An Excerpt of a Dissertation: War & Anthropology

Submitted and awarded a First in 2024

…Soldiers are often excluded from the ethnographic gaze, representing an invisible but valuable insight into ideologies, processes, and experiences of war. Even though soldiers are an “agent, instrument and object of state violence,” (MacLeish; 2013, 12), anthropology predominantly gravitates towards the everyday lives of civilians to further understand conflict. Whilst Lutz asserts that war, “literally fragments life, making the pieces of the social body harder to find,” (1999; 612), ethnographies about civilians in conflict reveal how war, instead, infects and malforms repositories of social connections, such as family and kinship, medicine and healthcare, local epistemologies, and cultures, to adapt for military occupation and normalised violence. For instance, ethnographers like Varma (2020), Scheper-Hughes (1992), Jansen (2018), Green (1994), Macek (2009), Lubkemann (2005), and Allen (2008) show how violence extends beyond the bodily realm and also permeates into every sector of life, such as language, kinship, space, healthcare, environment, and time, which in turn shapes modes of resistance to military occupation. These experiences highlight how war, as the violent accumulation fulfils demands for resources, fundamentally relies on pervasive dispossession, including the civilian body, ontology and community. Thus, the everyday lives of civilians, constituted of bodily and ontological trauma, struggles and resistance, is a rich anthropological repository to understand the multidimensional characteristics of war, violence and necropolitics.

Despite this, I contend that this approach doesn’t provide a larger framework of war as a global political and economic project. Whilst it highlights internal processes of colonialism that destroy bodies and environments to facilitate state formation, it also often excludes interactions between peripheral and central states that support and benefits from war.

Specifically, I emphasise interactions between the West, as a surreptitious provider of arms, intelligence, and financial aid, and regions of conflict, often in resource-laden Global South. Ironically, in depicting colonising processes of dispossession through bodily and ontological violence, Western imperialism is often pushed to the margin in anthropological critiques of war. As Lutz states, “there has been an eerie silence in our field around the question of U.S. military power through most of this 60 year period,” (2009; 1). This is not coincidental when we consider the history of anthropology and the American state. Anthropology is useful in its ability of understanding and deconstructing the Othered enemy due to its’ cultural analysis of social systems, practises, and languages, allowing the US to wage efficient war by achieving maximum damage whilst saving costs, time, and soldiering bodies. By being able to know the face of the enemy, anthropology further bolsters the imperial expansion of the state that relies on environmental and bodily destruction of civilians. This notion is reflected historically; Price (2000) asserts that anthropologists were deployed as spies around the Third World during the First and Second World Wars, gaining access through their pretence of fieldwork whilst monitoring political operations, Lutz (1999) notes how American anthropological work during World War II was underpinned by anti-German, anti-Japanese, nationalist sentiment, Perugini (2008) shows how anthropologists were part of the Human Terrain System for the Iraq and Afghanistan War which catalogued the cultural landscape for military operations. Furthermore, the American state ensures a constant production of anthropological knowledge due to its’ large funding of research initiatives, such as Project Camelot, the US Army College Quarterly, and the Minerva Initiative.

Anthropology also epistemologically bolsters imperial expansion through the production of orientalist narratives about the Other, which dehumanises and alienates Iraqi populations, Arab culture, and Islam (Perugini; 2008). This orientalist production of knowledge is dangerous because it can extend beyond the epistemological realm, becoming utilised to motivate, justify and inform new ways of biopolitical control and violence. For instance, in 2003, Abu Ghraib made headlines for numerous human rights abuses by US troops, including physical and psychological torture, starvation, sexual abuse, and social humiliation (Hasso, 2007). Hersh describes ‘The Arab Mind,’ by anthropologist Raphael Patai as “the bible of the neocons on Arab behaviour,” (2004) utilised to shape US geo-political strategy, intelligence, and military training. Torture methods that sexually humiliated inmates, such as rape, nudity, photography, and genital mutilation, were devised from the narrative that sex is taboo in Arab culture, fuelled by shame and repression and fundamentally a “prime mental preoccupation,” (Patai, 1973; 99). Holding 50,000 inmates of men, women and children, the official death toll is 63, though realistically more as many inmates were never formally recorded in the first place.

It is precisely this uneasy historical relationship that highlights the moral responsibility of anthropologists, and the potential anthropology holds in cultivating war that makes discussing Western responsibility in war unapproachable and scandalous. Firstly, it calls into question the agendas of anthropologists- as academics that platform the voiceless or as citizens with duties to the state. For instance, the widespread opposition to the instrumentalization of anthropology in the Iraq War, such as panels and petitions that called for the AAA to officially boycott the war, condemn the use of anthropology in torture and military operations, and to review ethical codes, reflects a “sanctity of the relationship of anthropologist to the people (they work with),” (Berreman, 1980; 6). On the other hand, McFate, the pioneer and eventual advisor to the Human Terrain System, reprimands these academics as having an “uninformed unwillingness to learn about what actually goes on in Washington,” that “sit back in their ivory tower and spit at these people (the military) that are asking for help- I think there’s something unethical about that,” (Stannard, 2007).

Furthermore, the complex relationships of violence mean that it’s difficult for anthropologists to align themselves with a particular stance. As Robben puts it, “should an anthropologist choose the side of Shi’is, brutally oppressed for many years by Saddam Hussein, who pursue a government of national alliance to overcome ethnic-religious tensions but will need the long-term assistance of U.S. forces resented by many Iraqis? Or should one cast one’s lot with equally oppressed Shi’is who oppose such foreign presence and desire more political autonomy, even at the risk of civil war?” (2010; 4). Secondly, it has created an anthropological interest in war as a minefield, where anthropology for war has an entirely different set of meanings and questions about the moral character of the ethnographer than anthropology of war (Lutz, 2009). As Mohr et al emphasise, these anthropologists move in “morally liminal spaces as they are constantly at the risk of (un)doing themselves as respectable ethnographers, perpetually unable to (gain the approval) of academic peers,” (2021; 601). Lastly, ideological, and academic suppression of anti-war sentiment by the American state further dissuades anthropologists from writing about war as an imperial project, as spheres of knowledge production, such as campuses and libraries, become monitored through ‘sneak-and-peak,’ searches by the state (Welch, 2006). These factors have contributed to a silence in spotlighting and critiquing the role of Western imperialism in cultivating and benefiting from war as the anthropologist becomes “wary of (being) entangled in new military adventures,” (Robben, 2009; 2). In the contemporary field, there remains a lack of political engagement in American war as an imperial project, with post-Iraq War literature often focusing on the ethics of military anthropology (Mandler, 2013, Mullings, 2015, Pleasant, 2019), and the impact of war in post-invasion Iraq/conflict societies (Al-Mohammed, 2012, Moghimi, 2012, Rubaii, 2019). Thus, this dissertation will endeavour to end this silence by bringing historical and contemporary relationships of Western imperialism to the forefront in the production of war and soldiering bodies….

References

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