The Human Terrain Complex

Max Forte over at Zero Anthropology:

Any suggestion that HTS is not about supporting war, and separate from the military-industrial complex and corporate war-profiteering, is at the very least naïve or disingenuous. As soon as corporations become such a significant part of the picture, arguments about “saving lives,” “peace keeping,” and “cultural sensitivity” become, at the very best, secondary concerns. The main concern for any corporation is the accumulation of capital. The main concern for any war corporatist is the accumulation of capital derived from engagement in warfare – the main drive is to maintain the war that produces the contracts that generate revenue and growth.

So what exactly IS HTS all about? How is anthropology (and academia) being marshaled toward the war effort? What can (or should) be done about this? Where should anthropologists stand on this matter? What is the purpose of anthropology?

You see, this just makes me ask a lot of questions. I think I'm not asking ENOUGH.

David Price on HTS (Counterpunch)

David Price has a new article over at Counterpunch that discusses the experiences of John Allison, a cultural anthropologist/archaeologist who was recruited into the Human Terrain Systems project. An excerpt:

These issues have such significance to professionally trained anthropologists that the military is increasingly becoming aware that the unethical nature of the everyday procedures makes it difficult for them to hire Ph.D. anthropologists with normative understandings of ethical practices. One choice for the military facing this problem would be to halt a program that necessitates engaging in ethically problematic behaviors; the other choice for the military could be to start training their own “ethnographers” and “anthropologists,” with a different standard of ethical behavior. According to John Allison, the military appears interested in the second of these two choices; in early December he wrote me that he concluded, “that the military is beginning to do an end run by producing its own anthropologists/social scientist PhDs at West Point, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy and other cooperating institutions; thus marginalizing the criticism.”

Take the time to read the whole article. This is, in my opinion, a serious problem for anthropologists (understatement).