Anthropology and the military 1968, 2003, and beyond?In 1971, in the midst of the Vietnam War, theAmerican Anthropological Association issuedits official Principles of ProfessionalResponsibility. These principles were aresponse to revelations in 1970 that universityanthropologists were acting in secret as con-sultants to the military on counterinsurgency inThailand, as well as to the earlier exposure in1965 of Project Camelot, a secret armyresearch programme to enlist anthropologistsand other social scientists in what the DefenseDepartment called a plan for a coordinatedprogram of applied behavioral and social sci-ence research in support of counterinsurgencyand special warfare on behalf of the entireDepartment of Defense.1

Ethics and the war on terrorThe 1971 AAA Principles included the fol-lowing bold statement: In research, an anthro-pologists paramount responsibility is to thosethey study. When there is a conflict of interest,these individuals must come first.Anthropologists must do everything in theirpower to protect the physical, social, and psy-chological welfare and to honor the dignityand privacy of those studied. The principleswent on to state: in accordance with theAssociations general position on clandestineand secret research, no reports should be pro-vided to sponsors that are not also available tothe general public and, where practicable, tothe population studied Anthropologistsshould not communicate findings secretly tosome and withhold them from others.2 Inother words, the Principles directed anthropol-ogists torn between their obligations to thosethey studied and their duty to the security oftheir home nation to place their professionalloyalties before their patriotism. Unlike theprofessional code of political scientists, theprinciples also warned against whispering inthe ear of the prince, defining the publicsphere as the proper locus of anthropologicalknowledge and debate.

By 1990 these principles had been weak-ened, partly in response to lobbying by thegrowing community of non-academic anthro-pologists. In particular the absolute proscrip-tion of secret consulting and research wasreplaced with the following watered-down for-mulation: Whether they are engaged in aca-demic or non-academic research,anthropologists must be candid about their pro-fessional identities. If the results of their activi-ties are not to be made public, this should bemade clear to all concerned from the outset.3

These issues take on a new urgency today asthe US, engaged in its war on terror, movestoward military intervention in many placeswhere anthropologists have done fieldwork. Inthis context some anthropologists may agreewith Anna Simons, a Harvard-trained anthro-pologist who recently left UCLA for theSpecial Operations Academic Group at theNaval Postgraduate School. In a 2002 inter-view with American National Public Radio,Simons advocated that anthropologists consultfor the US military. The critical question here

is what we have to offer to people who areabout to go abroad to the Philippines, toGeorgia, to Yemen, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, towherever it may be, in terms of helping thembetter understand what theyre going to find onthe ground. And the better prepared our guysare, the fewer casualties there will be on allsides The real context is that were in a waragainst terrorism and were essentially fightingpeople who would like to destroy the UnitedStates If anthropologists want to put theirheads in the sand and not assist, then who willthe military, the CIA and other agencies turn tofor information? Theyll turn to people whowill give them the kind of information thatshould make anthropologists want to rip theirhair out.4

The tables turnedI would like to propose a thought experimentto help clarify the ethical and professionalissues at stake here. I like to imagine that inthe 1980s an anthropologist of mixed Saudiand Iraqi parentage lets call him Hussein came to the US to do a PhD in anthropology.His doctoral work was funded by the SaudiFoundation for the Study of AmericanCultures a front organization for Osama binLaden which sponsored his thesis onnational security culture and Muslim networksin the United States. After graduation, Husseintook a job at the University of Riyadh in SaudiArabia.

The United States was on good terms withmany countries in the Middle East whenHussein embarked on his doctoral work but,over time, relations between the US and theIslamic world deteriorated and Hussein him-self began to harbour increasingly mixed feel-ings about the country where he had beentrained and conducted his fieldwork. Teachingas a visiting professor at the University ofBaghdad one year, Hussein could see at firsthand an epidemic of birth defects left behindby the US militarys use of depleted uraniumweapons. His anger only grew as he witnessedfirst the US attack on Afghanistan in 2001 andthen its unilateral invasion of Iraq in 2003. Itwas at this time that the Foundation for theStudy of American Cultures approachedHussein to ask if, on the basis of his ethno-graphic expertise, he could help them intro-duce radical Islamic infiltrators to conductattacks within the US. He was also asked touse his knowledge of American cultural psy-chology to help frame public statements aboutattacks that would be most likely to underminepublic morale in the US. He agreed to bothrequests, reasoning that these attacks wouldtake place with or without his assistance andthat, by working from within, he would be ableto prevent attacks that would cause largernumbers of civilian casualties.

How are we to judge the behaviour of myfictitious Hussein? Do we feel violated by hisdecision to repay Western hospitality and open-ness by improving the effectiveness of thoseseeking to attack the West? Does it make uswant to exclude future anthropologists thatmight fit his profile? In arriving at a judgmentwe have to weigh the competing claims of

patriotism, personal values and our profes-sional ethics. I presume that a Saudi anthropol-ogist consulting for the Saudi military wouldput patriotism first and defend Hussein,pointing out that his/her country needed hisexpert information in order to defend itself inwar. (S)he might also defend the ethics ofHusseins behaviour by arguing that, if theIslamic coalition relied on less informed andmoderate advice, the military struggle with theUS would involve greater casualties on allsides. In other words, the logical implication ofsuch position, as I understand it, is that the pri-mary obligation of anthropologists around theworld is to their own nations and that in war,just as physicists and chemists might feel freeto contribute to their countries war effort, soanthropologists should feel free to deploy theirexpert knowledge of their informants culturesin support of their own nations militaryefforts.

But maybe some anthropologists woulddefend a US anthropologist consulting for theUS military but not Hussein consulting for theSaudi military. One can imagine an argumentthat it would be ethical for anthropologists toconsult for the US military but unethical toconsult for other militaries because the USstands for uniquely superior values in theworld. However, such an argument would relyon a kind of cultural chauvinism that goesagainst our every instinct as social and culturalanthropologists. If anthropologists stand foranything it is surely pluralism, respect fordiverse values, and suspicion of cultural fun-damentalisms.

The ethics of consultingDoes this mean, then, that anthropologistshave a professional obligation not to consultfor the military at all? I believe not. There areanthropologists who have studied, forexample, time pressures and addiction in themilitary, with the goal of improving the qualityof military life.5 I see nothing professionallyunethical in it as long as the interests ofinformants are not compromised. Here theinformants in question, US military personnel,presumably have an interest in avoiding timepressure and addiction.

The complication comes when anthropolo-gists find themselves in a situation where themilitary is interested in their expertise becausetheir informants have become enemies of theanthropologists own government. Consultingfor the military in such circumstances is prob-lematic indeed, I would say, professionallyunethical for three reasons. The first, asDavid Price has argued, concerns anthropolo-gists professional obligations toward oneanother, since such consulting may damage thevery project of anthropology itself byimpeding the ability of future anthropologiststo conduct their research or even, in extremecases, endanger their lives. Once Thai peasantsor Somali clansmen learn that some anthropol-ogists are secretly working for the US govern-ment, they begin to suspect all otheranthropologists. Anthropologists have a pro-fessional obligation to one another not to con-duct slash-and-burn fieldwork fieldwork that

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makes it harder for other anthropologists to dotheir work. It was partly for this reason that, in1919, Franz Boas wrote a celebrated letter toThe Nation in which he excoriated fourunnamed American anthropologists forengaging in espionage in Central America inWorld War I under the cover of doing field-work. Accusing these men of putting patrioticdevotion above common everyday decency,he said they had prostituted science by usingit as a cover for their activities as spies.6

My second concern has to do with anthro-pologists obligations toward their informants.The Principles of Professional Responsibilityquoted here at the beginning stated clearly: inresearch, an anthropologists paramountresponsibility is to those they study. Whenthere is a conflict of interest, these individualsmust come first. What is at stake here maybecome clearer through an example from myown fieldwork, in which the politics are thereverse of those confronting the militaryanthropologist. In this work I undertook anethnographic study of a nuclear weapons labo-ratory in California. I did this as someone whohad been active in the movement against thenuclear arms race and, while the ethnographicencounter has complicated my thinking aboutnuclear issues in many ways, it is clear that insome ultimate sense my politics remain anti-nuclear.

Would it be acceptable for me to use theknowledge I have acquired about weapons sci-entists to help the antinuclear movement?Should I, for example, pass the names andaddresses of key weapons scientists on toactivists so they can mount aggressive protestsoutside their homes? How about using myknowledge of the labs organizational cultureto help activists strategize? The answer in eachcase is no. It is not acceptable to enter intoconfidential relationships with informants andthen deploy the fruits of those relationshipsagainst those who have trusted us, no matterwhat our own political commitments. The yearbefore Boas published his attack on anthropol-ogists as spies, Max Weber published hisfamous article Science as vocation,7 arguingthat good scholarship requires political self-abnegation. There is much to quarrel with inWebers formulation, particularly in the lightof the critiques of objectivity in anthropologyin recent years. Yet it is clear that anthro-pology as vocation does require a certain self-abnegating discipline a commitment to putour informants first.

The third reason for anthropologists not toundertake this particular kind of military con-sulting concerns our rules for informed con-sent. According to these rules, we aresupposed to explain clearly to potentialinformants any possible risks our fieldworkmay entail for them, so that they can make atruly informed decision to give (or withhold)consent to be studied. If we tell informants in,say, Somalia that we may decide to share whatthey tell us with the CIA or with the US mili-tary so that the United States can neutralizewhat it perceives as threats in Somalia, then itis hard to imagine people being eager to coop-erate with us. If we do not tell them that we

may consult with the CIA or the military andthen go ahead and do so, then we have notobtained properly informed consent for ourresearch and have thus violated the funda-mental canon of our professions ethics code.

The future of consultingIt is important to articulate this message verystrongly at this particular moment in history.This is a moment marked geopolitically by theemergence of American empire and, within thediscipline, by the increasing visibility of prac-tising anthropologists working not for univer-sities but for corporations or military thinktanks. We know from the work of Talal Asad8and other anthropologists that the very birth ofour discipline was bound up with the emer-gence of European empires in Asia and Africaand an American internal empire demarcatedby the frontier. But, while anthropologists pro-duced knowledge that was of great interest tocolonial administrators, our discipline evolvedin a way that increasingly questioned the pre-scriptions of empire, that put the humaneencounter with the other at the centre of ourethical practice, and that prized free debate inthe public sphere above the kind of consultingwork that has made many political sciencedepartments and business schools so intellec-tually conservative. At a moment when theworld is increasingly polarized by the projectsof American empire and, at home, the publicsphere is atrophying as knowledge is increas-ingly privatized under the pressure of corpo-rate sponsorship, the question is how topreserve our disciplines humane legacy.

You will hear, from those anthropologistswho advocate consulting for the military in thewar on terrorism, an economistic discourse thatimplicitly presents the United States as a sort ofglobal policeman with a unique calling to inter-vene around the world. Taking this calling forgranted, this discourse then frames ethicalchoices as simple cost-benefit calculations ofhow many more or less lives are likely to belost if anthropologists do or do not help out. Inthis context it is important to remember that,hard as it may be for some of us to understand,many people around the world, many of thepeople studied by anthropologists, see theUnited States not as a source of order in theworld but as a source of immediate, acute suf-fering and disorder in their own lives. Think ofthe people of Guatemala, El Salvador, andColombia caught at Ground Zero in Americasproxy wars.

In such a situation where the world is polar-ized and polarized precisely aroundAmerican projects of intervention what is theresponsibility of the international and theAmerican fraternity of anthropologists? Surelythe humane tradition of our discipline at itsbest is one not of plunging into conflicts but ofseeking to recast and mediate them, tohumanize and understand the other rather thantake for granted the terms in which it is vili-fied. I think, for example, of Faye Ginsburgswork explaining the cultural logic of bothsides in the abortion debate9 or of RenatoRosaldos writing on the cultural meaning ofheadhunting in the Philippines.10 The ability to

generate a profound transformation of theterms in which conflicts are cast is our disci-plines humane legacy a legacy that we mustdefend and extend. !

Hugh GustersonMIT

guster@mit.edu

Hugh Gustersons research focuses on the political cultureof nuclear weapons scientists and anti-nuclear activists inthe US and the former Soviet Union. He is also interested inthe contemporary biotech industry and in cultures ofpsychopharmacology. He is the author of Nuclear rites: Aweapons laboratory at the end of the Cold War (Universityof California Press, 1996) and is co-editor of the bookCultures of insecurity: States, communities and theproduction of danger (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).He is currently completing a book on the US nuclearweapons laboratories after the Cold War and, together withCatherine Besteman of Colby College, is editing a volumeon anthropology and public intellectuals.

1. Quoted in Eric Wakin: Anthropology goes to war:Professional ethics and counterinsurgency in Thailand(Madison: University of Wisconsin Center for SoutheastAsian Studies Monograph, 1992), p. 28

2. Quoted in Wakin, pp. 273-4 and 274-5.3. Quoted in Wakin p. 235.4. Morning edition, National Public Radio, 14 August

2002 (transcript from NPR website).5. Pamela Stern, Marching in Navy time: Temporal

regimes of a total institution. Paper given at AmericanAnthropological Association Meetings, New Orleans, 22November 2002; Roland Moore, Tobacco control policy inthe military: Global directives and local interpretations.Paper given at American Anthropological AssociationMeetings, New Orleans, 22 November 2002.

6. Quoted in George Stocking: Race, culture, andevolution: Essays in the history of anthropology. New York:Free Press, 1968, p. 273.

7. Max Weber 1918. Science as vocation. In Gerth &Mills (eds.) Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York:Galaxy.

8. Talal Asad 1973. Anthropology and the colonialencounter. New York: Humanities Press.

9. Faye Ginsburg 1989. Contested lives: The abortiondebate in an American community. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

10. Renato Rosaldo 1980. Ilongot headhunting 1883-1974: A study in society and history. Stanford UP.

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