Anthropologists At War

New military program that embeds anthropologists with soldiers has academics up in arms

By Bill Stamets

Not in our name. That could be the battle cry of American anthropologists resisting the recent use of their discipline in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. Army is sending anthropologists into the field to help soldiers counter insurgents. The program, called Human Terrain System [RETURN TO ARTICLE]

  • Reader Comments

     Page 1 of 1 pages

    Surely we don’t want to discriminate and just kill the bad guys. Shame on those who seek to understand for practical purposes!

    After all, in anthropology aren’t we taught that all cultures are equally valid? So lets stop discriminating against such “equal” cultures like Burma, North Korea and Zimbabwe (not to mention the Taliban), they are merely different, not better or worse.

    United States Posted by wolf on Jun 19, 2008 at 1:28 PM

    It’s easy to get seduced by the rhetoric: If you ethnographers tell us military folks all there is to know, we’ll kill less of them. Hey, we hunky uniform types are just the grunts, sympathetic characters, risking our lives for a bunch of corrupt politicians and CEOs. You geeks have your hearts in the right place, let’s work together, so less of us romantic-uniformed grunts/heroes die and less exotic civilians get bombed, mined, and given cluster bombs for the holidays.

    It’s win-win, they say; you get info, which makes you academically and financially comfy. We get info which makes us the Big Cheese, able to exploit their resources with less spent on fire-power. Fire power is so expensive because so many bribes must be paid, so much profit must be made by those corrupt politicians and CEOs - we grunts can’t stop them, we just minimize the collateral damage (!).

    What, you might break thru the spell for a moment to ask, of all the knowledge available in advance to avoid the bloodshed? Mistake #1: They [corporate/political/military honchos] are not trying to avoid the bloodshed. They want the bloodshed to shock and awe, paralyze resistance. Then they want the knowledge because it’s too expensive to keep up the full-out assault. All they ultimately want is resources, oil, gas, minerals - wealth, not to avoid bloodshed. Blood is incidental to them, wealth is the goal - remember, There Will Be Blood? We don’t want your knowledge up front, we want bombs up front.

    If you’re an academic tempted by all that, just become a mercenary and be done with it. It pays better, and there’s no hypocrisy. You’ll be just as big a target, either way. Is it any wonder?

    United States Posted by Inaru on Jun 19, 2008 at 3:55 PM
     Page 1 of 1 pages

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