Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Philip Carl Salzman

“He must be a spy,” said the visiting Baluch, bearded, turbaned, and baggy in long shirt and trousers. My fellow camp mates of the Dadolzai shrugged. They had accepted me and were past wondering exactly how I got there. “Sure,” I replied; “the government”—whether Iranian or American was left unspecified, “they are paying me big bucks to tell them how many rocks”—I point at rocks on the ground—”there are in Baluchistan. And they are very interested in how many of these”—goat turds—”there are in Baluchistan.” Camp mates shrug; visitor is now bored with the subject.

New locale: Rajasthan. The Brahman veterinarian from the Sheep and Wool Service who served as my guide, local expert, and traveling companion, assured me that everyone knew that so-called tourists who went to Jaisalmer, up near the Pakistan border, to ride the camel safaris in the sand dunes were really spies. “Why,” he said, “they went missing for days at a time, and we know what they are spying.” His trump argument: “No well-to-do, educated people would ever do anything so dumb as to want to ride camels in the desert, for fun.”

It is very common for anthropologists, and foreigners in general, to be regarded as spies, agents, dubious, and perhaps dangerous. So the oft-heard plea of researchers—”We can’t ever work for government or people will think all of us all the time are spies and agents”—seems at the very least naive, and, one cannot help thinking, disingenuous.

It is not that anthropologists believe any more in neutrality, objectivity, or truth. These ideas are largely deceased among social and cultural anthropologists (excepting behavioral/evolutionary ecologists). On the contrary, subjectivity is now explicitly paired with political commitment as the twin pillars of anthropology. As there is no point seeking “truth,” the only purpose of the field is advancing the interests of the subaltern: people of color, women, gays, workers, the third world, and so on. Thus the call from the most famous of contemporary anthropologists, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, for “revolutionary anthropology.” This is a “postcolonial” extension of the Marxism that was so popular in anthropology for the decades prior to the fall of the Soviet Union.

So it is not much of a surprise that the American Anthropological Association has condemned the Human Terrain System, under which anthropologists and other social scientists have served with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many, perhaps most anthropologists do not support the United States or the United States military. Or they only support some imagined Soviet-like version of the United States, or, as a last resort, some neutralized and anesthetized European-like version. In line with widely held postcolonial theory, many if not most anthropologists believe that all troubles in the world have been caused by the West, and, latterly, by the United States. As one anthropologist put it so eloquently, he hoped that Iraq would turn out to be a thousand Mogadishus.

The muddy water of the anthropological swamp has been recently stirred by the proposals of Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense, to the Association of American Universities, for cooperation in generating knowledge—on China, on terrorism, on religious ideologies, and on the application of social science—to help America cope with the challenges of “jihadist extremism, ethnic strife, disease, poverty, climate change, failed and failing states, [and] resurgent powers.” More specifically, Gates proposes a set of consortia funded by the Pentagon to develop knowledge relevant to the future security of the country.

Anthropologists have responded as if to a proposition by Satan. Catherine Lutz of Brown University says that the Pentagon does not understand real research, but is advocating “faux social science.” She acknowledges that some people believe the military protect the country, but she says she takes another view grounded in history. Hugh Gusterson of George Mason University is an organizer of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, coaching all to chant, Hell no, we won’t go.

Other of Gates’ proposals likely to prove unpalatable to those unsympathetic to defense efforts include respecting those who wish to enlist in ROTC, which would of course entail accepting ROTC on campus, and offering “online courses… to troops at home or in combat zones [on subjects such as] history of the Middle East, anthropology classes on tribal culture, and so on. As a way of offering incentives, universities could together set standards and agree to count these classes for credit should troops matriculate at participating universities.”

For many anthropologists, cooperating with the Pentagon would be cohabiting with the Devil. It would be siding with power, capitalism, whites, men, heterosexuals, and thus with the evil forces in the universe. When it comes to the American military, cultural relativism does not apply.