The Americans’ catastrophe in Iraq is prompting a rethink of US military tactics: as in, maybe it would be helpful if we knew something about the countries we invade. We need anthropologists, says Dr. Montgomery McFate, in ‘Anthropology and counterinsurgency: the strange story of their curious relationship’, Military Review, March/April 2005 (at )
‘Anthropology is largely and conspicuously absent as a discipline within our national-security enterprise The alternative approach to fighting insurgency, such as the British eventually adopted through trial and error in Northern Ireland, involves the following: A comprehensive plan to alleviate the political conditions behind the insurgency; civil-military cooperation; the application of minimum force; deep intelligence; and an acceptance of the protracted nature of the conflict. Deep cultural knowledge of the adversary is inherent to the British approach.’
In his interesting short history of anthropology’s relationship to US overt and covert foreign policy in the 20th century, McFate notes that the US military’s need of anthropologists is stymied somewhat by the state of American anthropology after the Vietnam War.
‘Rejecting anthropology’s status as the handmaiden of colonialism, anthropologists refused to “collaborate” with the powerful, instead vying to represent the interests of indigenous peoples engaged in neo-colonial struggles. In the words of Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, anthropologists would now speak for the “subaltern”. Thus began a systematic interrogation of the contemporary state of the discipline as well as of the colonial circumstances from which it emerged. Armed with critical hermeneutics, frequently backed-up by self-reflexive neo-Marxism, anthropology began a brutal process of self-flagellation, to a degree almost unimaginable to anyone outside the discipline.
The turn toward postmodernism within anthropology exacerbated the tendency toward self-flagellation, with the central goal being “the deconstruction of the centralized, logocentric master narratives of European culture”. This movement away from descriptive ethnography has produced some of the worst writing imaginable.’