Last Friday the New York Times reported that anthropologists have been
working alongside the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to
make the occupation more effective:
In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan,
American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new
weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian
anthropologist named Tracy.
Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons,
is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon
program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to
American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to
understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a
land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe —
has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.
This is not the only instance of professionals becoming handmaidens to
the Bush White House. It has recruited psychologists to fine-tune
interrogation techniques in Guantanamo over the protests of some members
of the profession.
Anthropologists have also intervened to challenge the misuse of their
skills. Chief among them is David Price, who has launched a Pledge of
Non-participation in Counter-insurgency. Background articles can be
found here. A number of them were written by Price and are included
along with others in his excellent website. One of them that originally
appeared in the Nation Magazine quite rightfully lauds Franz Boas:
On December 20, 1919, under the heading “Scientists as Spies,” The
Nation published a letter by Franz Boas, the father of academic
anthropology in America. Boas charged that four American
anthropologists, whom he did not name, had abused their professional
research positions by conducting espionage in Central America during the
First World War. Boas strongly condemned their actions, writing that
they had “prostituted science by using it as a cover for their
activities as spies.” Anthropologists spying for their country severely
betrayed their science and damaged the credibility of all
anthropological research, Boas wrote; a scientist who uses his research
as a cover for political spying forfeits the right to be classified as a
scientist.
While there are many reasons to admire Boas’s courage, his academic
record was not entirely unblemished. While at the Museum of Natural
History, Boas decided that Eskimos were suitable objects for study,
because they represented a kind of “living fossil” that demonstrated a
connection to Ice Age hunters in Europe. So eager was he to have some
useful specimens that he commissioned Robert Peary to bring back some
specimens from an Arctic expedition on his ship “The Hope.” Some 30,000
New Yorkers paid 25 cents each in 1896 to view the six Eskimos that
Peary retrieved from their home. Later on they were transported to the
basement of the Museum in order to be studied. When a reporter asked
Boas how they were kept busy, he replied:
Oh, we try to give them little things to keep them busy. Their work
doesn’t amount to much, but they have made some carvings, and occupied
themselves either indoors or around the place with any employment that
suggested itself to them. They do not seem discontented.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/10/07/colonial-anthropology/
