Your Army Boots

I got this NYTimes article sent to me about 2 or 3 times when it first came out, because I'm the only anthropologist most of my friends know. I've already gotten the response piece that came out today forwarded once.

I have to say, I keep trying to find some revulsion toward the program in myself, and I can't. Yes, I'm fully aware of the tangled history of anthropology with policy goals--the eugenics stuff, of course, but also the legacy of colonial ethnography: we'll send you to the island to study the natives so you can tell us how best to control them. And I don't know if my attitude toward the image of anthropologists in army boots is one of fatalistic reconciliation, insofar as if they're going to have a war they might as well have us around to make it less awful in the execution, or one of genuine endorsement. Many of my foreign-policy arguments boil down to the sentiment that there ought to be more anthropologists in the State Department, but actually I don't think that an Undersecretary of Cultural Understanding would turn me into a neocon.

It's not that I'm still a cultural relativist. I think my stronger reservations have to do with the practice of anthropology--not concerns about its "integrity," just its efficacy. I don't think goal-based ethnography is likely to be that helpful, because what makes ethnography most useful is its ability to observe everything (or as much as possible) and only then determine what is important and causative. That does require a certain degree of open-mindedness philosophically, but a much larger one intellectually. The history of early modern ethnography (I'm thinking specifically of Laura Bohannan here) is littered with anecdotes wherein the anthropologist goes in looking for something, constructs an entire theory to explain the culture she's studying, then finally, suddenly learns the real answer was in front of her nose all the time. That's probably liable to happen with any ethnography, but if you think you know what you're looking for it's bound to be much more difficult.

Besides, isn't it likely that if we weren't sending anthropologists into Kabul and Basra to figure out the problem of short-term security and peaceability, but rather to give us a better long-term understanding of those regions, no strings attached, that we'd have much better information available to us for future strategy? Are we serious about the question of whether democracy is a universal good, or aren't we? Because again, I'm no neocon, but I think it's worth looking into--at very least measuring the diameter of the throat before we shove the gun barrel down.

P.S. To the woman who wrote today's Op-Ed: "Emily Post" work is degrading, sure, maybe. But it would be much more so if the anthropologists didn't seem to be the only ones who knew how to do it. It's silly that people don't think about these things, but if they really need a cultural babysitter, so be it.