Anthropological Engagement Research Articles

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

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...

Don’t they really represent us?

In this article we position ourselves as socially and politically committed anthropologists, thinking about the possible ways research and activism come together in contemporary anthropology. We emphasize how critical social sciences have contributed to this debate mainly around two key ideas: the democratization of knowledge production and the politicization of that knowledge. We examine our experiences in the Spanish 15M movement and share four examples -two ‘failed’ and two ‘successful’ experiences- in which we discuss two key aspects of being activist academics. First, the difficulties and advantages of doing activism and research as a combined anthropological engagement; and, secondly, the usefulness of combining a long-term commitment to social justice as an effort to democratize mechanisms of knowledge production.

Different repetitions: Anthropological engagements with figures of return, recurrence and redundancy

ABSTRACTIt is a central contention of this special issue that an anthropological engagement with repetition has the capacity to open up fertile fields of comparative ethnographic and historical work. In this introduction, we link our approach to past anthropological and philosophical works, connecting for instance to discussions of historiography, rhythm, scale, and the characterization of experience. We move on to consider the present and future uses of the concept of repetition, providing five ‘dimensions’ that we consider helpful in exploring its nuances as well as its potentialities. These dimensions we designate as matters of production, medium, anticipation, consequence and scale. Each might be recognized within the discourse of informants or ethnographers or both. What they are intended to do is to provide an operational framework through which to anatomize processes of repetition as observable in whichever ‘field’ we are investigating.

Responding to contemporary challenges and opportunities for anthropological engagement: Revised NAPA Guidelines for Ethical Practice

Responding to contemporary challenges and opportunities for anthropological engagement: Revised NAPA Guidelines for Ethical Practice

The aesthetic terrain of settler colonialism: Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov’s natives

ABSTRACTWhile Anton Chekhov’s influence on Katherine Mansfield is widely acknowledged, the two writers’ settler colonial aesthetics have not been brought into systematic comparison. Yet Chekhov’s chronicle of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East parallels in important ways Mansfield’s near-contemporaneous account of colonial life in New Zealand. Both writers are concerned with a specific variant of the colonial situation: settler colonialism, which prioritizes appropriation of land over the governance of peoples. This article considers the aesthetic strategies each writer develops for capturing that milieu within the framework of the settler colonial aesthetics that has guided much anthropological engagement with endangered peoples.

Transnational moralities: the politics of ir/responsibility of and against the EU border regime

ABSTRACTThe death of Alan Kurdi, the boy washed ashore in Turkey in September 2015, provoked a global moral outcry. The pictures of the toddler went viral across social networks and in the media. Following these images across borders, we analyse moral and political responses to the ‘EU refugee crisis’ by illuminating the circumstances under which people feel, take on, and demand responsibility. Considering EU policies and their lethal consequences as mechanisms of an organised irresponsibility, we show how the circulation and modification of the images played on moral sentiments and on political demands in Europe and across the Mediterranean. The anthropological engagement with transnational moralities contributes to the analysis of politics of ir/responsibility of and against the EU border regime.

Engagement Beyond Critique?

AbstractIN RESPONSE TO THE IDEALS OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE, COMPLEXITY AND MORAL RELATIVISM PROMOTED IN POSTMODERN ANTHROPOLOGY, DIFFERENT ATTEMPTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN RECENT DECADES TO MAKE ANTHROPOLOGY MORE ‘ENGAGED’ IN THE PROMOTION OF SOCIAL CHANGE. IN THIS ARTICLE, WE FOCUS ON THREE CENTRAL CONTEMPORARY POSITIONS ON ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENGAGEMENT: POLICY-ORIENTED ACTIVIST RESEARCH, FEMINIST-INSPIRED COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH, AND WHAT WE HAVE CHOSEN TO CALL RESEARCH FOR ALTERITY AND ALTERNATIVES. EACH OF THESE APPROACHES HIGHLIGHTS CERTAIN IDEAS OF PARTICIPATION AND THEREBY CONJURE UP PARTICULAR KINDS OF COMMUNITIES TO WORK WITH AND THROUGH. WE DISCUSS THE VALUE AND LIMITATIONS OF THE THREE POSITIONS ON ENGAGEMENT AND ARGUE THAT, IN ALL ITS DIVERSITY, ANTHROPOLOGICAL PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH CAN PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN CO-CREATING PLATFORMS FOR RESISTANCE AND PROTEST AGAINST VARIOUS FORMS OF DOMINATION AND OPPRESSION WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY CONTRIBUTING TO PREPARING THE GROUND FOR ALTERNATIVE IMAGINATIONS, DESIRES AND WAYS OF LIVING.

AFTER POLITICAL ECOLOGY

This book review article probes present anthropological engagement with the environment through the prism of political ecology, placing political ecology in conversation with newer work in environmnetal anthropology. In situating this conversation, the reviewer draws on four recent anthropological monographs that, in one way or another, deal with aspects of ‘nature’. The four monographs are Tania Murray Li's (2014) Land's end: Capitalist relations on an indigenous frontier; Marianne Elisabeth Lien's (2015) Becoming salmon: Aquaculture and the domestication of fish; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruin; and, lastly, Marisol de la Cadena's (2015) Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. As I suggest, political ecology requires a radical remake, perhaps a political ecology 2.0, which brings in nature in a new way and makes the category of the political more inclusive.

The Aesthetic Terrain of Settler Colonialism: Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov's Natives

While Anton Chekhov’s influence on Katherine Mansfield is widely acknowledged, the two writers’ settler colonial aesthetics have not been brought into systematic comparison. Yet Chekhov’s chronicle of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East parallels in important ways Mansfield’s near-contemporaneous account of colonial life in New Zealand. Both writers were concerned with a specific variant of the colonial situation: settler colonialism, which prioritises appropriation of land over the governance of peoples. This essay considers the aesthetic strategies each writer developed for capturing that milieu in their travel writings within the framework of the settler colonial aesthetics that has guided much anthropological engagement with endangered peoples.

The "Me" in the "We" Anthropological Engagements with Personalized Medicine

From the introduction:
 No one can doubt the current relevance of personalized medicine in Danish society. "The state will steal your DNA" and "Critique: DNA project is high risk” are but two catchy newspaper headlines from a heated public debate about the planned state-run national genome bank in Denmark, Nationalt Genom Center. What has spurred discussion is the government’s suggested organizational and ethical framework for collecting, banking, and using genomes from the Danish people as part of its realization of personalized medicine in Danish health care. The framing of "stealing" and the articulation of this project as "high risk" points to the discussion’s central issue of how to treat and administer genomes as concomitantly part of the "me" of the person and the "we" of the welfare state. Anthropology has a lot to offer in understanding the intertwining of the person and the collectivity. But before I discuss what anthropology can bring to personalized medicine and this question, let me begin with what anthropology is.

Epidemics (Especially Ebola)

Anthropology's response to the West African Ebola epidemic was one of the most rapid and expansive anthropological interventions to a global health emergency in the discipline's history. This article sets forth the size and scale of the anthropological response and describes the protagonists, interventions, and priorities for anthropological engagement. It takes an inclusive approach to anthropological praxis by engaging with the work of nonanthropologist “allies,” including qualitative researchers, social workers, and allied experts. The article narrates how the concept of “anthropology” came to serve as a semantic marker of solidarity with local populations, respect for customary practices and local sociopolitical realities, and an avowed belief in the capacities of local populations to lead localized epidemic prevention and response efforts. Of particular consideration is the range of complementary and conflicting epistemological, professional, and critical engagements held by anthropologists. The article also discusses how to assess anthropological “impact” in epidemics.

Citizens and Suspects: Race, Gender, and the making of American Muslim citizenship

AbstractWorking at the intersection of anthropological engagements with cultural citizenship and interdisciplinary scholarship on the racialization of Muslims in the United States, I examine the making and unmaking of American Muslims as both citizens and suspects. Based on my ethnographic research with young Chicago Muslims, I argue that state surveillance and multiculturalism shape U.S. Muslim claims to citizenship as rights and belonging. I chart racialization across different domains to argue that the fetish of Muslim body and behavior can actually render Muslim identity both legible and illegible. It is instances of legibility and illegibility, I argue, that illuminate how race and gender coproduce differential experiences of suspicion for American Muslims, and also different beliefs in the very possibility of, and thus desire for, citizenship. Ultimately, I contend that the experience of the American Muslim indexes the centrality of both race and gender to citizenship in the United States.

Beyond multispecies ethnography: Engaging with violence and animal rights in anthropology.

Anthropologists have mediated between discriminated communities and outsiders, helping to influence public opinion through advocacy work. But can anthropological advocacy be applied to the case of violence against nonhumans? Ethical inquiries in anthropology also engage with the manifold ways through which human and nonhuman lives are entangled and emplaced within wider ecological relationships, converging in the so-called multispecies ethnography, but failing to account for exploitation. Reflecting on this omission, this article discusses the applicability of engaged anthropology to the range of issues from the use of nonhumans in medical experimentation and food production industry, to habitat destruction, and in broader contexts involving violence against nonhumans. Concluding that the existing forms of anthropological engagement are inadequate in dealing with the massive scale of nonhuman abuse, this article will suggest directions for a radical anthropology that engages with deep ecology, animal rights, animal welfare, and ecological justice.

Reflections on an Anglophone academic sect

While saluting the ethnographic originality of the contents of this special issue and the ambition of its editors to extend recent debates in the anthropology of Christianity to large Catholic populations in Asia, the author argues that the contributors remain in thrall to Protestant tenets of rupture and individualism. He urges more balanced coverage of the diversity of Christian communities and more attention to a long history of anthropological engagement with them.

Moments of Proximity: Former Political Prisoners, Postmemory and Justice in Indonesia

This article builds upon recent anthropological engagements with postconflict transitional justice processes, suggesting that ethnography can illuminate the ways in which these processes involve the negotiation of both physical and symbolic space, and intergenerational, postmemorial identities and relationships. This is demonstrated through my fieldwork observations of a 2005 class action lawsuit filed by eks-tapol (former political prisoners) in Indonesia against current and former heads of state. Tracing the symbolic resonances and the sometimes confrontational relationships brought into play around the court case, the article examines how a significant aspect of the ways in which victims of state violence situate themselves after the violence has ceased involves locating themselves, other citizens and state actors in intergenerational relationships.

Christian Difference. A Review Essay

The discipline called the “anthropology of Christianity” began to gain traction in the early to mid-2000s when interested scholars focused on Christianity as an object of collaborative and comparative cross-cultural analysis. Along with several landmark works of Joel Robbins, one foundational text is Fenella Cannell's edited volume The Anthropology of Christianity, published in 2006. In her introductory essay, Cannell poses a pointed question for the volume and the discipline itself: “What difference does Christianity make?” Bracketing the question of whether “difference” can or should be defined (Green 2014), several anthropologists have taken inspiration from Cannell, including Naomi Haynes (2014) in the concluding essay to a recent special issue of Current Anthropology, and myself and Debra McDougall (2013) in an edited volume on Christian politics in Oceania. Difference, as the criterion by which continuity and transformation are evaluated, is arguably the key concept for an effective anthropological engagement with Christianity.

Proper property or anti-fascist anthropology? The Trojan Horse of possession-based economies and modes of production as its Achilles' heel

This commentary discusses Julien-Francois Gerber and Rolf Steppacher’s proposal for an anthropological engagement with the basic principles of possession-based economies. The empirical and analytical validity of the theory of ownership is dismissed. That theory mistranslates classics of economic anthropology into economics. The modes of production approach reveals that the theory of ownership’s core claim is false – capitalism is not based on legal property but on inequality instead. Further, the theory of ownership’s analysis of an absence of legal property in socialist economies and its recent alignment with far-right anti-migrant and Islamophobic ideologies are rejected. Accordingly, Gerber and Steppacher’s theoretical and empirical assumption that possession-based economies are capitalism’s opposite is false, as is their conception of basic principles and logics, which empties economic anthropology of an analysis of power and inequality. Alternatively, a historical anthropology of modes of production ...

Despairing Moods: Worldly Attunements and Permeable Personhood in Yap

AbstractBuilding upon ongoing efforts to further a phenomenological anthropological engagement with affective and mooded dimensions of moral experience, the article examines the ways in which everyday moods may disclose forms of attunement to worldly conditions. The article focuses specifically upon the mood‐inflected concerns of a Yapese woman suffering from type II diabetes named “Thiil” who despairs of the possibility that her children will eventually become afflicted with the disease as well. A central goal of the article is to explore the ways in which Thiil's mood‐inflected responses to her illness disclose an attunement to the “communicable” pathways of an otherwise “noncommunicable” disease.

Who or what is ‘the public’ in critical public health? Reflections on posthumanism and anthropological engagements with One Health

This paper extends the terms of engagement between social science, posthumanist debates and One Health by questioning whether ‘the public’ may include non-human animals. The One Health concept refers to interdependence between human beings and non-human species in socio-ecological systems. One Health interventions and critiques have tended to emphasize the prevention of zoonotic infections, whereas this paper reflects on more than a decade of engaged research in One Health promotion. Repeatedly, this particular approach to One Health promotion has highlighted the imprint of multi-species entanglements in public life, especially the problematization and politicization of people’s pets. Serious consideration for multi-species entanglements cautions against conflating ‘the public’ with human beings and human interests, to the exclusion of all others. Human beings have never lived separate and apart from non-human species, and we all depend on shared environments. To do justice to multi-species entanglements, socio-ecological theory should undergo expansion in health promotion.

Epistemologies of Ebola: Reflections on the Experience of the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform

By September 2014, it was clear that conventional approaches to containing the spread of Ebola in West Africa were failing. Public health teams were often met with fear, and efforts to treat patients and curtail population movement frequently backfired. Both governments and international agencies recognized that anthropological expertise was essential if locally acceptable, community-based interventions to interrupt transmission were to be designed. The Ebola Response Anthropology Platform was established against this background. Drawing together local and internationally based anthropologists, the Platform provided a coordinated and rapid response to the outbreak in real time. This social thought & commentary piece explores how the Platform developed and interacted with other epistemic communities to produce knowledge and policy over the course of the outbreak. Reflecting on the experiences of working with the UK Department for International Development, the World Health Organization, and other agencies, we ask: what do these experiences reveal about the politics of (expert) knowledge and its influence on the design and implementation of policy? Did differing conceptions of the place of anthropology in humanitarian crises by policymakers and practitioners shape the contributions made by the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform? What are the implications of these experiences for future anthropological engagement with, and research on, humanitarian responses to health crises?