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.

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

I am looking forward to reading Alfons’s posts; meanwhile, a PhD student at VU’s anthropology department, Erella Grassiani, has made it to the cover of the student newspaper, Advalvas.  I am not clear yet whether this paper is really edited by students, but at least it does discuss political controversies. In this instance, it is about Erella’s activism in opposing Israel’s intervention in Gaza. Erella, herself an  Israeli, recently completed her dissertation about Israeli soldiers who serve in the occupied territories, and recently was instrumental in setting up a group of Israelis in the Netherlands critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza. The cover story, entitled ”"Erella Grassiani may not criticize”, is about the reaction of Dutch Jewish groups, which have rejected her initiative, even as they support “dialogues” with Arab intellectuals who are similarly critical of Israel’s policies. Erella’s position is quite mainstream within Dutch academia (or dare I say it, “among Dutch intellectuals”), and her conflict with Dutch Jewish organisations may well be due in part to the challenge this poses to the latter in their role as spokespeople for the Jews vis-a-vis the Dutch government. Yet what makes it a more complex issue is that (as I speculated in an earlier post) anti-semitism may be rising in Europe, and though the synergies between the current popularity of anti-Israeli political positions and antisemitic conspiracy theories should not be overstated, they cannot be ignored either.

In Hungary, the front lines are drawn in a strikingly different way. Leftish/liberal Hungarian press has been full of condemnations of a prominent leftist intellectual, Tamás Gáspár Miklós, who had condemned fellow intellectuals for their cowardice in not protesting against Israel’s invasion, and stated that this had nothing to do with one’s opinion of Hamas. Although among my colleagues here and probably in Australia this position would probably be quite mainstream, the responses, ranging from conservative-liberal philosopher Agnes Heller to committedly left-wing sociologist Vásárhelyi Mária, were furious. They insisted that it was not possible to ignore the context of Hamas, and indeed some of them bid TGM farewell, saying he had parted ways with them. By contrast, the Hungarian nationalist press, which often publishes antisemitic articles, cheered TGM, although he is one of its most implacable and vitriolic opponents.

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

A couple of people (thanks Greg and Laleh) sent me this link: USA Today has an article on anthropology and the military that covers debate over the Human Terrain System (HTS) at the last AAA meeting.  The article situates the anthropology-military relationship within the history of colonialism, reports that two HTS social scientists were killed in the last year (but doesn’t clarify that they weren’t actually anthropologists), and covers perspectives advanced at the AAA by anthropologists Roberto Gonzales (whose book on HTS will soon be published by University of Chicago Press), Kerry Fosher, Brian Selmeski, and Phillip Stevens.

There is also a sidebar where Montgomery McFate answers questions about the program, and another sidebar that notes that three other academic/professional associations (the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association) have policies barring various forms of professional participation with the US military.

The article contains several typos, I’m afraid, which doesn’t speak all that highly of USA Today, but it’s still interesting to see anthropology being covered in such a mainstream news outlet with national coverage.  There are 93 comments on the article — most of them inane.

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