FW: Upcoming AAA mail ballot on uses of anthropologists

[Susan Ervin-Tripp]

We Must Fight the Militarization of Anthropology

By ROBERTO J. GONZALEZ

When students take introductory courses in cultural
anthropology, they learn the techniques necessary for
understanding daily life in peasant villages or among bands
of hunter-gatherers. Professors teach them about the
importance of building rapport with informants, the insights
gained from cultural immersion, and the benefits of
linguistic fluency - while interacting with people in the
Amazon Basin, the Kalahari Desert, or the Australian
outback.

But students rarely learn that today a small but growing
number of Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Department,
and State Department officials and contractors are promoting
militarized versions of the same techniques as key elements
of the "war on terror." Military and intelligence agents
seem to be particularly interested in applying academic
knowledge to interrogation and counterinsurgency efforts in
the Middle East and Central Asia, and at the U.S. detention
facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Recent events have dramatically demonstrated that
anthropological and other scholarly information is a
potentially valuable intelligence tool. But history tells us
that such information can easily be misused when put into
the wrong hands. That is why we, as scholars, must make a
continuing effort to speak out against the misappropriation
of our work. Last summer the governing council of the
American Psychological Association, under tremendous
pressure from the rank and file, passed a resolution
prohibiting members from engaging in torture or training
others to use it - although the statement allowed members to
assist in interrogations. In late fall, a colleague and I
presented a resolution at the annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Association unambiguously opposing torture
and the use of anthropological knowledge as an element of
torture. Those present at the business meeting unanimously
passed the statement. Now we must find ways to promote a
wider discussion of the issue.

Early evidence of using culture as a weapon came from the
Abu Ghraib scandal revealed in 2004. That year the
journalist Seymour M. Hersh reported in The New Yorker on
the brutal practices of U.S. personnel at the Iraqi prison.
Hersh included a quote from an unnamed academic who noted
that the anthropologist Raphael Patai's 1973 book The Arab
Mind was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." Hersh
implied that Patai's depiction of "sex as a taboo vested
with shame and repression" in Arab cultures provided U.S.
interrogators with culturally specific material that could
be used to recruit Iraqi informants - and, with or without
official approval, to develop torture techniques tailor made
for Iraqi prisoners. If true, that marked a new and
dangerous phase in applied anthropology. (Ruth Benedict's
classic study of Japanese national character, The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture,
published in 1946, had helped the U.S. military - to create
a peaceful post-World War II occupation in Japan.)

Widespread concern erupted among anthropologists about how
interrogators might use readily accessible ethnographic data
for the abuse and torture of prisoners. Would the
possibility lead anthropologists to censor themselves? Would
they be recruited for interrogation or counterinsurgency
work? Would collaboration with spy agencies or interrogation
teams create global mistrust of scholars conducting research
abroad? Those and many other questions arose in rapid
succession.

In some cases, the answers appeared quickly. In October
2005, the anthropological association, the discipline's
largest professional organization, posted a CIA job
announcement in several of its journals. The association
accepted the advertisement without wide consultation of its
members. Many anthropologists were outraged. (By this time,
reports about the CIA's extraordinary rendition program and
its secret prison network had appeared.) The CIA's covert
dealings with anthropology-association officials during the
cold war had set an ominous precedent, as had the
involvement of social scientists in the ill-fated Project
Camelot, a 1960s counterinsurgency-research project planned
by the Pentagon for use in Latin America. The CIA's job
announcement was eventually retracted, and the anthropology
association assembled a special committee to examine the
roles played by anthropologists in military and intelligence
work.

Other anthropologists were troubled by the findings of the
historian Alfred W. McCoy, who has recently analyzed how
interrogation techniques used by U.S. spy agencies have
rapidly evolved over the last several years to incorporate
behavioral-science research. His 2006 book, A Question of
Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on
Terror, examines how physically brutal torture methods were
augmented by the work of American and Canadian psychologists
in the 1950s and 1960s. Their research, with covert
government financing, led to the discovery that sensory
deprivation, disorientation, and self-inflicted pain could
more effectively (and more rapidly) break down the human
psyche than could physical assaults.

Such social scientists unwittingly paved the way for what
McCoy calls a "distinctively American form of torture,"
relying primarily on psychological assaults, which would be
used extensively by the CIA and its proxies during the
latter half of the 20th century. The techniques were
codified in a 1963 counterintelligence manual, now
declassified, which makes chilling reading even today.

The latest developments in the science of suffering have
provided another component to the interrogator's tool kit -
cultural manipulation. Since 2002, U.S. interrogators have
used Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (so-called
Biscuit teams) of psychologists and other social scientists.
According to McCoy, U.S. agents at Guantanamo Bay have
created a "de facto behavioral-research laboratory" that
goes beyond using psychological stressors by attacking
"cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to
issues of gender and sexual identity."

Last December even more news appeared regarding the use of
social-science expertise by military and intelligence
agencies when George Packer, a staff writer for The New
Yorker, reported the emergence of anthropological
counterinsurgency experts. His article profiles the
Australian anthropologist David Kilcullen, who is under
contract at the State Department's counterterrorism office.
Among other things, Kilcullen is in charge of writing a new
counterinsurgency manual. In his work, Kilcullen refers to
counterinsurgency as "armed social work" and maps out a
range of extremists, providing a guide for military
personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. At times it reads like an
anthropology fieldwork guide: "Know the people, the
topography, economy, history, religion, and culture. Know
every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader,
and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world
expert on your district." At other times, Kilcullen's tone
is brazenly militaristic: "Counterinsurgency is a squad and
platoon leader's war, and often a private soldier's war.
Battles are won or lost in moments: Whoever can bring combat
power to bear in seconds, on a street corner, will win."

Meanwhile at the Defense Department, a new office, the
Cultural Operations Research Human Terrain, has been created
to tap into social-science knowledge. Its director, Steve
Fondacaro, is recruiting social scientists to join
five-person teams in Iraq and Afghanistan as cultural
advisers; pilot teams are scheduled to begin work in the
spring. Fondacaro has at least one anthropologist on his
staff.

The fact that Kilcullen and others are eager to commit
social-science knowledge to goals established by the Defense
Department and the CIA is indicative of a new anthropology
of insurgency. Anthropology under these circumstances
appears as just another weapon to be used on the battlefield
--not as a tool for building bridges between peoples, much
less as a mirror that we might use to reflect upon the
nature of our own society.

Spurred by such revelations, Kanhong Lin, a graduate student
at American University, and I crafted the resolution
opposing torture and the use of anthropological knowledge as
an element of torture that we brought to the anthropology
association. At the group's annual business meeting, nearly
300 anthropologists - the largest number in years - packed the
conference auditorium and unanimously adopted the
resolution.

The resolution is being submitted to the full membership by
mail ballot this spring. It is important that all our
members, particularly those who were not at the business
meeting, know what led up to the meeting's vote. It is
important that scholars in other fields know, as well. At
the anthropology conference, there was widespread discussion
of whether the earlier resolution by psychologists - who
condemned scholarly participation in torture, but not in all
interrogations - had gone far enough. These are issues that
scholars need to discuss widely.

Although academic resolutions are not likely to transform
U.S. government policies, they do articulate a set of values
and ethical concerns shared by many scholars. We who adopted
them hope that the recent resolutions will extend and
amplify dialogue among anthropologists - and others - around
issues of torture, the "war on terror," and the potential
abuse of social-science knowledge. We also hope that they
will prompt us to directly confront - and resist - the
militarization of the social sciences at this critical
juncture in the history of the American academy.

Roberto J. Gonzalez is an associate professor of
anthropology at San Jose State University. He is most
recently the editor of Anthropologists in the Public Sphere:
Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power (University
of Texas Press, 2004).
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