Anthropologists aid US empire

February 7th, 2006 at 14:24 Björn Hallberg

Wouldn’t be the first time either. Despite their seemingly fluid and multicultural approach, anthropologists have historically been instrumental in just about every misconception about foreign cultures. They lent a hand in drawing up apartheid in South Africa, just to name one of the highlights. And then there is the work of Margaret Mead and others of course that have been exposed as hoaxes and as staggering accounts of etnocentrism. Even more generally, one can despise anthropology because even when they do get things right, they are eager to defend western incursions by glossing over the obvious crimes. I.e. they usually lack any grasp of politics and consequences. The rationale being that as long as a group maintains fragments of its heritage, its spiritual fabric if you will, their actual living conditions do not matter. Traditional danced even without context or content is fine by that definition. So is living the Christian and material lives of the western conqueror as long as long as people are allowed to dream of past glories, as they sit shackled during mass. It is almost akin to religious theory stating that the worldly life matters not, whether it be poverty, suffering or injustice, because obviously only the kingdom of heaven is real.

UPI - U.S. analysts are starting to apply anthropological models to trying to understand and fight the Iraq insurgency.

Speaking at the Women in International Security Conference on Monday, Montgomery McFate, a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses, argued for an increased understanding of the tribal nature of Iraqi society. She suggested this would benefit the U.S. forces by enabling them to adapt to the enemy.

If they were really so eager to adopt social science, they should also realize that what they have been trying to do for the last couple of years is utterly futile. Even Cato Institute libertarians expressed scepticism at the plan noting that one had to focus on dealing “with Iraq as it actually exists, not as you wish it to be.”

Finally one could also wonder if even anthropologists will aid the US this time. Or if the Pentagon will just cut and paste ideas they like from various textbooks and pretend they’ve done their home work. This being of course worse still even than having actual anthropologists doing the dirty work. The best known example of this sort of larceny is perhaps Social Darwinism which was Natural Selection taken out of context, twisted to prove a point of view, and resulting in incalculable suffering. History is in fact full of quirks that turned out to be quite devastating because someone couldn’t see the difference between a handy metaphor and an entire ideological framework. Bottom line: Science continues to be a crude tool in the hands of pirates and emperors, not the shining beacon of light that we had hoped.

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