DURING the cold war, the US Pentagon called on physics to help it gain an edge over its enemies. To help win today鈥檚 鈥渨ar on terror鈥� it is calling on rather a different discipline: anthropology. It believes cultural knowledge is just as useful a tool for counter-insurgency as technological superiority. So social anthropologists are being called to the front line 鈥� a highly worrying development.
The Pentagon recently announced two major initiatives to improve its cultural understanding in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first is the , for which defence secretary Robert Gates allocated $40 million last September. The HTS consists of 26 five-person teams, one for each combat brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each team includes an anthropologist or other social scientist, who wears military uniform and receives weapons training. They advise US troops on culturally appropriate behaviour, such as avoiding staring at Muslim women or exposing the soles of the feet to local dignitaries. They also talk to local people about their needs, provide military commanders with information about genealogical, political and religious groupings, and help these commanders work out whom they can trust (and, presumably, whom they cannot).
The other Pentagon-backed cultural venture is , a $50 million initiative to mobilise anthropologists and other social scientists to translate seized Iraqi documents and conduct research on the relationship between religion and terrorism.
Advertisement
Both the HTS and Project Minerva represent an attempt to rebuild a relationship between anthropology and the national security apparatus that was shattered in the Vietnam years. In 1971, after it came to light that the US was funding covert research on counter-insurgency, the rewrote its ethics code. The new code outlawed secret research and emphasised that anthropologists鈥� primary ethical obligation was to the human subjects they worked with.
A few anthropologists have spoken in favour of the HTS. Some of them liken Islamic terrorism to the Nazi threat that motivated earlier anthropologists to get involved. Others, while sceptical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, believe anthropological knowledge could at least save some lives by easing the cultural friction between occupiers and occupied. But the overwhelming majority of US anthropologists .
First, many anthropologists have at some point been suspected by those they study of spying for the US. This happened to me while working in Russia. Now that the Pentagon openly embeds anthropologists in military units, it will become harder for the rest of us to cultivate the trusting relationships that anthropological fieldwork requires. Second, our code of ethics emphasises the importance of getting free and informed consent from those we study. You cannot get free and informed consent when you roll into a village in a Humvee, surrounded by soldiers wielding M16s.
鈥淓mbedding anthropologists in military units makes it harder for the rest of us to cultivate trusting relationships鈥�
Third, there is concern that the Pentagon projects make a mockery of another fundamental principle in anthropology: to do no harm to those we study. Whatever good embedded anthropologists believe they are doing in helping to reduce casualties of war, they know that the information collected by them may be used by the US military to target attacks. Anthropologists have not forgotten how the military used ethnographic research carried out by cultural anthropologist Georges Condominas in Vietnam, without his knowledge, to plan the assassination of villagers he had studied.
The HTS is already a failure. In April, that it was deploying a ragtag assemblage of often underqualified social scientists, most of whom do not have local language skills. Two of them have since been killed. The project should be either discontinued or reconfigured without the participation of anthropologists. As for Project Minerva, it is unlikely to attract the best researchers while funded by the military. It should be turned over to civilian funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, which in any case has more expertise than the Pentagon in judging anthropological research proposals. This will be better for anthropology, and in the long run it will be better for the military too.