For over a year, I have been using the term “Witch Hunts”to refer to the actions of some people who are violently opposed to the existence on the Human Terrain System. It is important that people realize that when I use that term, it is not being used in the normal meaning of political hyperbole but, rather, in the very technical sense of a well understood social process. When it comes to Witchcraft and its associated processes, I actually do know what I am talking about, having done my MA on the topic and published and presented in the area.

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[this is the final post in this series]

Topologies of competition

In the previous post, I identified two classes of battlespace topologies: perceptual and technological. While the two classes have common dimensions, it is analytically useful to treat them as if they were separate. Social groups (and individuals) operate across a multiplicity of battlespaces (”workspaces” in Darwinian terms), competing for a variety of resources, using a variety of tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to engage with other groups opeating n the same battlespace. The combination of a battlespace, all the groups competing within it, the resources that may be procured and the sum total of all current, past and conceived of TTPs may be termed a “gamespace”.

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[This continues from the previous post]

Linking battle/workspaces into perceptual topologies

In a recent article, Raphaël Baeriswyl, drawing heavily on the work of Jacques Baud, argues that there are six distinct “battlespaces”: topographic space (land, sea), airspace, electromagnetic space, cyberspace, infospace, and human space. Each of these battlespaces has emerged as technological advances has shifted the options as to where conflict may take place. While I find Baeriswyl’s idea interesting and useful, it is, however, too limited.

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[Note: I am in the process of putting together a journal article on asymmetric warfare and I will be using the next few posts to help me think abut it.]

Competition appears to be an inevitable consequence of our natural (read biological) state. Darwin termed this “natural selection”. But, as with most species, we are not, on the whole, so insane as to equate “competition” with “conflict” in all settings. Indeed, if Sahlins is correct, then one of the key roles played by culture is as a mitigation against or “channeling of” the potential for conflict. Indeed, one of the great major fallacies of thought in the area, Spencer’s concept of Survival of the Fittest which led to some of the worst episodes in human history, completely missed this point: culture channels and defines competition.

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Last month, Hugh Gusterson published an article in Foreign Policy entitled When Professors go to War that sparked a fair bit of commentary. This article just sparked a new exchange on the FP site. First, Peter D. Feaver at Duke, responded with a rebuttal called Pentagon Funding? Bring it on. In which he characterizes Gustersons’ argument as

Anthropologists are too politicized and wedded to an antimilitary, far-left ideology, he claims, to be reliable partners with the Defense Department. His colleagues, Gusterson informs us, tend to view the military narrowly as an organization that kills the people who are the subjects of anthropological studies, treating such people only as “collateral damage.” Given those views, working on a Pentagon-funded project is “unthinkable.”

Hugh’s response is limited to a tu quoque analogy (asking if Feaver would accept communist funding) and one good point: informants typically ask us who us funding us when we are in the field. While it is a good point, it is also less of one than Hugh thinks. After all, one has to wonder how many people in the areas under consideration for Project Minerva money don’t think that any US institutional funding is a front for their Department of Defense? Doesn’t everyone “know” what the “S” in NSF stands for?!?

In case you are wondering why I put the term “theologian” in quotation marks, it’s simple: the quotation marks are used to indicate a verbal tonality, in this case, dripping sarcasm (the red text is used to indicate “Danger”). I use the term “theologian” to indicate a person who is, as Dawkins might say, “a carrier of ideological mind viruses”. This type of person has certain core psychological characteristics, such as a Manichean view of the world and an absolute conviction that they know the Truth. Sometimes mislabeled as a “fanatic”, the “theologian” is actually much more dangerous than the typical fanatic since they have the ability to mobilize (and produce!) fanatics to achieve their ends by producing the situationally relevant Authoritative Word (Truth). Even worse, as “carriers” they are partly immune to their own mind viruses, and often motivated by other, non-Truth related, motivations.

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On August 5th, my friend Matt Armstrong posted a very interesting article entitled New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation (cross-posted at the CT Lab). As with most of Matt’s work, it is a great blending of solid academic analysis (in plain English!) aimed at an applied topic. Since Matt’s specialty is Strategic Communications, I was certainly not surprised to see him produce a top notch piece of work. In the piece, Matt tracks how various groups are sing the “new media” to spread their messages and, in the conclusion, he notes that

We have returned to an time in which the value brute force is reduced and the pen, or keyboard and camera-phone, is mightier than the gun. The United States created a term for this “unfair” fight: asymmetric warfare. The only asymmetry was the adversary understood the power of information to persuade, mobilize, and facilitate action.

Matt is, in his usual pithy way, quite correct; the US government does not understand this type of competition at all, even if certain individuals within it do, and the same is true of most Big Organizations for one simple reason: the “new media” has activated a very old form of communications style.

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Of all the areas I have studied, probably the furthest removed from the consensual reality (i.e. “normal culture”) of North America is that of Magic. Were many of my colleagues studied Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, in order to get a handle on how cultures conceptualized and formalized technologies of the mind, I was more interested in looking at Western forms and their integration into our modern society. Inevitably, the study of Western Magic leads one to the study of Western music which, for me at least, was fortuitous since I had been singing it since I was nine years old. This led to the somewhat surreal situation where, when I was doing fieldwork studying modern Witchcraft, I was recognizing cord sequences and emotional progressions that I had first learned singing in Anglican choirs and from folk songs.

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Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

“The Scottish Play”, Act 5, Scene 5

To pleasant songs my work was erstwhile given, and bright were all my labours then; but now in tears to sad refrains am I compelled to turn.

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

In a sadly under-read monograph entitled Reality Construction in Society, Burkart Holzner introduced the concept of “reality shocks”, “the unanticipated feeling of unreality arising in situations of extreme disappointment or extreme success, or in situations in which the social support for our interpretation of reality is withrawn, or in which we are confronted by entirely meaningless events.” (page 11). I would suggest that these types of events have become increasingly common over the past 40 years and our reactions, both as individuals and as groups, to them are coming to increasingly define social and inter-social relations.

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The personal is political

Carol Hanish (?)

I don’t usually write about politics. This isn’t because I don’t have strong political beliefs (I do) but, rather, because I prefer to devote my time and energies to other things. This wasn’t always the case, as a few of my close friends know, and I like to think that I am still engaged in a political / advocacy struggle when it comes to science and, in particular, Anthropology. I am breaking with tradition because of a recent article that showed up in Mother Jones and one, particular response to it by Max Forte.

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