This past weekend, I was down in Kingston at the biennial IUS Canada conference presenting a paper on the use of ethnographic knowledge in Romano-Byzantine military PME (Professional Military Education) as part of a larger session on “Educating for Cultural Awareness” organized by John Hawkins.  It was an interesting session in a lot of ways, and really got to the core of how the US military is attempting to teach “culture”.

Being the only person not looking at how the US military is trying to train “culture”, and also being the first presenter in the session, I felt that it was somewhat encumbent upon me to try and present an overarching framework that could help to situate what came after - an interesting exercise since we didn’t have each others papers!  With that in mind, I set out to situate ethnographic knowledge, rather than Anthropology, and look at how its uses (and abuses) had shifted over a 2000 year period from roughly 550 bce to 1453 ce.  Needless to say, the discussion was quite general, but certain clear patterns did emerge out of it.

One of the clearest patterns to emerge was that there was a very curious interplay between ethnographic knowledge, military knowledge, and civil-military integration.  At times, ethnographic knowledge was viewed as being exceedingly “dangerous”, while at other times the danger of not having it exceeded the danger of having it.  This was the theme I used to order the paper - “dangerous knowledge” - and the “explanation (actually hypothesis) for changes in its institutionalization patterns was centered on relative risk / danger assessments as a product at the population level of emergent views from the members of that population.

The paper itself is still in the “working paper - draft” phase, and I had finished it just before getting to the conference.  But something utterly fascinating happened there on the first day during a workshop on the Teaching of Culture organized by Brian Selmeski and Kerry Fosher - the themes I had identified in my paper kept cropping up again and again; the sense of deja vue (and deja crit!) stayed with me the entire weekend, popping up at the oddest of times, but with a fairly uniform pattern.

The pattern of appearance was intriguing and always involved a paper (presentation, observation, question, etc.) asked by someone from one discipline where the topic had already been examined and slved in another discipline and they weren’t aware of it.  And, in a truly ironic twist, the most egregious examples showed up in a session where the presenters worked the hardest to say that they were in an interdisciplinary environment - that one reminded me of attempts to use sympathetic magic to armour temselves against attacks by symbolically claiming / appropriating the construct of invulnerability (i.e. disciplines cover all knowledge, we are interdisciplinary and don’t know about anything to answer these problems, therefore there has never been any answer to these problems so what we are doing is “new” and “worthy”).

True interdisciplinarity, however, is not about having a coule of people from a few different disciplines who work together - it is about the systematic sharing and negotiation of “mapping conventions” (theories, models, methods) applied to problem areas.  It is also about a willingness to be wrong and to appear to be a fool which, when you come right down to it, is all about how individuals define themselves.  True interdisciplinarity is about subjective reflexivity, humility and play or, as Socrates once noted, “I am the wisest man I know for I know that I know nothing”.