Word: aaa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...their tweed for military fatigues and leave the halls of academe for the front lines. For the past two years, the U.S. military has embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with American troops in order to improve the Army's cultural IQ. But last week the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a report coming out strongly against the program, saying that in both concept and application, it "can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology...
...military's program is to continue its expansion in Afghanistan with the nation's top scholars, it may be facing an uphill battle. The AAA says the program violates its code of ethics - a sort of Hippocratic oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm. Two years ago, the AAA condemned the HTS program, but this month's 72-page report goes into much greater detail about the potential for the military to misuse information that social scientists gather. Some anthropologists involved in the report say it's already happening. David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martin...
...Still, Wintersteen, who is waiting to be sent to Iraq through HTS, says the AAA's decision to attack the program will ultimately put more lives in danger by undermining the organization's ability to provide guidance and dissuading top talent from joining. So far, HTS has struggled to bring in topflight social scientists with regional knowledge. "It hurts HTS and the people downrange like the American soldiers and the locals who depend on the rational analysis that anthropology brings," Wintersteen says. In his training class of about 50 people, there were only about 13 social scientists, five with Ph.D.s...
...moved out of Chile, however; in 1965, once the public got wind of it, Project Camelot was canceled. Later, in 1970, documents stolen from a U.S. anthropologist's office implicated a number of social scientists in clandestine counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand. These two scandals created an uproar at the AAA, and many anthropologists grew wary of military-funded programs. Over the past 30 years, according to an article by Montgomery McFate, the senior social scientist at HTS and a trained anthropologist, "the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its ivory tower...
...AAA policy is not against anthropologists helping the military - a few of the co-authors of the AAA report, in fact, work closely with the military. But McFate's larger point stands: for the past few decades, anthropologists have had little influence in military or foreign policy circles. As American troops adopt a counterinsurgency strategy, cultural knowledge has become a foremost Pentagon concern. They know historically the record for winning a short-term counterinsurgency is not good, so they've once again sought out cultural expertise. The discipline's checkered history, however, has made many anthropologists sensitive to the parallels...