Anthropology's Terms of Engagement With Security

Abstract

Both Price and Fluehr-Lobban understood participation in the double panel in terms of a call to revisit and to clarify such a “deep and muddy” history of anthropological ethics, with particular emphasis on locating responsibility for anthropological accountability and for restoring clear guidance about the harm of secret research in the current AAA Code of Ethics (adopted by the membership in 1998). But Andrew Shryock articulated the challenge of any straightforward application of ethics with his description of the “upside down world” of Detroit’s Arab-American community. Shryock showed how multicultural citizenship is a discourse of “disciplinary inclusion” that also doubles as a discourse of national security defining Arab-American identity. Cultural identity and national security are tightly woven as a part of the effort to render the Arab community more subject to US sovereignty. This case complicates the ethical picture for researchers, since public interventions like human research legislation guiding IRBs also risk increasing peoples’ vulnerability by exposing them to scrutiny. Histories of Empire and Social Science Other panelists in the double session contributed by providing a historical context to help enable the present disciplinary discussion. Discussant Leslie Gill recalled anthropology’s long term relationship to state power, and warned against our becoming new kinds of expert “foot soldiers in the War on Terror” when engaging national security. Based on his three decades of work in Afghanistan, David Edwards in turn emphasized that provisioning governments with information gleaned from ethnographic counterparts is a piecemeal choice. Edwards allowed that anthropologists can work with governments, but only if for any given case we can distinguish between desirable sociocultural “insight” of a general sort and specific “information” about particular people and their circumstances that could be used against them. Ultimately, there are no guarantees that information will be used appropriately, he argued, but anthropological expertise should be employed in public interventions to change unconstructive policies and perceptions. Laura Nader compared contemporary Iraq to the history of the anthropology of Native Americans so as to highlight colonial and neocolonial practices of anthropology “in the service of empire” and to ask if a “culturally intelligent military” should be a goal of anthropology. Nader thus distinguished “empire” from “republic,” in differentiating the two distinct modalities of US behavior in the world, and called anthropology to resist complicity with “the empire in us.”