Kinship Weaponized

Abstract

This chapter shows kinship considerations are globally relevant, even in such pivotal decisions as whether to join or resist insurgencies, because kinship relations are largely presumed to play a significant role in organizing and controlling access to the operational and instrumental information needed to influence the outcome. It discusses approaches to kinship within the emergent discipline of applied military anthropology in the United States and introduces a perspective on the epistemological and heuristic legacies of knowledge production rather than on a practical ethnographic case. Evans-Pritchard’s classic model of the segmentary system of the Nuer, unmitigated by critique and empirical revisions, continues to inform strategizing in military anthropology. David Ronfeldt was influenced by early social anthropology, neoevolutionism, cultural materialism, and the cultural ecology of the 1960s. After 9/11 kinship began to receive additional attention, albeit in conjunction with the notion of the archaic past.