Observing people in Sydney made me quite clear that the dominant focus of cross-cultural academics and practitioners on national cultures is problematic. People from so-many cultural background study and work in closely cooperation at universities and public and private organisations. Looking at your Indian, English, Dutch, Japanese or German colleague as representatives of fixed national cultures will not help you very much in your collaboration. The so-called essentialistic perspective has become very popular in contemporary management literature and consultancy and is highlighted by European authors, such as Hofstede (1990) and Trompenaars (1993). The work of Hofstede and Trompenaars, who have developed ‘cultural maps of the world’ in which each country can be situated based on their score on different indexes, fitted perfectly in the assumption that culture is a (more or less) stable entity that can be ‘engineered’, and managed. However, recent evaluations of these essentialistic cultural programs are not positive in regard to organizational costs and sustainability. The programs use a dramatic oversimplification of the culture concept and make no difference between espoused values and actual behaviour. Consultants of large cross-cultural consultancy firms themselves don’t believe in the value of multi value models. Instead they do use their international sensitiveness and experience to train managers and employees. In our research on the number one consultancy on cross cultural business in the Netherlands showed that a larger part of the consultants were using anthropological tools and methods rather than the corporate developed multi value models. None of them however, were anthropologists.

And this is surprising as international management and the training of managers in cross-cultural affairs should be of the core competences of anthropologists. However, anthropologists are not very good at selling their knowledge and skills to corporations. They are outnumbered by all other kind of professions that have taken up cross cultural consultancy. Only recently I have seen a growth of (small) anthropological consultancy firms, but there could be many more of them. The message that everything is more complex than what our cultural “competitors” bring is of course not a very good argument for selling your services. That could be done better by, for example, showing in a business case the costs of failures and awkward collaboration.

To support managers and organisations operating in a international context, we have explored new directions in cross-cultural management by making managers aware of practices of (cross-cultural) collaboration. The interest is not so much in gaining knowledge of other (national) cultures but rather on spaces and boundary objects in which cross cultural collaboration in daily organizational life takes place. Two weeks ago I was working with a large project management firm that had asked help to manage their large diversity of workforce. The company had employees of more than 35 different national cultures working in complex projects. Instead of training the management on all these cultures we studied collaboration practices at the workfloor from a socio-material perspective which includes spatial settings, materiality and social behaviour. The French anthropologist Latour called this symmetric anthropology. We found that engineers and project employees of both the company and the client gathered around so-called “rollerboards”. These are tables that can roll and have large paper drawings of installations on them. Around the rollerboard 6 different professionals stand, hang and are bending over the drawings. In debating which objects had to be left out, changed or added, each of the 6 professionals got time to explain their view, experience, perspective. If agreed upon, different colours were used to materialize the debate and colour the drawings on spots were the debate was on. The manager was surprised as he wanted to replace the rollerboard by a computer system, which would have ruined this efficient cross-cultural collaborative practice. In this way anthropologists can deliver knowledge and advice that are not given by traditional cross-cultural consultancy firms.

This post has been removed at the request of the author.

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.

Misogyny:

“You invade and occupy a country, you better not send girlies with a psych degree to chat with locals”

and

“Afgan is an Islam [sic] country. The dumb-asses let a woman walk around like she owns the f***ing place and interrogate locals. There is no wonder the locals got so pissed off and set her on fire. She shouldn’t have been there in the 1st place. Stupid anthropologist [sic] got what is deserved.”

Homophobia: Shachtman and John Stanton, who has been writing a series of articles critical of HTS, are described as “blow buddies” by one commenter.

Cultural awareness: Many commentators express the view that Ayala’s reaction was culturally appropriate because

“Violence is the only thing people in that region understand.”

My favorite “cultural awareness” genre of comment, though (because I’m writing about stereotypes about Middle Easterners and camels), are the ones that suggest that this isn’t a matter of Geneva Conventions at all — it can just be reconciled by paying the dead man’s family some camels:

“But seriously, local customs would dictate he [Ayala] give the guy’s family some camels or cows and it’s done. So if the point of his team was to work within the local cultural framework, that is the appropriate response. Not an arrest and trial for murder. So lets embrace the local customs, raise some money, and buy some livestock.”

There are actually several comments that more thoughtfully reflect on legal codes that authorize or forbid different kinds of killing during war, but the overwhelming tenor of the articles is one of celebration that the Afghani who set Lloyd on fire was killed. It makes me wonder about the blood-thirstiness of Americans. It’s one thing to understand how a distraught man might kill after seeing his colleague set on fire, and it’s quite another to heroize that.

In other HTS news (they haven’t been getting much good press lately), Wired is also reporting that a Human Terrain contractor has been indicted as a Saddam-era spy.  There’s another series of comments ranging from the thoughtful to the bizarre, and one of the choicest in the “bizarre” category is this one:

“I blame the American Anthropology Association for all the dead and wounded HTS employees, for Ayala’s Human Terrain Murder, and for Montgomery McFate’s hiring of a one of Saddam Husein’s spies. Damn these anthropologists, if they would rise to the call of their patriotic duty and join this program like McFate wanted them to, there wouldn’t be a need to hire people like Issam Hamama or that woman who got set on fire after not realizing the problems with a woman approaching a man on the street (with a gas can) for an interview; anthropologists also wouldn’t have gotten into situations with the IEDs that killed those other HTS members because they’d have a clue about what’s what. Instead, now that the AAA has forbid its members to join McFate’s HTS, they have to hire people with no real experience in the area or whose experience includes spying for Saddam.”

I suppose it’s flattering that “Dr Darpa” (as s/he signs off) thinks that we anthropologists know everything, but it also seems rather cruel to suggest that intelligent social scientists and military personnel are getting killed because they’re not anthropologists so they don’t “have a clue about what’s what”!!

–L.L. Wynn

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”?

Brian R Selmeski: Thanks for the opportunity to talk about these issues, Lisa. Before we begin, let just emphasize that everything I say is my own professional opinion. As a professor at Air University, I have academic freedom like colleagues at other universities, but when you work for the government – especially the armed forces – it is important to make that clear right up front.

Now, as to your questions: When I accepted the position that I hold right now, at Air University, the home of the US Air Force professional military education, I already had a job. The contract was coming up on that, and my boss was being transferred to Toronto – I was in Canada at the time…

LLW: Are you Canadian? Where were you living in Canada?

BRS: I’m American, but I spent 5 years in Canada. I lived in Kingston, Ontario, right near Queens University, and I worked at the Royal Military College.

LLW: Sorry to interrupt – I was just curious because I went to school in Canada. You were saying?

BRS: When I accepted the position, there were other employment positions available, a number of other faculty positions, in fact, there were a number of employment opportunities which were not academic as well. This is sort of a long way of saying that I was the end of a journey that had started when I was an officer in the U.S. Army, and I was told that the Army didn’t need anthropologists. After that I left the service and went off to graduate school.

Then, a decade later, there was collective cry across the US military: “Is there an anthropologist in the house?” This was something that most anthropologists didn’t anticipate hearing, and a call that most weren’t interested in responding to. However, there were a number of anthropologists who worked with the US military historically, and others who have been working in this field for the past 10, 15, 20 years. So this is not brand new. But the volume of positions advertised, the interest, the number of programs, that has certainly expanded, expanded at a breath-taking rate, in fact.

Why? I can’t offer anything more than my opinion, but I’ll tell you that 5 years ago I set up a listserv for anthropologists and others interested in culture who work in the security sector. There were relatively few people who were talking about culture, “doing” culture in a security context, back then. That group has now grown to over 300 people. It’s not just a matter of getting the word out [about that listserv]; there really is a greater interest in culture within the military.

When did the growth take off? Clearly it was growing as the U.S.’ involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq proved not as short as first predicted, but I’d put the sharp increase somewhere around the bombing of the Golden Mosque of Samara. If you look at the chronology and recent history of how U.S. military operations have gone, I think you’ll see that that was a symbolic turning point – and not for the better. This is a bit outside my area of expertise; I know you work in the Middle East and I say this with some trepidation since I’ve worked primarily in Latin America. Still, my sense is that this event was an eye-opener that things which were going poorly were getting much worse. It may not have been clear to people back in the US, but I think by then the broad base of the U.S. military was beginning to understand the full scope of the challenges they had to deal with.

It is easy to blame the armed forces for this situation, but remember that militaries don’t choose when or where to go to war, especially not the rank-and-file that I’m talking about. That’s the principle of civilian control of the military that we could discuss on another occasion. As far as the military’s focus on culture, whatever the exact date or origin, increasingly there was clearly more interest, a general sense of “wow, this is really messy, how can I do my job better?” That’s something that I think a lot of people don’t grasp about military culture. The military as an institution doesn’t really have an interest in “culture” per se, they have an interest in what culture can do to help them. The military is a profession and an institution of the state. And when I say help them, I don’t mean to help them exert their force more effectively. This is not the goal of what I do.

There was an article in the Guardian about a symposium I participated in at the University of Chicago, which asked whether anthropologists working with the military were just helping them “aim better.” What I do is not about targeting, not about occupation, not about exerting military might more efficiently. I’m trying to prevent and minimize conflict. I’m responding to the military as an institution that wants to change and the members who are asking: “How can I get out of this in one piece? How can I do the most good? How can I avoid things from getting much worse?” I’ve never met any military professional who relished the idea of doing harm to others. Those people are sociopaths, not military professionals.

That was the genesis of what started slowly, first with individuals, and then took on an institutional flavor as enormous bureaucracies began to look at how to do a better job. Do I think it’s a fad? Well if I know one things about institutions, as an anthropologist of the state, it’s that things which are not institutionalized, especially things that run counter-cultural to the institution, that challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, can very easily be put aside. Do I think that will happen? Part of my job is to see that it doesn’t happen by institutionalizing our program within the U.S. Air Force. More generally, I think you’re also seeing a shifting mindset in the military. My sense is that this not an aberration, that asymmetrical conflict or counterinsurgency is going to be the norm, that working with international and public partners is becoming more common, that preventing and recovering from conflict will be as significant a task for the armed forces as fighting. All of this stuff is incredibly culturally complex. So, bottom line, no, I don’t expect that military personnel or institutions will stop being interested in culture in the near future.

LLW: Tell us about the 3C concept you’re applying in the Air Force. What are the main features, and who has been responsible for developing the concept?

BRS: Let me go back to why I took this position. It was because the objective of the Air Force Culture and Language Center is to develop a sustainable approach to cross-cultural education and training in the military. Sustainability will come when learning about culture is taken for granted by the men and women who go through military schools. Like I said before, I work at the home of professional military education for the U.S. Air Force. The military is unlike other professions, like, say, medicine, where you do your medical education and an internship, then you go off and you’re a physician. You may attend an occasional professional conference and receive some additional training here and there, but it’s pretty limited. Once you’re a licensed MD, you’re a MD. The military, though, sends people back to school throughout their careers, not to learn about liberal arts and sciences, but to learn about professional military matters. Officers and enlisted are all going through this system, and for the U.S. Air Force this is all located at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, rather than spread out at a variety of bases across the country.

I wanted to be part of an institutional shift, not just for officers or just one occupational specialty, but across an entire service. That’s how I ended up at Air University. The Air Force wasn’t the first to pick up this question, but they benefited from what the Marines and Army had done. Then they went out and found a couple of anthropologists, because they had one on staff, and they’re one of the few [military] schools who did. Our director, Dan Henk, did his Ph.D. at the University of Florida, he’s a retired colonel who spent much of his life living overseas, in fact he grew up overseas. He reached out to a couple of [anthropologist] colleagues to help define the problem, not operationally but in terms of professional development. I was one of the colleagues he asked. Then he had us develop a model that would adequately address that problem. To figure out what it was that the Air Force could accomplish. USAF not only accepted the results of this process, but they put an incredible amount of time, energy and institutional resources behind it.

We came up with 3C concept. How? Well, we did a massive literature review, we visited several other professional education systems, and universities. We wanted to design a developmental process that would span the entire career of every member of the Air Force. This way, they will, at whatever level of sophistication and rank they are, be able to exert some positive influence when they are on operations. In other words, they will be able to accomplish their goals when operating in culturally complex environments.

The first tendency is to think of this as helping Airmen deal with the Other – Iraqis, Afghanis, whatever. We’re interested in the Self as well. My background is in military diversity, that was my doctoral work. Not surprisingly, they’re guided by the same principles and goal, working effectively across cultural differences, be they indigenous and white soldiers in the Andes, or working with host nation personnel to rebuild their military, or on a coalition staff of Canadians, Brits, Dutch and American soldiers. The last example is a useful one, because they can all can speak English, so it’s not so much a linguistic challenge as it is cultural.

The literature we drew on to address this came from anthropology and from other fields as well. We don’t have all the answers nor do we have a stranglehold on the field [of culture] as anthropologists. Compared to what other disciplines teach and what other scholars have found to be important, anthropologists tend to emphasize cognition, I would say almost to the exclusion of other learning domains. We tend to focus on knowledge. Yet knowledge of itself is not useful to professionals – military or other – because professionals need to know how to operationalize what they learn. We figured out pretty quickly that knowing lots of facts about different peoples is not the whole solution for the military. What if you have the wrong information? Or things on the ground have changed? Or you’re missing a key piece of data? Or you get sent somewhere else on short notice?

So we decided that the cognitive knowledge component should follow a culture-general approach. Don’t just teach kinship of the Pashtun. First teach the importance of kinship more generally so they can apply these principles of kinship, gender, exchange, and so forth wherever they might be. Air Force personnel move all the time – they have the aircraft, after all. We’re not trying to make experts, we’re trying to make generalists who can learn specifics before they depart or when they arrive, then act on them. That brought us to the conclusion that we need to operationalize this culture-general approach. We need to provide skills, and the U.S. Air Force settled on three: negotiate, communicate, and relate across cultural differences.

At that point we went back and reviewed some more literature and found that even knowledge-enabled skills are not sufficient. Most of the willingness to learn the knowledge, apply it, and develop these skills is driven by attitudes. And to be frank, we suspected that groups like the Peace Corps and the military tend to have strong self-selection mechanisms, and the individuals with attitudes more closely correlated to learning and employing these sorts of knowledge and skills, well, I’ll let you guess which group [Peace Corps or the military] they tend to join more often.

What the military does have is a strong motivation to get home in one piece, to not have any loss of life on your side, to try to avoid the loss of life in whatever community you’re working in, and this is now a doctrinal principle of counterinsurgency: that whenever you employ force, you may be doing more harm than good. General Petraeus has been quoted as saying “Don’t do something, just sit there.” You know, the opposite of the old saying, “Don’t just sit there, do something.” Military people are generally action-oriented, so doing nothing is hard. So is developing empathy, open-mindedness, the ability to cognitively frame-shift, cultural relativism, things that come intuitively to anthropologists. That’s difficult to develop with people who don’t necessarily have that disposition and haven’t seen the benefit of these attitudes historically. Some members of the military clearly do, some get it, but institutionally this is an area for improvement.

We also concluded that we need to teach military personnel how to learn about particularly cultures on the fly, how to apply the general principles to figure out the cultural conditions they’re working in. We know we can’t get everyone enough and sufficiently specific knowledge before they go. Plus, given the complexity of the situations they’re going to face and number of actors involved, what we can provide may well be dated. So why not teach them to learn so they can supplement their pre-deployment training?

That’s the model we developed. It squares well with core tenets of anthropological theory and anthropological methods. It is supported by good work from the field of communications, psychology, and organizational behavior as well. The real point is that it’s not just a common sense approach. It was developed by a group of scholars, many of whom have military experience themselves, whose students have real concerns and requirements, so it’s scientifically sound and yet militarily relevant.

The Air Force adopted this model and Air University made it the centerpiece of their Quality Enhancement Plan. That’s the portion of academic reaccreditation for a university that’s not about meeting existing standards but about promoting better student learning. It is a transformative, forward-looking process, and it has tremendous support and visibility.

LLW: How extensively is the 3C program being applied? You say it’s being aimed at every member of the Air Force through ongoing training? How exactly?

BRS: First, you have to distinguish training from education. Training occurs constantly in the military, it never stops. You’re always taking some training, doing some training program. Professional military education is a different animal. It happens at different points along your career. For officers, it first happens within your first year then you come back a few years later for the next course as a Captain, then several years later as a Major, then again as a Lieutenant Colonel. Over the course of a 20 year military career you will spend approximately 2 years in professional military education. That’s a significant investment that comes after you’ve been commissioned, which entails a 4-year educational program either through ROTC or the Air Force Academy.

None of that addresses your basic question though, which I think has more to do with how big this program is – or will be. Let me put it into a timeline: the Quality Enhancement Plan we’re developing for Air University’s reaccreditation won’t be submitted until December. It won’t be approved by the regional accrediting body until senior scholars and experts in this field come and look at what we’re proposing. That will be done hopefully by next summer. Then we’ll implement it over a five-year period. We’re trying to develop something good and sustainable, not something quick and mediocre. The second thing [to consider] is what we’re doing in the interim, while the accreditation process takes shape. It’s about cobbling together the best we can do right now to address the urgent need while we’re building the long-term plan to transform the institution.

When fully rolled out, we will have basically the opportunity to touch all of the future officers in the Air Force through the commissioning programs, all officers who go through professional military education, and all the enlisted personnel who go through their school system. We didn’t add enlisted personnel as an after-thought. They’re the ones who most often have interaction with local personnel, we’re designing the program from the get-go with this in mind.

We have another anthropologist who I work with who is designing an introduction to culture course. Not exactly Anthropology 101 because it’s targeted at a professional audience, but something along those lines. It will be delivered to enlisted personnel, all done online for credit through the Community College of the Air Force. Whether it will be mandatory or not remains to be seen, but it will be available to over 17,000 students per year. That’s an enormous undertaking. Providing a course on such a mass scale is a gigantic challenge. There are serious delivery issues to consider. Unfortunately, 3C is not something that comes in a pill format. It requires reading, thought, writing, discussion, experiential learning, and structuring that for just that one course, that one group of Air Force members taking a basic intro to culture class, is a big deal.

It is just one class in one school though. We have approximately 10 other schools and programs that we’re working with as well, trying to get new material in or adjust what’s already in there, trying to provide more, and most of all, trying to synchronize the learning process so when you move from one level to the next, you are building on what you received last time. It’s very rudimentary, very commonsensical, and very difficult. When fully implemented, it will be enormous. Will we get to do everything we want to, or the way we would like to? Probably not, but we will have a scientifically sound model that the institution supports and reaches huge numbers of military personnel. That’s pretty exciting, and important.

To go back to your question, training, on the other hand, prepares people to conduct foreseeable tasks under given conditions to a set standard. We’re creating a large training program too, it will reinforce culture-general learning from education and provide culture-specific preparation before Airmen deploy overseas. My focus is on the education component, though. Education is about broad preparation for uncertainty. We don’t know where Airmen are going to be in the future, what missions they’ll be performing. It’s difficult to imagine the challenges they’ll be facing a decade from now. So the Air Force has developed this model and put institutional resources behind it, including people, hiring anthropologists and others, and grounding it in an educational system where they are taught by academics, not just by practitioners with experiential knowledge.

LLW: How do you teach “culture” in general without teaching about a specific “culture,” i.e. regional area or language or local history?

BRS: First off, we don’t expect that we’re going to develop expertise in people who take part in a professional military education system. This is not set up to develop cultural experts. What we’re trying to do is provide the general purpose force with more learning opportunities than they have right now. That sounds like a modest goal but it’s actually Herculean when you think back to the logistics of the community college course described previously. Still, you asked how you teach culture-general concepts without grounding them in a particular place. I think it could be done, but frankly that’s not what we’re proposing to do. We’re focusing on teaching basic concepts, theories, and processes first, then applying these to specific places, groups, and interactions.

No one is proposing to ignore specific cultural manifestations. We have 3 anthropologists in this Center, and I can’t imagine anyone of us would ever have signed off on that. I’m a Latin Americanist, so when I teach, my examples are often from Latin America, everyone knows that and expects that. I still teach about, culture, ethnocentrism, holism relativism and so on, though. I should also be examining the ethnographic examples in light of concepts and theories that address kinship and exchange and gender and symbols and so forth. I teach the specifics through the lens of the basics of our discipline. I suspect that most anthropologists do this. The problem is that previously, U.S. Air Force education has established very little of this foundational knowledge. Again, Air University is not a liberal arts school, it is a professional school. So, we have to start with the basics and ensure they are expanded, applied, reinforced using specific cases. And not just the cases of where Airmen are deploying – that is the focus of training, education needs to be broader.

Let me give you an example: I was talking with a class about masculinity – what does it mean to be a man, gender roles, distribution, exchange relationships, kinship implications of that, linking that all together. I couldn’t give students a holistic example of this if I were dealing purely in abstractions. So if we’re going to teach a holistic approach it must be grounded in case studies and that’s a challenge because traditional ethnographies are not particularly well suited to this group of students. In this case, I talked about my research on how the Ecuadorian Army recruits young indigenous men by respecting their ethnicity while appealing to their sense of masculine honor and duty to protect the mother-nation, demonstrate their eligibility for marriage or employment, and how this motivates them to submit to the national vision of officers and daily will of sergeants. One of the students responded that the case sounded like his unit, the Texas National Guard!

That’s precisely the point we’re trying to reach: the ability to apply general principles to specific cases and eventually compare between them to identify similarities as well as differences. It is a pretty basic goal for an anthropology department, but quite a challenge in the military educational environment. Students seem to respond to it though. They know that Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t forever. They want to prepare for the next deployment, but are concerned about being adaptable into the future as well. Of course, examples also have to seem relevant to students. So, what we’re trying to do is capture their experiences through ethnographic interviews and convey them in a way that makes clear how culture is pertinent to what they do.

A few people in the Air Force still say, “Culture, that’s something the Army and Marines have to worry about, we’re at 30,000 feet!” The truth of the matter is that Airmen are increasingly involved in reconstruction, security assistance, and similar roles. At the same time, the U.S. Air Force is moving to an expeditionary model, in which they deploy all their necessary assets, personnel and hardware, to the theater of operations. So Airmen are both helping ground forces and supporting their own deployed air forces, driving in convoys, providing medical care, patrolling outside bases, and so forth. Clearly they need greater cross-cultural competence for these sorts of tasks. Still, the primary purpose of the Air Force is to operate in aerospace, and occasionally you hear skeptics point out that English is the international language of aviation. They are right, but I remind them of Churchill’s description of the US and UK as “two countries separated by a common language.” That was his allusion to the significance of culture – despite linguistic commonalities.

Cross-cultural competence is just as applicable to individuals serving on a coalition staff, in peacekeeping operations, working with NGOs and international organizations – even if they all speak English. That resonates with military students who have had to work with counterparts in other countries as well as with members of NGOs from their own country. Sometimes I’ll ask a class whether it was more difficult to work with NGO reps from their own country or their foreign military counterparts. Usually they answer the former. Most understand that military culture helps them connect with international partners, and sometimes the biggest challenge is working with people from their own country but who see the world and their mission differently. That sort of insight opens up an entirely new discussion and gradually shifts the lens from looking at the Other to looking at the Self. This sort of introspection on military culture leads to questions about the differences between the Air Force and other services, how militaries learn about themselves, how they can better manage their image, adjust their behaviors so they don’t become or stay their own worst enemy as they try to relate, communicate, and negotiate with people.

That for me is an exciting twist, that’s where I started my research, looking at militaries, not for militaries. Now I work with the Air Force. I’m an academic, not a bureaucrat. I’m not an evangelist or missionary either, trying to convert people, save them, or sell my cultural wares to the institution. I was asked to take the position, and I thought it was an opportunity to do good. I have also had students ask for help. They know they’re getting deployed again, the truth of military life these days is that people deploy a lot. So, should we help them? I think we should. Morally I feel obliged, especially if it prevents, reduces and helps recover from conflict. A growing number of professional colleagues agree.

To return to your earlier question, is that a fad? I don’t think so. Is it going to go away? That depends on lot of things but if we get our program institutionalized then maybe in 5 years’ time, Air Force personnel will say, oh yeah, cross-cultural competence, we’ve always done that.

LLW: Who teaches the 3C classes at Air University? If anthropologists, do you think that anthropologists have something particular to offer that other disciplines don’t? Or is this something that anyone in the social sciences who is attuned to the concept of culture can teach? Where are you hiring your teachers from?

BRS: That’s a lot of questions. Let me say that much of what we are currently delivering is not provided by Center members. It is taught by faculty members in multiple schools at Air University. One challenge we have is to make sure they are up to the job, they is one of the legs of the stool our program rests on, and that requires faculty development. Let me be clear, I’m disparaging anyone. They’re good professors, but if you’re hired as a historian you teach history. Now, there are obvious places where you could look at culture, but nothing that says you have to, and most likely nobody told you to do that when you were originally hired. To help them, our Center is developing a common approach and schema, moving beyond definitions into something that is more robust and operationalizable for the classroom and beyond. We’re also developing exercises, scenarios, other pedagogical materials for them. Some of our teachers and guest lecturers are anthropologists, to be sure. Do we want to hire more anthropologists? Absolutely. Are we trying to hire more anthropologists? Yes, but it’s not easy. Hiring a professor is pretty much the same whether it is for Air University or a civilian school. It is a very, very slow process.

Second, there are obviously some concerns within the discipline about working for the military, and I understand a lot of them. My perspective is that at least I know what my students are going to do when they graduate; most who teach at university don’t! I consider myself very lucky to be able to shape an institution, influence policy decisions, teach, mold the training process, as well as teach. However, ultimately my job is much more akin to a regular university professor than anything else – albeit with heavier administrative responsibilities. I teach, I research, I do service. We’ve found some other great anthropologists who agree. We also have cordial relations with other scholars from other fields that we bring in for guest lectures and workshops. We’re trying to develop that group more.

Do I think that anthropologists have something particular to offer? Absolutely. There is no other discipline that is as good as conceptualizing what culture is and digging into the intricacies of a particular culture through the ethnographic process and understanding it holistically. Do I think anthropology has important role to play? Yes, no doubt. Do I think we could do it alone? Absolutely not. Anthropologists are not particularly good at measuring things, particularly measuring learning outcomes. That is the heart of any quality enhancement plan. Measuring things is something that comes naturally to and is a real concern for militaries. It is easy to measure learning poorly. Doing it well requires a scientific approach. So do I think we need other disciplines like psychology and education and organizational behavior to help us with these sorts of challenges? Yes! By background I am interdisciplinary, and that’s what we do with this program. We’re looking to integrate more perspectives to make sure they are contributing to our goal: cross-cultural competence.

Anthropologists are not obliged to do this, to be a part of this move to educate the military. But I’d ask anthropologists to reflect quite soberly about this. The military is one of the most powerful institutions of the state. Do we want them to be learning more about culture? I suspect the answer is a qualified yes. If that is the case, who should teach them? Some disciplines might simplify, Other-ize, objectify culture. The messiness of anthropology is its greatest strength and greatest weakness. If we do not step up and teach these students, other disciplines will, and while I think the effort should be inter-disciplinary, I’m not altogether comfortable with what it might look like if anthropology is not part of the mix.

LLW: Culture Matters is an applied anthropology blog, so I try to highlight things that can be done with anthropology degrees outside of the traditional teaching jobs in academia. One thing I’ve become aware of recently is this incredible demand for “culture” in various guises in the U.S. military, and I get the impression that a lot of the people responding to this demand are NOT anthropologists, but rather contractors who are already used to supplying services and products to the military.

For example, the organization that contracts and trains Human Terrain Team members, BAE systems, is largely an aerospace engineering firm that supplies products like “advanced short-range air-to-air missiles” and the Typhoon combat aircraft, which hardly seems like a logical choice for an organization meant to recruit and train social scientists.

Why do you think more anthropologists have not been filling the gap? Does it have to do with anthropologists’ attitudes towards working with the military, or simply a lack of familiarity with military contracting processes, or something else that I haven’t imagined?

BRS: Again, lots of questions in there. Let me start with quick overview of how the US military works with contractors. First off, the military is an enormous organization. The U.S. Air Force’s active duty strength is roughly 1/3 of a million. Add in all reserve personnel, national guard, civilian employees and it’s gigantic. Add in other services – Army, Navy, Marines – plus the agencies and it’s gargantuan. Such a large organization is inevitably bureaucratic and slow. To provide services in a timely fashion they often turn to contractors. I think there are some who do an incredibly good job at providing services. There are some that don’t.

The problem I see is this: Developing cross-culturally competent military professionals is not the same as buying “boots, black, size 9.” This is a conceptual enterprise. Those companies that are able to reach out and hire people with good ideas and the ability to do this stuff, they are providing tremendous service to government because they’re filling identified gaps. I’m not speaking of any contractor in particular, I’m saying contractors are a reality, and some do good jobs. Some of these are anthropologists, who work as contractors or subcontractors. Some of the latter are small business owners, applied anthropologists, they do tremendous work and work incredibly hard. There’s a misconception that working for the government is easy. It’s not, it’s hard. It doesn’t pay terribly well. There are earnest people who care deeply about this, not just out of patriotism but often times a sincere desire to contribute to making things better as well.

OK, so there are contractors, there are small subcontractors, and there are good results and some bad results. But if you ask one of these massive conglomerate contractors to “go out and get you some culture” – I’m exaggerating for effect because obviously I’ve never seen a contract that says “go out and get some culture” – the real question becomes who they have on staff that can do this. Usually the answer is nobody. Can they find someone who can do that? That’s where you separate the wheat from chaff. The more realistic contracting scenario is this: A realistic deliverable or service needs to be provided, so it is put out to bid. Most academics can’t compete because of the scope of the requirements. The fact that these tend to be very deliverable-oriented doesn’t help either, since anthropologists tend to not be very deliverable-oriented. Many feel, and I understand this sentiment, that this reifies culture. There are some applied anthropologists who do a wonderful job of balancing anthropology’s complexity with the armed forces’ requirement to act, but there are very few military applied anthropologists. Most in the U.S. are already employed by the government. So, other disciplines that focus more on tangible, measurable deliverables tend to be the “subcontractors of choice.”

LLW: Which disciplines?

BRS: Psychology is particularly adept at bridging the practitioner-academic divide. Organizational behavior, that’s grounded in business schools, they do this for a living. Communications is also a good example.

They bring important things to the discussion, but they shouldn’t be the only disciplines heard from. If we can provide anthropological frameworks, we conceptualize things better than anyone else, we can really flesh out the concepts. To come back to our program, here’s the neat thing: I’ve worked for really tremendous individuals from different disciplines in the past, but with this effort the anthropologists are subcontracting psychologists, organizational behavioralists, geographers rather than vice versa. That’s an exciting process to be a part of. These are exciting times to be in. Sometimes exhaustingly exciting, and sometimes frustratingly exciting. But we’re building something and I hope it’s going to provide some real examples of the work anthropologists can do, because I’ve known lots of people in grad school who said “I don’t want to teach, but what else can I do an anthropology degree?”

Here are some examples for applied anthropologists who want to work with the military: Perhaps they should look less at the contracting options. The down side to contracting is that you don’t necessarily get to set the conditions under which you work or how your work is used. A lot of people don’t care for that, including me. You can form a small business. That’s a good way to go if you have a track record, but you spend an enormous amount of time trying to learn how to bid on contracts. So it is probably a good idea to intern or apprentice first to learn the ropes. There are opportunities to work in government as well. There’s a tremendous focus on our discipline these days. The Human Terrain System is one frequently cited example, but there are many other domains in which anthropologists are also participating. Professional and undergraduate education is one example. There are also language education programs, training programs, anthropologists working on cultural resource management, policy, strategic planning. You have couple in the medical field. There was an article in the National Association of Practicing Anthropologists [NAPA] Bulletin [No. 29, Pp. 110-130], which stated that in the U.S., the federal government is the largest employer of anthropologists outside of academia. I thought the article gave a pretty narrow perspective on opportunities the military though. It’s incredibly complex. There are so many opportunities. As I’ve written elsewhere, the anthropologists I know who work with the armed forces are a very diverse and upstanding bunch of professionals.

I don’t know if you’re going to get into this at all, but I wanted to mention that I don’t know any anthropologist who works for the military who hasn’t reflected long and hard on professional ethics, in their own mind if not with others, and figured out where they will not tread. I did that fairly early, and the interesting thing for me is that I’ve never been asked to do any of the things that I considered to be beyond the pale. No one ever asked me for the sorts of nefarious support or malicious or malevolent assistance that is sometimes portrayed as a threat by a few members of our discipline. I’ve been doing this for a while. I have worked for the military in several countries. The anthropologists who work inside the system are a pretty collegial bunch. So you’d think that if there was shady stuff going on, I or one of my close colleagues – with whom I talk all the time – would be asked to do it at least once!

I understand people’s concern, from a historical perspective, but I’ve honestly never heard of that myself. I understand the concern of those who don’t like the state of the world right now. I’m a member of that group myself. But I want to do my part to make things better by working with people who because of their profession have to salute and comply. We want civilian dominance over the Armed Forces, we don’t want the military to be dominant over civilians, at least I don’t. The point is that no one has ever asked me to do anything I consider unethical. If they do, I can walk away. I think what I do can be laid out in explicit detail in front of my colleagues and I have no worries about what they would find.

I [teach] with full knowledge that my students may use what they learn for purposes other than what I intended. I know that’s a possibility, I’m not fooling myself. That possibility exists for anyone, but we tend to sweep it under the carpet. I have a sense that most of my students do not plan to use what I’m teaching them to go out and hurt innocent people. Is it possible? Yes. But it’s a risk I have to take and one I work to minimize. My reasoning does not follow a do-no-harm formula. That’s a biomedical ethical model that is nearly impossible to fully put into practice. My calculus is, does the probability of doing good outweigh the possibility of harm? I can look myself in mirror every morning and say yes. When I can’t, it will be time for a career change.

I love what I do. I really love what I do. It is not for everyone. I respect those who are critical, so long as their critique is grounded in empirical data, because I think those colleagues perform an important service to the discipline, they bring historical evidence and sometimes hypothetical, conceptual problems, and they put all of this on the table. I’m not going to engage from defensive position though. I try to listen carefully and tell myself, “That’s a really interesting point, I’ve never seen that in practice, but boy I’ll be on the lookout for it.” It’s the same multiple perspectives approach that guides our program, we need to do more of that in anthropology. A cordial and respectful dialogue, not a spiteful duel of monologues.

LLW: I know that you’ve been critical of all the attention focused on the Human Terrain System, as though it somehow represents the main effort at cultural awareness coming out of the Department of Defense. What do you see as the difference between a program like HTS, which embeds social scientists within military units to advise them, and the 3C program, which focuses on training the military in social science concepts?

BRS: I described some of the other ways anthropologists are contributing to the security sector before. Generally speaking– not specifically about the Human Terrain System – the way I look at it is: Do anthropologists want to be sole service providers of cultural knowledge or do we want to help people figure it out themselves? I obviously opt for the latter, but these are not mutually exclusive approaches. There will always be a role for specialists. We’ll always need experts. If someone were going to the places where I’ve done fieldwork, I’d want to have a chance to help them understand the place and think through the consequences of their actions. That being said, I think we also need to look at the general purpose force, the bulk of the institution, and enable them to do more and do better, to think through potential consequences before they act. Both elements are necessary.

My basic framework is this, and I speak for myself, not my institution. This is a principle that guided me through my doctoral work and applied research after that and now. It is my goal to help prevent conflict whenever possible. To help minimize conflict when it occurs. And to help recover from conflict after it erupts. So you get critiques that we’re enabling occupation, violence, these are standard critiques. I understand those, but I’m more concerned with preventing the next conflict than I am with trying to sort out a current one. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to help minimize and recover from it. But where do I feel I can do the most good? It’s where we can help prevent conflict and violence. And from that comes my effort to help an institution transform itself, to give people the tools to think about different ways of seeing the world. And to help those going to places that are conflict torn to go and deal with that. Ultimately what we’re trying to do is create a better future. I have to explain this to my kids too, not just my students and peers.

I recently learned that a small theatre in Budapest is putting on a play (according to other descriptions, and opera!) based on a short ethnographic piece I published in 2000, in a literary journal. (They seem to have treated it as “open source.”) It’s the monologue of a Chinese migrant woman — sraight from my field notes.

I remember the discussion some months ago about non-academic publications. So I guess it’s worth writing these pieces, if they manage to move people! The producer said what they liked was the way the story was everyday, and yet not. That’s what anthropology is all about, hm?

There has been a fantastic discussion going on here on Culture Matters that I wanted to draw attention to, for those who don’t meticulously follow the stream of comments on older posts.  After I ate humble pie over my simplistic and error-filled rendering of Steve Featherstone’s recent article on the Human Terrain System in Harpers, I have stepped back and enjoyed a really interesting dialogue between Steve and a couple of commentators: Gonzo, who supports collaboration with the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Joneilortiz, who fiercely opposes it.

What I think it particularly interesting in their discussion (which incidentally is remarkable for the way that two anonymous commentators can spar over an issue which they clearly feel passionate about, but at the same time engage respectfully without resorting to name-calling, which so often happens in debates over anthropology and the military) is the way Joneilortiz reorients the framing of the issue, pressing us to think about what occupation means for Iraqis, not Americans, and what the ethical obligations are for anthropologists who oppose the occupation.  Here’s an excerpt:

…the condemning of the occupation neither closes the chapter nor ends the discussion. On the contrary, it’s the point of departure for much more pressing questions: for example, if any alliance with the US military is violent and by definition colonial, what, then, is the proper (or ideal) role for an anthropologist on this unavoidable subject?

Further, if you are an anthropologist who opposes the occupation (and resists the discipline’s appropriation by the military), are you then obligated to support the insurgency? I mean, if the occupation is illegal, shouldn’t anthropologists be working with the Iraqi people and not the occupiers, the insurgents and not the military (if with anyone at all)? Is it logically sensical to oppose the war and ‘not’ support its resistance? Why is debate over anthropologists’ involvement with this war limited to talk of the military? Why not theorize or discuss how anthropologists might help those they admit are under attack? Why, once again, are Iraqis invisible in this discussion?

A provocative question.  If anthropologists oppose U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, should they work with the insurgents?

And on the topic of Iraqi perspectives on occupation, I just posted to Khaldoun (the other blogging hat that I wear) some info about a book of short stories by Iraqi author Kulshan al-Bayati that the publisher labels “Iraqi resistance literature.”  The book is only available in Arabic so far, but I hope that someone will want to translate it and publish it in English.

Finally, back to the topic of culture and the military, the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee just met two days ago to hear testimony on transforming the U.S. military’s foreign language, cultural awareness, and regional expertise capabilities. Videocasts and webcasts are available online. On that same page, if you scroll down you can also find the audio transcript from the previous subcommittee meeting on the topic of “Defense Language and Cultural Awareness Transformation,” which was July 9, 2008. Both provide interesting insight into the way the U.S.  military is increasingly taking up the topic of “culture.”

–L.L. Wynn

These days, states like to define their “values” — either, as in Europe or Australia, to limit immigration, or, as in Asia, to evade criticism of human rights violations. The “values” expressed in European or Australian citizenship tests are largely very similar: freedom of expression, respect for democratic institutions, equality of the sexes and of sexual minorities, non-coercive childrearing, reasoning instead of violence, and so on. Not bad, though who would have thought that the Christian Democratic Party in the conservative German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg would initiate citizenship tests that include questions like “In this country, it is accepted that people who are openly homosexual hold public office. Do you agree with this?”  The correct answer is “yes.” Considering Baden-Wuerttemberg’s sociodemographics, it is likely that a large proportion of current citizens would, however, answer “no,” and the question is simply an imagined way of ferreting out supposedly homophobic Muslims. That is perhaps part of the reason why conservative parties embraced these values, rather than, say, faith in God or the importance of family — an alternative set of “European values” espoused by the Vatican and its Eastern European allies, who are not worried about deeply religious immigrants. (Not just because there are few of those, but also because Eastern European politicians are less concerned about the niceties of keeping them out.)

In our recent book Maxikulti, Joana Breidenbach and talk about two Brussels politicians adamant about defending European values. Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and author of a number of liberal “citizens’ manifestos” that defend openness, tolerance and individualism in the face of the xenophobic moral panic that has followed the rise of home-grown Islamist terrorism. For Maciej Giertych, a member of the European Parliament representing the League of Polish Families (whose presidential candidate he also was), European values are morality, faith in God and respect for parental authority.

Another Eastern European politician who publicly shares these values is Zoltan Balog, chairman of the Human Rights Committee (!) of the Hungarian Parliament and “spiritual adviser” to the opposition leader, Viktor Orban, who is expected to win the 2010 election. In a recent interview, he explained that “it is not right to accept uncritically everything that people want to sell us under the pretext of human rights.” For example, it is not right that “the mayor of Berlin can only win with a large majority by getting out in front of people and declaring that he is homosexual,” or that soccer players are not allowed to pray on the field because that is an imposition of their religion on others. Balog went on to explain that although the state must be distinguished from religion, it “cannot be separated… from it” because “although they are not the same, they belong together.”

It is obvious that Giertych’s or Balog’s “European values” are close to the “American values” of the U.S. religious right or to the “Asian values” of Mahathir Mohamad, Lee Kuan Yew or the Chinese Communist Party than to the “European values” of the citizenship tests.  I wonder why this does not receive more public scrutiny — especially considering that Balog’s job is supposedly to ensure that those consensual European values of tolerance and respect for individual rights prevail in Hungary. In this capacity, he is presumably in constant touch with his Brussels counterparts. Yet these fundamental disagreements on the nature and limits of rights and tolerance within the EU’s mainstream institutions remain quite hidden.

News Limited sources recently ran a story about a new case involving Judge Sarah Bradley, a Queensland judge who became the centre of a furore after not imposing gaol terms on nine indigenous youths who gang raped a 10-year-old girl in their community in Cape York. In this new case, she has allowed a teacher accused of sexually abusing a child time to gather evidence that he was enacting local cultural norms. The story is interesting in a number of ways, not the least in terms of how ‘culture’ can be deployed in legal settings, and where judges may appear to be more ‘culturally sensitive’ and culturally relativist than members of the communities in question.

In this case, an anthropologist from James Cook University has apparently been called in to write a report on the authenticity of the claim about the cultural legitimacy of the act. It would be interesting to know what s/he has to say. I would particularly like to know what the response to the question of whether the practice of oral sex between men and boys is a ‘part of’ the culture in question. From my reading of the article, there are a number of problematic issues arising from the way the issue is being constructed, particularly about the sorts of assumptions being made about the nature of culture.

For example, in a fascinating detail, although the accused was not raised in a ‘traditional’ manner, his lawyer argues that he was ‘imbued’ with the culture, presumably simply by living and working in the area. Culture as contagion, I suppose. It also seems to ignore the holistic premises of an anthropological understanding of culture, which require that we consider an act not in isolation, but within the context of wider institutions, beliefs and practices. To simply ask whether the performance of oral sex between men and boys in a particular community is a ‘part of the culture’ decontextualises the act. It assumes that if an act can be found ‘in a culture’ then the act is therefore ‘cultural’, regardless of the context in which it occurs. This would appear to be a particularly erroneous position to take with regard to ‘mens’ business’ rite of passage type acts. If they are occurring in secret, isolated from the political institution they participate in — the production of initiated men — then it would be very problematic to my mind to ascribe them with cultural authenticity. Making use of the fundamental anthropological notion that culture is both shared and practised, I would also be putting more emphasis on the opinions of members of the community about the legitimacy of the act, than on an anthropologist’s opinion about an abstracted and therefore reified culture. Sorry, anthropologists!

Ironic, really, that an anthropological insight serves to delegitimise anthropological knowledge. However, this legal prediliction to treat anthropologists as experts on a particular ‘culture’, understood to be a sort of archive — a relatively stable, bounded and possessing a traditional and authentic form that can be catalogued — actually puts anthropologists at odds with their own understandings about culture and how it works. If anthropologists are to be experts on cases such as these, I think it should be as much to consider and critique the manner in which culture is being deployed in the courts as to act as curators of a cultural archive.

The full text of the article follows.

Gang-rape judge in child sex furore

By Padraic Murphy, Natasha Robinson and Tony Koch

February 15, 2008

Article from: The Australian

THE north Queensland judge who last year allowed nine child rapists to go free has given a teacher, who has admitted forcing an indigenous 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex on him, time to gather evidence that he was educating his victim in “men’s business”.

James Last, a Sydney-educated teacher who recently worked in Northern Territory communities, last week pleaded guilty in Cairns before District Court judge Sarah Bradley to seven counts of indecently dealing with an 11-year-old boy over a four-month period in 1983.

But Judge Bradley has granted a three-month adjournment to allow Last, who claims he received no sexual gratification from the assaults, to allow his lawyers to find an anthropologist to support his claim that he had been trying to introduce the Torres Strait boy to “traditional” islander sexual practices.

Judge Bradley granted the adjournment despite the prosecution pointing out that it had two witnesses – “respected elders” from the boy’s home island – ready to debunk the claim that such practices were part of “men’s business”.

The adjournment has outraged indigenous leaders, who have already called for Judge Bradley’s sacking after she failed last year to jail nine males for the gang rape of a 10-year-old girl in the Cape York community of Aurukun.

Last, now 61 and living in Darwin, took the 11-year-old boy from his family on Saibai Island in the Torres Strait in 1983, promising to educate him in Cairns.

But Last, who was 37 at the time of the offences, repeatedly sexually abused the boy, at one point saying: “I’ve sucked you, now it’s your turn.”

Last said yesterday he had taken the “self-sacrificial” step of pleading guilty to the charges to spare the boy, who he loved, a trial. He said Aboriginal elders in the Torres Strait had “entrusted” the boy to him, and he was tutored by the elders in “men’s business”.

“I’m saying that certain things are not abuse and they never were in the traditional culture,” he said. “A lot of it is men’s business and that’s why, I think very wisely, Aboriginal islander people have said men’s business is men’s business. They say, ‘You don’t tell the white fella what he can’t understand’.”

Prosecutor Skye Growden told the court Last had told the victim the abuse was a part of traditional culture. “The defendant told the victim that this was traditional and that older men did this to young men when they loved them and he believed him,” she said. “The complainant says in his statement that the arresting officer in this matter was the first person that he told because he was ashamed about the offences and worried what people would say if they found out.”

Ms Growden told the court that although Last had a part-Aboriginal father, he was not raised in a traditional manner and that he should receive a custodial sentence to send a clear message to the community.

“It is stated in the defence material that he was born in Sydney where he was educated to grade 12. He then went on to receive a scholarship and teach in Wollongong and undertake postgraduate studies,” she said.

“He has gone on to have an illustrious and distinguished career. He is an educated man, using what he claims to be part of Papua New Guinea and Torres Strait Islander culture, that is, men’s business, to explain away his offending behaviour. I have been instructed that this is not part of the culture.”

But Judge Bradley rejected calls for an immediate custodial sentence, allowing Last’s lawyers to gather evidence that he had been abusing the boy as some kind of rite of passage.

“What we’ve got here is a plea in mitigation on the basis that the defendant genuinely believed that what he was doing was culturally appropriate and that he had that excuse for it,” Judge Bradley said on February 6. “I appreciate he’s pleaded guilty but the prosecution is not accepting that, so we’ll need some evidence. Clearly, it’s got a significant impact on penalty.”

The following day, Judge Bradley adjourned the case until May 15 to allow lawyers to ask an anthropologist from James Cook University, which is based in Townsville, to write a report on whether child sexual abuse was an accepted part of Saibai islander culture. “It’s clearly a live issue, and it’s clearly an issue that’s relevant to penalty, so I need to give the defence that opportunity,” she said.

Judge Bradley’s decision to consider the anthropology report was made after Ms Growden said it was “the Crown’s submission that an adjournment is not necessary unless you’re rejecting the submissions that I made yesterday, which were based on decisions of the High Court and the Court of Appeal. I do have two people – two elders from Saibai Island – that are on standby this morning, but can give evidence that it’s not part of men’s business at Saibai Island.”

In earlier submissions, Last’s counsel Kevin McCreanor said his client had become “imbued” with indigenous culture.

He said Last told police when interviewed about the allegations that an elder on Saibai Island had told him cultural secrets.

Mr McCreanor said the interviewing police officer told Last that in his investigations in the Torres Strait he, too, had heard that boys’ first sexual experiences were “with an older male of their tribe to teach them about his body and things like that”.

But Ms Growden, a former associate to Judge Bradley, later said that statement was “a tactic” of the interviewing police.

Mr McCreanor said Last told police: “Those things were told to me as well, but I was encouraged because of the incapacity of most people to understand, and the derision that flowed back on to so-called primitive people, not to talk about these things.”

Judge Bradley said it was up to Last to supply evidence to support his contention that his actions were “culturally appropriate”.

Late last year, Judge Bradley had refused to impose jail terms on nine youths and men who gang-raped a 10-year-old intellectually impaired girl on Aurukun community, on western Cape York.

The Court of Appeal in Brisbane on Wednesday ruled that the Crown would be given an extended time to appeal against those sentences.

Many thanks to Kirsten Bell, former lecturer at Macquarie, for alerting me to this article.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23215930-2,00.html

Over the last few days, European papers have discussed the controversial comments by Rowan Williams, Archbischop of Canterbury, who stated in a speech, the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK “seems unavoidable”. The many outraged commentators, among them Islamophobe Mark Steyn, greatly exxagerated and misinterpreted Williams, who dealt with the topic in a highly differentiated way (here is the text).

I came across one reasonable blogpost by German journalist Heinrich Bergstresser, who pointed out that legal pluralism – far from being a dangerous new trend – is the norm in most countries. “In India, Jordania or Nigeria, to name just a few states, secular state law coexists with islamic law and customary law, without threatening the legal security in any way.” 

It is worth pointing out that in addition to countries with a colonial past, legal pluralism is also already practiced in many European countries, thus in Germany there are special slaughtering laws for Jews and Muslims. In disputes concerning inheritance and divorce among Muslims, German courts often take the legal principals of their country of origin into consideration. In Britain, orthodox Jews can have cases adjudicated in front of their own courts (Beth Din) and there already are sharia councils (yet their judgements are not legally binding and their authority is greatly disputed among different sectors of  British-Muslim society).

Far from being scandelous, the archbishops speech thus seems to me a welcome realization that we have to deal with the (legal) pluralisation of European countries in an open and differentiated way.

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?