Abstract
What can you do with a degree in anthropology? This enduring question, pondered annually by generations of ebullient university applicants and their dubious parents, is answered thus by the anthropology band Famous Dead Germans: Anthropology is a liberal arts degree It teaches you to read and to think critically It teaches you to write and to argue cogently If you want to learn to read and write and think try anthropology … Doctors, lawyers, socialists all learn from anthropology
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While the inclusion of the latter vocation among the beneficiaries of anthropological tuition indicates a proclivity toward certain dead Germans over others, the band nonetheless credibly abridges those broad disciplinary merits embraced by anthropology enthusiasts across the political spectrum. The song simultaneously bespeaks the ambiguity of anthropological identity in the present day, declining to intimate the qualities which set anthropology apart from other liberal arts degrees, which – presumably – also confer the advantages of reading and writing and thinking. Nowhere, for example, do the lyrics make any mention of indigeneity, the traditional marker of proprietary anthropological preoccupation, although the accompanying music video concludes pointedly with an iconic image of a particularly famous dead German squatting splay-armed and wild-eyed in emulation of the Kwakiutl Hamat'sa initiation. And they certainly do not disclose the irony that ambivalence (Kuper, 2003) about this historical legacy in anthropological circles is increasingly counteracted by certitude of its utility in military ones, with no institution embracing the return of the native more enthusiastically than the US Army. Indeed, this otherwise excellent disquisition on the latent potentialities of the anthropology degree omits entirely its promise as the foundation for a military career. This is probably proportionate, for to date, of some 6000 professional anthropologists working in the United States, little more than a handful appear to be employing their anthropology degrees in the service of war.
David Price puts the current figure somewhat imprecisely at “less than eight”, at least in terms of its most publicly contested manifestation, the Human Terrain Systems initiative (p. 4). His book, Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in the Service of the Militarized State, is therefore something of a negative analytic. This is less the story of why roughly 1% of American anthropologists have turned their hands toward “enabling the kill chain” (the Pentagon’s catchy euphemism for the mustering of ethnography to the banner of neocolonial violence (Vine, 2007)) than why the other 99.9% have not, despite the vast political, economic and cultural impetus to do so. This is also an account of why the US military wishes more of us would, a narrative which divulges more about modern warfare and the historical amnesia of its prosecutors than modern anthropology and the historical development of its ambitions, though it speaks acutely to the disconnect between the two. Anthropology and war are of course abiding bedfellows (Gill, 2007). But the flavour of warfare which has triggered the weaponizing of anthropology this time around, or so the story goes, marks a shift from the conventional wars of the recent past, thereby rendering legible the military utility of our discipline – or at least, the conventional anthropology of the popular imagination, as the Pentagon seems to see it: “As military campaigns shift away from wars between states, to wars of quick conquest and grueling endless occupations of regions identified with ethnic or ‘tribal’ groups rather than national boundaries, the needs for anthropological knowledge and skill sets grow” (p. 3). Price here recapitulates an argument proffered by military strategists themselves, one of whom argues similarly that “Throughout the past few centuries, wars have been fought between nations for many different reasons, but today the nature of warfare is transitioning back to a cause of past centuries. Fewer wars today are being fought between nations, rather they are being fought within the nations” (Lindberg, 1996).
This then, is the vernacular leitmotif underpinning the courtship of the discipline of reading and writing and thinking by the discipline of shooting and killing and maiming: anthropologists are experts in possession of cultural competence (linguistic being the foremost, and the gateway to most others), keepers of obscure knowledge pertaining to groups of “others” who operate at social scales (pointedly defined as ethnic, tribal or indigenous, rather than political) below the radar of the nation-state; the US military is an organisation in need of such expertise due to the shifting characteristics of its prescribed enemies and its general dearth of experience in engaging with such adversaries. But for anthropological demurral, it would be a match made verily in heaven. Yet it is a rocky relationship from the outset, entailing barriers of both will and ability. Part of the problem, notes Price, is ethnographic affinity, a logical product of the empathy required to successfully conduct participant observation. Anthropologists who sympathise with their informants are unlikely to assist in their subjugation, and may even contribute to their resistance. There is also the problem of competence. To a certain degree, argues Price, anthropologists do not help the military because we can’t: we don’t actually do what it thinks we do, largely because its emissaries arrive on our doorstep having cherry-picked from the canon a moribund structural-functionalist understanding of “culture” long past its sell-by date on the menu of anthropological theory. And yet, as with all conjugal affiliations, there is an economic subtext. Anthropologists have needs too; most acutely for cash. As the public retrenchment of social science funding in the United States proceeds apace, the US military steps in with an irresistible enticement, rendering the proffered union more a shotgun wedding than a marriage of convenience – one which anthropologists have thus far resisted, but whose over determining impetus threatens to sculpt the discipline into the plasticine cliché the military so urgently desires in a counterinsurgency partner.
Price draws us through this narrative, critically, 2 with greater attention to rumination and detail and less attention to theory and analysis than some readers might find adequate. The book is divided into three sections, which move in rough thematic order from the historical to the textual to the practical. The first provides a succinct contextualisation for the militarisation of anthropology and cognate social sciences as part and parcel of the broader militarisation of American social life in general, drawing appropriately upon the related work of Henry Giroux (2007), Roberto González (2004, 2009, 2010) and Hugh Gusterson (2007). The second comprises a discursive analysis of military texts with the aim of understanding what, precisely, the Pentagon seeks from its engagement with anthropology, with attendant commentary addressing the ways in which the military fundamentally misunderstands the evolving anthropological treatment of “culture.” The final section goes to ground, examining the ways in which anthropology has been employed specifically by campaigns in the so-called “war on terror”, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. The entirety of the book is informed by – and should ideally be read in tandem with – Price’s related monographs, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthysim and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (2004) and Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War (2008). It should also be understood within the context of Price’s activism, a critically-informed politics founded upon a record of exhaustive research into the relationship between anthropology and war, read most acutely through the aforementioned US engagements.
Weaponizing Anthropology might be construed as the third in a trilogy of monographs documenting this historical union and its contemporary progeny, yet it is a fundamentally different piece of work, in that it is far more ethnographic than its predecessors – largely historical investigations – could possibly have been. This is not an ethnography in the traditional sense of the term, and Price nowhere describes it as such. Indeed, he expends little concerted effort on reflexive consideration of his own position in the tale he unfolds. This is no detriment to the book, but a reflection of its singular place in the constellation of anthropological literary genres. Weaponizing Anthropology reads, above all, like an urgent report from an unforeseen field, 3 submitted for public consideration by an accomplished scholar with immense knowledge of a history which has enveloped the chronicler of its vicissitudes. If Price has previously documented our dissident forbears, he cannot now, in turning to the American wars of the present, help but document their heirs, of which he is one. Price’s analytical past has become his ethnographic present, his prose divulging in haphazard vignettes unsettling personal encounters with the architects of anthropological militarisation, the media apologists who tellingly fail to treat it with clarity, and the collaborators among our colleagues who promote it. My description of Weaponizing Anthropology as an advanced and nuanced field report is not a critique, but an accolade. Price could have waited to write this book. Years anon, he could undoubtedly have provided a more pat and satisfactory account – the analysis richer, the reflexivity deeper, the conclusions definitive, the lessons sadly learned (or not) – once the deeds were long past. That he did not wait is to his credit, and certainly to his risk: personal, political, professional. It is also to the immense benefit of the reader, and particularly to his fellow anthropologists, that we may act now, armed with the gritty empirical details of a pitched battle on whose sidelines most of us stand, not for lack of outrage, but lack of relevance.
Action is indeed the rub. Because Price’s activism entwines so dialectically, robustly and openly 4 with his research, it is the “what is to be done?” implications of this book which I would like to address by way of what I hope will be construed as a respectful critique of an important and insightful work. Beneath the rich detail of Price’s account lurks a set of under theorised questions pertaining to the ways in which anthropologists relate structurally to each other, and by extension to the broader scholarly community whose work the militarised state would subvert to its imperial purposes. Some of the key ties that bind anthropologists together emerge in the text through descriptions of active resistance to military programmes which blanket American campuses in a storm of acronyms (ICCAE, PRISP, NSEP, and Minerva 5 ): the department, the professional organisation, the university itself. Trade unions are notably absent, as is any discussion of our increasingly fraught labour relations, characterised, like much of the social sciences and humanities, by widespread precarity, the vigorous exploitation of a burgeoning reserve army of PhDs, and intense competition for scarce jobs. This is unfortunate, as becomes evident with one call to action proffered by Price on page 90: “… tenured professors on campuses with ICCAE programs, or on campuses contemplating ICCAE programs, need to use their tenure to speak out, on the record, in public: the threats presented by these sorts of developments are exactly why tenure exists”. This is a logical exhortation, yet the invocation of tenure points precisely to the perils of silence on what else tenure protects. The oppositional voices of the securely tenured, themselves colluders (however reluctant) in the very system of precarious labour which renders so many qualified anthropologists financially vulnerable to HTS predation in the first place, echo with unavoidable hypocrisy, as well as doubt. What structural tensions arise in calls issued by those afforded the relative academic freedom of the high road to those tempted to travel the low, not by substantive agreement, but economic compulsion (see Kendzior, 2012)? By the same token, what powers of resistance can be leveraged by those with no tenure to wield, or who enjoy at best only intermittent footing on campus at all due to chronic underemployment?
There are, of course, paths to organised dissidence beyond the boundaries of the campus gate, yet some of the most prominent share in common the problems of voluntaristic individualism entailed in campus-based resistance. The Network of Concerned Anthropologists (of which Price himself is a founding member), whose mild moniker evokes the spectre of the earnest learned pausing in their bookish business to raise a collective eyebrow, operates largely on the principle of protest by abstention. Its official Pledge, which I along with several hundred of my colleagues have signed, articulates a largely ethical opposition to anthropological engagement in counterinsurgency research before culminating in the following anticlimactic coda: “Consequently, we pledge not to undertake research or other activities in support of counter-insurgency work in Iraq or in related theaters in the ‘war on terror,’ and we appeal to colleagues everywhere to make the same commitment”. 6 Nowhere, interestingly, does the Pledge ask us explicitly to oppose the war itself – though this might plausibly be taken as a given through its description of the war on terror as a “brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties” – rather it begs that we decline to participate in it, especially in any covert manner. Yet the crucial point here is the passive definition of “support”. What are the responsibilities, and avenues of struggle, for those of us (tenured or otherwise) whose research expertise bears no relevance to the immediate objectives of the US military, because we do not study its targeted “others”, or perhaps any “others” at all, or whose campuses do not face direct colonisation by ICCAE and its ilk? How can even the tenured effectively employ that status in the course of resistance if they have no meaningful labour to withdraw from the production of a militarised anthropology? How do such bystanders transform ethical opposition into effective political action beyond renouncing a collusion they are incapable of executing, and politely requesting that the capable follow suit?
As Price himself suggests, the subversion of political opposition by ethical responsibility lies at the heart of anthropology’s institutional failure to cope adequately with its relationship to the US military. The subsuming of politics by ethics entails a pernicious amalgam of individualisation, atomisation and alienation which commences by reducing collaboration to a matter of personal conscience but finds its ultimate reflection in theory: the Taylorisation of conquest into a series of “kinetic engagements” that may be mitigated 7 to a kinder and gentler form of subjugation with appropriate ethnographic intervention, decontextualised from any broader political economic analysis of the war, its purpose and its end game. The killing-them-softly ethos of HTS can only make anthropological sense once effectively dissociated from this broader frame of reference, narrowed to the boundaries of an intellectual plane on which the ethics of battle can be neatly disarticulated from the politics of war. Price addresses this conundrum directly in a section entitled “But Ethics Can Be a Force that Allows Anthropology To Avoid Politics”, part of a chapter which compellingly argues that war has been the defining force in the development of our ethical codes, as well as in those portions of the text which posit the military funding of anthropological investigation as a dangerously self-fulfilling prophecy, constructing the world to be researched through an ideological lens whose unchallenged precepts are then reinforced by conclusions that were predetermined from the outset. Such discussions evoke the further irony that the very academic freedom to pursue research unencumbered by state-generated directives raises unspoken questions about other anthropological relationships – not just those between the discipline and the state, but between anthropologists whose economic, racial, gendered, national and intellectual liberties are decidedly uneven, and affect both our willingness and ability to “appeal” to our colleagues to abstain from research we find distasteful, misguided, or downright abhorrent. Our fault lines run deeper than those which divide collaborators from resisters, amounting to chasms which directly affect our wherewithal to muster any united stand against the appropriation of our discipline for military ends. David Price cannot provide the answers to these questions in and of himself (any more than I can), but his otherwise excellent book might have placed them more squarely on the table for our collective digestion.
Sol Tax once sardonically defined anthropology as “an association of people who have agreed to continue in communication with each other” (Hymes, 1969: 7). And perhaps we are little more than ships that pass in the night, solitary readers and writers and thinkers with no solid ground in which to anchor any totalising proprietary claims on the disciplinary terrain we sail, content to share brief interludes of exchange before disappearing back into the silent darkness of lonely scholarship. Yet Price’s tale of widespread resistance, from the resignation of John Allison from HTS to the opposition articulated by anthropologists to ICCAE at the University of Washington to the condemnation of HTT by the American Anthropological Association to the activism of the NCA, suggests that we are broadly, if not ubiquitously, united in our opposition to the weaponizing of anthropology, our intermittent flashes of resistance capable of coalescing into a steadfast beacon. It is also a crucial reminder that the threat of weaponization continues to loom on the horizon, through both the militarization of research funding and the subtle weaving of a self-righteous, self-regulating military ethos into the very warp and weft of American life. Price’s comprehensive account of the concrete mechanisms through which this ethos creeps across our classrooms, our campuses, our conferences and our consciousness should add urgency to the disciplinary imperative to organise across our differences in defense against a future in which no one, not even the tenured, will have the choice to recuse themselves from military-funded research initiatives if they are to conduct research at all. But I hope it will also compel us to consider the possibility that our own exploitative labour practices, whatever their short-term expedience, have already rendered us troublingly vulnerable to prolonged and entrenched military occupation. When the question “What can you do with a degree in anthropology?” is answered most readily by the Pentagon, it is surely time to ask ourselves what we might have done, and might yet do, to build a viable “science of humanity” to the benefit, rather than the violent subjugation, of the humanity we seek to know.