Backyard anthropology #1: Culturally Defined "Bad Plants" Edition

Bad plants, you ask?  I'm talking about weeds, people.  You know, those resilient botanical "pests" that pervade gardens, lawns, and yards and require the intervention of the lethal products designed by Monsanto.  Plants that are so bad, so terrible, so pernicious that we need to poison them with all of our industrial might.  Ya, those plants.  The funny thing, though, is that the very definition of what is and what is not a weed is very much a matter of social learning.  Nobody is born with the automatic knowledge that dandelions are not pretty flowers; we have to learn that they nothing more than evil little plants that only want to suck the life out of the putting green that is the front lawn.  At least, that's the so-called "common knowledge" about weeds, and many of us simply go along with it.  We follow the instructions and advice of the plant gurus who tell us which ones are "good" and which ones deserve nothing more than the botanical death sentence.

The irony is that the definition of what is and what is not a weed is certainly a matter of social learning.  That's right: what we think of as weeds all depends on how we were taught to categorize and value certain plants.  Some plants are weeds because they are not "indigenous," an argument that gets more slippery as you go further back in time.  When, after all, do we set the botanical boundary for indigeneity  One hundred years ago?  A thousand?  Ten thousand?  As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered."  

Just the other day I was looking over a nice selection of acceptable and unacceptable plants at my mom's house in California.  One that caught my attention is the notorious "spurge," which sounds like something that floods into town and devastates everything in it's path.  Watch out!  The spurge is coming into town.  I mean, it's a weed after all.  But what do I know?  I thought it looked kinda cool, and might be suitable as a cheap, resilient ground cover or something.  But, alas, numerous online plant and gardening sources informed me that spurge is little more than an evil plant that deserves only the treatment that companies like Monsanto can dream up.  That's right: it's in the botanical category of plants that requires THE DEATH SENTENCE.

All of this leads me to a recent NPR segment "'Weeds': In Defense of Botany's Cockroach."  If you have ever wondered why some plants get such a bad rap, this is a great piece to check out.

Anthropological Sundays #4: The Human Terrain System & Anthropology: Is "Culture" Really the Issue?

This past Friday I had the chance to see the film "Human Terrain," which critically explores the US military's implementation of the Human Terrain System program in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This is the the program in which "anthropology goes to war," meaning that social scientific concepts--and social scientists themselves--are being recruited to make war more "culturally-sensitive" and, supposedly, less lethal.  The thing is, there aren't too many anthropologists who are actually joining this program. 

While proponents of HTS often mention the desire to win the "hearts and minds" of Afghans and Iraqis and make the war effort more "efficient" through the use of socio-cultural knowledge, detractors (many of them anthropologists) argue that the program creates serious ethical issues and conveniently sidesteps many larger political issues in the process.  Numerous anthropologists have spoken out against HTS--including the American Anthropological Association, since it was implemented in 2007.  There have been some critiques leveled at academic anthropologists for expressing open resistance to HTS.  So what's the deal here?  Are the anthropologists who speak out against HTS simply cloistering themselves in the ivory tower, or is there legitimate reason to not only be suspect of this effort to "militarize anthropology"?

First off, the mission statement from the US Army's HTS Home page states that the program is designed to:

Recruit, train, deploy, and support an embedded operationally focused socio-cultural capability; conduct operationally relevant socio-cultural research and analysis; develop and maintain a socio-cultural knowledge base, in order to enable operational decision- making, enhance operational effectiveness, and preserve and share socio-cultural institutional knowledge. 

 Many people argue that HTS is NOT an intelligence gathering operation, and that it is not espionage.  The underlying idea is that gaining an improved understanding of culture will make things better on the ground, and while this sounds quite appealing on the surface, I think it makes sense to look further into what this means.  Just to add a little more background, here is a description of HTS from BAE systems (which looks like a study abroad program page if you ask me):

In addition to the most advanced weapons systems, intelligence and personnel, there is another valuable resource for America's military. It is the ability to understand the people, culture, traditions and social underpinnings that define an area of engagement. This is where BAE Systems’ Human Terrain System (HTS) program comes in. Because better understanding leads to more powerful and lasting solutions.

So, even though proponents proclaim that HTS is non-lethal (or non-kinetic as it is sometimes put), it is still part of a larger arsenal of "resources" that can be tapped in the theater of war.  Again, as with the mission statement on the US Army's page, the BAE description of the program emphasizes the importance of cultural understanding in an "area of engagement" in order to foment "more powerful and lasting solutions," whatever those "solutions may be.  As numerous anthropologists have pointed out, one of the fundamental issues with the military's use of HTS is that it has a particularly rigid, if not completely defunct, conception of the idea of "culture" that allows the justification of this program.  Now, this may sound like an academic point, but I assure you it is not.  As David Price argues in a 2009 piece in Counterpunch,

The notion of using anthropologists and other social scientists to gather information, probe and soothe the feelings of those living in these environments, increasingly monitored and controlled by machines, strikes me as an anthropological abomination. Given what we know anthropologically about the complexities of how culture works, it also seems doomed to failure.

Simple notions of mechanical, disarticulated representations of culture can be found in the Army’s new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, in which particular forms of anthropological theory were selected not because they “work” or are intellectually cohesive but because they offer the promise of “managing” the complexities of culture, as if increased sensitivities, greater knowledge, panoptical legibility could be used in a linear fashion to engineer domination. Such notions of culture fit the military’s structural view of the world. It is the false promise of “culture” as a controllable, linear product that drives the COIN Team’s particular construction of “culture.” Within the military, the COIN Team is not alone in this folly: I’ve just finished a critique of the recently leaked Special Forces Advisor Guide (TC-31-73), and found a widespread adoption of dated anthropological notions of culture and personality theories, being selected and used to produce essentialized reductions of entire continents as having a limited set of uniform cultural traits.

In short, HTS utilizes "culture" in a way that completely disregards histories and politics, and often frames conflicts in Afghanistan, for example, as if they are the result of mere cultural differences (their version of culture fits in with a very outdated notion that dates from around the 1940s, in which entire nations were understood to have singular, unified characters or personalities.  Despite the fact that such conceptions of culture have been thoroughly critiqued over the past 60-70 years, a popular notion of culture that stems from this time period is still quite pervasive.  In this sense, anthropologists are often fighting against some of the terms they helped to define, which is ironic).  This, the argument goes, just requires a deeper understanding of cultural knowledge in order to reduce casualties.  

But is "culture" really the problem?  I think there is good reason to question the claim that the violence and upheaval in places like Afghanistan are fundamentally rooted in cultural differences, since such thinking completely elides larger social and political realities.  First of all, it's pretty important to realize that there isn't just one "culture" or cultural pattern that can explain the behaviors and proclivities of all Afghans.  Anyone who claims that there is such a thing is hanging on to an understanding of culture that is seriously warped and lacking in empirical basis.  There are numerous groups in that country, each with their own histories and particularities.  Culture--whether in Afghanistan or the US--is not just some static object or state that people inherently possess.  Instead, it's a fluid, historical, constantly shifting process through which people learn and relearn social rules, norms, boundaries, and expectations.  

Much of the HTS rhetoric sounds as if there is a singular code or pattern that needs to be learned by soldiers so that they can then understand the minds of Afghans and somehow make everything better.  This kind of static, reified understanding of culture is also reflected in the thinking of folks like the late Samuel Huntington, Lawrence Harrison, and even people like David Brooks.  Each of these authors use(d) culture as a primary explanatory framework, even if their understanding of cultural processes themselves were by no means based in any sort of data-supported reality.  Huntington often argued that the ongoing conflicts between the "west" and the rest could be understood in purely cultural terms.  Harrison has basically rehashed the old "culture of poverty" argument to explain away global inequality as mere cultural traits and predispositions.  Brooks makes an argument that is closely aligned with Harrison, going so far as to say that poverty in Haiti is due to "a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences."  

All three of these uses of culture are egregiously ahistorical and they ultimately allow for an understanding of complex problems that completely evades political factors.  The west and the east clash not because of geopolitical power struggles over resources and territories, but because of deep cultural differences--or so folks like Huntington would have us believe.  The nation of Haiti is plagued with poverty not because of hundreds of years of political conflict, corruption, interventions, and social turmoil, but because the people themselves are resistant to progress--that's the version of culture that Brooks and Harrison are peddling.

And this is exactly the way in which proponents of HTS are employing culture.  For them, culture is a problem that needs to be addressed, so naturally they need social scientists to help them with this particular puzzle.  But it's just not that simple--the real issues behind the conflict extend far beyond cultural differences, that's for sure.  While the HTS rhetoric may sound as if it's geared toward improving conditions on the ground, the real issues exist at a much higher level.  People in Afghanistan aren't resisting US troops or refusing to cooperate simply because they have a different way of perceiving the world--such explanations completely obfuscate the fact that the people of Afghanistan are actually political aware of the situations and realities they face.  They observe the world around them, and they deal with constantly changing situations and make decisions based upon experience and judgment.  They aren't simply robots who are acting out of some supposed collective cultural mindset that magically developed over the last 1000 years.  They're stuck in the middle of a ridiculously complex--and violent--situation, and many of them are probably more worried about survival than anything else.  

What matters is attention not only to history, but also to all of the complex power relationships and political situations that pervade the region at various scales.  Many of the people are caught somewhere between the US military, the Taliban, and a pretty unpredictable set of economic and political circumstances.  Despite the glossy claims of the US military and the folks behind HTS, the problem ain't culture.  More than anything, the problems are political and economic--and no amount of superficial cultural sensitivity is going to ameliorate that fact.  It's certainly not a cultural trait unique to the people of Afghanistan to be wary, if not downright terrified, in the face of violence and warfare.  And that's an understatement.  

*Is HTS a dead issue?  Some might argue that it is.  However, just as I was getting ready to submit this post, this article showed up on one of the anthropology listservs that I subscribe to.

Notes about Grandin's "The Last Colonial Massacre"

There is one overarching theme that crops up in these readings that I can’t stop thinking about: democracy. I have read several histories and ethnographies that talk about US interventions and policies in Latin America, and the stories are usually pretty similar. This book by Greg Grandin provides more of the same: the US took a position on Guatemala that was completely anti-democratic, all in the name of democracy.

Grandin writes about this reinterpretation of democracy toward the end of his book: “the idea, widely held in different forms at the end of World War II, that freedom and equality are mutually fulfilling has been replaced by a more vigilant definition, one that stresses personal liberties and free markets and sees any attempt to achieve social equality as leading to at best declining productivity and at worst political turmoil” (197). This new definition of democracy obviously fits with certain political and economic needs, and defines freedom in terms of “efficient” or open markets. Actual social reform or democracy becomes problematic, because the right or will of particular populations may, in fact, be economically or politically inconvenient for certain government elites or interested outsiders.

My argument here isn’t meant to lionize the political left in Latin America, since the histories of Cuba (to name one) illustrate quite clearly that the socialists are by no means saints either. As Grandin shows throughout his book, the actual histories of violence in the communities of Guatemala are quite complex, contradictory, and difficult to assess. What I am talking about are the relationships between ideals (freedom, democracy, liberty), discourse, and actual political interventions. It’s ridiculously ironic how the US claims to be the global supporter of democracy and freedom, despite it’s less than stellar track record in Latin America, where supporting autocratic regimes was the norm for decades (this helps to explain why so many Latin American nations have a certain ambivalence toward the US).

In effect, US rhetoric about democracy has been incredibly hypocritical and self-serving. Basically, political freedom and prosperity in the US (and elsewhere in the west) has often hinged upon repression elsewhere (Latin America, the Middle East, etc). As Grandin writes, “The way the United States fought the Cold War on the ground was anything but liberal or democratic” (190). Even worse, these histories of intervention remain, in large part, out of public knowledge in the US. Every time I decide to talk about the histories of Guatemala in an intro course, it’s amazing how many students say they had absolutely no idea what happened. These histories are generally taught as being all about eliminating the anti-communist threat, and all of the details of the actual complexities of the events, the details of the real human lives that were lost, are completely obliterated. And today we have a population who thinks that US interventions in Latin America were all about justice, when they were more about serving particular economic and political interests. If that’s not an illustration of hegemonic ideological power, I don’t know what is.

To top all of this off, Grandin provides an example of how the US justified its actions in Guatemala. In a 1986 “retrospective survey” of the violence and war that plagued Guatemala for decades, the US State Department writes, “The explanation for Guatemala’s high level of violence probably is rooted in cultural and sociological factors unique to Guatemala … The use of violence to settle disputes of almost any nature is accepted in Guatemala’s indigenous culture” (100). Not only did the US make excuses for the Guatemalan government and provide material support, it also completely explained away all political factors by using a watered-down, twisted concept of culture to argue that all of the violence was ultimately part of the inherent nature of the Guatemalan people themselves.

This is Exhibit A for the ways in which the anthropological concept of “culture” can be used in incredibly insidious ways to justify pretty much anything. It’s also a good reason for anthropologists to remain actively engaged and vigilant in national and international debates about the histories of development and violence in Latin America to avoid the myopic, Ronald Reagan-esque black and white terms in which many pundits, politicians, and analysts still talk about these issues (Gunder Frank’s analytical arguments, while imperfect, were part of a strong reaction to depoliticized explanations about development and conflict in the “Third World”). Despite the best efforts of many US historians and politicians, Grandin illustrates the fact that democracy can take some very different forms, and while particular governments may not be convenient for the US and other western nations, actively allowing them to be crushed has only resulted in repeated histories of devastation. At some point, it seems the US would learn to actually side with popular democratic movements. But then, maybe the US has already decided which side it wants to take, and the idealists who actually hold onto particular notions about governance and freedom just haven’t figured that out yet.

References

Grandin, Greg. 2004. The Last Colonial Massacre. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Nature versus Culture

So I am getting back into the rhythm of being in seminar classes again, which means complete inundation in books, articles, films, and INFORMATION GALORE. That's life in graduate school. This semester already has a decidedly environmental focus, since I am taking a seminar about culture and environment, and am also a TA for a course that covers very similar ground. And the recurrent issue that has been cropping up all over the place: the whole idea of nature versus culture.

Should we continue to think of human culture and behavior as something that exists outside of the so-called natural order? The nature/culture binary is not only an old theme in anthropology, it's an old theme in western thought specifically. But, the more that I think about this division, the less it makes sense. Yes, of course, the ways in which people think about or even conceive of the environment in which they live is culturally and socially mediated. But here's my point: If culture (or socially learned behavior) is a defining aspect of what it means to be human, then how can it be something that is somehow "unnatural"? Add to this the fact that primatologists have been showing us for years that there is evidence of culture in many primates, and this notion of culture as something that we should contrast against nature breaks down.

So why the division? Why do we talk about this idea of "nature" as something that is separate from human behaviors and actions? What purpose does this serve? Is it a convenient way to label one as ideal and the other as undesired? What kinds of effects does this sort of discourse have on how we think about contemporary environmental and political issues? If we continually think of "development" as something that is "unnatural" how can this affect our inclination to do something about the ways in we think about development as a social and political process?

I think that we can become somewhat blinded when we only think about human activity as something that occurs unnaturally. This separation of what humans do from some sort of natural condition or state may create a division that only impedes how we think about human-environment relationships. As David Harvey writes, "Energy flows, shifts in material balances, environmental transformations (some of them irreversible) have to be brought thoroughly within the picture. But the social side cannot be evaded as somehow radically different from its ecological integument. There is, as I argued in Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, nothing unnatural about New York City" (in Spaces of Global Capitalism, 88).

Many people (Harvey included), argue for the need to move beyond the nature/culture dichotomy and instead see nature and culture as co-created through a dialectical process. Recently, however, I am leaning more toward ditching the whole division altogether. What explanatory value is there in saying that the urban development of Los Angeles is unnatural? Clearly, humans have been modifying their environments from the get go, so I don't see how calling something unnatural actually explains anything. It is, in fact, quite natural for humans (and many other species) to shape the environments in which they live. Now, it's an entirely different matter as to how we should assess or evaluate those effects. What would be a lot more effective, at least in my view, would be sidestepping vague philosophical debates about what is natural vs what is cultural, and instead focusing on the particular characteristics (positive and negative) of specific environments--whether we're talking about the Kalahari desert or New York City.