Cloth: 978-0-226-42993-9 | Paper: 978-0-226-42994-6 | Electronic: 978-0-226-42995-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429953.001.0001
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ABOUT THIS BOOK
Global events of the early twenty-first century have placed new stress on the relationship among anthropology, governance, and war. Facing prolonged insurgency, segments of the U.S. military have taken a new interest in anthropology, prompting intense ethical and scholarly debate. Inspired by these issues, the essays in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency consider how anthropologists can, should, and do respond to military overtures, and they articulate anthropological perspectives on global war and power relations.
This book investigates the shifting boundaries between military and civil state violence; perceptions and effects of American power around the globe; the history of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice; and debate over culture, knowledge, and conscience in counterinsurgency. These wide-ranging essays shed new light on the fraught world of Pax Americana and on the ethical and political dilemmas faced by anthropologists and military personnel alike when attempting to understand and intervene in our world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
REVIEWS
“This extensive compendium of critical ideas, information, and narrative accounts makes for an absorbing reading experience. Beyond its cogency for present debates, it might well serve as a historical marker for future researchers, likely to become as important as an expression of a certain epoch of anthropological relevance to events as Reinventing Anthropology has been in the context of the 1960s.”
“This collection deeply and creatively challenges many forms of received wisdom about the nature of security and of U.S. power in the age of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Its diverse points of view, its productive comparisons, and its lucid ethnographic and historical examples are a feast for anyone concerned with where the history of this turbulent, portentous moment is headed.”
“When U.S. counterinsurgency strategy took a ‘cultural turn,’ it incited another form of resistance in addition to those it was already fighting, namely from anthropologists who objected to the enlistment of their discipline in the global military projects of Pax Americana. For the great majority of anthropologists, the integrity of other peoples’ existence is at once an intellectual premise of their discipline and its moral imperative. They will not put the peoples they live and work with at risk of bodily harm, foreign domination, or cultural destruction. Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency is a rich and profound exploration of the contradiction between a human science of culture and its militarization.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Culture, Counterinsurgency, Conscience
SECTION 1 - Categories of Conflict and Coercion: The Blue in Green and the Other
1. Bluing Green in the Maldives: Countering Citizen Insurgency by “Civil”-izing National Security
2. Phantom Power: Notes on Provisionality in Haiti
3. The Categorization of People as Targets of Violence: A Perspective on the Colombian Armed Conflict
4. Seeing Red: Mao Fetishism, Pax Americana, and the Moral Economy of War
SECTION 2 - Ethnographic Experiences of American Power in the Age of the War on Terror
5. Paranoid Styles of Nationalism after the Cold War: Notes from an Invasion of the Amazon
6. Hungry Wolves, Inclement Storms: Commodified Fantasies of American Imperial Power in Contemporary Turkey
7. Rwandan Rebels and U.S. Federal Prosecutors: American Power, Violence, and the Pursuit of Justice in the Age of the War on Terror
8. Weapons, Passports, and News: Palestinian Perceptions of U.S. Power as a Mediator of War
9. The Cold War Present: The Logic of Defense Time
SECTION 3 - Counterinsurgency, Past and Present: Precedents to the Manual
10. The Uses of Anthropology in the Insurgent Age
11. Small Wars and Counterinsurgency
12. Repetition Compulsion? Counterinsurgency Bravado in Iraq and Vietnam
13. Counterinsurgency, The Spook, and Blowback
SECTION 4 - The U.S. Military and U.S. Anthropology
14. An Anthropologist among the Soldiers: Notes from the Field
15. Indirect Rule and Embedded Anthropology: Practical, Theoretical, and Ethical Concerns
16. Soft Power, Hard Power, and the Anthropological “Leveraging” of Cultural “Assets”: Distilling the Politics and Ethics o fAnthropological Counterinsurgency
17. Yes, Both, Absolutely: A Personal and Professional Commentary on Anthropological Engagement with Military and Intelligence Organizations
SECTION 5 - Constructions and Destructions of Conscience
18. The Cultural Turn in the War on Terror
19. Cultural Sensitivity in a Military Occupation: The U.S. Military in Iraq
20. The “Bad” Kill: A Short Case Study in AmericanCounterinsurgency
21. The Destruction of Conscience and the Winter Soldier
22. No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy: History, Memory,and the Conscience of a Marine
Reference List
List of Contributors
Index