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Today's Stories November 6-8, 2009 Mark Greuter November 5, 2009 Pam Martens Vijay Prashad Brian Gallagher Norman Solomon Nadia Hijab Joseph Shanksy Andy Thayer Tracy Rosenberg Website of the Day November 4, 2009 Stan Cox Andy Worthington From Gitmo to Palau: Who are the Uighurs? Robert Weissman Susan Galleymore Ralph Nader Michael Leonardi Bitta Mistofi Robert Bryce Martha Rosenberg Dave Lindorff Website of the Day November 3, 2009 Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Franklin C. Spinney Laura Carlsen Serge Halimi John Stanton Sophia Weeks Dave Lindorff November 2, 2009 Steven Higgs Ishmael Reed David Macaray Bouthaina Shaaban David Michael Green David Swanson Ellen Brown Adam Federman James McEnteer Stephen Fleischman Website of the Day October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair / Carl Ginsburg Mike Whitney Joe Bageant Gareth Porter Saul Landau Anthony DiMaggio Dave Lindorff Rannie Amiri Niranjan Ramakrishnan Jayne Lyn Stahl Rev. William E. Alberts Alvaro Huerta Martha Rosenberg Binoy Kampmark Norm Kent Charles R. Larson Roth's "The Humbling:" Nothing Like a Novel From an Old Pro Ron Jacobs David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 29, 2009 Michael Neumann Mike Whitney Gary Leupp Conn Hallinan Marshall Auerback Laura Flanders Eamonn McCann David Macaray Mark Weisbrot Stephen Soldz Christopher Brauchli Website of the Day October 28, 2009 Moshe Adler Dave Lindorff Frank Joseph Smecker Alexandra Early M. Shahid Alam Vijay Prashad John Ross Franklin Lamb Gregory Travis Susan Galleymore Website of the Day October 27, 2009 Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Stewart J. Lawrence Alan Farago Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Bouthaina Shaaban Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around Iain Boal Carl Finamore Jayne Lyn Stahl Website of the Day October 26, 2009 Bill Quigley / Paul Craig Roberts Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Michael Snedeker Shamus Cooke David Michael Green Martha Rosenberg Patrick Bond Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 23-25, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Christopher Ketcham Jeff Gore Gareth Porter Jayne Lyn Stahl Saul Landau Mike Whitney Nikolas Kozloff Ron Jacobs Russell Mokhiber Missy Beattie Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman David Ker Thomson Rannie Amiri Ronnie Cummins Norm Kent Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Ben Sonnenberg Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 22, 2009 Dan Pearson / Jonathan Cook Paul Craig Roberts The US as Failed State Mark Engler Johann Hari Brian M. Downing Eric Toussaint Tom Mountain Israel Shamir Charles Thomson Website of the Day October 21, 2009 Pam Martens Linn Washington, Jr. Liaquat Ali Khan D. K. Wilson Franklin Lamb Norman Solomon Stephen Fleischman Patrice Higonnet Binoy Kampmark Kevin Coval / Website of the Day October 20, 2009 Sharon Smith Tariq Ali Mark Brenner Bouthaina Shaaban Michael D. Yates Dean Baker Dave Lindorff John Ross Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Kevin Zeese Gilad Atzmon Website of the Day October 19, 2009 Mike Whitney Greg Moses John Ross Michael Donnelly Jayne Lyn Stahl Eric Walberg Russell Mokhiber Barbara Rose Johnston John V. Whitbeck Christopher Ketcham Website of the Day October 16-18, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Carl Ginsburg Ralph Nader Nikolas Kozloff Carlo Galli Dave Lindorff Catherine Rottenberg
/ Neve Gordon Marshall Auerback Nicola Nasser Windy Cooler James L. Secor Ron Jacobs Wes Jackson Jesse Lerner-Kinglake David Ker Thomson Against Leaders Missy Beattie Emily Ratner Stephen Martin Michael Snedeker Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Peter Stone Brown Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 15, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Brian M. Downing Ramzy Baroud Danny Weil M. Idrees Ahmad Margaret Kimberley Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Harvey Wasserman Nirmal Ghosh Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 14, 2009 Michael Neumann M. Reza Pirbhai Gareth Porter Paul Craig Roberts John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon Ralph Nader Dean Baker Charles Modiano Nadia Hijab Walter Brasch Website of the Day October 13, 2009 Peter Linebaugh Shamus Cooke John Ross Brendan Cooney Frida Berrigan Yves Engler David Macaray Dave Lindorff Mark Weisbrot Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 12, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Martha Rosenberg Jessica Arents Eamonn McCann Bill Hatch Sen. Russell Feingold Niranjan Ramakrishnan Gideon Levy Iyad Burnat Alan Cabal Dan Bacher Website of the Day October 9-11, 2009 Alexander Cockburn James Bovard Kathleen and Bill Christison Andy Worthington Marc Levy Tariq Ali Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Alan Nasser Jack Z. Bratich Steve Breyman David Michael Green Dave Lindorff Paul Buchheit Jim Goodman Missy Beattie Michael Leonardi Nadia Hijab Mel Packer David Macaray James T. Phillips Charles R. Larson Michael Donnelly David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 8, 2009 Saul Landau Paul Fitzgerald / Linn Washington, Jr. Marshall Auerback Dave Lindorff David Rosen Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee John V. Walsh Stewart Lawrence Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 7, 2009 Brendan Cooney Paul Craig Roberts Dean Baker Jonathan Cook John Stanton Joanne Mariner Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman Sen. Russell Feingold Mary Lynn Cramer Website of the Day October 6, 2009 Mike Whitney Gareth Porter Jonathan Cook Boris Kagarlitsky Iain Boal Ron Jacobs John Ross Michael Dickinson Stephen Fleischman Ira Glunts Missy Beattie Website of the Day October 5, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Harry Browne Sara Mann Omar Barghouti Shamus Cooke Brenda Norrell Fred Gardner Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap Website of the Day October 2-4, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Diana Johnstone Greg Moses William Blum Brian Cloughley Russell Mokhiber John Ross Ellen Brown David Ker Thomson David Macaray Gary Engler Robert Fantina Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer Anthony Papa Joe Allen Harry Browne Ron Jacobs Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
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Weekend Edition From Malinowski to Human Terrain SystemsEmpires and the Sullying of AnthropologyBy ROBERT LAWLESS In the September 30, 2009, online edition of CounterPunch in an article titled “Country of Constant Sorrow: McChrystal's Afghan Desolation,” Vijay Prashad wrote,
The notion of anthropologists being helpmates in the First World conquest of the Third World seems now to have become embedded in the day-to-day understanding of the Bush-initiated Iraq-Afghanistan cultural-military fiasco. Whether political scientists, philosophers, area specialists, or whoever actually fills the “societal” expert position on the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) teams, anthropologists apparently are to take the blame. And anthropologists themselves are not exempt from furthering this notion. Perhaps the most notorious anthropologist associated with the U.S. military’s HTS is Montgomery McFate, who writes primarily for military publications and whose pivotal article “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency” appeared in the April 2005 issue of Military Review. A hapless mix of shoddy history and misdirected anthropology, her article was, nevertheless, reprinted in the 2007 edition of Annual Editions Anthropology -- along with articles by Conrad Kottak, Richard Lee, and Ralph Linton, and in the 2009 second edition of Classic Readings in Cultural Anthropology, edited by Gary Ferraro -- along with brand-name anthropologists such as Horace Miner, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward T. Hall, Richard Lee, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Why McFate deserves to be in this company is unclear; there are many other articles by respectable anthropologists that clearly explained the HTS affair. [Among them have been David Price’s path-breaking contributions on this site and in our CounterPunch newsletter. Editors.] Making McFate’s piece widely available only further sullies anthropology. Anthropology hardly needs a renewed association with First World empires; it has obviously had difficulty living down its close association with colonialism in its formative recent past. The great British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the most important founders of modern anthropology who provided a model for nonjudgmental, systematic, long-term fieldwork -- the hallmark of anthropology -- was director of the International African Institute in London for a few years, and in that position he was concerned primarily with helping British colonial officials with their problems. One specific problem for Britain centered on getting the indigenes to work hard on the cash-crop plantations owned by the Europeans. In a 1929 article Malinowski wrote:
And in further advising about the duties of the anthropologist Malinowski wrote, "He should formulate his conclusions in a manner so that they can be understood by those who carry out policies. He also has the duty to speak as the natives' advocate, without, however, succumbing to an outburst of pro-native ranting. Through comparative study he can discover and define the common factor of European intentions and of African response. . . . Knowledge gives foresight, and foresight is indispensable to the statesman and to the local administrator, to the educationalist, welfare worker, and missionary alike." Notice that it is European intentions and African response. Notice that "knowledge" and "foresight" is for the European colonialists, not for the “natives.” No anthropologist in these early years suggested that anthropology should be used to help the indigenes throw off the yoke of colonial oppression or that anthropologists should study the contradictions and weaknesses of colonial imperialism so that the indigenes could strike at the heart of the oppressors. Malinowski was, of course, a product of his time. And before World War II it was widely assumed in the colonial metropoles, that colonialism was beneficial in the long run to everyone; backward peoples were, after all, being civilized so that they could enjoy the benefits of modernization and civilization in the future. And these early anthropologists strove to enlighten the rulers and protect the ruled from the more brutal aspects of colonialism, such as forced labor. Today, however, most anthropologists have moved beyond this 1920s colonial version of the discipline. Some anthropologists even at the time escaped this ethnocentric perspective. Franz Boas, the founder of U.S. anthropology, famously critiqued anthropologists involved with the U.S. military in World War I in his 1919 letter to the Nation titled “Scientists as Spies.” His student, and my first anthropology instructor, the great Melville J. Herskovits, refused government financial assistance for Northwestern University’s African Studies program and he also refused to accept government officials into the Ph.D. program. These towering figures certainly would not allow anthropology to be sullied. The discipline did, however, suffer some sullying during World War II and the subsequent Cold War. Anthropologists’ activities in World War II are examined in David Price’s 2008 Anthropological Intelligence, and the Thailand part of Project Agile is examined in Eric Wakin’s 1992 Anthropology Goes to War. One would hope, however, that modern-day anthropologists have learned the lesson and that such sullying and empire-helpmate activities would no longer occur. As Price wrote on October 1-15, 2009, however, in an article in CounterPunch newsletter titled “Anthropology, Human Terrain’s Prehistory, and the Role of Culture in Wars Waged by Robots,” “Human Terrain Systems is not some neutral humanitarian project, it is an arm of the U.S. military and is part of the military’s mission to occupy and destroy opposition to U.S. goals and objectives. HTS cannot claim the sort of neutrality claimed by groups like Doctors Without Borders, or the International Committee of the Red Cross.” In October 2007 much to its credit the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association denounced HTS for its failure to follow the fundamental principles of anthropological ethics. Out of the 261 comments from members of the American Anthropological Association in the blog accompanying the statement of the executive board the vast majority overwhelmingly condemn the participation of anthropologists in HTS. The few anthropologists engaged in these neocolonial enterprises cannot be said to represent the discipline, but they have received considerable publicity thereby sullying anthropology’s reputation. Exactly what they expect to accomplish anthropologically is not entirely clear. They are a fairly motley bunch. The ones that we have information on seem to have little if any expertise in the Middle East. And most of them are not exactly forthcoming about their activities -- nor is the U.S. military. One who has written rather openly is Marcus Griffin, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Illinois and who, until recently, was an assistant professor at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, a rapidly growing public university with an enrollment of about 5,000. Griffin has been the subject of several articles, has written about his experiences in his own blog, and has briefly replied to criticism in the anthropological blog Savage Minds. In an article in the April 21, 2008, issue of Newsweek titled “A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other” written by Dan Ephron and Silvia Spring it is pointed out that Griffin “had never been to the Middle East before he arrived in Iraq last fall,” though he had spent much of his life in the Philippines with his anthropologist father who does research on the Agta of Northern Luzon. Ephron and Spring noted that although he is a civilian Griffin wore army clothing and carried a rifle. The reporters stated, “For their services, the anthropologists get up to $300,000 annually while posted abroad -- a salary that is six times higher than the national average for their field.” The rest of the Newsweek article is largely critical of the HTS program, which, it reported, “was handed to BAE without a bidding process.” BAE Systems is a company that apparently lives off U.S. Department of Defense contracts. According to their website, BAE Systems currently has positions open for HTS Reachback Research Center Analyst, Human Terrain Systems Analyst, Human Terrain Systems Research Manager, and HTS Team Leader. A more critical article by Dahr Jamail in the May 1, 2009, edition of Truthout titled “An Anthropologist and Army Medics Work at a Medical Clinic in the Shabak Valley in Afghanistan” pointed out that HTS developed “into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 US combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.” Jamail reported that Griffin, “while preparing to deploy to Iraq at part of an HTS team, boasted on his blog, ‘I cut my hair in a high and tight style and look like a drill sergeant . . . I shot very well with the M9 and M4 last week at the range . . . Shooting well is important if you are a soldier regardless of whether or not your job requires you to carry a weapon.’” An article meant to be favorable toward HTS and toward Griffin was datelined Baghdad and released by the American Forces Press Service on January 25, 2008. Titled “Anthropologist Helps Soldiers Understand Iraqis’ Needs” and written by Sgt. James P. Hunter, U.S. Army, it characterized Griffin as “an anthropologist working for the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team” who is bringing “his knowledge and experience to the fight” and “is helping soldiers better understand the needs of the Iraqi people.” The article focuses on Griffin’s study of Iraqi local markets, which he toured accompanied by an armed escort. In responding to questions of ethics posed by anthropologists on the popular blog Savage Minds in August 2007, Griffin wrote:
Griffin’s blog is currently unavailable. Griffin is no longer with Christopher Newport University and is, in fact, now employed by BAE Systems. In response to questions I recently posed to Griffin, he wrote on October 7, 2009, “I am currently getting ready for a trip to Afghanistan and not able to give answering these questions priority. Perhaps when I return next month I will have more time.” In a similar fashion to the problems faced by psychologists dealing with the role of a few of their cohorts’ compliance with torture, anthropologists will need to cleanse the standing of the profession not only by careful discussion of the issues but also by taking action that clearly separates the discipline of anthropology from war, spying, empire building, and military adventures. Robert Lawless teaches anthropology at Wichita State University . He has done fieldwork in the Philipinnes, Haiti , Florida and New York (studying urban hippie communes in the early 1970s). He can be reached at robert.lawless@wichita.edu Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Obama and Black America Ten months into Obama-time, the plight of black Americans is terrible. Yet overwhelmingly they rally behind the president. In a powerful report from the Deep South Kevin Alexander Gray asks the question: what should the black political agenda be? Mark Rudd counterposes “organizing” with “activism” and describes what it will take to build a movement. H. Bruce Franklin gives a chronology of the march into Afghanistan. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !
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Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Yellowstone Drift:
"Powerful and shocking ..
Waiting for
Lightning
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