Militarization of Anthropology

S.A.M. · Jan 30, 2007

From an article 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.

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Militarization of Anthropology

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