OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY

Great news from How the university works that Ward Churchill’s very good case against the University of Colorado will go to court in early 2009, challenging the right wing witch hunt that unfairly targeted him and that stalks the 65% of faculty in the U.S. who are not tenured, or are not tenure-track. As laid out on that blog, and in many other writings, the charges against Churchill were nothing short of ludicrous and defamatory, and neither the investigating nor the appeal committees of UC felt that the extraordinarily minor items in question in Churchill’s writing merited dismissal. Hopefully this suit will teach the totalitarian hacks in charge of the University of Colorado a much needed lesson, not to mention the petty, pseudo-scholars that have tried to build their reputations by destroying Churchill’s. I encourage readers to visit the site of the Ward Churchill Solidarity Network as well, and to read the testimonies of the many internationally prominent scholars who have written in Churchill’s defense. To think that all of this began because of a mass mediated holy war in the U.S., fueled by outrage over Churchill’s piece, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens – still one of the most sober, best pieces of writing on “9/11″ to have been written by an American author. Unfortunately for Churchill, at that time any public writing that did not toe the line of authorized sanctimony and repeat the third-grade sentimentality of so many public commentaries would necessarily turn Churchill into a target. What few cared to understand was the way that Churchill turned U.S. military and nationalist logic on its head, so that in their outrage Americans could begin to sense a little of what it felt like to be on the receiving end for a change. The only other “public” figure to have gained such notoriety because of remarks about the attacks was Obama’s Rev. Wright, for making the same argument using the same metaphor, which Malcolm X used to frame the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Churchill, Wright, and Malcolm X were all, of course, disowned and ostracized in the land that speaks of “freedom” as if it had invented the idea and had special rights to its meanings. (Luckily for Oprah Winfrey, few remember that almost immediately after “9/11″ one of her shows was devoted to “root causes” and why the U.S. had provoked these attacks.)

One useful online resource, germane to some aspects of current discussions on anthropology and counterinsurgency, following from the previous post, is:

Jorgensen, Joseph G., and Wolf, Eric R. (1970). Anthropology on the warpath in Thailand (a special supplement). The New York Review of Books, 15 (9), November 19.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10763

In that article, which provoked lengthy and critical responses, the two authors reflect on the significance, back then, of what they learned of the role of anthropologists in gathering information to facilitate counterinsurgency activities. The problem, as they state, is one that has,

dogged anthropologists from the inception of the discipline. European conquest and colonialism had, after all, provided the field for anthropology’s operations and, especially in the nineteenth century, its intellectual ethic of “scientific objectivity.” But “scientific objectivity,” we believe, implies the estrangement of the anthropologist from the people among whom he works.

Here the authors place scientific objectivity within the framework of building empire. They refer to Claude Lévi-Strauss for further defining this issue:

Anthropology is not a dispassionate science like astronomy, which springs from the contemplation of things at a distance. It is the outcome of an historical process, which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered, their institutions and beliefs destroyed while they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence. Its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as an object. (Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Anthropology: Its Achievement and Future,” Current Anthropology, vol. 7, 1966, p. 126.)

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Jorgensen and Wolf reflect on their colleagues’ engagements with counterinsurgency, in light of the history of anthropology. As they put it,

The Thailand episode is only the latest violation of the conscience of anthropology; in retrospect we see that anthropological projects calculated to interfere in the affairs of others have a long, and not entirely visible, genealogy.

The advent of World War II, in the words of the outgoing president of the American Anthropological Association, “[provided] anthropologists [with] an unprecedented opportunity to play a variety of applied roles in government.” There was, for instance, an opportunity to aid in the forcible relocation of 100,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry to places east of the Sierras. There was the opportunity to analyze Japanese culture through the analysis of secondary sources and interviews with Japanese in the United States, under the auspices of the Foreign Morale Analysis Division, Office of War Information. There was, further, the chance to write war background studies of individual countries, such as “Siam—Land of Free Men,” under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. Finally, anthropologists shouldered the White Man’s Burden in Micronesia, serving as administrators to local populations under the auspices of the Navy.

Also worth noting is that the Human Resource Area Files (HRAF) emerged from Yale’s Cross-Cultural Survey, which had the purpose of providing the military with information on world areas that were deemed critical. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and CIA each contributed $50,000 annually to help support the development of the HRAF.

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At the time at which they wrote there had already been several meetings between government officials, military representatives, and academics from the SS (the social science community). Participants were aware of several problems that would place obstacles in the way of acceptance of their research plans, including widespread opposition to war in southeast Asia. As the minutes of one conference made clear, Jorgensen and Wolf explain,

there are devices for getting around these difficulties: increased salaries, congenial companionship, “interesting problems like existence of Thai communists”; professional opportunities and prestige; support of military officials at universities; closer ties of government with universities; greater support for RAND and Army think tanks; the hiring of top professionals at high costs to enlist and serve as a model for others; the development of administrative anthropologists who, on the British and French design, would become advisers to Empire.

Like much of the rest of the article, it often reads like an exposé of the Human Terrain System and the Minerva Research Initiative, only with different actors and acronyms. With some remarkable resemblance to what is contained in the call for Minerva grant applications Jorgensen and Wolf state: “As the Thailand papers show, the government is less interested in the economic, social, or political causes of discontent than in techniques of neutralizing individual or collective protest.” Little has changed.

It’s also interesting to note how the payment of high salaries is meant as more than just “compensation,” but as a lure in attracting SS recruits. Interesting to note as well the presence of RAND, now as then. The infusion of government and military money had a definite impact, Jorgensen and Wolf note:

Nearly everywhere, anthropologists were drawn into the network of information gathering and processing; the demand was for their data, not for their values. The anthropologist was supposed to bring in the “behavioral” information; others would use that information to formulate and execute public policy. Thus the curious quid pro quo which provides current working conditions for a great many anthropologists was established. The researcher would get the chance to carry on field work with a heady sense of engagement in a global welfare operation, punctuated by occasional participation in an international meeting, followed by a dry martini at the airport bar in Bangkok or Dar es Salaam. In exchange, others received the right to play with his data. Many signed their contracts, unwittingly or otherwise, in return for fellowships, research grants, and jobs.

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Throughout the article the authors are highly critical of secret research, noting how much damage it can do not just to anthropology’s credibility and future, but especially to the people studied by the anthropologist:

Obviously, such techniques and goals are anathema to the anthropologist who is dedicated to open and free inquiry, and who feels an obligation to the people among whom he performs his work, people whom he can no longer regard as objects of the goal of “scientific objectivity.” Indeed, the anthropologist’s traditional obligation to the people among whom he works is the critical issue. In order for the anthropologist to work at all, he must learn to trust them and they him. He must learn to depend upon them, and in return, he promises that he will not betray their personal confidences, or permit his findings to be used without their knowledge for political purposes. Furthermore, many anthropologists feel that they should obtain their subjects’ consent to collect and disseminate information, and that, moreover, having received such consent on one topic, the researcher is not free to collect and use information on other topics.

Jorgensen and Wolf do not stop there. They argue that a naive anthropology can serve in the role of “informer” to the powerful and aid the purposes of imperial domination:

The days of naïve anthropology are over. It is no longer adequate to collect information about little known and powerless people; one needs to know also the uses to which that knowledge can be put. Behind an appeal for pure research, a research grant, a consultant’s fee, an appeal to personal vanity or to patriotism, is a government that may well use the knowledge gained to damage the subjects among whom it was gathered. Perhaps this is the grimmest lesson of all the events of the past years: many a naïve anthropologist has become, wittingly or unwittingly, an informer.

I was similarly concerned about this in an earlier post about “exposing the network.”

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Jorgensen and Wolf essentially call for the decolonization of anthropology as a means of countering the cooptation of anthropology in building empire:

Admittedly, anthropology was ambiguously conceived. Now, in our view, it must disengage itself from its connection with colonial aims or it will become intellectually trivial. The future of anthropology, its credibility, depends upon sustaining the dialectic between knowledge and experience. Anthropologists must be willing to testify in behalf of the oppressed peoples of the world, including those whom we professionally define as primitives and peasants

Now, as then, the decolonization of anthropology remains to be achieved, and it will now be harder than ever. It’s best not to set any limits to either the nature or the extent of opposition to the recolonization of anthropology that is necessary.

Putting some red herrings to rest, in a pan with hot oil

Re-reading some of David Price’s online articles about the militarization of social science research has been rewarding for the important insights and questions he raises (see Counterpunch 2005/05/12, 2005/05/22, 2008/06/24). Anyone who doubts that there is a “national security state” at work in bending social science to meet imperial objectives is of course free to dispute the details of the information provided by Price, and there have been a few, slim attempts. Price takes us through various programs, including the National Security Education Program (NSEP), the Intelligence Community Scholars Program (ICSP), the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), the Minerva Consortia, and of course this builds on discussions of the Human Terrain System (HTS). It is difficult to get a sense from Price’s articles about the total amount of money that has been dedicated to all of these programs, together, but my own rough estimate based on the figures provided is that it is not less than $150 million US.

That is quite a few programs and a good sum of funds, at a relatively early stage in some of these programs, added to grudging acceptance by various professional bodies, and more enthusiastic support from university presidents, in a climate where “national security” is pumped up as something that all Americans (and even Canadians) need to be worried about. The notion that anthropologists and other social scientists who wish to embed themselves in counterinsurgency or otherwise aid the military are somehow being stopped from joining by critics of these programs is simply false. Nobody is stopping them, they are being funded to the hilt, and getting a lot of job opportunities. So we can at least dismiss this first red herring.

However, why was the red herring raised to begin with? Like many other red herrings, this one can be useful for distracting and deflecting attention. The objective is to target the critics as the problem, as the oppressor, who somehow have the power to persecute their militarist colleagues, when the militarists are getting the funding and institutional support. The only real aim of such discourse is to try to mute dissent and criticism. That’s all. The militarists are doing what they want to do already, and get all the support that counts, but they would prefer to do so either with silence or applause from the audience. If there is one lesson for all parties to be learned from this clash, a clash that will likely become a defining feature of academic social science for many years to come, is that nobody will get everything they want (and some of us get close to nothing we want).

The second red herring has to do with what we see on some of these surrounding blog discussions, the idea that criticism is problematic because it is not objective and scientific, it is does not do enough to waffle itself into an obscure middling position where it could remain as good as silent for being incomprehensible and ambiguous. One argument has thus involved caricaturing criticism of academic support for the military and intelligence arms of the state as being “rhetorical,” while those upholding such engagement do so instead as a result of their embrace/ownership of “reasoned discourse.” The appeal to ownership of reasoned discourse, while tossing every imaginable definition of “rhetoric” at one’s critics (in the hope that one will stick), is of course a rhetorical strategy in itself. That is why the more productive strategy is not to rehash antiquated notions of rhetoric and reason, but to examine these discussions as producing and reinforcing particular discourses.

For example, the discursive strategy of claiming to be reasonable, yet unleashing the dogs of war. One of the best groups of writers to understand this, and to spoof this logic, was of course Monty Python:

It’s all very well to laugh at the Military, but, when one considers the meaning of life, it is a struggle between alternative viewpoints of life itself, and without the ability to defend one’s own viewpoint against other perhaps more aggressive ideologies, then reasonableness and moderation could, quite simply, disappear.

What remains unanswered, because it is not meant to be answered, is: How should one understand the retreat to intellectual ambivalence and rhetorical obscurantism, in the face of documented violations of human rights of the most severe kind, as a result of an unprovoked invasion and a war of occupation?

What I want to draw attention to below is in line with the way Price begins one of his articles, with a quote from Robertson Davies: “In Paracelsus’s time the energy of universities resided in the conflict between humanism and theology; the energy of the modern university lives in the love-affair between government and science, and sometimes the two are so close it makes you shudder.”

What follows is for the scrapbook of this blog, a selection of what I think are key quotes from some of Price’s articles. The headings are mine.

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June 24, 2008
Inside the Minerva Consortium: Social Science in Harness

Sovietizing the social sciences

The demands of conforming scientific knowledge with the ideological positions of a powerful state stunted the development of Soviet biology for decades…American social science faces new forms of ideologically controlled funding that stand to transform our universities’ production of knowledge in ways reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s ideological control over scientific interpretations…

…the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, the National Security Education Program, Intelligence Community Scholars Program…leave our universities increasingly ready to produce knowledge and scholars aligned with the ideological assumptions of the Defense Department.

…ideological narrowness of the Defense Department’s approach to and presuppositions of these topics [in the Minerva program] will necessarily warp project outcomes…

Broken institutions can’t repair themselves, and agencies bound to neo-imperial desires of occupation and subjugation will not be receptive to scholarly work seeking to correct this national blunder.

Because of the narrowness of scope and assumptions about the causes of problems facing America, Gates’ Minerva plan will harm America’s strategic capabilities as it will inevitably fund scholars willing to think in the narrow ways already acceptable to the Defense Department.

Remembering that anthropology was and is imperial

In…anthropology, there is an overwhelming disciplinary amnesia of the extent to which research has been directed by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies in the past….there has been a broad spectrum of overt and covert control over this funding control, with the full range running from the rampant secret directing of funding of unwitting scholars doing research of interest to the CIA and others, to the open, massive funding of a full spectrum of social science and language projects through agencies like the NSF or Fulbright Programs.

Cultural knowledge as a weapon

The Bush Doctrine’s proximity to Minerva suggests a program designed to give the tools of culture to those in the military who will be told where to invade and occupy, not to those who might be asked of the wisdom of such actions.

Minerva seeks to increase the efficiency of implementing the Bush Doctrine, not the questioning of it.

Minerva doesn’t appear to be funding projects designed to tell Defense why the US shouldn’t invade and occupy other countries; its programs are more concerned with the nuts and bolts of counterinsurgency, and answering specific questions related to the occupation and streamlining the problems of empire. This sort of Soviet model of directed social science funding will make America’s critical perspective more narrow precisely at an historical moment when we need a new breadth of knowledge and perspective.

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March 12 / 13, 2005
Exposing the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program: The CIA’s Campus Spies

Classroom spies

The secrecy surrounding the current use of university classrooms as covert training grounds for the CIA and other agencies now threatens the fundamental principles of academic openness as well as the integrity of a wide array of academic disciplines.

Silence

…there has been no public reaction to an even more troubling post-9/11 funding program which upgrades the existing American intelligence-university-interface. With little notice Congress approved section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act which appropriated four million dollars to fund a pilot program known as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP). Named after Senator Pat Roberts (R. Kansas, Chair, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence)…

Beyond a few articles in a Kansas newspaper praising Senator Roberts, as well as University of Kansas anthropologist Felix Moos’ role in lobbying for the PRISP, there has been a general media silence regarding the program.

The cultures and places that matter

PRISP recruits scholars with “advanced area expertise in China, Middle East, Korea, Central Asia, the Caucasus,” with a special emphasis given to scholars with previous linguistic expertise in “Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashtun, Dari, Korean, or a Central Asian or Caucasian language such as Georgian, Turkmen, Tajik, or Uzbek.” PRISP also funds Islamic studies scholars and scientists with expertise in bioterrorism, counterterrorism, chemistry, physics, computer science and engineering.

Felix Moos: Imperial anthropologist

PRISP is largely the brainchild of University of Kansas anthropologist Felix Moos-a longtime advocate of anthropological contacts with military and intelligence agencies. During the Vietnam War Moos worked in Laos and Thailand on World Bank-financed projects and over the years he has worked in various military advisory positions. He worked on the Pentagon’s ARPA Project Themis, and has been as an instructor at the Naval War College and at the U.S. Staff and Command College at Fort Leavenworth. For years Moos has taught courses on “Violence and Terrorism” at the University of Kansas. In the months after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon Moos elicited the support of his friend, former CIA DCI, Stansfield Turner to curry support in the senate and CIA to fund his vision of a merger between anthropology, academia, intelligence analysis and espionage training…

…Moos is a bright man, but his writings echo the musty tone and sentiments found in the limited bedside readings of Tom-Clancy-literate-colonials, as he prefers to quote from the wisdom of Sun Tzu and Samuel Huntington over anthropologists like Franz Boas or Laura Nader.

It is tempting to describe Moos as an anachronistic anthropologist out of sync with his discipline’s mainstream, but while many anthropologists express concerns about disciplinary ties to military and intelligence organizations, contemporary anthropology has no core with which to either sync or collide and there are others in the field who openly (and quietly) support such developments.

Covert campus

Of course I would be remiss to not mention that students are the only ones sneaking the CIA onto our campuses. There are also unknown thousands of university professors who periodically work with and for the CIA–in 1988 CIA spokeswoman Sharon Foster bragged that the CIA then secretly employed enough university professors “to staff a large university.” Most experts estimate that this presence has grown since 2001.

The quiet rise of programs like PRISP should not surprise anyone given the steady cuts in federal funding for higher education, and the resulting pressures for more mercenary roles for the academy.

the current shift now finds a visible increase in students whose studies are driven by the market forces of Bush’s War on Terrorism.

If the CIA can use PRISP to indenture students in the early days of their graduate training-supplemented with mandated summer camp internships immersed in the workplace ethos of CIA-the company can mold their ideological inclinations even before their grasp of cultural history is shaped in the relatively open environment of their university. As these PRISP graduates enter the CIA’s institutional environment of self-reinforcing Group Think they will present a reduced risk of creating cognitive dissonance by bringing new views that threaten the agency’s narrow view of the world.

The self-censoring campus

Though no scholar can control the uses of information they make public, there does need to be an awareness of how any knowledge can be abused by others–and as awareness of the presence of PRISP spreads, many scholars may find themselves engaging in new forms of self-censorship and doublethink.

Healthy academic environments need openness because they (unlike the CIA) are nourished by the self-corrective features of open disagreement, dissent, and synthetic-reformulation.

The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program infects all of academia with a germ of dishonesty and distrust as participant scholars cloak their intentions and their ties to the cloaked masters they serve.

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May 21 / 22, 2005
CIA Skullduggery in Academia: Carry On Spying (or Pay Us Back at the Rate of 2,400 Per Cent)

Damaging Trust

Roberts and sources at CIA did not dispute the likelihood that having undisclosed CIA operatives amongst the ranks of academics could seriously damage the credibility of American academics conducting domestic and foreign research. This blasé attitude concerning the collateral damage of hapless academic bystanders will win Roberts no friends in the academy as the damage from such actions can be widespread.

NACHoS

many institutions are cultivating closer relations with intelligence agencies. New campus intelligence consortia are forming. Most of these are organizations like the National Academic Consortium for Homeland Security…which aligns research and teaching at member institutions with the requirements of Bush’s war on terror. But NACHoS is more of a programmatic loyalty marker than it is a key to inner sanctum funding. Member institutions range from Clackamas Community College to MIT. Interestingly, some of the universities that one might suspect would be NACHoS apex institutions (Harvard, Yale, Chicago etc.) are missing from the rolls.

The 251 universities in the consortium (www.homelandsecurity.osu.edu) have firmly declared their vague commitment to studying national security issues, antiterrorism, developing new Homeland Security technologies and to “educate and train the people required by governmental and non-governmental organizations, to effectively accomplish international and homeland security roles and responsibilities”.

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Closing remarks

As these discussions have grown and spread across the Internet, it is surprising to see any anthropologist not fully considering, nor wishing to understand, the consequences for establishing rapport and relations of trust with “informants” where one does one’s “fieldwork.” Without the trust needed to gain intimate access to people’s everyday lives, expressed thoughts, and behaviour, any claims to knowledge gained are, to say the least, suspect.

The notion that there is little consequence for anthropologists’ reputations is one that I can counter with some personal experience doing research in a country that is (not far) removed from the swirl of developments surrounding the foolishly named “Global War on Terror.” This year marks the 20th anniversary of my first going to Trinidad & Tobago. In the passage of those 20 years, I have spent seven in Trinidad, and have kept up to date with the majority of media reports that were published in that time, and trying my best to keep up at a distance by reading Trinidadian news reports online. In all of that time, I have never seen an article in a Trinidadian newspaper devoted exclusively to anthropology, that is, until recently — with this one:

Henry Charles
ANTHROPOLOGISTS ON FRONT LINES
Monday, 26 November, 2007
TRINIDAD GUARDIAN

IN September this year, Robert M Gates, the US Secretary of Defence, authorised a considerable expansion in a novel Pentagon programme called “human terrain,” which embedded anthropologists in each of the combat brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As the strategy became known, it quickly became polarising. Military personnel and anthropologists in the programme could see only positives in the move. Anthropologists on the outside gave it a failing grade.

Martin Schweitzer, a commander of an airborne division unit working with the new arrivals in Afghanistan, for instance, said that his unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 per cent since they came, and soldiers were able to focus more on improving security, healthcare and education for the population. [MF: Note, and this one statistic, this one report, never independently verified, would be repeated countless times for months afterwards.]

“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”

“Call it what you want,” said his colleague, Col David Woods, “it works. It works in helping you define the problems, not just the symptoms.”

The academic anthropological community, on the other hand, remains either uncomplimentary or hostile. Some of the members speak of “mercenary anthropology,” “armed social work,” or the exploitation of social science for military gain. They fear that whatever the successes or failures of the group, the overall impact will be that anthropologists abroad will be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the US military.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University and ten others are thus circulating an online pledge calling on colleagues to boycott the combat team, especially in Iraq. The pledge denounces involvement there as aiding and abetting the war and being guilty by association of its terrible tragedies:

“Anthropologists should not engage in research and other activities that contribute to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq or in related theatres in the ‘war on terror.’ While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world, at base it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties.”

Gates expanded the “human terrain” initiative a few months ago, as I said, but the need for something like it was identified since 2003. Army officers in Iraq had complained that they had little or no information on the local population. In fact, prospective planning for Iraq after the anticipated “cakewalk” of an invasion was practically nil. Ignorance of the people and the culture was just one of the many resulting areas of strategic blindness.

The Pentagon contacted Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the navy. She advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy.

McFate sees anthropology as a “crucial new weapon” in the war on terror, Author of a new counter-insurgency manual, she vigorously defends “human terrain,” and dismisses its critics.

“I’m frequently accused of militarising anthropology,” she says. “But we’re really anthropologising the military.”

McFate’s critics, on the other hand, dispute that what she does actually counts as anthropology. She is in large part, they say, just a tour guide accompanying the military on non-lethal missions.

The news reports themselves provide no account detailed enough to suggest what the programme looks like in totality across the theatres of war. What is suggested is a combination of social work, Emily Post, and useful advice on how to approach issues of an alien culture.

Ms McFate, for instance, describes her front-line colleagues as anthropological “angels on the shoulder,” offering advice to soldiers negotiating a poorly understood environment, telling them when not to cross their legs at meetings, how to show respect to leaders, and how to be ethnocentrically neutral.

She herself wears a military uniform and carries a gun during her sensitivity missions. In the words of Richard A Shweder, anthropology professor at the University of Chicago, and a participant at one of her explanatory sessions, “(it) brought to my increasingly sceptical mind the unfortunate image of an angelic anthropologist perched on the shoulder of a member of an American counter-insurgency unit who is kicking in the door of someone’s home in Iraq, while exclaiming, ‘Hi, we’re from the government; we’re here to understand you.’”

I couldn’t help thinking as I read various accounts of this new drive in counter-insurgency, what a totally different approach is suggested by the Peace Corps, still at work in over 70 countries of the world, and doing a great deal more to bring “governance down to the people,” in areas that include education, health, business, information technology, agriculture, and the environment.

Initiatives like “human terrain” unintentionally underline the need to expand the corps, revisit its mission and equip it with the means to transform it into a 21st-century engine for peace.

But to return to the present context, it seems to me that the issue for anthropologists is not whether the military should be better informed about foreign cultures and customs. It obviously should be. The real issue is the level at which anthropology becomes part of the fabric of foreign policy planning and determination.

Just by way of illustrating this point, I checked the index of Fiasco, Thomas E Ricks’ famous critique of the devolution of the Iraq war from executive decision to military execution. It contains not a single reference in any form to anthropology or anthropologists.

Scholars like McFate are obviously well-intentioned, but it’s unfortunate that at this point, late in the day of this war, people like her should become armed angels riding the shoulders of an uncertain American military.

David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 30, 2008
Minerva Takes Flesh: Pentagon and Science Foundation Sign Social-Science Deal

In a memorandum of understanding that was signed today, the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation agreed to work cooperatively to support social-science research on topics of interest to the Pentagon.

As widely expected, the NSF has agreed to help review proposals submitted to the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative, a fledgling program that will offer grants to university-based scholars to study the Chinese military, the records of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and other specific topics.

The two agencies will soon - possibly within a week - release a joint request for Minerva-related proposals. Those proposals will be judged by the NSF’s typical merit-review panels, though both the science foundation and the Pentagon will have the right to nominate experts to serve on those panels. (The Pentagon is also accepting Minerva proposals through a separate pathway known as a broad agency announcement. Proposals that are submitted via this second track will reviewed through the Defense Department’s usual processes, not by NSF panels.)

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American Anthropological Association, Public Affairs Blog:
Minerva & NSF
July 10, 2008

The Pentagon has launched a program called the Minerva Research Initiative that would fund university-based social scientists to study topics of interest to the Department of Defense, such as the Chinese military and religious fundamentalism. The AAA expressed its concerns about Minerva in a letter to Washington, and urged the Pentagon to coordinate with the National Science Foundation and other agencies that have extensive experience in peer-review and are familiar with the ethical standards and concerns of our discipline. The Pentagon was apparently listening. Pentagon officials signed an agreement with NSF last week enabling the two agencies to collaborate on approving Minerva-funded social science research. Still, there are concerns within the discipline that research will only be used when it supports the Pentagon’s agenda.

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American Anthropological Association: Conference Call

Click here for more details from Culture Matters.

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David H. Price
Inside the Minerva Consortium: Social Science in Harness
Counterpunch, June 24, 2008

Minerva doesn’t appear to be funding projects designed to tell Defense why the US shouldn’t invade and occupy other countries; its programs are more concerned with the nuts and bolts of counterinsurgency, and answering specific questions related to the occupation and streamlining the problems of empire. This sort of Soviet model of directed social science funding will make America’s critical perspective more narrow precisely at an historical moment when we need a new breadth of knowledge and perspective.

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The U.S. military’s quest to weaponize culture
By Hugh Gusterson | 20 June 2008

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Kintisch, Eli. (2008). Defense, NSF team up on national security research. Science, 11 July, 321 (5886): 186-187.

The program will have two arms of equal size. One will be managed by Defense officials and the other by NSF, with some Pentagon input on the selection of reviewers. “There are several topics of mutual interest” within the Minerva areas, says David Lightfoot, who heads NSF’s social sciences directorate. “Securing the national defense was part of our charter in 1950,” he adds.

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Nature. (2008). Editorial: A social contract — Efforts to inform U.S. policy with insights from the social sciences could be a win-win approach. Nature, 10 July, 454: 138.

Social scientists, meanwhile, should embrace the opportunities that the AAA pointed out last November in a report on engagement with the military. These include studying military and intelligence organizations from the inside and educating the military about other cultures and societies. Outrage at the current administration should not derail efforts that have potential to be a win-win for all concerned - including, most especially, the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and regions of future conflict.

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Steven R. Corman
Minerva Followup
COMOPS Journal, July 11, 2008

I think what’s really going on here is that that the anthropologists, who have an NSF division of their own, want to be sure they have control over the money (isn’t that a conflict of interest?). Also many of their members are squeamish about taking money from the Big Bad DoD, and somehow the same money will be purified if it is routed through NSF.

In a press release yesterday, the AAA bragged that “the Pentagon was apparently listening” because they signed a Memo of Understanding (MOU) with the NSF. Well, not exactly. The MOU is about future NSF programs. The original Minerva program is going ahead as planned, with DoD organizing the reviews.

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Navy Lt. Jennifer Cragg
Pentagon Funds National Security Research
American Forces Press Service, July 14, 2008

The Defense Department is continuing its efforts to finance university research on national security-related issues, a senior Pentagon official said.

The Minerva Initiative is an effort to build the Defense Department’s capacity to reach out to the academic community for research in social science topics of interest to national security both present and future, Thomas Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning, said in a teleconference with online journalists and bloggers July 10.

Mahnken said the project has multiple strands, such as an agreement with the National Science Foundation and “broad agency announcements that seek research proposals in specific areas of study.

A memorandum of understanding recently signed between DoD and that the National Science Foundation allows researchers to apply for grants to study subjects that may be of interest to U.S. national security. Officials anticipate the agreement will fund work leading to new knowledge about topics such as religious fundamentalism, terrorism and cultural change.

•••••••

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Press Release 08-114
NSF Signs Memorandum of Understanding with Department of Defense for National Security Research

“To secure the national defense was one of the original missions we were given when we were chartered in 1950,” said David Lightfoot, assistant director of NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) Sciences Directorate. “We’ve always believed that sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and other social scientists, through basic social and behavioral science research, could benefit our national security. In fact, we’ve always done so through various research projects. The MOU gives us another tool and more resources to do what we’ve always done well.”

According to the MOU, funding for research projects will be determined on a case-by-case basis. DoD will consider supporting proposals submitted to regular NSF programs managed by SBE. In return, DoD will get the gold standard for the U.S. peer review process ensuring the research meets specific criteria for intellectual merit and broader impact.

Grant proposals will be evaluated by SBE’s normal merit-review panels, though Pentagon officials will have some input into who sits on the panels. The research will not be classified and there will be no constraints on the researchers’ ability to publish their results.

•••••••

Following from five previous posts on the impacts on research arising from the structure of funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), I have had at least one reaction from a member of Canada’s Federal Parliament. Incidentally, the last of that series of posts can be seen here, with the posts previous to that listed there.

The federal member of parliament for my area (I will not name either the area or the MP), belongs to the Bloc Québécois, the federal wing of the Quebec sovereignty movement. Having exchanged some correspondence concerning SSHRC he/she has agreed that SSHRC funding, a federal program, should be devolved to the provinces (”Nous croyons aussi que les fonds du SSHRC devraient aller aux provinces”).

Hopefully, slowly but surely, we can start to make some room for this issue.

To grossly summarize, my contention was that funding for education in Canada is a provincial matter, including higher education, and that SSHRC involves federal trespass on provincial territory. I also argued that the funding reinforces provincial inequalities, and that both aspects appear to go against either the letter or the spirit of laws and government policies regulating education, and access to education.

Apolitical, as in Conservative

“Apolitical intellectuals” is a poem by Otto René Castillo from Guatemala, appearing on Deathpower. An apolitical intellectual is an interesting idea, and there may be one some day. What I think Castillo is referring to as “apolitical” is not the absence of political subjectivity, but rather disengagement from the politics of revolutionary transformation. The choice of not being engaged is a political one. It may appear to have been “apolitical” in the Guatemalan context in the same way that Anglo is never labeled “ethnic” in North America — in Castillo’s situation, apolitical is adherence to the mainstream norm, orthodoxy that would previously have escaped notice as political, that is free from question from the dominant classes in society, that might have gone without saying as if it were unproblematic. Castillo, and other revolutionary poets, were instead “problematic,” and as “problems” they were dealt with sometimes brutally.

•••••••

A Fish in the Net

Teachers, Stanley Fish tells us, should just stick to the books, and voice no political opinions of their own. Politics does not belong in the university classroom, he argues. Presumably, politics should even be kept as far away as possible when discussing political issues. Fish knows what he is talking about, as a survivor of, and thriver in, what Peter Tosh called the “shitstem” (system). Too bad that Fish will not recognize that one can voice one’s opinion, and still call forth many other opinions, and have genuine debate and discussion, and provoke questions. Too bad for Fish that he seems to have only known comfortable frowners as students, who think politics and knowledge have never met — in my experience, students tend to be far more radical and critical than I am in class. And too bad that he chooses outmoded ways of segmenting politics from culture, and from economics … like the economics that constituted the class of students who could afford to attend his Duke University, and frown on heresy, and insist on the techniques of a professional career? Perhaps the reality at Duke is more mature than the mute child Fish wishes for.

•••••••

One-Dimensional Man

Cultural infantilization, doctrinaire moral conservativism, and fear, teach some people to avoid politics and stick to the “facts,” as in the academy during the Cold War. The byproduct, perhaps intended, is the student as a flat character who espouses the doctrines of correct middle-roading discourse — no sarcasm, no satire, no irony. Sarcasm is simply “bad” — no matter what the target or the context, this kind of static primary school dogma should lead hordes of adults to acrimoniously protest against any reruns of Monty Python, because it is surely beyond their limited sensibilities. And if the The New Yorker makes a joke about caricatures of Obama as a terrorist and “secret Muslim,” without an understanding of satire and sarcasm some mistake it as an endorsement of such caricatures. You can see a culture degenerating, first hand. Obama’s campaign on auto pilot does not help matters: anything with any force of conviction, any pointed question, any counter punch, is immediately, robotically … “denounced and rejected,” “condemned and refuted”, for being “tasteless and offensive.”

But where the cold finger of orthodoxy meets the aquarium, many Fishes are sure to follow.

•••••••

Truth on the Razor’s Edge

PETER TOSH: SPEAKING TRUTH TO THE DEVILS OF THE SHITUATION

Un-diploma-tic. Peace, as Tosh used to say, is the diploma you get in the cemetery. In cultures that value diplomas, Tosh showed scorn. This is unmoderated, unregulated opinion, this is not self-policing. Tosh, a.k.a. the Stepping Razor (see below), had no interest in being the bit player in someone else’s orchestration of allowable forms of dissent. Nor can I recall one love song from Tosh (the Caribbean usually offers a break from the sugary industrialization of “love” found in North America). This was the Malcolm X of Jamaican music in a way, scissors on legs, unrelenting cutting. This is a man who valued freedom and the right to speak out, not someone who would show off to “those that count” his mastery of perpetual pupildom by being the safe speaker, occupier of centres of middle grounds, eschewing controversy, collecting his rations, mindful that the guards are said to be always watching. Tosh is here and now, as a sign to all militant artists to forget about rewards and congratulations and to keep speaking truth … to shit.

STEPPING RAZOR

•••••••

Slave Hymns

So then one has to wonder what has happened to Rastafarian culture if certain Reggae artists endorse Obama? What happened to the rejection of party “politricks”? What happened to the rejection of the various “isms”? What happened to the critique of state authority? What happened to looking within, to self-knowledge, against dependence on elite and foreign sources? Rastas spoke of Zion as metaphor for liberation, and when Obama comes even close to Zion it is in a hawkish, neo-con speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. Of course Rasta culture was never “pure,” and with a few compromises here and there its internal diversity has been open to official appropriation and to commercialized messages (Cocoa Tea’s for instance) that are high on enthusiasm, and low on substance. “Change you can believe in” — if you are a cynic, or perhaps “pragmatic” — is change that hardly happens, because real change would just be “unbelievable.”

•••••••

Damnable Heresies

There is always time for one more video, when the words of the beautiful song that is featured say:

These damnable heresies,
Sold into slavery,
By my insecurities, oh, they keep taking me down,
…
Total confusion, no right or wrong,
Keeping the people from where they belong,
Refusing to speak, afraid to upset,
…
…conforming my life,
Keeping me blind, keeping me blind, keeping me blind
From the reality of whats being done
I keep playing the fool to help everyone…

•••••••

“If you’ve got a big tree,
I’ve got a small axe”

For this post I am once more referring to the contents of this document, just released by the U.S. Department of Defense, soliciting proposals for grants under the Minerva Research Initiative (MRI). The following is a series of topics of concern raised by this document.

HOW TO MAKE IMPERIAL RESEARCH INSIDIOUS:
On page 2 we read, “Proposals from a team of university investigators may be warranted because the necessary expertise in addressing the multiple facets of the topics may reside in different universities or in different departments of the same university”. The effect of this would be to disseminate the program, to widen its allure, and in an age of viral media, to cast a recruitment net as broadly as possible across academics and their institutions, and not just in the United States as we find out, but internationally as well (see page 4).

On page 4, the document indicates: “It is anticipated the awards will be made in the form of grants to universities”. That is not an unusual practice, at least not in Canada. What it does mean in this instance is that it is not just the single researcher, or team of researchers, who is complicit of supporting an imperial research program, but also the university.

Foreign universities, as mentioned before, are also encouraged to participate, and this information appears on page 4: “This MRI competition is open to institutions of higher education (universities) including DoD institutions of higher education and foreign universities, with degree-granting programs in social sciences. Participation by foreign universities either as project lead or in a supporting role is encouraged”.

PARTICIPATING WITH U.S. MILITARY UNITS:
On page 8, and this with reference to “furnishings,” “facilities,” and “equipment” for research projects, we are told: “Government research facilities and operational military units are available and should be considered as potential Government furnished equipment/facilities.” Moreover, the document adds, “Maximum use of Government integration, test, and experiment facilities is encouraged in each of the offeror’s proposals”.

CRITERIA FOR EVALUATION:
The two most important, and equal, criteria for assessing the value of an application are: (1) the “soundness, and programmatic strategy of the proposed social science research”, and, (2) the “relevance and potential contributions of the proposed research” to the Department of Defense (p. 12).

Of lesser importance are criteria such as the qualifications of the researcher, or even the ability of the researcher’s home institution to train students in social science research.

Please note: This is the kind of program that the American Anthropological Association and the National Science Foundation sought to support by adding their peer review structures. The program is formulated by the Pentagon, and would have remained as such, with or without the peer review of the NSF.

On page 13, as is obvious now, the evaluations are conducted in the following manner:

White papers will be reviewed by an evaluation panel chaired by the responsible Research Topic Chief. The evaluation panel will consist of subject matter experts who are Government employees. Results will be provided by the Research Topic Chief. Full proposals will be evaluated by an evaluation panel chaired by the responsible Research Topic Chief and will consist of subject matter experts who are Government employees.

PROTECTION OF HUMAN SUBJECTS, “VULNERABLE POPULATIONS”:
This is one of the more striking instances of irony in the entire document, where the Pentagon urges researchers to respect its limitations with reference to the treatment of “vulnerable populations” (p. 14).

How have the subjects been made vulnerable by U.S. domination? Do vulnerable subjects include the victims of U.S. torture? Do the vulnerable ones include those detained in secret and mobile detention centres? Do they include those made vulnerable by the very intent of the research itself?

“ISLAM = TERRORISM” — HOW ANTHROPOLOGISTS CAN HELP:
Does the report suggest such an equation? On page 17, detailing “FY09 MRI Topic #2″, titled “Studies of the Strategic Impact of Religious and Cultural Changes within the Islamic World” states:

The Department of Defense seeks to support a program of multidisciplinary research that will elucidate the relationships amongst social, cultural, political, religious and economic factors that interact to foster political violence, terrorism or insurgent behavior.

Relevant disciplines, specifically stated, include: “anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, social and cognitive psychology, and computational science.”

Questions to be addressed include:

how can the resurgence of the Taliban be explained, and what does their resurgence mean within the new context of relationships in Afghanistan? How can the West better understand the militant madrassah school and radical missionary movements and their messages in the respective nation-states in which they reside? Are there “counter-dialogues” within Muslim cultures and communities that account for why radicalism and militancy are found more in some places than others? The impact of new phenomena such as global travel, the Internet and other aspects of communications technologies that can span continents should also be considered, placing these studies within a larger strategic context.

The document states that under this heading, “All regions of the globe are open to inquiry” (p. 17), presumably everywhere where Muslims can be found. The MRI is therefore implying that a global surveillance of all Muslim populations be instigated and undertaken by academics, with all such populations held as potentially suspect of terrorism.

Anthropology is called upon more than once in this section, as it is throughout the entire document. Is it a coincidence, a question of mere research methods, that would bring anthropology to mind for purposes of imperial control and containment?

“TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS AND IDEOLOGIES”:
Regarding, “FY09 MRI Topic #4 — Studies of Terrorist Organization and Ideologies” (p. 20):

Another astounding feature of this document is the free manner in which the label “terrorist” is deployed. Does it apply to the “organization” that coined and popularized the phrase “shock and awe” when a civilian, urban area was being bombed in March of 2003 from high altitude? Does it include the “organization” that blanketed densely inhabited urban areas of southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in August of 2006? Does it include the “organization” that electrocuted and sodomized Iraqi civilian prisoners who were guilty of no crime? Obviously not — the focus of the project is against those who fight against their oppressor.

This project also calls on academics to themselves identify an organization or an ideology as “terrorist” without providing any guidelines or list of suggested organizations and ideologies. This drafts academia into the U.S.’ global inquisition.

“This effort will involve the development of models and approaches to study behavior networks, groups, and communities over time” — surveillance is intended, over the long term, and anthropologists are specifically called upon, as “the relevance of context and situation may require field research” (p. 20).

IDENTIFY THE TERRORIST:
“there is an urgent need to be able to locate the points of influence and characterize the processes necessary to influence populations that harbor terrorist organizations in diverse cultures as well as individuals who identify with terrorist group figures of note” (p. 20).

CONTAIN THE “EMOTIONAL CONTAGION”:
No, there is no recognition of the role of U.S. military aggression in fomenting an emotional outcry, apparently “non-rational” factors (the documents uses this term) are at work.

DEVELOP COUNTERMEASURES:
“Especially helpful to the Department of Defense,” the document states, is “understanding where organized violence is likely to erupt, what factors might explain its contagion, and how to circumvent its spread. Research on belief formation and emotional contagion will provide cultural advisors with better tools to understand the impact of operations on the local population. This research should also contribute to countermeasures to help revise or influence belief structures to reduce the likelihood of militant cells forming” (p. 21).

“EXPLORE NEW DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL SECURITY”:
The document ends on page 22 with a call for research projects that explore new dimensions of national security.

AMERICA IS INNOCENT:
There is no discussion of what accounts for American national insecurity or how Americans might contribute to, if not cause, that sense of insecurity. There is no questioning of American imperial aggression. There is no questioning of American human rights abuses. There is no questioning of the moral valence that runs throughout the document, where all evil resides with others, elsewhere, “we” Americans simply need to find ways to protect ourselves. There is no questioning of the totalitarian impulses and implications of the national security state. There is no questioning of why the military is taking such a leading role in controlling research that should be addressing the very problems that it has caused.

Islam is clearly a target, the notion that the U.S. “Global War on Terror” being something other than a crusade against Islam can finally be put to rest. Islam and the Middle East figure in as many as four of the five areas of research. And please let us not forget that this comes at a time when being Muslim is virtually a crime in the U.S., as evidenced by the supposedly damning allegations that a presidential candidate (Barack Obama) may be a “secret Muslim”, or that “Muslim ancestry” might render him a Manchurian Candidate or Trojan Horse, and where even a gesture of congratulation between himself and his wife is labeled a “terrorist fist bump” by a leading cable news network (Fox). Obama’s response that he has never been a Muslim, rather than questioning what is the problem if he were, only compounds the rising complex of anti-Muslim hatred.

This is imperial research at its best, at its most scandalous. It is a heinous piece of work, as are all the social scientists who will become involved with it. The national security state is a Nazi state.

•••••••

Addendum: McClatchy has been running a series titled “Guantanamo: Beyond the Law” at the same time as this project announcement was being made. It’s interesting to see the coincidence where journalists have already tackled, and invalidated, some of the way of thinking behind the Minerva Research Initiative. How to explain the “emotional contagion” behind the spread of “terrorism”? How to circumvent its spread? How to develop countermeasures? McClatchy reporters answer these questions in detail, and the best way to summarize their answers is: shut down Guantanamo, end the illegal detentions, detainees should have been treated humanely. Instead, what Guantanamo did was to convert those innocent of any crime (not that fighting foreign invaders is any crime) into warriors who fought for the Taliban and Al Qaeda after their release. Guantanamo has ended up being one of the world’s radical madrassas, thanks to U.S. policy in action. Does the Minerva initiative want such answers? If so, why would the focus being on the workings of “foreign” cultures, when the problem lies very much closer to home? In the final analysis, by leaving U.S. power and its abuses out of the equation, this Minerva Research Initiative invalidates itself as anything other than a form of exercising surveillance, drafting academics and controlling research, and creating propaganda.

[Note that the official document discussed below can be downloaded from here (pdf).]

The Minerva Research Initiative (MRI) has now become official and is ready to begin accepting grant proposals. Proposals are being accepted for projects that address any of the following areas (with a detailed breakdown of each area provided in the document linked above):

(1) Chinese Military and Technology Research and Archive Programs
(2) Studies of the Strategic Impact of Religious and Cultural Changes within the Islamic World
(3) Iraqi Perspectives Project
(4) Studies of Terrorist Organization and Ideologies
(5) New Approaches to Understanding Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation

The Department of Defense (DoD) anticipates that awards will be paid out to universities, and will range from $500,000 to $3 million (US) per annum, with the average award estimated at $1.5 million per annum.

Alarmingly, the DoD is also encouraging the participation of foreign universities, “either as a project lead or in a supporting role” (p. 4). With Canadian troops in Afghanistan, this means that was previously as U.S. political funding issue could become a Canadian one as well (and you can expect the author of this post to actively lead surveillance and opposition to the involvement of any Canadian universities).

In a report published by the Chronicle of Higher Education on June 17, 2008, we learn that while Minerva was to coordinate with the National Science Foundation in vetting applications, such an arrangement has not been formalized. The American Anthropological Association also points out that its concerns have been ignored. Indeed, as WIRED’s Sharon Weinberger notes on June 16, 2008, in her coverage, reviewers of grant applications will consist entirely of government employees.

Given the fact the first awards are scheduled to be paid out in December, before the Bush regime vacates office, suggests that these military planners already know something that is crucial: that no new administration, whether led by Obama or McCain, will likely end the program.

This is fundamentally much broader in its implications for U.S. academia than the Human Terrain System, as it involves supporting knowledge for U.S. counterinsurgency, but without necessarily embedding social scientists in military teams on the ground.

Given the cash-strapped nature of many universities, and the many researchers without funding, one can expect that there will be many “compromises” and many “pragmatic reconsiderations” as even perhaps past opponents of HTS find their way to submitting a grant proposal. Producing “nuanced” justifications for imperialism will become a sub-industry in itself.

Nowhere in the proposed areas of research is there a call for studies of how decades of U.S. foreign intervention, invasions, occupations, and the systematic violations of human rights worldwide might have at least sparked some little militant opposition. The basic principle at work is to spotlight what is going on within those forces that threaten U.S. interests, while absolving the U.S. — found guilty of state-sponsored terrorism by the International Court of Justice in 1986 — of any role in promoting violent opposition to itself. As a result, the academic merit of projects funded under this scheme is automatically nullified.

Update: See also the New York Times piece for June 18, 2008, “Pentagon to Consult Academics on Security.”

[Note that the official document discussed below can be downloaded from here (pdf).]

The Minerva Research Initiative (MRI) has now become official and is ready to begin accepting grant proposals. Proposals are being accepted for projects that address any of the following areas (with a detailed breakdown of each area provided in the document linked above):

(1) Chinese Military and Technology Research and Archive Programs
(2) Studies of the Strategic Impact of Religious and Cultural Changes within the Islamic World
(3) Iraqi Perspectives Project
(4) Studies of Terrorist Organization and Ideologies
(5) New Approaches to Understanding Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation

The Department of Defense (DoD) anticipates that awards will be paid out to universities, and will range from $500,000 to $3 million (US) per annum, with the average award estimated at $1.5 million per annum.

Alarmingly, the DoD is also encouraging the participation of foreign universities, “either as a project lead or in a supporting role” (p. 4). With Canadian troops in Afghanistan, this means that was previously as U.S. political funding issue could become a Canadian one as well (and you can expect the author of this post to actively lead surveillance and opposition to the involvement of any Canadian universities).

In a report published by the Chronicle of Higher Education on June 17, 2008, we learn that while Minerva was to coordinate with the National Science Foundation in vetting applications, such an arrangement has not been formalized. The American Anthropological Association also points out that its concerns have been ignored. Indeed, as WIRED’s Sharon Weinberger notes on June 16, 2008, in her coverage, reviewers of grant applications will consist entirely of government employees.

Given the fact the first awards are scheduled to be paid out in December, before the Bush regime vacates office, suggests that these military planners already know something that is crucial: that no new administration, whether led by Obama or McCain, will likely end the program.

This is fundamentally much broader in its implications for U.S. academia than the Human Terrain System, as it involves supporting knowledge for U.S. counterinsurgency, but without necessarily embedding social scientists in military teams on the ground.

Given the cash-strapped nature of many universities, and the many researchers without funding, one can expect that there will be many “compromises” and many “pragmatic reconsiderations” as even perhaps past opponents of HTS find their way to submitting a grant proposal. Producing “nuanced” justifications for imperialism will become a sub-industry in itself.

Nowhere in the proposed areas of research is there a call for studies of how decades of U.S. foreign intervention, invasions, occupations, and the systematic violations of human rights worldwide might have at least sparked some little militant opposition. The basic principle at work is to spotlight what is going on within those forces that threaten U.S. interests, while absolving the U.S. — found guilty of state-sponsored terrorism by the International Court of Justice in 1986 — of any role in promoting violent opposition to itself. As a result, the academic merit of projects funded under this scheme is automatically nullified.

Update: See also the New York Times piece for June 18, 2008, “Pentagon to Consult Academics on Security.”

Perhaps it would be best if I avoided any more discussion of the work of anthropologists in counterinsurgency programs, especially when I see opening lines like this one: “To wage war, become an anthropologist.” (First, let me thank Culture Matters for pointing me to an article which then pointed me to more.) The reason I say that is that I am not keen about either domination or resistance, about either passive or active opposition, when for very long time my philosophy has been a withdrawalist one, which in practice can be exemplified by the following:

• If they want to take your house away, burn it.
• If they come to plunder your fields, torch the crops.
• If they arrive looking for your gold, dump it all in the ocean.
• If they think you need them, walk away.
• If they assume that you depend on their services, and are at their mercy, close the account.
• If they think you worry about your credit rating, skip payments for a couple of months.
  
• If they think you will do anything to keep your job, quit.

One could think of many other examples — and unfortunately it can be tragic as well, as in the case of African slaves committing suicide, or murdering their newborns to keep them out of the hands of the slave owners. Perhaps this is why, to my knowledge, this is not clearly articulated as a political philosophy in the West (whatever West may be, but we all have an intuitive, working notion of what it might be) — it is a slave ideology. It has no prominent theorist. Unless, of course, we lump in “civil disobedience” as a form of withdrawalism, and then we at least have Gandhi and perhaps Martin Luther King Jr. If we extend it to relations between nations in the global market, then this ideology can take the form of autarky, and autarky has few if any examples of having ever existed, or having existed and inspiring a following. So I am in trouble, and it’s no wonder that for very long I tended to suppress this thinking and maintain it at a barely conscious level. I like it, but then again, I don’t live by it, not always, and I am not even sure I like it now. What I don’t want is a reputation for being the man who preaches “early withdrawal.” That would be premature.

At this stage, I am out of energy and will not comment on details or arguments, but rather just list the items I have come across of relevance to anthropology and the Human Terrain System:

• L.L. Wynn, “To wage war, become an anthropologist.”
• Brian McKenna, “What Would Smedley Butler Do?,” Counterpunch, May 28, 2008.
• Patrick Porter, “Good Anthropology, Bad History: The Cultural Turn in Studying War,” Parameters, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 45-58. (pdf version)
• Newsletter of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 1, February 2008: a whole string of articles on this subject.

Please feel free to read these, and get depressed.