Another presidential candidate with anthropology in the family

[cross-posted at Khaldoun]

Ralph Nader has announced that he is again running for president in the United States. As the BBC notes, the 2% of votes that he received in the 2000 elections when he represented the Green Party was a deciding factor in Bush’s win over Gore, and this time around, Republicans again welcome his candidacy, since it is again expected to split the Democratic vote.

So, on the occasion of Ralph Nader’s entry into the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and since we’ve been talking about the anthropology links of another presidential candidate, let me tell you how I first found out who Ralph Nader was.

Homo Politicus

Dana Milbank’s recent book,  Homo Politicus: The Strange and Scary Tribes that Run Our Government (Doubleday, 2007), plays on the jargon of classical anthropology to send up “Potomac Man, that strange indigenous tribe inhabiting the area in and around Washington, D.C.“  Here’s an excerpt from the official book synopsis:

Deep within the forbidding land encircled by the Washington Beltway lives the tribe known as Homo Politicus. Their ways are strange, even repulsive, to civilized human beings, their arcane rites often impenetrable, their language coded and obscure, violating their complex taboos can lead to sudden, harsh, and irrevocable punishment.

Normal Americans have long feared Homo Politicus, with good reason. But fearless anthropologist (and Washington Post columnist) Dana Milbank has spent many years immersed in the dark heart of Washington, D.C., and has produced this indispensable portrait of a bizarre culture whose tribal ways are as hilarious as they are outrageous.

Robert Leopold, Director of the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian, has just reviewed Homo Politicus in the Washington Post.  You might have to know or care about Washington, D.C. political society to be interested in the book, but any anthropologist will enjoy Leopold’s review:

…these cursory cultural excursions are merely tongue-in-cheek set-ups for the Potomac Land institutions that follow: the curious rituals (face time), rites of solidarity (fundraisers), fictive kinship (party affiliation), Kabuki theater (judicial confirmation hearings), purification rituals (the Gridiron Club) and shadow puppets (pundits), to name only a few…

L.L. Wynn

A round-up of news coverage of the AAA meetings

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

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

Marcia Langton on the NT Intervention

In the wake of Labor’s stunning victory over the weekend there is a lot of speculation about the future of the Northern Territory Intervention. One indigenous commentator on this is Professor Marcia Langton, who has never been one to mince her words. She has written the following article, published in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, which says a lot about the complexities of the intervention and the social problems it is supposed to address. She points out the gender and generational dimensions of “the problem” and draws attention to the role of power within the indigenous population itself. Her approach suggests that the question shouldn’t be “intervention, yes or no?” but “intervention for whom?”

It’s time to stop playing politics with vulnerable lives

Marcia Langton, November 30, 2007

The crisis in Aboriginal society is a public spectacle, played out in a vast reality show through the media, parliaments, civil service and Aboriginal world. This obscene and pornographic spectacle deploys a special mode of dehumanising abuse and parody, and ultimately shifts our attention away from the everyday crises that Aboriginal people endure, or don’t endure, dying as they do at excessive rates.

This spectacle is not a new phenomenon in Australian public life but the debate about indigenous affairs has reached a new crescendo, fuelled by the uncensored exposé of the extent of Aboriginal child abuse.

More than a century of policy experimentation with Aboriginal people climaxed with the Commonwealth Government sending the army and a specialist taskforce into the Northern Territory, the only jurisdiction where it has such broad powers.

It legislated more than 500 pages of emergency intervention measures that subvert self-government powers of the Northern Territory in the most extraordinary federal takeover in Australia’s history. In some critical respects, the outcome is what many have recommended for decades: interventions to prevent the abuse, rape and assault of Aboriginal women and children and decisive action against the perpetrators.

The federal legislation and the emergency taskforce constituted a slap in the face for the Northern Territory Government led by the then chief minister, Clare Martin - a bracing vote of no confidence in her government’s capacity to deal with the Aboriginal crisis.

Even though the Commonwealth provides funds to the Northern Territory Government on the basis of the disadvantages of the population, it was the Commonwealth, rather than the Territory Government, that became the villain of the piece in the public debate about the intervention.

Last Sunday Labor’s Trish Crossin and Warren Snowdon reportedly demanded that the intervention be halted, with a list of demands: the reinstatement of the Aboriginal work-for-the-dole scheme; the removal of measures to limit alcohol sales; and the reinstatement of permit restrictions for Aboriginal communities that had been not just isolated from the outside world but effectively quarantined from the larger society and economy. It remains to be seen whether the Prime Minister-elect, Kevin Rudd, will honour his commitment to the intervention.

Now Martin and her deputy, Sid Stirling, have resigned.

There has also been a spill in the chairman’s position at the powerful Northern Land Council. Wali Wunungmurra, one of Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s cousins, was elected to the position. Just before the federal election, Yunupingu supported the principal intention of the intervention in a public lecture at the University of Melbourne.

The political earth is moving after so much pretentious, vain, and ultimately anti-humanist dancing with symbols while the practical responses to the crisis never came.

There’s a cynical view afoot that the emergency intervention was a political ploy - a Trojan Horse - to sneak through land grabs and some gratuitous black head-kicking disguised as concern for children. These conspiracy theories abound, and they are mostly ridiculous.

Those who did not see the intervention in the Northern Territory coming were deluding themselves. It was the inevitable outcome of the many failures of policy and of the strange federal-state division of responsibilities for Aboriginal Australians. Added to this were the general incompetence of the civil service and the non-governmental sector, including some Aboriginal organisations, lack of political will and the dead hand of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

The combined effect of the media campaign for action and the emergency intervention has been a metaphorical dagger sunk into the heart of the powerful, wrong-headed Aboriginal male ideology that had prevailed in indigenous affairs, policies and practices.

It’s time for the voices of women and children to be heard. It’s time for both the federal and the Territory government to stop playing politics with the lives of the vulnerable and shut down the alcohol take-away outlets, establish children’s commissions and shelters in each community - as Noel Pearson has suggested - and treat grog runners and drug dealers as the criminals that they are. Otherwise, they will all have the blood of the victims on their hands.

Professor Marcia Langton is the Inaugural Chairwoman of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.

More on culture, the military, and “counterinsurgency”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L.L. Wynn

 

Guantanamo Manual Leaked Online

Wired is carrying the news that Wikileak.org, a website that encourages corporate and government whistle-blowers to post documents online anonymously, has last week published the U.S. government manual for Guantanamo detainees, the Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures. It’s not a classified document, but unlike the publication of the military’s Counterinsurgency Manual by the University of Chicago Press, this one was not intended for public consumption.

Here is the link to the PDF. However, I cannot get the wikileaks website to work to see the document myself. Overwhelmed by traffic or blocked by nefarious secret forces? If you’re really keen to see it, you can download it as a bit torrent (8.4 MB). (Bit torrents usually get bad press for facilitating copyright infringement but this is reminder of something legal that they’re good for.)

L.L. Wynn

An anthropologist in the military

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

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

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

Where are the soldier-academics?

Lawyer and human rights activist Asli Bali alerted me to this recent article in the Guardian:

“A study by an Israeli psychologist into the violent behaviour of the country’s soldiers is provoking bitter controversy and has awakened urgent questions about the way the army conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians, aggravated by poor training and discipline. In her recently published report, co-authored by Professor Yoel Elizur, Yishai-Karin details a series of violent incidents, including the beating of a four-year-old boy by an officer.

The report, although dealing with the experience of soldiers in the 1990s, has triggered an impassioned debate in Israel, where it was published in an abbreviated form in the newspaper Haaretz last month. According to Yishai Karin: ‘At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.’

In the words of one soldier: ‘The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That’s when I enjoy it. It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah, and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.’

Another explained: ‘The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides… As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.’

The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street….

Warning for the faint-hearted: the descriptions of violence only get worse; the one at the end of the article made me physically ill.

It is key to note here that the Israeli psychologist who conducted the study, Yufar Yishai-Karin, was prompted to undertake and publish this study as a result of her own experience as a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza, and the 21 soldiers and officers she interviewed for the study were ones she had worked with. It seems likely that she never could have elicited the kinds of revelations that she did if she were not herself an Israeli fellow soldier with a close relationship to the soldiers she interviewed and an intimate personal knowledge of the what it is to be an occupying soldier.

In some of the recent calls for anthropologists to study the published memoirs of soldiers, the implicit assumption seems to be that soldiers provide the data and anthropologists provide the metanarrative. The Israeli study, in contrast, is an example of the soldier-academic. It is a powerful position from which to critique the Israeli military. (There are almost daily reports of Israeli military violence by Palestinians and outsiders that have not generated this level of public debate.) The soldier-academic is perhaps a position that we are more likely to find in Israel, where the mandatory army service puts almost all citizens in the role of soldier at some point of their lives, than in the U.S. , where soldiers are largely drawn from the undereducated lower classes. Are there any Culture Matters readers aware of American soldier-anthropologists who are writing about the current war?

L.L. Wynn

More on the dreaded Intervention

I feel like it deserves capital letters — The Intervention — such is the gravity of the recent government push to restructure the way remote indigenous communities are managed. Already a number of the more dubious policy changes seem to be bearing fruit.

For example, one of the more disastrous aspects of the Intervention would appear to be the dismantling of community-based employment projects that have provided government subsidised work in remote communities. Anthropologist Jon Altman has written this article criticising the scrapping of the Community Development Employment Programmes (CDEP). The article also provides some background on the rationale for setting up the scheme in the first place.

Accounts are emerging of the damage scrapping the CDEP is causing. For example, an anthropologist who recently returned from doing fieldwork in Arnhem Land, Jennifer Deger, has cited cases of people who have had community-based roles for many years, such as collecting the garbage, and have effectively been left without jobs since the CDEP funding ran out. There also doesn’t seem to be any plan in place for replacing such vital services or offering similar sorts of employment opportunities. Instead, Aborigines are being forced onto Work for the Dole schemes, a move which would seem to increase welfare dependency rather than providing any meaningful employment.

On a larger scale, entire projects have been scuttled by the sudden shift in the management of employment and community development. Margaret Carew, a lecturer from Alice Springs writes:

I don’t know how you are all feeling about the intervention, but the reports coming in are making me angry, sad and sick to the stomach. We keep hearing of terrible stories from places like Titjikala (Successful tourism enterprise forced to close) Utopia (existing training doesn’t fit into new compulsory work for the dole being introduced on 29 Oct) and Tennant Creek (Pink Palace Arts Centre is closing its doors because they have abolished CDEP).

It seems pretty obvious that these sorts of developments are going to negatively affect communities. I also don’t understand what scuttling the CDEP has to do with the original issue which set off The Intervention in the first place, the protection of children from abuse.

The motivation for making these changes seems to be designed to maximise government control and leverage rather than being based on sound social or economic policy. According to Altman, the key objectives of this change are to increase the coercive power tying welfare payments to certain behaviours, such as parents sending their children to school, and to neutralise the political power of Aboriginal organisations. He writes:

One part of the agenda seems to be to sacrifice CDEP positions, many that generate extra hours of work and extra income, to bring participants and their earnings under the single system of quarantining that will apply to welfare payments. It is as if the Government is happy to sacrifice work and income to deal with a perceived expenditure problem: cash is spent on unacceptable goods.

Another part of the agenda seems to be to further depoliticise Indigenous organisations, in this case robust CDEP organisations, perhaps to give government-appointed community administrators greater powers.

In other words the policy is designed to reduce Aboriginal independence, centralise power, and create more docile subjects. This is of course in accordance with other moves, such as doing away with the permit system that gives Aboriginal communities control over who enters their land.

If readers would like to express concern about the Intervention I recommend the Women for Wik website, which has been following developments and also includes a petition against The Intervention.

Upcoming workshop. Practice and Practicality: anthropology in Indigenous Australia

In the wake of the recent discussion generated about the Little Children are Sacred report and the subsequent government reaction, members of the Australian Anthropological Society have arranged a workshop about anthropology and indigenous Australia.

One of the main points of the workshop is to question what the practical limits of anthropology in both its “applied” and “engaged” modes might be. Seems like a very important discussion to be having at the moment, and although I won’t be able to attend myself I would be very interested to know what is discussed. Maybe I can find someone who would be willing to provide a summary of the day’s papers and discussions…

Here is the description of the workshop:

9am – 5pm, Monday October 29

Workshop organisers: David Martin, Ben Smith, Kevin Murphy & Kati Ferro

This workshop will be held ahead of the AAS conference in Canberra. It aims to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas around anthropological practice about, with, and for Australian Indigenous people. It aims to transcend the ‘applied’ – ‘academic’ divide, but is specifically focused on those forms of anthropological practice which seek to have ‘practical’ effects. The conference theme is particularly appropriate given recent events regarding Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory.

The workshop will consist of four interrelated sessions.

• The limits of and on anthropological practice
• “Making a difference” - intentions and effects
• Communicating anthropology
• Can anthropology speak to the Indigenous condition? In what contexts? And to whom?

Each session will be of 90 minutes duration, and involve no more than three presentations. While presentations may be based on written and pre-circulated papers, to allow adequate time for discussion each will be limited to an absolute maximum of 15 minutes. However, while time is limited, in keeping with our theme we encourage diversity in positions, subject matter and modes of presentation. For example, we would suggest people consider jointly developing panel presentations for all or part of any of the four sessions, which could involve shorter presentations by panel members, and potentially more time for audience participation. A panel presentation could be for an hour, for instance, or for the full 90 minutes.

In the first instance, we are calling for expressions of interest for presentations or panels. Each expression of interest should consist of:

• The session in which the presentation would be located;
• Presenter or panel members;
• Presentation or panel title;
• A short abstract of no more than 250 words (300 in the case of panels)

For more information, go the conference page at www.aas.asn.au, and follow the links to the Indigenous workshop.

Hope to see you there!

Dave Martin

____________________________

David Martin

Executive Member

Australian Anthropological Society

www.aas.asn.au