ASA Globalog

For the past decade and a half I have been exploring archival sources, conducting interviews and oral histories and using the Freedom of Information act to document various ways that anthropologists have interacted with military and intelligence agencies throughout the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries. Some of this work examines instances of anthropologists being targeted for surveillance and harassment by these agencies, but I have increasingly been documenting the history of anthropologists’ interactions with military and intelligence agencies. This work probes the core ethical issues raised when anthropologists use their discipline and ethnographic knowledge to support warfare or counterinsurgency. This project tries to delineate the ethical, moral and political issues raised by specific applications of anthropology for warfare.

Although the formal codification of professional anthropological ethics codes has been a relatively recent development, ethical questions concerning, possible harm, representation, secrecy, and voluntary informed consent have long overshadowed evaluations of anthropological research. Considerations of professional ethics have taken on increasing importance over the past half-century, but it is the use of anthropology by military and intelligence agencies in the context of warfare that most graphically exposes the political context of our work as well as the vital need for an ethically engaged anthropology.

Anthropological knowledge has been used in wars throughout the past century in ways seldom studied, and while some have tried to rationalize the use of anthropology in a particular war strictly in terms of the perceived justness of a given cause, the existence of professional ethical standards mandating disclosure, transparency, protection of the wellbeing of those studies, and meaningful voluntary informed consent are not principles to be set aside by anthropologists simply because they are drawn to a cause. But ethical codes exist in part from a recognition that safeguards are needed because political or other forces inevitably create conditions that will press scholars to look beyond the best interests of those they study. We need to pay attention to ethical standards whenever our discipline hears the calls of “necessity” and “duty” asking us to make exceptions to normal ethical practices.

The U.S. military’s misadventures in Iraq led some within the Pentagon to look to anthropologists with hopes of using culture to accomplish what the military campaigns could not. Anthropologists recently contributed their skills to writing portions of the U.S. Army’s new Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and anthropologists have designed and joined embedded military advisory units known as Human Terrain Teams which are now militarizing anthropological knowledge in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. While the specific scholarship produced and harnessed in such ventures appears to be uneven at best and often questionable, military and intelligence agencies are now seeking to weaponize anthropological knowledge for their own ends at levels not seen since the Second World War. As I describe in my forthcoming book, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, in the United States, it was the mixed experiences of anthropologists during World War Two that gave rise to the development of the first American anthropological ethics code by the Society for Applied Anthropology in the post-war period, just as it later was issues with the uses of anthropology during the Cold War that gave rise to the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics code. In the U.S. it has recurrently been issues of military uses of anthropology that have pushed ethical issues to the forefront of anthropologists’ attention.

My opposition to many of the current anthropological engagements with the military has two strands. One strand comes from my personal opposition to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq as an unjustified act of aggression; separate from this is a strand of concerns that anthropological contributions to counterinsurgency risk violating anthropological ethical commitments ranging from obtaining informed consent to not bringing harm to studied populations. Even if I accepted the justifications of the present war (as I do accept justifications for other wars), my concerns over the ethical issues would still fuel my opposition to anthropologists engaging in these particular actions.

Anthropological contributions to counterinsurgency risk betraying our stated and unstated disciplinary commitments to the worlds we study. The problem isn’t that counterinsurgency seeks to change the world (obviously this world needs changing), it is that counterinsurgency uses anthropology for manipulation; it plays people, exploiting culture and situations for political gains often in violent settings supporting neocolonial domination. Such applications abuse anthropology’s critiques of power and subvert anthropology for the needs of state in ways that connect the present to our discipline’s colonial past.

But here in the U.S., there is also a growing resistance to the military and intelligence community’s efforts to use anthropology for counterinsurgency. One grassroots example comes from a group of anthropologists I belong to called the Network of Concerned Anthropologists that organized and wrote, circulated and posted a simple pledge giving other likeminded individuals the opportunity to declare that they will not work on counterinsurgency programs (we will soon have an international version of the pledge available on our website). Some professional associations have issued statements in opposition to particular uses of anthropology by the military. The AAA recently issued a strong statement declared that Human Terrain Teams are “an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise,” and last month a resolution was adopted at the AAA’s annual business meeting calling for the re-establishment of removed language from the 1971 ethics code that prohibited secret anthropological research.

While there are differing views concerning the ethical, moral and political issues raised by specific engagements between anthropologists and military and intelligence agencies, principles of professional ethics provide a foundation for discussions of such interactions.

David Price