In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on January 10, 2009

I wanted to post a quick follow-up to the example I used in my last post regarding conceptualizations of space and time.  In it, I noted that “For the irhabi, the Area of Operations (AO) is glocal while for much of the Western military the AO is local (i.e. geographically limited)”, an observation I stand by.  This morning, I was reading through a position announcement coming out of the USG for Cultural Awareness Based Intelligence Assessment Support, and the way in which the requirements were structured hammered home to me how endemic the perception of the AO as local is.

First off, the “Areas of Interest” were all geographic, and never functional and, possibly more importantly, there was an explicit linking of “culture” with “geography”.  Now, it is quite true that “culture” is linked with “geography”, but that linkage involves the inhabitation of a geographic location by members of a culture (the question of geographic features shaping a culture popularized by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel
is another matter entirely).  The problem with this is that it does not recognize that cultural populations around the world are diasporic.  As a case in point, I believe that it is currently impossible for the entire membership of the Samoan ethnic community to physically fit in the geography of Samoa.

Now this particular position announcement actually does appear to recognize that cultures are somewhat distributed; at least that is the implication I draw out of one of the requirements where it talks about developing “Cultural Distribution Maps”.  I do have to wonder, however, what the reaction would be if such a map included such core cultural areas as, for example, New York, DC, LA, London, Paris and Toronto.

A second observation that came out of reading the requirements, and which is implicit in the first, is that this focus on the “local”, and some limited perception of a cultural heartland at that (shall we bring up the old Pristine Cultures debate from the 1930′s anyone?), places a structural obstacle to actual intelligence support.  Let me give a simple example of this.

The Sultinate of Brunei is one of the most “confusing” places in the world when it comes to its history of technological deployment.  At the same time, it is also one of the best places in the world to look at the phenomenon of adaptation of a new technology to a set of cultural applications.  Consider, by way of example, the placement of radio phone stations in many, essentially neolithic villages during the 1950′s and 1960′s.  Now if one were to structurally require expertise based solely on geographic area, it is unlikely that a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in, say, Kenya, would know about Brunei’s experiences.  As a result, they would be lacking critical data points on possible effects of cell phone usage which is a key technological shaper of the irhabi concept of battlespace.

There is another example which is germaine to this point as well.  Many of the irhabi tactics and conceptualizations of battlespace and Area of Operations (AO) are actually diffused from Western tactics developed by various social movements ranging from the anti-Vietnam War protests to the modern anti-Globalization movement.  In order to understand how these tactics and conceptualizations operate, analysts really do need to be familiar with these social movements.

Which brings me to my final point which is about the inherent “essentialization” of culture contained in the position announcement.  I briefly mentioned the Pristine Cultures (PC) debate earlier, and it is germain to this problem.  Very briefly, the PC argument (pun partially intended), states that “They” are limited and restricted by their cultures, while “We” are free from such “barbaric” and/or “savage” limitations.  As a result of “Their” being “in thrall” to their “primitive superstitions”, “We” must either assimilate / educate them in (our) “reality” or “protect” their culture by making sure that it never changes.

This essentialist view of culture, and it dovetails nicely with the geographically deterministic view of culture elsewhere in the position announcement, is steering “analysis” along a line that any military historian should recognize: the debates on the proper use of cavalry after World War I.  It will generate analyses that will be analogically similar to calling for cavalry charges against hardened machine gun emplacements (oh, yeah, I should have put that as “uphill cavalry charges”).  I think that any social scientist can easily understand why generals always start out fighting the “last war”, but isn’t this carrying tradition too far?  Is it really necessary to fight wars with concepts from 125 years ago?

Category: COIN, Epistemology
Tags: Culture, Epistemology, Intelligence Analysis, Space and Time