I ran across this article in the New York Times, and also received the petition from academic anthropologists mentioned in the 7th paragraph.
Just to out myself, I’m a trained anthropologist and a leftist activist. I find the work being done by Tracy (the anthropologist) offensive. As the article notes, anthropological techniques and anthropologists themselves have been involved in counter-insurgency efforts in the past, using their specialized knowledge and relationships to often work against those they seek to understand.
Tracy and others like her hurt my profession and diminish my ability to work with communities throughout the world. I ask her to think through what she’s doing and to hark back to her training, especially if she’s younger and has seen the impact of anthropologist’s naive actions in Vietnam and Latin America (e.g. Guatemala).
To extrapolate, though, I also feel huge discomfort when military units are assigned to civilian reconstruction teams. In Afghanistan, they’re called Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and they blur the line between military pacification and humanitarian aid. In some sense, it destroys the value of the civilian endeavor, since it militarizes traditionally civilian activities. If the military was seen as a problem, as is often the case in counter-insurgency operations where the military is fighting an indigenous rebellion, then having the military provide the humanitarian reconstruction can put the population in an uncomfortable situation.
The article talks about one of Tracy’s “contributions”, where she is the impetus for the U.S. military’s creation of a job training program for war widows. As Linda Green discussed in her work in post-civil war Guatemala (Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala, 1999), these well-intentioned programs can often backfire in the larger context, by privileging one group of individuals (war widows) over others. Are beneficiaries receiving such largess because they’re bad, i.e. their family members were rebels, or because they’re cooperating with the counter-insurgency program now? What about others who lost their livelihoods due to the civil war? Are new divisions being created due to not thinking through aid programs that are targeted at short-term goals of ending immediate insurgency activities?
I’m seriously concerned with this quote:
[Ms.] Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the Navy who advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy
. To me, the goal of social science is not to improve military operations or strategy, it’s to better understand local communities and to work to help them improve their own communities. I can’t see how the two intersect. The article even calls such anthropologists “embedded” social scientists. If such “embedding” is like it is for journalists, than social science has taken a huge hit. Embedding has, in this writer’s opinion, become code for “mouthpiece” of the Administration. To be allowed to be embedded, you must agree to the party line, and thus once embedded, you echo the talking points you’re fed. Additionally, I believe Stockholm Syndrome (whereby captives gradually come to empathizes and defend their captors) thrives in such situations. Living in such real life and death situations breeds brother/sister-hood, and is hard to shake off in order to live up to your previous ideals.
