Curiouser and Curiouser: Montgomery McFate's Strange Interpretation of the Relationship between Anthropology and Counterinsurgency

Abstract

In 2005, in an article in Military Review titled “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship,” Dr. Montgomery McFate launched a serious academic assault on the anthropological tradition of noninvolvement in mission‐related military and counterinsurgency research. Dr. McFate was then instrumental in the establishment of the Human Terrain System in 2006, which has “embedded” social scientists with front‐line army units in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has caused great concern among anthropologists and renewed interest in the professional ethics of the discipline. This article critically reviews McFate's accounting of the relationship between anthropology and counterinsurgency and argues that it is her particular reading of history of that relationship that is curious and strange. Viewed in its proper historical context, and illustrated with the example of the politics and ethics of my research on community support for the Irish Republican Army and Irish National Liberation Army in Northern Ireland, the antipathetic relationship that had evolved was perfectly appropriate, ethical, and in no sense “curious” or “strange.” This article critiques McFate's article as a fundamentally flawed revisionist history intended to legitimate and facilitate the active involvement of anthropologists with the US military in the “war on terrorism” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond.

Anthropology of security and security in anthropology: Cases of counterterrorism in the United States

“…This discussion has been carried out over several publications (e.g. Gonza´lez, 2007Gonza´lez, , 2010Gonza´lez, , 2015aGonza´lez, , 2015bMcFate, 2005McFate, , 2007McFate and Jackson, 2005;Price, 2002Price, , 2006Price, , 2011Sluka, 2010). 6.…”

Winning hearts and minds: una mirada ética desde la antropología a la Acción Integral en Colombia

“…Si bien, en general, la antropología se ha alejado de la lucha contrainsurgente, ya que éticamente no se considera apropiado poner el conocimiento al servicio de estas prácticas militares (Whitehead, 2009) que transformaron a la antropología en arma (Sluka, 2010), es evidente que las operaciones psicológicas se continuarán realizando a través del uso de conocimientos y herramientas etnográficas. Por esta razón, y teniendo en cuenta las críticas que se le hicieron al Hts, la Ain debe ser una práctica consciente de las lecciones aprendidas de la experiencia norteamericana y su relación con las ciencias sociales.…”

Spies like us

“…Leading anthropologist Franz Boas initiated the discussion with an early warning in 1919 about ‘Scientists as Spies’, published in The Nation , for which he was censured by the American Anthropological Association (reprinted in Boas, 2005; see also Borneman and Masco, 2015: 784; Price, 2012) . Since then, disciplinary anthropology has attempted to maintain distance from the various national security services both at home and abroad (Sluka, 2010). However, the long history of military appropriation of anthropological knowledge documented in David Price’s research on the Human Relations Area Files in the 1950s and M-VICO project in the 1960s attests to the fact that the original producers are often unaware of what is happening to their data (Price, 2012: 20).…”