Theory: Critique and Response to Gusterson's Anthropology and Militarism

Critique and Review of Dr. Hugh Gusterson's "Anthropology and Militarism"
10.9.07

In his article for the 2007 Annual Review of Anthropology Dr. Gusterson writes a lucid historical overview of Militarism's influence on the field of Anthropology. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct his analysis into key points, reveal areas where his language and assumptions are inadequate or misleading, and propose more relevant question's using Gusterson's own data.


Introduction
"...anthropology has been more or less subtly molded by the priorities of the national security state and the exigencies of other peoples' wars...(Gusterson 156)"

This statement blatantly describes a fact about the field of Anthropology that I have come to accept only after four years of University study. The surprising thing about this simple assertion is that I have never heard it said or even implied in any Anthropology course, it was a conclusion I had to come to on my own. After reaching this conclusion unaided I wrote a brief abstract on the topic which I sent to many of my favorite American Anthropologists including C.M. Shaw, D. Brenneis, P. Lyndell, and others. To my surprise only one responded to my allegations and that response was an affirmative. Upon reading Gusterson's work I now ask the pertinent question: If it is the case that Anthropology has been molded by the national security state, why is this never emphasized in any U.S. Anthropology courses? It seems a vital facet to understanding the dynamics of the discipline.

To further support this assertion Dr. Gusterson has a host of historical examples:

1) "In the United Sates, anthropology emerged as the state sought to understand and administer native populations in the Indian Wars (Borneman 1995)."
2) "During World War II, a small number of anthropologists were also... involved in the administration of internment camps for Japanese Americans (Starn 1986)."
3) "By the Vietnam years a new generation of anthropologists... began to question anthropology's private bargains with the national security state (Gusterson 157)"
4) "...anthropologists covert work in the service of counterinsurgency in Latin America and Southeast Asia in the 1960's.. (Berreman 1968; Nader 1997; Price 2000, 2004; Watkin 1992; Wolf & Jorgenson 1970)"
5)"... critique of anthropologists who doubled as spies during World War I...(Boaz 1919)"

It becomes increasingly obvious that Anthropology has been consistently interwoven with the military intelligence community since it's very inception. I think it would even be fair to say at this point that Foreign Intelligence Agencies are one of Anthropology's parents. While the rhetoric of most Anthropology courses is such that a "true" anthropologist is one who can keep an objective viewpoint, we find that the reality is that this has never been the case. Possibly more disturbing is that anthropology students are not taught about these connections. This leads to malformed learning, where the student is studying ethnographies and other papers which where written from an intelligence viewpoint and , as a result, these students are being taught that the viewpoint in question is actually neutral. If the field of Anthropology truly wished to remain objective, rather than training new spies and calling them anthropologists, it would teach these historical points first. The purpose being to give the student the ability to separate true scientific objectivity from "anthropology molded by national security."

The End of The Cold War
One of the more lucid and telling points of Gusterson's article in my opinion was his reference to the work of Huntington and Kaplan, whom he refers to as "popular writers," rather than anthropologists:

"Huntington argued that Cold War bipolarity would be... exacerbated by globalization, that would throw the West into conflict with China and the Islamic world (Huntington 1996)."

Which, indeed, we see coming to pass today. Kaplan wrote an article for Atlantic Monthly, no anthropological journal by any stretch of the imagination, which was faxed by the State Department to every U.S. Embassy in the world. This is a key point in my argument. Here you see a scholar who is not tied to the intelligence community, but never-the-less, has his work co-opted by them. This is a point I will come back to, but I use it as supporting evidence for the assertion that all anthropological work serves the interest of the intelligence community, whether solicited or not.

Ethnic Violence and Genocide
"Globalization eroded the state's old monopoly of legitimate violence from above - through the 'trans-nationalization of military forces' - and from below, as force was increasingly privatized (Gusterson 159)"

Here the dynamics of the modern day global intelligence community is being subtly explained. As Victor Marchetti writes in his ethnographic biography "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence," the Cold War was an age of so much espionage that the intelligence agencies of different countries became indistinguishable from one another. This was the result of mutual infiltration on all sides. To make a simplified example, when enough KGB agents had saturated the CIA, and when enough CIA agents had infiltrated the KGB, the two organizations became indistinguishable from each other, creating one large entity. Add to this equation "Proprietary Corporations" or private companies such as Air America, which were secretly owned by the CIA, and we have the groundwork for a global corporate intelligence complex which, although acting as private entities, are actually outgrowths of the military.
Gusterson continues to explain how this dynamic changed the effects of war on the world's population:

"Partly because these wars sought to settle the identities of entire populations, 80%-90% of the casualties were civilian - the exact inverse of the military-civilian casualty ratio at the start of the twentieth century (Gusterson 160)."

Not surprising considering that Intelligence Agencies function as Civilian organizations. What Gusterson fails to point out here is that this change in militarism is a direct result of the increase of the power of the Intelligence community. Where the historical military has been concerned with other militaries, historical intelligence has been more concerned with terrorism and disinformation, which commonly come in the form of civilian casualties. This ratio change is solid evidence that the balance of power in the world has changed from one of military might to one of Information. He then asks the question;

"...of why identities that, according to this literature, are manufactured and contingent are nevertheless so powerful in mobilizing populations for mass murder, and why when nations fractured in the 1990's they so often did so along ethnic lines... (Gusterson 160)."

The answer to his question is self evident and asking this question is misleading. A better question is: "Who molds the identities that are manufactured and contingent?" The answer can be found in "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli, Dr. Zapolsky's famous Stanford Prison Experiment, as well as a document known as "The Willie Lynch Letter." In "The Prince" Machiavelli is teaching an incoming regent how best to maintain control of populations under his jurisdictions. One of his key pieces of wisdom is to keep the people divided against themselves in order to keep them powerless to overthrow the regent. Keep in mind that this was written over three hundred years ago. This tactic has been used by modern intelligence agencies for at least a century and the fact that the "fracture of nation's in the 1990's" was due mostly to the work of the Intelligence community should be a solid pointer to the fact that these mass rapes and violence were manufactured by those in power.
Zapolsky's experiment shows very clearly how easy it is to group people into arbitrary categories and influence them to enact atrocities they would never consider otherwise.
Finally, "The Willie Lynch Letter" is a letter from European Slave owner Willie Lynch from the turn of the century. Lynch is giving advice to a group of North American slave owners about how to best control them. He counsels that the best method for control of the slave population is to create dissension between: " 1) The younger slave and the older slave. 2) The light-skinned slave and the darker-skinned slave. 3) Those who worked in the house and those who worked in the field. 4) Those who had straight hair and those who has coarse or kinky hair. 5) Those who came from the south and those who came from the north. 6) Miss no manner of pointing out to them how one is better than another, one more worthy than the other."
All three of these examples illustrates a simple truth which the controlling intelligence agencies of today have learned to master. Why this topic is rarely brought up in the academic world is another mystery to me, when it seems self-evident that this is the answer to so many of the questions Gusterson is posing.

Memory Work
"When fighting ends, collective memory of war and suffering is controlled through an institutionalized interweaving of remembrance... what Yoneyama calls "amnesiac cells" and Lifton & Mitchell call 'historical Cleansing' (Gusterson 161)."

Here Gusterson is reflecting on acts of violence perpetrated by different groups and positing what it is that causes humans to group themselves together against one another. His answer "Institutionalized Interweaving of Remembrance" sheds light on his previous question and further supports my assertion that the dynamics of human behavior are already well established (Zapolsky). Who exactly is the entity which is institutionalizing these 'amnesiac cells?' Gusterson doesn't say or even guess. This being the case, his arguments for more study of these "Memory Phenomena" seems to me to be superfluous. We have already established that Anthropology has been widely and continuously influenced by the national security state and here it begins to be unveiled that groups of people can also be similarly influenced, a point we will come back to later.




Fear as a Way of Life
The article continues to address "how violence works as a set of cultural practices and what it does to people to live in a society wracked by civil war or state-sponsored terror (Scheeper-Hughes & Bourgois 20003)".
Gusterson goes on to quote Green from 1994 with an eerily accurate depiction of modern life in America since the events of September 11th, 2001:
"...routinizing allows people to live in a chronic state of fear with a facade of normalcy, while the terror, at the same time, permeates and shreds the social fabric (Green 231)."
Although using this quote to discus the "phenomenology of war," it seems the greater implications of this theory, i.e. the possibly for planned, institutionalized, routinizing are lost to Gusterson. He gets very close to stating the truth in our next quote, but misses by virtue of two words:
"... militarist apologetics (bold/italics mine) have distorted U.S. media coverage of international affairs (Hannerz 2004, Herman & Chomsky 2002, Gusterson 1999, MacArthur 1992, Pedelty 1995) and helped shape a degraded popular culture saturated with racial and national stereotypes, anesthetized destruction, and images of hyper-masculinity (Der Derian 2001, Feldman 1994, Gibson 1994, Weber 2005)."

The term "militarist apologetics," when used to refer to the controllers of the U.S. mass media is very misleading. The people that are being referred to not "militarist apologetics," but "calculating propagandists" at best and "First Degree Conspirators" at worse. It has been shown repeatedly in the past five years that private interest groups have taken a greater interest in the molding of U.S. media. These interest groups are composed of wealthy private individuals and corporations who deliberately choose what they wish the public to hear and to know, to the end of supporting routinizing. To call them simple apologetics misses a very important dynamic in the current world situation. The views that are being fed to the public are not merely apologetic. They are manipulative, and placed with specific aims in mind.

"...recent years have seen the parallel emergence of anthropology contracted to, enabled by, or in a broad sense allied with the military (Gusterson 164)."

Recent years? In the very beginning of this article Gusterson recounts how anthropology has been closely allied with the military since it's inception. Why now is he saying it's a recent phenomena?

Gusterson's Conclusion
"Anthropology has much theoretical and empirical work to do illuminate militarism, today. If we sell our skills to the national security state, we will just become part of the problem (Gusterson 165)."
This is a pitifully weak conclusion which battles against common sense, when taking into account the wealth of information already given to the reader in this article. It is now apparent that Anthropology has been selling it's skills to the security state since it's inception. Saying " If we..." is obtuse at best and deliberately misleading at worst. Militarism and anthropology are helplessly interwoven from years of mutual interaction and ignoring that fact only serves to perpetuate it's existence.
The more relevant question that this paper brings up is "Can anthropology exist without militarism?" The answer is not as straight forward as some would think.
For example, Gusterson cites some areas which could use more "independent" anthropological studies such as "Diasporas roles in revolution" and "living near land mines." However, the data gathered by every study he suggests would be valuable to the Military-Industrial complex. A study of "Diasporas roles in revolution" benefits the intelligence sector that wishes to manipulate governments in countries with Diasporas. A study of the life of people who live in abandoned conflict zones surrounded by land mines can serve to help the military learn how to fight "cleaner" wars, but that has never and most sadly probably never will be the goal of the military. With that in mind that same study could be used to increase the instances of landmines, in an effort to create stronger routinizing in the country in question.
As a linguistic anthropologist, Gusterson does a poor job of auditing his own words. I get the impression that he already knows the truth, but is bound by institutional forces to not state it. His conclusion does not utilize, nor match, the data he provides, and his recommendations for future fieldwork play right into the hands of the national security state he claims to be trying to distance himself from. He shows how anthropology is inextricably connected with militarism, yet continues to use these same anthropological methods to study how that could not be. To borrow a page from the science of Quantum Physics there is a principle called the "Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle." This principle is easily understandable to the layman and states basically that "Any scientific study is biased based on the tools used to study the phenomena. No amount of calculation can remove the bias of the tool, because other tools are then being used to measure the bias and every tool has a bias." Finally, Gusterson's only recommendations are for more fieldwork. This does not in any way address the issue at hand.
The tools of anthropological analysis cannot be relied upon to study either anthropology or militarism because they were formed by them and have continued to be strongly influenced by them. Imagine a Republican doing a comprehensive investigation of Republican politics. Do you think his or her conclusions would be free of Bias? They couldn't be. Now imagine an anarchist that was raised and educated away from politics and society doing the same study. Which do you think would be more observant? Any writer or computer programmer can tell you that others are often the best judge of ones work, because the creator is often too close to their own work to judge it objectively.

My Conclusion
Why did the State Department fax a copy of an Altantic Monthly article to all of it's embassies in the world? And why did that Anthropologist choose to publish in a "popular magazine" rather than writing an Anthropological paper on the subject? The obvious conclusion is that the author was aware of the bias of his own field and opted for trying to reveal the truth to the public rather than work within the biased national security establishment. How did the national security establishment respond to this action? They immediately co-opted his work anyways.
No study of militarism is free from co-option, regardless of the forum, and no study of this nature can exist without coming to the attention (and ultimately aiding) the national security state. Anthropology has and always will be a tool of the Intelligence agencies. No amount of additional study needs to be done on the topic, we already have all the data we need.
The only anthropological work which can be done which does not benefit the International Intelligence community is work which is closely edited by the singular anthropologist alone, while they are in the field. Future Anthropologists need to be taught the full history of anthropology's interaction with the national security establishment and obtain a deep academic grounding in ethics - both of which are greatly missing from today's curriculum. Every field worker needs to learn to see their own work, not as pure academics, but also as intelligence reports. In this manner they will be greater able to edit out information which could potentially be abused or misused.
Why is this not occurring? Why is there so much resistance to his happening? I will leave you to your own conclusions.