culture as more operative than history in the current phase of this conflict - or why they believe that culture and history can be separated to promote further conquest and occupation in the Middle East today.