The AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) has published its final report on the Human Terrain System (HTS).  Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

When ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment – all characteristic factors of the HTS concept and its application – it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.

In summary, while we stress that constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible, CEAUSSIC suggests that the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers and that it further recognize the problem of allowing HTS to define the meaning of “anthropology” within DoD.

The entire report can be read online at http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/commissions/CEAUSSIC/upload/CEAUSSIC_HTS_Final_Report.pdf.

–L.L. Wynn

Readers familiar with the ongoing discussions on the utilisation of anthropological knowledge and the employment of anthropologists within the Human Terrain System will be familiar with the views of the small band of its most vocal supporters: namely Montgomery McFate, Andrea Jackson and Steve Fondacaro. While these vocal supporters and a number of other program personnel (including, among others, Zenia (Helbig) Tompkins, Marcus Griffin, Brit Damon, and Major Robert Holbert) have expressed their opinions and experiences with the program publicly, the overwhelming tone of analyses of such opinions and  experiences has focused not on their stated experiences but on what their stated experiences belie about the program. Concerns expressed with the HTS largely revolve around the potential of the program to produce effects which are in conflict with anthropological values and ethics.

The views of the anthropologists involved with the HTS have often been censured, derided and ignored on the basis that they are representative of supreme ignorance, immorality and/or naivety. This is likely too simplistic a reading. It is important to acknowledge the diversity of experiences and thoughts of the HTS personnel or else we are subjecting ourselves to a narrow (and potentially flawed) conception of the program and the HTS personnel. In adopting such a narrow conception, we risk distancing ourselves from the actual issues of the program and fighting a war against a phantom of our own creation.

I would thus like to direct your attention to a blog by Ben Wintersteen, a current HTS member. The stated audience of his blog is his friends and family, but as his stated purpose in the program is (at least in part) to critically examine the workings of the HTS from the inside, his blog contains many reflections on his experiences with the program to date (he is currently in week 15 of training). He posts 2 extended blogs per week on his ethical, educational, social, emotional and physical experiences in the program, and often takes the time to compare them to the issues raised against the HTS in the broader disciplinary debate.

Without further ado, here’s the link:

http://www.thoughts.com/blog/browse/keywordSearch/ben%20wintersteen

–Nikki Kuper

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has just announced the winners of the first round of research funded under the Minerva Initiative.  This was a joint process whereby the National Science Foundation (NSF) and DoD determined funding for research on “Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict and Cooperation” — i.e. social science research deemed of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy.  You can go to the DoD media release for more details, but in case you’re wondering if David Vine’s proposed Minerva research got funded, the answer is no.

There were four topic areas  for the NSF solicitation: authoritarian regimes, the strategic impact of religious and cultural change, terrorist organizations and ideologies, and new dimensions in national security.  17 men were funded, compared to 6 women (1 man and 1 woman were both funded for more than one project).  I did a quick search on the departmental affiliations of each grantee to try to determine disciplinary background, and as far as I can tell, no anthropologists were funded.  The disciplinary breakdown is: 14 political scientists, 6 economists, 3 sociologists, 2 psychologists, 1 linguist, 1 communications studies researcher, and 1 computer scientist were funded.

Of course, what we don’t know is what proposed research projects and disciplines were not funded.

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

This weekend’s issue of the Books of the (New York) Times has a review of The Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen, the Australian anthropologist and mastermind of the Human Terrain programme. The review, which is very positive, describes Kilcullen as “one of the few brave souls who had the ear of people in the Bush White House and advised against the invasion of Iraq.”

A couple of news items about the Human Terrain System have crossed my desk in the past week and I’m finally getting around to writing about them.  First, there’s an extended article in the Boston Globe about Paula Loyd, the HTS anthropologist who was killed in Afghanistan by a man who set her on fire (she died after 2 months in the hospital).  It gives more details than had previously been available about the man who killed her, suggesting that it wasn’t a spontaneous act of rage but something a bit more premeditated:

As part of a new military program that uses social scientists to improve the troops’ understanding of the local population, Loyd began interviewing a gregarious stranger who approached her with a jug of cooking fuel in his hands. He talked for 15 minutes, thanking her profusely in English. But just as her guards motioned it was time to leave, he lit his jug on fire and engulfed the 36-year-old Loyd in flames.

The other news item from this week’s Wired.com and Pravda is that HTS employees are about to become government employees instead of private contractors, with a substantial decrease in pay. From Wired.com’s Danger Room:

Imagine you’re on a mission for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The job is dangerous. The hours are long. And suddenly, you find out that your pay is about to be cut by sixty percent or more.

That’s the situation facing interpreters, researchers and  managers, deployed overseas as part of the Army’s social science program, the Human Terrain System. Since the inception of the project in 2006, these specialists have been generously-paid contractors, serving as cultural counselors to combat units. Earlier this week, however, program manager Steve Fondacaro told workers that they’re all becoming government employees — effective almost immediately. Which means that Human Terrain pay is suddenly not all that generous. One linguist, previously pulling in an annual salary $270,000, will now make about $91,000 — if that person continues his warzone work for the Human Terrain project, that is.

It abruptly changes the incentives calculus for anthropologists working for the military, which is something that has been widely reported on and critiqued — though even a ‘measly’ $91,000 a year is still about double the average starting salary of most anthropologists who teach at U.S. universities.

–L.L. Wynn

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.

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

A Nature editorial calls for a swift end to HTS. Their objection: not the principle of putting anthropology and the social sciences in the service of the U.S. military in Iraq, but the fact that there have been several deaths, injuries, and a scandal in the form of hiring as an Iraqi translator a suspected (by the FBI) former spy for Saddam Hussein (frankly I struggle to see how that’s a scandal).

UPDATE: David Price has just published in CounterPunch an article which puts the Nature editorial in context along with the recent publication on WikiLeaks.com of the Human Terrain System handbook (unclassified, but previously unreleased publicly).

–L.L. Wynn

Some sad news: Paula Lloyd, a social scientist on a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan, was reportedly doused in gasoline and set on fire by a Taliban supporter.  According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lloyd was interviewing a man about gasoline prices when the man, who was carrying a container of gasoline,  doused her and lit her on fire.  Via Open Anthropology, a Reuters news report says that the Taliban claim that children were responsible for setting on fire and killing a “female soldier” when she was searching homes in Maiwand in the province of Kandahar.  Lloyd, however, is not dead; she was evacuated to a hospital with burns over 60% of her body.  Reuters also reports that another “U.S. civilian” shot dead the Afghani who set her on fire.