Indianism

Welcome to the Military Anthropology page!

Here I am exploring the largely ignored intersection of anthropology and contemporary warfare. As anthropologist Montgomery McFate has pointed out (Link), the withdrawal of anthropologists from governmental service and national security in response to the Vietnam War has gone hand-in-hand with the increasing involvement of the American, West European and Russian military with local populations worldwide. The essential character of contemporary warfare, as exemplified by Russia in Afghanistan and Chechnya and the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the conflict between a technologically superior state-goverened military machine and a diaspora of clan-based, tribal and religious guerilla groups operating across state borders and supported by shadow economy and foreign investment. The knowledge of local cultures and languages has become, therefore, a crucial skill in the resolution of conflicts between different segments of the world system. I believe anthropology can contribute (and, inadvertently, has always contributed) to better understanding of the nature of contemporary military encounters and to the containment of violence through the exercise of culture-sensitive preventive intelligence. Alternatively, military anthropology is a unique opportunity to observe the exact mechanisms by which bureaucratic and economic structures operate in the modern world.

Several facts and phenomena have triggered my interest in this topic and made it part of my kinship studies agenda.

First, the founder and first director of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution was Major John Wesley Powell, who earned his rank and lost his arm during the Civil War. Here is him, in an Indian outfit, with an unidentified Native American woman.

The collaboration of forensic anthropology with the FBI has continued uninterrupted since Ales Hrdlicka’s times. Here is a link to Douglas Ubelaker’s article.

Second, in my Stanford dissertation, I bring to light the curious case of an “American Indian” platoon among Russian Special Forces during the first Chechen war of 1994-1996. (See my paper entitled “Spearheading American Indian Cultures: Cultural Appropriation and Military Encounters in Eastern Europe and the Middle East” presented at the Fourth Annual International Conference on Social Sciences, June 13-16, 2005, Honolulu, Hawaii.)

Third, my work on the Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe archives at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace has convinced me that native-point-of-view-oriented information warfare was also part and parcel of the Cold War.

Fourth, as a research assistant to the project “Accounting for State-Building, Stability and Violent Conflict: The Institutional Framework of Caucasian and Central Asian Traditional Societies” directed by Christoph Zuercher, with the Freie University of Berlin, I had a chance to see how the blatant lack of cultural competence on the part of Russian military officials has resulted in unprecedented violence against Chechen people and in unjustified losses on the part of Russian troops.

Fifth, the capture of Saddam Hussein by American troops became possible not until his kinship chart had been outlined. (See The Washington Post, December 16, 2003, A27; Link; The Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2004, A1.) Classical kinship studies turn out to be a functioning practice in today’s world.

Sixth, the overwhelming support of the U.S. military operations throughout the 20th century by Native Americans deserves special attention. As American soldiers, Indians have been surrounded by an aura of primitive mystique, as this Menominee soldier posing for a photographer in a Plains Indian warbonnet.

Notably, the first U.S. servicewoman killed in Iraq, Lori Piestewa, belonged to the Hopi nation (Link) known for its conservative tribalism. Seen against the violent history of the conquest of North America, the continuing discrimination against Native peoples in the U.S. and Canada, and the struggle of Native American nations to fully restore their treaty rights, native patriotism presents something of a puzzle.

In the context of an ongoing controversy surrounding the attempts of U.S. and British national security agencies to co-opt anthropologists into the “global war on terror,” it is legitimate to ask why, if, as Dustin M. Wax put it, “a functioning anthropology can never be on the side of U.S. forces,” is there such a gap between American anthropologists and their traditional subjects, Native Americans? And why do many Native Americans refuse to cooperate with biological or cultural anthropologists, although these anthropologists have nothing to do with the C.I.A.? The answer seems to be that contemporary anthropologists, while refusing to romanticize “primitive” cultures, have constructed a romantic vision of themselves as a diverse, egalitarian and open-minded community existing on a tropical “island” and disengaged from the vices of the world. However, in the real world, of which anthropologists believe to have a correct vision, the “good” and the “evil” are tightly entertwined. And anthropologists’ theories, methods, and ethics are innocent and good sometimes only from their own perspective.

A glimpse from my European fieldwork - a monument to Native American soldiers, who participated in the liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis, in Ardennes, Belgium, - seems to provide a very appropriate metaphor for this controversial theme.