Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire by Montgomery McFate

Abstract

Reviewed by: Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire by Montgomery McFate David H. Price Montgomery McFate, Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 352 pp. Military Anthropology: Soldiers, Scholars and Subjects at the Margins of Empire provides historical summaries of ten 20th century anthropologists' engagements with military operations. Montgomery McFate's telling of this history seeks to identify positive outcomes of these anthropological contributions and argues for increased future uses of anthropology by the military. Each chapter evaluates the effectiveness with which anthropological knowledge was incorporated into operations and analyzes recent military situations where US forces used, or could have used, anthropology in similar ways. With each historical vignette, McFate champions militarized forms of anthropology that connect the discipline to campaigns of violence and occupation, advocating for the development of a type of militarized anthropology which will trouble many anthropologists. McFate is perhaps best known to many anthropologists as the architect of Human Terrain Systems (2007–2014), the almost three-quarters of a billion-dollar failed Pentagon program that tried to embed ethnographers with soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Human Terrain System was widely condemned by the international anthropological community, and by the American Anthropological Association, for not considering basic ethical principles of anthropological engagement (CEAUSSIC 2009). Beyond these ethical concerns, many anthropologists also critiqued the political project of militarizing anthropology (NCA 2009). Military Anthropology was written for a military rather than an anthropological audience (11), but because this book is published as an academic book, drawing upon anthropological knowledge, it deserves [End Page 969] anthropologists' critical attention. Written at the Naval War College, funded by a Department of Defense Minerva Fellowship, Military Anthropology exemplifies the sort of work many critics of the Minerva Program predicted these fellowships would produce. It draws on a limited subset of social science and includes little substantial engagement with the critical peer reviewed literature found in mainstream academic writings. McFate's reading, and writing, of this history differs from the work of many anthropologists (including my own), most significantly in her refusal to address the political and ethical issues raised by using anthropology for warfare, but also in the simplification of these complex relationships. Where many scholars find cautionary tales, McFate finds blueprints for improved means of using anthropology for militarized ends. I suspect that most anthropologists will find this book not only highly problematic in its historical representations, but also fundamentally flawed in its claims about the ease with which culture can be weaponized and for refusing to engage with the core political and ethical issues raised by military anthropology. But anthropologists are not the book's target audience. Its representations of how culture can be instrumentalized for conquest provides much for its military audience to like, and Military Anthropology may well become a classic work within military circles as a foundational text for the military training their own "anthropologists." The ten anthropologists whose stories are recounted in individual chapters are: Gerald Hickey, Robert Sutherland Rattray, Ursula Graham Bower, Gregory Bateson, Tom Harrisson, John Useem, Jomo Kenyata, Louis Leakey, Don Marshall, and David Prescott Barrows. The military engagements discussed range from colonial occupations, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Mau Mau Rebellion. The operations include a mixture of combat, counterinsurgency, insurgency, and occupations. In order to advocate for specific types of future anthropological collaborations, McFate shapes the telling of these incidents in very specific ways. She simplifies the complexities of the military anthropologists' stories appearing in her pages. Her Gregory Bateson has fewer reservations than the Bateson other scholars have found in archival and FOIA documents; and her version of Hickey writes RAND reports that had a greater impact than other scholars have found. Ursula Graham Bower's World War II success in directing Naga warriors' military and intelligence operations is shown to reveal key traits of successful transformational leadership skills. Robert Rattray's early 20th century use of anthropological knowledge to [End Page 970] help impose indirect rule in west Africa frames arguments for adapting similar tactics in other post-conquest situations. Many anthropologists will likely not share the general admiration of the effectiveness of Rattray...