the history of these interactions. I find extraordinary continuities of roles, status, and economic contingencies between the military and academy as many of the present efforts to use anthropology for conquest mirror specific failed efforts to use and abuse American anthropology during the Second World War and the Vietnam War with little realization of these continuities of failure. Beyond this historical background, I also draw upon my anthropological interest in studying relationships between cultural economic systems and cultural ideological systems of knowledge. Though it counters the predominant postmodern fashion of rejecting meta narrative explanations: the political economy of American academia needs to be critically examined as linked to the dominant militarized economy that supports American society. These chapters chronicle a dramatic shift in the production of academic knowledge, as military and intelligence sectors are now impatient to receive the broad range of social science knowledge that has long served them as they now take active measures to more directly harness the production of knowledge to more exactly fit their intelligence and training needs.
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The book is organized in three sections: the first section describes the ethical and political problems of anthropologists, and other social scientists’ engagements with military and intelligence agencies and accounts of recent innovations (programs like the Minerva Consortium, the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholarship Program and the Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence) designed to enmesh the military industrial state with anthropology and other social sciences. The second section critically examines a series of leaked and publically available military documents; using these texts to understand how the new military and intelligence initiatives seek to harness social science for their own ends in current and future military missions. These leaked manuals demonstrate how the military dreams that culture can be (has been) conceived of as an identifiable and controllable commodity that can be used (to quote the 2004 Stryker Report Evaluating Iraqi Failures) as a “lever” to be used to move (enemy, occupied, resistant) populations by smart military or intelligence agencies. Missing from these manuals is any sort of understanding of the complexities of culture that fill anthropologists writings, these complexities are instead edited out, leaving uncomplicated heuristic narratives that create fictions more than they simplify. Finally, the third section considers a variety of contemporary uses of social science theory and data in support of counterinsurgency operations in the so called “war on terror,” including the training and policies of Human Terrain Teams for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To clear up some possible confusion about the title, from 2005-2007, Weaponizing Anthropology was the working title of my book that became Anthropological Intelligence (Price 2008), and any published references to the title Weaponizing Anthropology from the 2005-2007 period refer to that re-titled book.
In the weeks after 9/11 I published my first piece in CounterPunch, and Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are the people most responsible for allowing me to develop the essays that form the heart of this collection. Without CounterPunch, I would not have had the support or venue to develop these critiques, and even if I did, other editors would have pushed me to ease the directness of my critique, urging obscurantist prose in the name of “nuance.” The work benefitted from exchanges with the following colleagues and friends: John Allison, Thomas Anson, Julian Assange, Catherine Besteman, Andy Bickford, Jeff Birkenstein, Jason Collins, Tony Cortese, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Greg Feldman, Maximilian Forte, Roberto González, Linda Green, Hugh Gusterson, Gustaaf Houtman, Jean Jackson, Bea Jauregui, John D. Kelly, Kanhong Lin, Brian Loschiavo, Catherine Lutz, Stephen Mead, Sean T. Mitchell, Hayder Al-Mohammad, Laura Nader, Steve Niva, David Patton, Midge Price, Milo Price, Nora Price, Lisa Queen, Eric Ross, Marshall Sahlins, Schuyler Schild, Daniel Segal, Roger Snider, David Vine, Jeremy Walton, Michele Weisler, and Cathy Wilson.
The initial sources for chapters are as follows: Chapter One: is based on a paper I presented on February 9, 2009 at Pitzer College as part of Pitzer’s Interpreting War and Conflict series; Chapter Two: CP 2005 12(1):1-6; CP 2005 12(5):3-4.; CP 2008 15(15):6-8; Chapter Three CP online 6/25/08; Chapter Four CP 2010 17(2):1-5; Chapter Five: elements from CP online 12/12/08 and CP online 2009 4/7/09; Chapter Six: CP 2007 14(18):1-6; Chapter Seven CP online 4/18/08 & Keynote Address, War and Social Sciences Symposium, University of Arizona, 1/24/09; Chapter Eight: is expanded and reprinted with permission and is based on my 2010 article “The Army’s Take on Culture” Anthropology Now 12(1):57-63 and incorporates material from a October 1, 2009, presentation at Syracuse University’s Anthropology Department on “Structural Limits of Anthropological Engagements with the Military,”; Chapter Nine: CP online 2010 2/15/10; Chapter Ten: CP online 2009 12/23/09; Chapter Eleven: paper presented on April 24, 2009 at the University of Chicago Anthropology Department’s conference on Reconsidering American Power; Chapter Twelve: CP 2009 16(17):1, 4-6.
Part 1: Politics, Ethics, and the Military Intelligence Complex’s Quiet Triumphal Return to Campus
Chapter One: War is a Force that Gives Anthropology Ethics
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Anthropology has always fed between the lines of war. Whether these wars rage hot in the immediate foreground of fieldwork settings or influence the background of funding opportunities, wars and the political concerns of “National Security” have long influenced the development of anthropological theory and practice. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have become increasingly conscious of the ways that knowledge honed from fieldwork was historically used by colonial and military powers against the populations anthropologists share lives with and study. American anthropology’s efforts to grapple with the political and ethical problems associated with warfare have been episodic, occasionally heroic, sometimes timid, and often embarrassingly linked to the whims of market forces as funding sources have recurrently situated individual anthropologists between the needs-of and duties-to those they study.
Although anthropologists have historically lent their skills to a range of military and colonial campaigns, the last hundred years has not been without moments of progress, minor enlightenments, and tangible contributions to social justice movements. During the past half-century, even while the need for anthropologically informed military maneuvers has increased, the fundamental ethical, moral and political issues raised by these activities have periodically forced the discipline to not only critically confront ethical and political questions about what anthropology is and what it is good for, but historically for American anthropology, it has been the abuses of anthropological knowledge in times of war that forced the discipline, in episodic spasms, to develop professional ethics codes.
In a world of political power struggles and military might, knowledge of other cultures has long been recognized as possessing a strategic value. Long before there was even a formal academic discipline of anthropology, politicians and militaries had uses for understanding the language and culture of their enemies. Because of the structural needs of occupations after conquests, basic forms of counterinsurgency have been around far longer than David Galula, Edward Lansdale, Sir Richard Thompson and contemporary counterinsurgency gurus. Sun Tzu understood the dangers of occupations and acknowledged that insurgencies at times lead wise leaders to abandon some occupations. Alexander the Great encouraged his mercenary armies to intermarry with locals, providing them with financial incentives to put down local roots in ways that stabilized the empire, and plenty of other conquerors have understood the basic principles of population centric dominance. The Greek occupation of Ptolemaic Egypt became a sort of historical high water mark in the cynicism of military occupations, as the Greek occupiers calculatingly merged their religious views with local Egyptian beliefs in ways that eased the political scene, allowing the export of goods and profits back to the empire’s core.
But counterinsurgency isn’t just concerned with occupations through forms of indirect rule. At times, counterinsurgency campaigns undermine traditional power structures and traditional economic systems, asserting external economic forces on indigenous political economies. There is nothing modern in recognizing that if one can get enemy populations to give up their traditional means of economic independence and make them dependent upon occupiers for the health or economic wellbeing, one can undermine traditional systems of governance and dominate these populations. These are standard counterinsurgency tactics, and the elements