Staging the Orient: Counterinsurgency Training Sites and the U.S. Military Imagination

Abstract

This article is a descriptive narrative of the U.S. military's “cultural awareness” training for counterinsurgency doctrine at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center (MUTC) in Indiana. Within the narrative, I show how the “Arab,” “Afghan,” and “culturally sensitive soldier” are constituted within the U.S. military imagination through the practices and spaces of MUTC. Drawing on recent work in “new materialism” and the material geographies of late-modern war, the article argues that the circulation of “culture” within the U.S. military is not an indifferent exercise in familiarity with an occupied population, nor a mere knowledge production. Rather, cultural awareness must be understood as an instrumental activity through which identities are positioned and habitually put to use, like tools, to orient strategic and tactical operations in counterinsurgency contexts. Counterinsurgency training sites such as MUTC are ideal for interrogating how cultural identities acquire a status of serviceability akin to what Heidegger (1962) once called “equipment” or “paraphernalia” that inform the practices of everyday military occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq. In my thick description of the MUTC, I examine the function and silences of the site of the U.S. military's imagination, which I deliberately leave vague here but whose orders, phantoms, and figures I elaborate fully in the narrative.