Weaponized irony

There’s a fabulous little piece in the July issue of Harper’s from Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven, a couple of professors at Princeton who put together a $650K, 3-year grant proposal for Lockheed Martin to identify irony and weaponize it.  An excerpt:

“Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes…

“If we don’t know how irony works and we don’t know how it is used by the enemy, we cannot identify it…. Without the ability to detect and localize irony consistently, intelligence agents and agencies are likely to lose valuable time and resources pursuing chimerical leads and to overlook actionable instances of insolence.  The first step towards addressing this situation is a multilingual, collaborative, and collative initiative that will generate an encyclopedic global inventory of ironic modalities and strategies.  More than a handbook or field guide, the work product of this effort will take the shape of a vast, searchable, networked database of all known ironies.”

Human Terrain indeed.

Harper’s notes that “Princeton declined to forward [the proposal] to Lockheed.”  It puts me in mind of David Vine’s vow to write a proposal for Minerva funding from the Pentagon to study “how overseas military bases affect relations with other nations, ‘how they’ve damaged our international reputation and how they’ve damaged the lives of people around the world.’”  Anyone know of other examples of this wonderful genre of grant proposal as parodic critique of the funding source?

–L.L. Wynn

Making ethics training ethnography-friendly

I’ve been meaning to write about an ethics project I’ve been working on, and now someone else has beaten me to it! Serves me right for neglecting poor Culture Matters for three weeks. I’ll tell you about the project and then I’ll tell you who has scooped me with a critique of my own website.

It all started out because I teach a couple of methods classes and I ask my students to do their own independent research projects. This requires a bit of careful work to secure ethics clearance with our Human Research Ethics Committee. Another time I’ll write about that what that entails. Here I want to describe my solution for giving the students training in research ethics. It became apparent to me that our ethics committee would be more comfortable about the idea of undergraduate students launching into their own fieldwork if they were sure that they’d been trained in research ethics, so I had the idea that I could develop a set curricula to use with every class that I want to send “into the field.”

My inspiration, and nemesis, was the U.S. NIH ethics training module. I had to take it when I was a graduate student, and so I had only dim recollections of what it covered. My first thought was that I could use it as a starting point for my students, but when I went back to look at it, I was shocked at how inappropriate it was for training anthropologists in the ethical dilemmas of ethnographic fieldwork. Like most international ethics codes, its basic assumptions about research are grounded in a model of a clinical (mostly biomedical) encounter. Plus it was full of U.S. regulatory code. Ad nauseum.

A screen capture from the NIH training module covering the concept of “equipoise.” I gotta say, I never heard of this word before.

So at first I thought, OK, it’s a government document so they would probably give me permission to adapt it for my own non-profit, educational use. I’ll just change a few things around, drop every mention of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and replace it with a reference to the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, mention “ethnography” a few times, and add some stuff about Australian research.

But the more I played around with the idea, the more I thought it needed something completely new.

Kelly Fosher’s “Under Construction: Making Homeland Security at the Local Level”

Merriden Varrall, our PhD student who is doing her research on Chinese foreign policy, forwarded a review of Under Construction: Making Homeland Security at the Local Level, a dissertation-turned-book by Kelly Fosher published by the University of Chicago Press. Writing in The Times Higher, Jeremy Keenan rubbishes the book as “the epitome of all that anthropology should not be,” and Merriden’s email seemed to have a worried undertone as to whether all research on government apparatuses may meet with censure for possible complicity. For Keenan does not say much about the book itself; for him, “Fosher’s relationship with the US military-intelligence-security establishment”, i.e. the fact that she is employed as “the US Marine Corps’ command social scientist at the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia” (having decapitalised “command”, Keenan makes some cheap fun of what a “command social scientist” might be) makes it impossible to take any of her claims of a detached observation seriously.

This may be so, but I would still be interested in what the book says. Those who have opposed any engagement with the military by anthropologists have tended to say that they would not produce any critical studies of the establishment anyway. Yet here is someone who, apparently, claims to have tried to do just that with the  apparatus of “homeland security.” Clearly this is a very important thing to do, and it is probably impossible from the outside. On the other hand studying it from the inside, without being kicked out, is likely to entail compromises and ethical dilemmas (whose description, according to Keenan, make the book “an unrewarding read”). I haven’t read the book myself, but I am looking forward to reading at least a serious review.

Any research of government apparatuses, assuming that to some extent it has to be done from the inside, can attract accusations of complicity. Sure, this is especially so if the apparatus is a military one and if the researcher is actually employed by it. Still, I can hardly think of more important tasks for anthropology than studying precisely these mechanisms of power from the inside.

A new anthropology ethics scandal (?)

The Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO), an Indigenous umbrella group, has issued a press release condemning the American Geographical Society’s Bowman Expedition, “México Indígena.”  (Below I’ve pasted this press release, and following that, the text of the AGS description of the Bowman Expedition’s “México Indígena” project, which refutes many of the UNOSJO charges.)

The first charge is that one of the AGS researchers, University of Kansas’s  Peter Herlihy,  failed to disclose the fact that his research was partially funded by the U.S. military, specifically the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) of the United States Army. It also claims that Herlihy failed to disclose the participation of Radiance Technologies, “a company that specializes in arms development and military intelligence.”

Another ethics charge is a novel variation on accusations that international researchers exploit Indigenous cultural and intellectual property: they accuse the project of “geopiracy.”

They also claim that the mapping data collected by the project is fed into “a global database that forms an integral part of the Human Terrain System (HTS), a United States Army counterinsurgency strategy designed by FMSO and applied within indigenous communities, among others.”

AGS refutes  the association with HTS, but one thing that seems clear from this project is that one of the 5 main concerns expressed by the American Anthropological Association about the HTS, namely its prediction that HTS would taint anthropologists and their informants worldwide, seems to be coming true.

–L.L. Wynn (pasted press releases below)

More on HTS

It’s a pity that the month that Culture Matters won the Savage Minds blog award, we’ve been really slow. It’s the end of the semester right before everyone disappears for the summer, and I assume that everyone is either swamped with marking or making exciting travel plans. I have a huge backlog of work and e-mails to answer so I probably shouldn’t be taking the time to post something, but I couldn’t resist because I keep getting distracted from grading by a couple of Wired articles on the Human Terrain System.

We already reported on news coverage of the attack on a Human Terrain Team member, Paula Lloyd, who was set on fire in Afghanistan by a man she was interviewing. Another Human Terrain Team member, Dan Ayala, then reportedly shot her attacker in the head after the attacker was disarmed and fully restrained. Ayala has since been charged with second degree murder and subsequently released on bail and is back in the U.S. (Open Anthropology has a list of links covering the story.)

Of course the attack and the revenge killing raise to a whole new level the debate about the ethics of putting social scientists in the middle of a war, and though I didn’t attend the AAA meetings this year in San Francisco, my sources tell me that this was hotly debated (see Inside Higher Ed for coverage). But all of this has been amply reported on elsewhere, so I didn’t think we needed to write more about it, until a friend and colleague based at SOAS in London sent me to have a look at the comments that have been posted to the Wired articles.

The first is an article by Noah Shachtman reporting on the charges against Ayala. What’s been distracting me from work is the comments that readers posted following the article. If you don’t get sick reading them, it’s actually fascinating to observe how misogyny and homophobia blend seamlessly with the ostensibly “anthropological” statements about local culture.

Doctors complain about ethics oversight – just like anthropologists! (well, almost)

I have been working on an ethics teaching module and just came across this December 2007 editorial in the NY Times by Atul Gawande. Medical anthropologists might have encountered Gawande through his articles for the New Yorker or for his book of collected essays, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science — which I think is great material to assign to undergraduates in an introductory medical anthropology class. Gawande has an anthropological appreciation for the technological, social, cultural, political, and organizational forces that shape science and medicine. Plus his writing is punchy, dramatic, and neatly wrapped up with concise morals-to-the-story that makes it easy to digest for students who are new to anthropology’s way of complicating everything, especially neat morals-to-the-story.

Still, Gawande is a doctor, not an anthropologist, and I thought it was mostly anthropologists (plus our social science relatives who also do ethnographic research) who chafe at the way ethics oversight developed to regulate biomedical research has crept over to the social sciences. We can all agree that ethical research is a good goal in either domain, but anthropologists are acutely aware (in a way that sometimes IRBs / ethics committees aren’t!) that there are very different research ethics issues at stake depending on whether you’re testing a new drug or doing ethnographic fieldwork.

But in his NY Times article, Gawande shows us a conflict where medicine chafed at the way ethics regulation originally developed for biomedical research crept into applied research on the social organization of medicine.

Here’s an excerpt:

A year ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published the results of a program that instituted in nearly every intensive care unit in Michigan a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections. It reminds doctors to make sure, for example, that before putting large intravenous lines into patients, they actually wash their hands and don a sterile gown and gloves.

The results were stunning. Within three months, the rate of bloodstream infections from these I.V. lines fell by two-thirds. The average I.C.U. cut its infection rate from 4 percent to zero. Over 18 months, the program saved more than 1,500 lives and nearly $200 million.

Yet this past month, the Office for Human Research Protections shut the program down. The agency issued notice to the researchers and the Michigan Health and Hospital Association that, by introducing a checklist and tracking the results without written, informed consent from each patient and health-care provider, they had violated scientific ethics regulations.

More on the Military’s ‘Culture Rush’: Brian Selmeski interview

There’s a culture rush going on in the U.S. military. While the Human Terrain System gets most of the media attention for being the face of the military’s sudden interest in culture, there are a whole host of other military efforts revolving around the concept of culture. For example, as we have mentioned on Culture Matters, the Marine Corps has just published a textbook called “Operational Cultures for the Warfighter” with chapters that include sections on topics such as “tribes,” “folklore,” “rituals,” and “religious beliefs.” In 2006 the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) opened the TRADOC Cultural Center which teaches soldiers about foreign cultures and languages, particularly “the cultures of Iraq and Afghanistan.” And the Air Force teaches what it calls “cross-cultural competence,” or the idea that soldiers can be taught to comprehend and act in a culturally complex environment, even without having any past experience in that part of the world.

On 3 September 2008 (actually it was 2 September in the US), I interviewed one of the driving forces behind the Air Force’s Cross Cultural Competence (dubbed “3C”) program, Dr Brian Selmeski.  He’s the Director of Cross Cultural Competence at the Air Force Culture and Language Center of Air University at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. I thought it might be interesting for Culture Matters readers to hear about how one branch of the military is applying anthropological concepts in practice. He gives us information about the Cross Cultural Competence program and talks about the ethics of anthropologists working with the military.

Lisa L Wynn: Some have said that the past 5 years or so have seen a “culture rush” in the US military. Do you think this is an accurate assessment? Do you think it’s a passing fad or here to stay? And what do you think is driving this recent “culture rush”?

CTlab virtual symposium on the Hamdan trial

[cross-posted to Khaldoun]

CTlab is hosting a virtual symposium on the Hamdan trial, and they’ve got a lot of people, including myself, poised to comment on Dr Brian Glyn Williams’ fascinating account of the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver. Williams was an expert witness for the defense.

This week, Williams has been posting a five-part narrative account of his experience, and after the fifth installment, CTlab will post comments and observations from a panel of invited legal scholars and social scientists based in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

–L.L. Wynn

AAA to revise ethics statement

With Lisa Wynn currently indisposed doing fieldwork in Egypt, I am continuing the HTS thread with news that the AAA’s executive has decided to revise its ethics statement.  This decision has followed a long review process since November 2007 which has apparently involved a lot of input from AAA membership.

This is a very significant decision, which will have implications for the conduct of Applied Anthropology.  We wait with interest to see exactly what form these revisions take and we will post updates as they arise.

More information, including the text of the letter sent to AAA members can be found at the AAA Public Affairs blog.

JM

The story behind an HTS picture

[Note: after I posted this article (which Major Holbert didn't edit at all), he told me he'd been getting some flak for it and asked me to remove the personal information in it. I have done so, and so below is an edited version of the original post. --LLW]
_______________________________

Major Robert Holbert was part of the first Human Terrain Team deployed to Khost province, Afghanistan, in early 2007. I first saw his picture when I was reading an article about the Human Terrain System by Roberto González (“‘Human Terrain’: Past, Present, and Future Applications,” Anthropology Today 24(1):21).

U.S. Army Maj. Robert Holbert takes notes as he talks and drinks tea with local school and Andar Special Needs School administrators during a cordon and search of Nani, Afghanistan, on June 2, 2007. Holbert is attached to the Human Terrain Team, 4th Brigade Combat Team. DoD photo by Staff Sgt. Michael L. Casteel, U.S. Army. (Released)

But then I started seeing the picture other places, too. It is used on blogs to illustrate the Human Terrain System (see, for example, here), and on the official Human Terrain System (HTS) website (though it seems to rotate with other pictures so I can’t provide a stable link). When I finally found it on a military photo source website, I understood why: it’s a free picture from the military (on http://www.defenselink.mil/).

As I was researching this article, someone I was talking to about HTS wrote to me and said, “By the way, Lisa — the army fellow in the bottom photo taking notes is Bob Holbert …a ‘typical’ US Army white dude, but also a practicing Muslim, ardent Obama-phile, and all-round super guy.” I thought that it would be interesting to track down Major Holbert and ask him for the story behind that photo. On 21 August, we had a chat on the phone and I took notes. Since he told me so many more things than I could ever include in the article I’m writing about anthropology and the military, I asked Major Holbert if I could post our interview on Culture Matters.