Value of Life

Jovan’s latest article on the censorship of online research on ‘abortion’ in the US reminded me of philosopher Peter Singer’s article ‘Devaluing Life’ , which was published on the website http://www.project-syndicate.org on February 2006. Although Singer’s article is not on the controversy of abortion, he reflects on a similar issue, which is the controversy about the stem-cell research that requires the destruction of  human embryos. George W.Bush denied government funding for stem-cell research since it encourages the destruction of human-embryos and as a result devalues human life.

Peter Singer challenges this argument by George W.Bush and people with a similar worldview in the US who on the one hand value and respect the life of human embryos, and on the other hand who encourage wars in other countries and cause the killing of millions of people.

Peter Singer’s article is food for thought; and also I suggest that American anthropologists should study the ‘exotic cosmology-worldview’ of these people which is full of contradictions. Singer’s article is below:

Devaluing Life

February 2006

In August 2001, President George W. Bush told Americans that he worried about “a culture that devalues life,” and that he believed that, as President of the United States, he has “an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world.”

That belief lay behind Bush’s denial of federal government funds for stem-cell research that could encourage the destruction of human embryos. Although the Bush administration acknowledged that some scientists believe stem cell research could offer new ways of treating diseases that affect 128 million Americans, this prospect evidently did not, in Bush’s view, justify destroying human embryos.

Last month, the military forces that this same president commands aimed a missile at a house in Damadola, a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border. Eighteen people were killed, among them five children. The target of the attack, Al Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was not among the dead, although lesser figures in the terrorist organization reportedly were.

Bush did not apologize for the attack, nor did he reprimand those who ordered it. Apparently, he believes that the chance of killing an important terrorist leader is sufficient justification for firing a missile that will almost certainly kill innocent human beings.

Other American politicians took the same stance. Senator Trent Lott, a conservative Republican – and a prominent opponent of abortion – said of the attack: “Absolutely, we should do it.” Senator John McCain, another leading Republican, though one often ready to disagree with Bush, expressed regret for the civilian deaths, but added, “I can’t tell you that we wouldn’t do the same thing again.”

Indeed, it would be hard for the current administration to say that it wouldn’t do the same thing again, because it has done it many times before. On November 1, 2001, American planes bombed Ishaq Suleiman, a group of mud huts, because a Taliban truck had been parked in one of the streets. The truck left before the bomb hit, but 12 local villagers were killed and 14 were injured. There are many more such stories of innocent lives being lost in the war in Afghanistan.

In Iraq, too, American attacks have taken the lives of many civilians. Again, one of many examples will suffice. On April 5, 2003, a civilian neighborhood in Basra was bombed. The target was General Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” because of his use of chemical weapons against Iraqis. One bomb hit the home of the Hamoodi family, a respected, educated family, none of whose members belonged to the ruling Baath Party. Of the extended family of 14, ten were killed, including an infant, a two-year-old baby, a 10-year-old boy, and a 12-year-old girl. Four months later, Majid was captured alive; the bombs had missed their intended target.

This consistent pattern of readiness to inflict civilian casualties – often when striking targets that are not of vital military significance – suggests that Bush and other pro-life American leaders have less concern for the lives of innocent human beings in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, than they have for human embryos. This is a bizarre set of priorities. No parents grieve for a lost embryo in the way that they would grieve over the death of a child. No embryos are capable of suffering, or have hopes or desires for the future that are abruptly cut off by their death.

It might be possible to justify the loss of innocent human life in Damadola by a utilitarian calculation that killing Al Qaeda’s leaders will, in the long run, save a larger number of innocent human beings. After all, if they remain at large, they may succeed in carrying out further terrorist attacks that take hundreds or even thousands of innocent lives. Bush, however, cannot rely on that argument, for it is precisely the kind of justification that he rejects when it comes to destroying embryos in order to save, in the long run, those dying from diseases for which we currently have no cure.

Other moralists will say that the difference between destroying embryos for research purposes and killing civilians in military attacks is that the former is deliberate killing, whereas the latter deaths are “collateral damage” – unintended, if foreseeable, side-effects of a justifiable act of war.

We can grant that it was not the primary intention of those who planned and authorized the attack on Damadola to kill innocent people. We can also accept that al-Zawahiri is undoubtedly a dangerous foe, still active in a terrorist movement, and that he is a legitimate military target. Perhaps this particular attack can be justified on those grounds.

Nevertheless, the doctrine that it is acceptable to take actions that will foreseeably kill innocent people can have the effect of leading us to treat more lightly than we should the deaths of those killed. That, it seems, is what has happened somewhere in the American chain of command. The presence of a Taliban truck does not justify bombing a village in which civilians are going about their daily lives. Killing innocent people in order to bring a kind of rough justice to “Chemical Ali” – a particularly nasty member of Saddam’s military elite, but one who at the time of the raid was no longer in command of military forces – is wrong.

A culture that allows – and even endorses – such tactics is not one that is genuinely committed to encouraging respect for life. We can be quite sure that American forces would not have acted in the same way if the civilians nearby had been other Americans.

Self censorship of US public health search engine

Recently, BoingBoing posted about change to a government-funded public health search engine, Popline, so that queries including the search term “abortion” turn up no results. According to the article, the owners of the engine Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, have made the modification because they believed it was a condition of their federal funding.

Lisa Wynn, our resident expert on reproductive technologies, is not able to post about it herself as she’s off doing research in Egypt, but she did send me these comments on the story:

1) what’s interesting to note is the self-censorship. We’ve all known for years that the US administration under Bush has had a chilling effect on research and provision of reproductive health services internationally (the so-called “global gag rule”), but the idea that people in a university would voluntarily self-censor their database based on the interventions at an unofficial and extra-legal level from individuals at a federal funding agency is bizarre and troubling;

2) and secondly, on a whole different level, the restriction would have excluded a large body of medical literature that has nothing to do with “abortion” as it is popularly used, since the medical community uses the term “abortion” to also include miscarriages (”spontaneous abortion”) as well as intended abortions (”induced abortion”).

Johns Hopkins Public Health has a statement by their Dean, Michael Klag, on their website stating that the restriction of the search term was only intended as a temporary measure while certain articles deemed to be “abortion advocacy” were removed from the Popline database. Klag also states that the block on “abortion” was immediately removed once he learned of it. He also kindly includes details of the references removed from the database.

While this paints a slightly better picture of the affair, I’m concerned that materials regarded as advocacy should be excluded from searches. People interested in public health research might have perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to read advocacy materials. What if some anti-abortion scholar is researching a paper on pro-abortion advocacy and is unable to find materials? It would also seem to imply that there is a clear line between advocacy and other scholarly writing on a topic. Isn’t it possible for writing to be both? And does this mean that all research and writing aimed at promoting social change of some form, or engaging in a debate, should also be excluded on the same grounds? And who is to be the judge of such questions, deciding what is advocacy and what is not? The over-reaction of the administrators to this issue would suggest that many making these decisions will err on the side of caution, and the self-censorship will continue.

Beeman on Anthropologists in Iraq

Brown University anthropologist, William O. Beeman, recently published Lethal Field Work: Anthropologists Cry Foul Over Colleagues’ Aid to Iraq Occupation in Le Monde diplomatique (the link is to an English version on Alternet). Beeman is probably one of the anthropologists who most successfully publishes in the popular press, drawing on his fieldwork in the Middle East to comment especially on US foreign policy in regular columns. In this article, he covers the basic outline (very basic) of the recent controversy over the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) in the US military.

One of the principal proponents of cooperation is Montgomery McFate, a Yale PhD anthropologist and senior fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace. In a seminar on 10 May 2007, McFate presented a plan that was influential in establishing the HTS project. She pointed out that the U.S. military spends almost nothing on social science research that would be crucial to the success of operations, and recommended an approach to closing the cultural knowledge gap.

The article really does not add much to the anthropological discussion of anthropology’s potential role in Iraq, certainly nothing beyond what’s already been covered on this site and on others, like Savage Minds. In fact, the article is so general that the only reason I provide a link to it is to note that this mostly internal discussion in our field is only leaking out in very limited forms. I’m left perplexed by the article, frankly. Either Beeman does not know about, or chooses not to write with any recognition of much more extensive debate in our field, including some much stronger opinions than those he relays: basically, that there is a conflict, with some anthropologists doing HTS-related work, even when not experts in the regions involved, and other anthropologists criticizing them and pushing for a resolution to prohibit intelligence gathering for counter-insurgency by anthropologists.

I usually like Beeman’s columns, but this one left me flat. If this is how discussions within our field are being relayed to those outside it, then the effect of any critiques of these programs is liable to be negligible. The debate sounds polarized and, oddly, comes out muffled, balanced between those who want to use anthropology to reduce casualties and those who worry that anthropology will be used as a weapon. Do we use anthropology for good or for evil? Is that really all this debate is about, because if that’s it, then it’s a pretty easy debate to resolve: I’m for good and against evil. But I think that if the debate is reduced to this flat of a discussion, the general public isn’t going to really understand why its still going on. ‘What are you guys carrying on about? Just use anthropology to decrease casualties and don’t assassinate people. What’s your problem?’

In this case, I think a simple moral framing actually robs the public account of much that is engaging in this debate. The methodological, pragmatic, structural, and other difficulties of doing serious ethnography, and of using anthropological knowledge in these settings, the likelihood of becoming ethically compromised, of having data compromised by its use, and the epistemological challenges of anthropology in war are, in my opinion, also amenable to popular accounts. And these all make the simple, do-we-use-anthropology-as-a-weapon-or-to-save-lives framing, actually more interesting because it becomes clear the question is not so simple.

“Medical Adoptions”

The school year started today at Macquarie and I’m trying to juggle obsessively revising the reading list for the Honours Seminar I’m running this semester and obsessively revising the budget of my ARC application, so I really do have better things to do than write little ditties for this blog, because Obsessive Revising really ranks very high on my list of Important Things To Do. But I simply can’t resist with this one.

Let me back up to tell you that a couple of weeks ago, my brother-in-law wrote me from Toronto to tell me that he’d met an anthropology graduate student who was doing his research on organ trafficking.

Compensation is essential!

Professor Peter Read, a historian at Sydney University, coined the phrase ‘The Stolen Generations’ in 1981 in a pamphlet of that name; he was co-founder of ‘Stolen Generations Link Up’ and he is today the public officer of that organisation. In an opinion piece published in The Age newspaper on 9 February 2008, he says that compensation is essential:

A wonderful start, but compensation?

CONGRATULATIONS, Prime Minister, on planning your apology to the removed children and their families. You may not realise how incredibly important it will be for the stolen generations to hear the words: “We thought it was right for the country, now we realise it was wrong, and we are sorry for the hurt we caused you, your extended family, and to Aboriginal society.”

I know you’re surrounded on all sides by advisers, but let me put in two-bob’s worth from someone who has been closely involved in the story for more than 25 years.

Note, please, the plural. There are seven or eight generations stolen, beginning with Governor Macquarie enticing a dozen children into his Aboriginal school at Parramatta.

Were the removal policies really all that ill-intentioned? After decades of research there isn’t doubt any more about the purpose of the state and federal policies. Let’s face it, Prime Minister, the policies were quite malevolent. They were designed to put an end to Aboriginality in southern Australia forever. We can be confident of that malevolence because the early 20th century policymakers didn’t bother to mince their words. Here’s a NSW official in 1909: “The only solution of this great problem (is) the removal of children and their complete isolation from the influence of the camps. In the course of the next few years there will be no need for the camps and stations; the old people will have passed away, and their progeny will be absorbed in the industrial classes of the country.”

Yes, I know that your speechwriters are saying: “But there were children who had to be removed.” Sure there were — but these kids should have been allowed to be raised by their own race and within their own cultures. They were almost never allowed to. And yes, of course there were deeply caring white adopting parents who created an enduring bond of love with their children. But that’s not the point. Almost none of those children should have been removed in the first place.

Don’t let anyone talk you down about numbers, making out that a removal rate of one in three is a wild exaggeration. For the decades of the 1920s and the 1950s especially, there is no exaggeration. I see no reason to reduce my original calculation of about 50,000 Aboriginal children removed in all the states and territories since settlement. It’s hard today to grasp how relentless some of those “welfare” officers could be in the pursuit even of one particular family and, equally, how many children bypassed the government net and were simply handed over by churches or hospitals or managers of holiday camps. These were children who left in good faith and never came home.

I’m sure you don’t need prompting from me to avoid the “genocide” distraction. I don’t use the term either. First, it’s too divisive. Second, the children were being deprived of their identity, not their lives. Third, the policies were directed at part-Aboriginality, the mixed-descent children who supposedly, in the late 19th century, threatened anarchy and uprisings around the half-formed bush towns. Even in the north, it was almost always the so-called “half-caste” children who were taken.

If you want to use a term, try “ethnocide”.

But no compensation? Mr Prime Minister, come on! It seems like the Labor Party simply doesn’t get it either. I’ve known many hundreds of stolen generation adults and worked with quite a few, and there is not one who does not deserve a monetary apology as well as one in words. So much abuse, so much pain, so much torment, death for some, misery for almost everyone. And it was all so unnecessary. It didn’t have to happen. Don’t listen just to me, it’s there in thousands of hours of recorded testimonies. No, it won’t be easy to sort out who is more deserving. But that’s what a tribunal could do, work out the guidelines in advance, and respect them.

I’m glad you are heeding the argument of the migrants who say: “Why are you apologising on my behalf? I hadn’t even arrived in the country when all this was happening.” It’s best to say sorry not for what “we” have done, but for what the Australian government has done. Many Australians of every variety will be satisfied.

Everything’s OK now from Wednesday? Not without compensation, no. And even if you paid compensation, your government would have done something for only one part of the long-suffering Aboriginal people. To the terrible threesome — stolen children, frontier killings and land theft — sooner or later our nation is going to have to confront the fourth, the enormity of the managed reserve system that degraded and abused and humiliated Aboriginal people for 90 years after 1870.

Don’t worry about that on Wednesday, though, you’ll have my best wishes. I’ll be there in the crowd cheering you on. It will be one of the biggest events in my life.

www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2008/02/08/1202234161498.html

UnAustralian Vegetarian?

I have started going to Yoga classes at my local Yoga center. In a recent class I was standing in the tree pose and staring fixedly ahead for balance. It so happened that the object of my gaze was one word on a nutrition chart; “MEAT”. The word stood out because it had been written above (and almost on top) of the word “TOFU” in black permanent marker. The nutrition chart was entirely vegetarian but for the minor addition.

The nutrition chart was not large enough for anybody but the person standing in front of it to see, so people would have to actually walk up and read the chart with some purpose if they did not happen to be standing in front of it during the class due to the room being slightly over crowded.

Somebody clearly felt that this piece of information should be communicated, “MEAT” was needed. Was this person concerned that people attending this yoga center might be confused with a nutrition chart that did not position “MEAT” under the protein section? Or perhaps that the chart was UnAustralian? The Australia day advertisements tell us that if we don’t BBQ lamb chops on Australia day we are UnAustralian… maybe this is something that should be added to the citizenship test? Who was Don Bradman? Which country “discovered” Australia? Do you eat lamb chops on Australia day?

A round-up of news coverage of the AAA meetings

Usually anthropology is only in the news when some new theory about Neanderthals is announced. But in the past week, anthropology has been all over the news, thanks to the American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington, D.C. which just ended a few days ago.

Before I left for the meetings, I fantasized that every night I would post some news from the day’s events on Culture Matters. I diligently took notes during the sessions on anthropology and the U.S. military, but between the intensity of the perpetual overlapping meetings (at one point I actually ran back and forth four times between two panels that I was trying to follow simultaneously) and the jet lag, I barely opened my computer. Now that I’m back, I see that journalists have covered the AAA meetings better than I possibly could have done, so instead I thought I’d just provide a round-up of the coverage and links to recently published stuff.

More on culture, the military, and “counterinsurgency”

For those of you who aren’t utterly sick of the whole topic, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, a Chicago-trained anthropologist and tenured professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, has just published an essay, “On the Uses of Cultural Knowledge,” on the Strategic Studies Institute website (an army publication). Jager makes points that are not dissimilar to the arguments of Kilcullen in the New Yorker profile of 2006: essentially, divide and conquer using culture as the key way of distinguishing between enemies:

The monograph concludes by suggesting four distinct ways in which cultural knowledge can work to help redefine an overarching strategic framework for counterinsurgency.

1. Reconceptualizing the “war on terror” not as one war, but as many different wars.
2. Focusing less on the moral distinctions between “us” and “them”—a major centerpiece of the Bush Doctrine—and more on the differences between “them.”
3. Building support and relationships among both friendly and adversary states by taking into account how other societies assess risks, define their security, and perceive threats.
4. Building support for counterinsurgency among America’s civilian leaders. Especially amid the domestic acrimony spawned by the Iraq War, inadequate coordination between military and nonmilitary power will severely hamper U.S. counterinsurgency capabilities. Cultural knowledge of both military and civilian institutions is therefore vital if the coordination between them is to be effective.

But she also sees the use of ‘culture’ as part of a “gentler” army, which she opposes to “former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s heavy-handed approach to counterinsurgency which emphasized aggressive military tactics.”

The publication of Jager’s monograph reinforces the growing evidence that “culture” is the hip new catch-phrase in the military and government, but she argues that it’s only the military, not the government, that ‘gets’ culture:

The innovative insights about cultural knowledge adapted in operations and tactics by our military leaders have so far not yielded any comparable innovations from our political leaders.

Jager distinguishes between “the kinds of cultural knowledge that inform military operations and tactics on the ground—the “how-to” practical application of cultural and ethnographic knowledge” and “the forms of cultural knowledge that are needed to formulate national strategy and policy” (note the echoes of the de Certeauian distinction between strategy and tactics, though she does not explicitly refer to de Certeau) and argues for a shift in emphasis from tactical uses of culture, as in Petraeus’ Field Manual and the HTS, to the application of the ‘culture’ concept to government “grand strategy and policy” (though she does say that the two should essentially work together).

Her definition of culture is not dissimilar from that current in anthropology, as something that is dynamic and susceptible to creative transformation. Perhaps where she differs from many anthropologists, though, is in her idea that this historicized and malleable culture can or should be manipulated by a powerful occupying power for political ends, as well as in the fundamentally militarized language and metaphors she uses to talk about the ‘deployment’ of culture:

Applied to the level of strategy, cultural knowledge must therefore take into account the vital role of history and historical memory. Culture is not unchanging, nor does it entail a set of enduring values and/or ancient “patterns” of thought from which we can predict behavior. This is where the usage and understanding of culture as applied to the level of strategy differs significantly from the application of cultural knowledge at the operational and tactical levels. The uses of cultural knowledge in counterinsurgency operations emphasize the need for soldiers to understand the intricacies of customs, values, symbols, and traditions in order to be able to adapt and fight in a foreign society. It is hoped that this anthropological approach to war “will shed light on the grammar and logic of tribal warfare,” and create the “conceptual weapons necessary to return fire.”

Jager also writes about the Human Terrain System and the Counterinsurgency Manual and the “rave reviews” that the latter has received in the New York Times, but goes on to discuss the reception of these within anthropology as “decidedly cool, if not downright hostile.” She attributes this to “the disciplines’ ethical codes and also its tendency to look inward and its turn toward postmodernism and critical self-reflection,” which explains why, she says, “anthropology remains a rather insular field which attracts few readers beyond its disciplinary boundaries.” (The anthropologists that she names as leading the opposition to the use of anthropology by the military are Roberto Gonzalez, David Price, and Hugh Gusterson.) Yet from thus characterizing anthropologists as “insular” and irrelevant, she goes on to suggest that their reaction to the HTS is something like the ethical pulse of the nation:

Ultimately, however, the demands of counterinsurgency may be too great for the American public to bear, not because of the significant costs and commitments involved, but because the ethical and moral dilemmas posed by counterinsurgency may drive Americans, like Gonzales, to retreat from the world and leave the fighting to the military.

She concludes by suggesting a rather different application of culture to the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan: the study of the culture of the military.

“cultural knowledge of both military and civilian institutions is vital if the coordination between them is to be effective. In particular, cultural knowledge of the military, its institutional values, traditions, historical role in society, and how it operates must be explained to the American public.”

The full text of Jager’s article can be accessed at http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB817.pdf.

L.L. Wynn

 

American Anthropology Association issues Human Terrain System resolution

The American Anthropology Association has released a statement of resolution by the Executive Board on the Human Terrain System (HTS) Project. The statement, posted online, is dated October 31, 2007 (though I just received the e-mail from the AAA announcing the resolution today, and as as far as I can tell from the metadata on the website, it was only posted online November 7, 2007).

The resolution is brief and it concerns itself almost exclusively with ethics, not with the methodological trouble of working for the military in a war zone (which Greg has discussed here on Culture Matters). The resolution identifies three key areas of ethical trouble that potentially puts anthropologists involved with the HTS at odds with the AAA code of ethics:

(1) the difficulty of distinguishing between anthropologists and the military “places a significant constraint on [anthropologists'] ability to fulfill their ethical responsibility…to disclose who they are and what they are doing”;

(2) the imperative of doing no harm to the people being studied cannot be assured when anthropologists are reporting on these people to the dominant military power; and

(3) the ethical imperative of voluntary informed consent is compromised when anthropologists are working for the military in a war zone.

It also notes that (4) involvement of anthropologists with the HTS project puts at risk other non-HTS anthropologists — and the people they study — all over the world.

It concludes,

“Thus the Executive Board expresses its disapproval of the HTS program.

“In the context of a war that is widely recognized as a denial of human rights and based on faulty intelligence and undemocratic principles, the Executive Board sees the HTS project as a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds.”

The full text of the resolution can be read here.

The AAA has also created a blog where members can comment on the Executive Board Statement and related issues at http://aaanewsinfo.blogspot.com/. However, as far as I can tell, one need not identify as a dues-paid member of the AAA to comment.

While the AAA statement is primarily about ethics, many of the comments posted on the blog grapple with the complicated entanglement of ethics and methodology. Some, for example, doubt whether an ‘applied anthropology’ can call itself anthropology when it is in the employ of an interested institution. For example, Hugh Jarvis from the University at Buffalo argues that, “Surely to achieve any credibility or scientific objectivity, anthropologists need to be independent observers.” Others profess deep disappointment with the resolution’s seeming rejection of any anthropological cooperation with imperial power on the grounds that, as long as harm is being done somewhere, anthropologists have a duty to try to minimize that harm, if necessary by working for the powers that be. Some criticize the AAA for not going far enough in expressing only “disapproval” and not “condemnation”; others criticize the AAA for taking a position on the war itself.

As of this writing, there are only 14 comments, but I expect we’ll see that explode in the coming weeks, and the matter of anthropology at war is bound to dominate the annual meeting of the AAA later this month. I’ll be attending and I’ll write about it on this blog, so stay tuned.

L.L. Wynn

An anthropologist in the military

In a recent post, Lisa asked the question “where are the soldier-academics”?  As chance would have it the anthropology.net blog has just reproduced a first hand account of an anthropology student-soldier, Jeff Bristol, and his thoughts on the HTS and the relationship between anthropology and the military.

I won’t reproduce the post, but it can be found here.

Meanwhile, Savage Minds has reported on an article by David Price which shows the “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” to be riddled with plagiarism.  They also raise the question about whether the whole push towards “cultural sensitivity” within the military is more about PR than anything else.