War, Technology, Anthropology

INTRODUCTION

War-Technology Anthropology

Koen Stroeken

The title of this volume, War, Technology, Anthropology, not only refers to war technology as an object of anthropological research but also recognizes that anthropology itself can be a technology of war. Of the three forms in which anthropology contributes to warfare, the first and most direct form is collaborating with the army by providing ethnographic data on populations deemed insurgent (NCA 2009). A recent case in point is the militarization of AFRICOM, one of the US's Unified Combatant Commands, which is present in African countries to pro-actively ‘prevent war’, in part by predicting insurgency through cultural modeling (Albro 2010; Keenan 2008). A second, more insidious form of ‘war-technology anthropology’ is the diffusion of a militarized concept of culture (González 2010) that justifies violent intervention by attributing ‘tribal customs’ and ‘harmful cultural practices’ to certain populations, as opposed to the ‘democratic values’ of the occupying forces. The third and least acknowledged form in which anthropology supports the occupying forces is through silence on the matter of culture. Whether in discourse on human rights or debates on poverty and conflict, we notice a return to universalism. There is a tendency to give in to globalist pressures and disregard the concept of radical difference.

How can one explain the transition, beginning around 1989, from covert CIA operations during the Cold War (e.g., sponsoring groups to overthrow democratic yet non-allied governments) to the post-Cold War series of ‘just’ wars in Muslim countries that present no direct threat (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya)? Some aspect of present-day society assures the military-industrial complex of public approval. Historically, one could point to the way in which Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have imposed their antagonistic definition of culture on American foreign policy since the 1980s (Hunter 1992). But the approval has been more widespread. It went hand in hand with Western audiences increasingly identifying themselves with values such as gender equality and democracy, in the name of which war was waged, while anthropology—‘the’ understanding of humanity—increasingly avoided the culture concept. In a media-ruled world of pundits eager to intervene publicly, the anthropologists’ silence condones for the larger public the hierarchy of cultures that is used to justify military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon Africa. The condoning effect should not be underestimated when the silence comes from a socio-scientific discipline performing the state-salaried function of dissent in order to reassure the public that the state's policies are being monitored.

The 300,000 soldier reports from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars published by WikiLeaks (2010a, 2010b) are instructive as to the problematic position of the coalition forces in relation to the local population. The picture emerging is that of an invader, alienated from the population and mystified by foreign ‘human terrain’, that is, an occupier suffering from Western exceptionalism. If we check the WikiLeaks Web site for the 20 incidents rated as most significant by visitors (as of 30 January 2011), the geographical locations of critical actions in these wars all appear to be roadsides, which suggests engagements in the least human of terrains from the disengaged position of armored vehicles. Moreover, in response to the growing critique about civilian casualties, the military has more recently undergone something of a cultural turn. In the WikiLeaks war logs, the references to culture dramatically increase in soldier reports after 2007; however, they are invariably of the stereotyping, dehumanizing kind: It is in their culture to….

In brief, the politico-economic structure of warfare has a cultural component. This small bundle of pithy essays offers an update on the cultural and structural components of war-technology anthropology.

Anthropology, Culture, and War

The fights in Iraq and Afghanistan together add up to over 100,000 civilian casualties (Burnham et al. 2006), a number that continues to grow. The wars are the outcome of a decision-making process undertaken by US and European democracies. Between the decisions and the killings runs a long but unbroken line. This collection of essays retraces that line, which ranges from war technology, including the use of drones, night vision goggles, and war games, to the more oblique levels of warfare, such as hierarchical distinctions used in the media, the sensory language of the entertainment industry, the new magic resorted to by poor African miners, and ethnographies that objectify other cultures rather than having their perspectives rebound on the authors’ own culture.

There are indications that recent social theories are no less collusive with imperialism than was functionalism in the days of colonialism. For one thing, post-critical theories have emerged that no longer question the logic of the state apparatus. In Latour's (2005) ‘actor-network-theory’, agency is dispersed in nature-culture hybrids. The maneuvers of the corporate elite are refracted by the network. There is no political structure supporting the chaotic and proliferating interactions of man and machine; the seemingly decentered Internet exemplifies the network (see Joxe 2002). In this view, cultures resemble the US Army's Human Terrain Systems (HTS) Project, ¹ appearing to be interactive regimes devoid of perspective. Any claim to social critique is hopelessly ‘asymmetrical’. This post-critical position is understandable in terms of the dominant, constructivist approach of science and technology studies, in which networks of users and designers together decide on the norms to be implemented in technology (Feenberg 1999). The constructivist approach prides itself on squarely overcoming the substantivism of twentieth-century dystopias, which warned about technological developments serving the status quo in function of a global political structure.

This volume revisits the substantivist hypothesis on what was once called the ‘ghost in the machine’, namely, the tendency of technology to standardize behavior and sideline criticism and hence to sustain those in power. Realizing an era announced since the late nineteenth century by various dystopias, the ‘ghost’ or the ‘magic’ (an invisible influence through this-worldly means) has, rather than replacing it, become an integral part of the machinery called science and technology. The substantivist idea of such a lethal ‘structure’ refers to the current transition of nation-states (non-collaborative empires regulating the lives of their citizens) into oligarchic ‘corporate states’ (versatile networks privatizing the commons), as described by Kapferer (2005: 16). Social negotiation is handed over to technocrats and to autonomous, anonymous apparatuses. The drones do the killing for us. We hear ourselves ordering more drones.

The dominance of the symmetrical, post-critical position today prevents social scientists from confronting the reasons for current extremisms, starting with why the Taliban ‘hates’ the West. The presumed motives of religious fanaticism are poverty and suffered injustices; however, these do not account for hate. What the insurgents hate is something that they deem too obvious to point out and that Euro-Americans have become blind to: a deeply rooted sense of cultural superiority, the result of a history of colonization, imperialism, and scientific positivism. The twin towers of the World Trade Center were no arbitrary target on 11 September 2001. Skyscrapers in the Middle East and Asia had taken up the gauntlet much earlier, in acknowledgment of the challenge by the West. I here contend that the pinnacle of the latter's deeply set sense of superiority is present in the social theories dominating anthropology. What are concepts such as ‘global scapes’, ‘plural modernities’, and ‘flat networks’, among others, trying to tell us? They find the sign of their superiority not in empirical data but in their culture, in their approach, which proves to be more open, inclusive, and diverse than the cultures being studied. In these theories, certain matters—for example, whether behavioral regimes in the public sphere affecting Muslim women might be ‘good’, as in protective against jealousy, depression, or divorce—have become irrelevant. The non-Western cultures under study are no longer in the position to determine societal theories; they inspire only moral discourse. Tolerance and an emphasis on diversity characterize the ‘correct’ approach. Acceptance of ‘other’ views confirms the anthropologist's superiority. This is how anthropology could gradually evolve into a technology of war. The discipline whose task it was to translate other perspectives to the point of unsettling its own perspective has settled for tolerance. Thus, it not only condones the dehumanizing of other cultures’ values and practices but also exemplifies the search for a culturally supreme position.

Discourse on cultural diversity counters the imperialist enterprise yet seems in line with that search. What happened to cultural difference, which highlighted the blind spot in any culture? Today it has become almost dissident for anthropologists to take small communities seriously enough to treat their cultures as actual ontologies, generating a sense of purpose that academics could not fathom (see Viveiros de Castro 2004; Willerslev 2007). Once schools, universities, and the media stop evoking the post-colonial hypothesis of radical difference, governments have no qualms about the price to pay for ‘rescuing’ other cultures. Moreover, the justification follows a surprisingly magical, actually capitalist rationality—that of profit according to investment. Spending billions of dollars to legitimize the deaths of soldiers and civilians rests on a magical expectation. The ultimate human sacrifice will yield ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’—something Western, at least, that could restore the West's hurt pride at a time of diminishing oil reserves, rising Asian powers, and eager upcoming populations, Muslims and others. The motive is as rational as it is magical because any sort of help—whether through military engagements or development projects—benefits the already-haves, shifting attention from the negotiable basis of their wealth to other people's efforts to achieve wealth too.

The Essays in Two Parts

The first part of the volume opens with a perplexing observation. Combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is often nocturnal, sometimes urban, and mostly erratic in response to insurgents’ attacks. However, the latest technologies pertaining to allied warfare, such as remote-controlled drones (Sluka, this volume) and night vision devices (Robben, this volume), serve instead to reinforce the insecurity that they are meant to eradicate. Jeffrey Sluka details the increase in civilian casualties and the role therein of technologies that ‘virtualize’ human targets. The use of drones makes life and death decisions less personal, but 50 civilians are killed per insurgent. If the consequences were not so tragic, one could see the irony of the ‘war on terror’ being designated ‘overseas contingent operations’ by the current US administration. Judging by the rate of human collateral damage, these overseas operations are indeed ‘contingent’, as in ‘subject to chance’.

Drawing on Virilio (2002) and Vasquez (2009), among others, Antonius Robben notes in the second essay how warfare in Iraq has come full circle in terms of violence. The face-to-face combat of World War I was succeeded by the empty battlefield due to artillery in World War II. The Gulf War, by introducing stealth planes, continued the evolution toward ‘transhuman’ combat and resulted in very few allied casualties, compared to the opposition. The war in Iraq featured a return to close-proximity killing, but with a twist: the face-to-face combat was mediated, and made possible, by images that dehumanize the victim. Robben (this volume) points to the sensorial, ‘scopic’ context of equipment that affects the soldier's weighing of life-or-death decisions: Nuanced human and social characteristics that are present in real-life holistic vision are deleted, producing a reconstructed human representation.

The third essay by González bridges the apparent gap between war technology in the strict sense of that term and the use of cultural data to identify human targets. The human and social characteristics that Robben refers to are effectively deleted by anthropologists, who strip ethnographic data from their broader social meaning and reduce them to behavioral predictors. González analyzes the government-sponsored reductionism of the Pentagon, which has committed $19 million to funding a Human Social Culture Behavior (HSCB) Modeling Program that is geared toward forecasting human behavior by means of computational/analytical anthropological data. He describes how the US Army's National Training Center has developed software known as Reactive Information Propagation Planning for Lifelike Exercises (RIPPLE). Largely the work of game developers and Hollywood directors, RIPPLE employs ethnographic data to realize the army's deadly delusions.

The participation of anthropologists