The (potential) role of Anthropology operating with the military has been a topic of rather heated discussion for some time. In some cases, the reactions by Anthropologists have been close to witch hunts, while in other cases they have been quite positive. The latest foo-forah comes with the revelation that Montgomery McFate may also be the infamous Pentagon Diva and author of the Sex in the City-esque I LUV A MAN IN A UNIFORM! blog now offline). Montgomery was apparently “outed” in an Elle (or possibly More) article, at least according to Wired’s Danger Room blog in a posting entitled Do Pentagon Studs Make You Want to Bite Your Fist? on June 17th, 2008.

Needless to say, reactions have been fairly quick. Anthropologist and blogger Maximilian Forte at Concordia, who runs the openanthropology blog, ran a long posting on the 19th of June entitled “Me so horny, me love you long time”: The Phallo-Fascism of a Vainglorious Anthropologist in the Academilitary (2.2). Savage Minds has, as of Saturday the 21st at noon, stayed silent on the reports, while the Wired post has been reported at Small Wars, but not commented on - yet. I had read the post at Small Wars, and Max’s post at openanthropology was forwarded to me by my friend Matt Armstrong (aka MountainRunner).

Before I comment further, let me make it clear right at the start that I consider Max Forte to be an excellent scholar and I have recommended his blog to a number of my students. Max has done some excellent work on the Caribs and on Trinidad and Tobago and I have heard him at conferences a couple of times, although not for several years now. All of this makes me wonder why Max doesn’t recognize why the I LUV A MAN IN A UNIFORM! blog is so funny!

The last time I was down in DC, I managed to spend a couple of hours chatting with Montgomery and her husband Sean. Max characterized Sean as a “Musical Mercenary”, based in part on a blog of Sean’s that hasn’t been updated in almost a year. After talking with him, I wouldn’t call him a “mercenary” so much as a musical masochist - I STILL can’t believe he sat through a 4 hour Poulenc organ recital (20 minutes of Poulenc, either organ or singing, usually does me in!). Personally, I suspect that Max completely missed the role of music in keeping soldiers sane. As Sean noted,

Music is my lodestone in an irrationally horrific world. Opera’s beauty offsets war’s ugliness, and without such balance, we slip into insanity or numbness, both of which rob us of our humanity. Perhaps this is why the more horrors I witness, the deeper I cling to music.

The same use of music, as a method of maintaining sanity in the face of the insanity of war, has shown up in other discussions as well at Small Wars and happens to be a topic I am researching, given my own interest in music (Bach and Baroque rather than Poulenc and Opera).

While I was bothered by Max’s comments about Sean and his innuendo’s of Sean liking Beethoven for its militaristic overtones (see the video here), I could have written this off as him not really groking the relationship between music and sanity. That interpretation, however, is much harder to sustain given how he characterizes Montgomery:

McFate tells Elle she has been accused of prostituting the science, and she may be playing up to that deliberately, seeing that her blog is a testament to such prostitution. A joke about a joke about a joke? I don’t think McFate means anything on that blog to be taken seriously. There is definitely something “in your face” of not just her blog persona, but of her multiple self-representations, like someone laughing at you, everybody, employers included, laughing all the way to the bank. Or perhaps she is sick of it all, and wants to get fired.

I do agree with Max in that I seriously doubt anything on the I LUV A MAN IN A UNIFORM! blog should be taken with any more than a grain of salt. It is an ongoing joke. But, having talked with her, I seriously doubt that it is a either about “laughing all the way to the bank” or “get[ting] fired”. Having had her scholarship attacked as “shoddy“, and being accused of being a spy both for the military and corporations, I would suggest that she is certainly under a large amount of pressure not only from the Pentagon but, also, from her fellow Anthropologists (and with friends like this, who needs enemies?).

Max notes that

The Pentagon Diva, aka McFate, aka McFellate, asks important questions on her blog too, it’s not all silly sexual innuendo. She asks the very reasonable, sober question, “Why is Admiral Eric Olson so freakin’ HOT?” She doesn’t answer that one clearly, but mentions her love of warhammers, and her love of neo-paganism. Aw, Adolf would have been proud to have spawned such a child from beyond his 1945 bunker:

“we’ve had the neo-cons, and now it’s time for the neo-pagans. Some neo-paganism would really liven up the scene at the Pentagon! Just think, we could roast some pigs in a fire pit at Ground Zero, drink psychotropic reindeer urine, raid the State Department in our long boats, and sacrifice some virgins in the E Ring…. And we need a foreign policy to go with our new neo-paganism. I think Conan really summed it up best. When asked the question: what is best in life? Conan replied: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.” Forget all this nonsense about nation-building – I want Thor the Admiral to crush MY enemies!!!”

My, my my! Max, did you know that neo-paganism is a recognized set of religions in the US military (see here and here) and that Thor’s Hammer is at the centre of a fight to be recognized by the VA as a symbol on military graves (see here)? But if the blog post is a joke, then what is it about?

One thing that comes through in all of the posts you mention (even the thread on Small Wars - and thanks for the comments ) is the inherent tensions. In all cases, there are very serious goings on and significant tensions, many of which are structural (i.e. inherent in the socio-cultural environment). How would you suggest that these tensions be resolved? I would suggest that the resolution that Montgomery, Sean and others use is a classic one that we, as Anthropologists, have known about for a long time - we use Joking Relationships.

Now, the classic definition (from Radcliffe-Brown; p. 195) is

What is meant by the term ‘joking relationship’ is a relation between two persons in which one is by custom permitted, and in some instances required, to tease or make fun of the other, who in turn is required to take no offence.

Let’s play with this for a second. I would suggest that in Sean’s case it actually is a custom and has been around since at least the Vietnam War (see here) if not earlier. This is actually a simple one since he is following the “customs” of his “tribe”.

How about Montgomery’s blog or the Small Wars discussion which “amazingly side tracked itself with each of the contributors going on and on and on and on about what academics wear, and how unfashionably silly they look” (emphasis in the original)? I would suggest that both of these situations are about the emergence of a convention for dealing with the thorny problem of academic-military relationships at a group level. Radcliffe-Brown noted that such a relationship was possible. In speaking of its existence between groups (p. 200), he says

It is precisely this separateness which is not merely recognized but emphasized when a joking relationship is established. The show of hostility, the perpetual disrespect, is a continual expression of that social disjunction which is an essential part of the whole structural situation, but over which, without destroying or even weakening it, there is provided the social conjunction of friendliness and mutual aid.

I think we can both agree that there is such a tension between the groups and, at the same time, that there is no established custom for dealing with this tension. No, let me correct that… Anthropologists and the military have tended to have a custom of avoidance for the past 30-40 years, but that can no longer be sustained. We are now feeling our way towards a new custom, whether that is with a joking relationship or not.

I suspect, but never having served in the military I don’t know, that Joking Relationships are both quite recognized and quite common; I have certainly observed many of them on Small Wars and in other venues. I would suggest that this observation is by no means unique and that any Anthropologist who spends time with the military will see the same thing. And, being that we tend to “blend in”, I see nothing unreasonable in the adoption of that style of interaction by Anthropologists who deal with the military. Indeed, I suspect that the use of such a style of discourse makes Anthropologists more easily classifiable as “acceptable” by the military, as long as the general customary boundaries of the Joking Relationship are not breached.

I believe that Montgomery’s blog should not be viewed as a form of “Phallo-Fascism” (and what radical separatist feminist book did that come from?!?) but, rather, as a formalization of her Joking Relationship with the Military. Or, to put it another way, Max, it’s a joke!