Hard Books Research Articles

Book Review: The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, by Luke Harding

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of World's Most Wanted Man. Luke Harding. New York: Vintage Books, 2013. 346 pp. $14.95 pbk.Reviewed by: Anthony Moretti, Robert Morris University, Moon Township, PA, USA DOI: 10.1177/1077699014554765eDepending upon your opinion, Edward Snowden is either a great man who has sacrificed much to reveal depth of domestic and international spying National Security Agency (NSA) has done, or he's a traitor who wimped out, fled country, and isn't man enough to handle legal charges stemming from what he did.Luke Harding's book will not change your opinion. In fact, because of its decidedly pro-Snowden position, it very well will reinforce those hardened positions.Harding is award-winning foreign correspondent for Guardian, Londonbased newspaper that more than any other media publication has reported on Snowden, documents he took, and fallout from his actions. Recognizing that this book was published within months of Snowden leaving United States for Hong Kong and then Russia, it reads more like a spy narrative than a work of journalism or academic research. Nevertheless, it is worth your time, and depending upon journalism course you teach, it might be worthy of course adoption.Harding does not reveal any great surprises in his book. But he does methodically detail what prompted Snowden to ditch his six-figure income and life in Hawaii; how journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras became integral to Snowden sharing his stolen documents with world; why Snowden first went to Hong Kong and then to Russia; and international repercussions from his decisions.It is probably no surprise that Obama administration is not viewed favorably in this book. Harding's work suggests White House was caught flat-footed by what Snowden had done and then somehow believed that it could persuade Guardian's editors to not publish what had been made available to paper. Worse, as Harding describes, President Obama and various American ambassadors couldn't provide sufficient answers to German, Brazilian, and other world leaders about NSA's massive spying on their governments and citizens. Later, he notes that once public opinion had turned against agency, the Obama administration did something it was good at: it sat on fence. The impression current and former NSA employees got was the fact they felt like White House had chucked them under bus. The British government and its spy agencies also are not positively portrayed in this book, but depth of Harding's anger directed at United States exceeds that pointed at British.The multiple chapters devoted to Snowden are strength of this book. According to Harding, in aftermath of September 11, 2001, terror attacks in United States, Snowden quickly became a patriot who sought to fight in Iraq because of an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression. …

Anthropology and Theology: An Awkward Relationship?

Although the trend is still quite new, certainly no more than a decade old, it is hard to miss the growing anthropological interest in Christianity. A topic that was once a complete non-starter in disciplinary conversations, Christianity has become of late a subject one can raise without fear of eliciting blank looks or raised eye-brows. As an object of ethnographic attention, at least, Christianity is on its way to becoming established, its worthiness of attention taken for granted. And this new-found legitimacy of Christianity as an ethnographic topic also raises a number of theoretical questions for anthropology more generally. Among these is one I want to take up here: what is or should be the relationship between anthropology and theology? It is fair to say that to this point this question has hardly been asked, much less answered. As anthropologists have come to take Christianity seriously, they have begun to read here and there in theology, but there has been little explicit reflection on how we should approach theological thinking. As a way into this subject, I want to lay out three possible ways anthropology might engage theology-though in the end, given limited space, I will only go on to consider the last of these in detail. A first way in which anthropology might engage theology is to study the role of theological ideas in its own formation. This strategy has worked before to redeem previously disregarded topics. One could say, for example, that some of the original impulse to begin interrogating capitalism seriously as a culture several decades ago came from our recognition that its logics too often unquestioningly become our own theoretical assumptions. To date, this route is also the one we have gone down the furthest with theology. Asad's (1993) well known argument about the Christian origins of anthropological notions of religion and culture; Sahlins' (1996) discussion of the theological sources of our fundamental images of human nature and desire; and Keane's (1997, 2002) studies of the Protestant roots of key aspects of our models of agency and of both linguistic and material phenomena, are all well known examples of work that reads theology to uncover and critique its influence on anthropological thought.1 Widely read, these works have spurred a good deal of further research along similar lines and it is fair to say that the project of tracing theology's role in the formation of anthropological thought is well begun. A second way anthropologists might read any given piece of theology is as data that can inform us about the particular Christian culture that produced it. We have done rather less of this than of the first kind of work mentioned above. In part, this may be because of a still lingering reluctance to study elites-a reluctance that leads us away from studying the work of the theologians who influence, however indirectly, the Christian communities we study. It probably also follows from a paucity of models to draw on in thinking about how elite intellectual work and writing contribute to popular thought in most places, though we should be able to get help in this regard from the rapidly developing anthropological study of knowledge and expertise as cultural phenomena. And despite the relative lack of development of the this approach, it should be noted that the single most widely read book in the anthropology of Christianity-Susan Harding's (2000) The Book of Jerry Falwell-might be seen as exemplifying its potential. For Harding's book is clearly a study of how the systematic thinking of church elites has shaped fundamentalist culture, and in the concept of speech mimesis it provides a specifically Christian model of the way theological speculation can become popular practice (see also Crapanzano 2000). Coleman's (2000) work on Swedish charismatics similarly attends to the ideas of church elites and lays out indigenous models of communication and influence. Harding's, Crapanzano's, and Coleman's books are, then, good first steps in developing this second kind of relationship in which anthropologists approach theology as data. …

The Impulse to Dominate

ANY serious attempt to survey the psychological causes of war is noteworthy. But a work which leads logically and inevitably to the conclusion that war is inherent in our social pattern, relying as this essentially does upon dominative and prestige values, must challenge our best attention. In D. W. Harding's book, the author traces our individual failure in responsibility to two main problems. On one hand we need to become aware of certain unconscious tendencies which have fostered, and still maintain, the relation of domination or submission as the evolutionary ground-pattern in the development of our social and international relationships. On the other hand, the extreme complexity of the political issues of the great modern States makes it well-nigh impossible for the inexpert citizen, however intelligent, to participate responsibly in the crucial decisions of statesmanship. Since little can be done to reduce the latter factor to manageable proportions, the author wisely focuses attention upon those unconscious tendencies which can be largely modified through the cultivation of psychological responsibility. The Impulse to Dominate By D. W. Harding. Pp. 256. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1941.) 7s. 6d. net.