This week there will be a conference on Anthropology and Counter-Insurgency taking place at the University of Chicago. Late last night, a friend of mine, Matt Armstrong, emailed me and asked me if I would be going – my response was (roughly) “No, why bother?”.

After I replied to Matt, my sub-conscious started trying to process why I had said that. I realized that a lot of it had to do with my entire frustration with the entire so-called “debate” on Anthropologists working with the military. Most recently, this frustration had been stoked by a comment by Rex Brynen on SWC.

Regarding the latter, I’m struck by the extent to which–despite all the hot debate on HTTs, Project Minerva, and so forth–there has been very little substantive analysis of the pluses and minuses of the relationship, how to address the ethical issues involved, and other practical issues. (SWJ and Savage Minds being, in general, relatively rare exceptions to this pattern.)

Rex’s comment resonated and started me thinking about how such an analysis could be done. One of the things I realized was that Anthropology and the Military operate on totally different metaphysical assumptions:

I’ve often suspected that part of the problem is some pretty basic different philosophical assumptions about “reality”. In many ways, the position taken by a lot of the extreme anti-military crowd are on the extreme end of social constructivism - “reality is a social construct”. This, at least in many of the forms it shows up in, is an extreme version of “nurture” (vs. Nature) or free-will vs. predestination and one that disregards many of the scientific discoveries of the past 20 years in the area of neuro-cognition, etc.

In this paradigm, conflict cannot be “natural” since “nature” is an illusion that is used as a rhetorical device to explain the complexities of social manipulation. Since conflict arises from the social, then we must look to the social for its causes and this can only be because of the US (okay, I skipped out about 10 intermediate levels in the causal chain, but, hey, this isn’t a dissertation!).

I noted that Phil [Salzman] specifically excepted the behavioural and evolutionary crowd in Anthropology which, on the whole, doesn’t surprise me at all since these are some of the few people who still look at “nature” (read biology and neuro-biology).

This postulate that the extreme anti-military crowd inside Anthropology are from the extreme end of the constructivist spectrum was reinforced by looking over some of the abstracts for the Chicago conference. For example,

Hugh Gusterson
The Cultural Turn in the War on Terror

Clausewitz theorized “friction” as the major impediment to rational, predictable, controllable war. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has belatedly realized that “culture” is a source of such friction. Now, as military contractors rush to hire anthropologists and other social scientists, the military is experimenting with “ethnographic intelligence,” “human terrain teams,” “smart culture cards” and so on. Military culture initiatives have repressive and facilitative modalities. We see the repressive modalities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, where cultural knowledge has been used to enhance torture. Facilitative initiatives have sought to deploy cultural knowledge to smooth away cultural misunderstanding and friction. Both kinds of initiatives are based on the misrecognition of opposition to occupation as reaction to cultural insensitivity.

One of the most fascinating things about all of this is that nowhere do people like Hugh analyze the other side of the issue – why do radical irhabi conduct atrocities aimed at destroying the West? The naïve assumption that the West has brought this upon itself is, on the whole, only supported by their theoretical (theological?) position and cannot in any way explain the actions of these groups against Muslims. It is time for Anthropologists to stop asking how many oppressors can dance on the head of a pin (with apologies to St. Thomas Aquinas) and start asking some more immediate questions such as:

• Why have some revitalization movements (cf. A.F.C. Wallace, Revitalization Movements, American Anthropologist, April, 1956, 58:2 264-281) within Islam produced terrorist groups?
• How have these movements warped Sharia Law to justify the killing of women, children and non-combatants?
• How has the systematic use of terrorist tactics in areas controlled by these groups influenced other Muslims? And, finally,
• How and why organized groups of sociopathic thugs can garner support for their actions in the West?