the quotidian and professional performative contexts that encourage the self- interested behaviours that most economists

regard ipso facto as human nature are left intact. l Kalman Applbaum University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee applbaum@uwm.edu
Gudeman, Stephen 2008. Watching Wall Street: A global earthquake. Anthropology Today 24(5): 20-24. Hart, Keith and Ortiz, Horacio 2008. Anthropology in the financial crisis. Anthropology Today 24(5): 1-3. Ho, Karen 2005. Situating capitalisms: A view from Wall Street investment banks. Cultural Anthropology 20: 68-96. Miyazaki, Hirokazu 2003. The temporalities of the market. American Anthropologist 105(2): 255-265. Zaloom, Caitlin 2004. The productive life of risk. Cultural Anthropology 19: 265-291.

Retooling anthropology

A response to Hart/Ortiz and Gudeman (AT24[6]) Keith Hart, Horacio Ortiz and Steven Gudeman make provocative suggestions for retooling the analytical apparatus of anthropology as we all get caught up in various ways intellectual and personal in the current moment. We share Hart and Ortizs pedagogical impulse to send us all back to reading Polanyi and Mauss. And we appreciate Gudemans tracking of inequality and spheres of exchange. Yet we have also begun to appreciate just how much is lacking in our fields ability to make sense of the crisis we are all living through. Anthropology has a lot to contribute to thoughts about the current moment, but may need to re-equip itself by studying mainstream economics, the field in which our new natives have been schooled. Gudeman has an MBA and Ortiz has in-depth research experience in the world of banking. However, most of us have an oversimplified view of what economists and specialists in the world of finance believe in, leaving us with insufficient analytic and technical tools to make sense of what is going on. Using anthropologys signature method to document what is happening at the microlevel, informed by a higher level of knowledge about the history and meaning of the concepts and tools at work in the world of finance, might afford new insights and suggest other avenues for research. These might, in Michel Callons terms, involve research among those economists in the wild who are making economic decisions and theories every day outside of economics formal location in the academy, from the soup kitchens feeding newly hungry families to the chambers of the Senate Finance Committee. We imagine anthropologists fanning out and doing very traditional ethnographic work of the kind that has fallen out of fashion in the profession. We need to do a Roosevelt-style WPA project. We could be sending out students to follow the lives of people in our communities who are losing their homes to foreclosure, who are being fired, who cannot pay the bills, who cannot retire, and who are seeing a complete change of their lives and horizons in a very

short space of time. We could be doing ethnographies of loans, and tracking the journey of a loan where it went, what it turned into, and who was affected along the way. We need to be thinking about why the current moment is still, by and large, being experienced as a series of personal tragedies (how many exchanged details of losses from their retirement accounts at the recent AAA meetings? How many of us face bankruptcy and foreclosure as political issues?), while in the 1930s and 40s they were felt as part of a broad social experience. Marieke de Goede, in her prescient review essay on finance in the Economic Sociology European Electronic Newsletter, made the connection between the 1930s and the early 2000s before the crisis was even announced. Hart, Ortiz and Gudeman provide excellent suggestions for an anthropology of this crisis. Can we trace the loans and the relationships undergirding them in the way we have done in studying everything from Melanesian kula to Egyptian microcredit and Nigerian informal economies? What would such analysis offer? First, it would afford another modality of engagement with our informants and our audience, current and potential. It would allow us to learn the languages and the practices of the people in the financial and banking sectors who are desperately trying to keep their own jobs while they travel around the world assigning value to things, relationships and contracts and deciding who gets foreclosed, fired, furloughed and who does not. It would contribute to a deeper understanding of the regulatory policy issues, too, as Douglas Holmes has been suggesting for some time in his work on and with central bankers. It is not clear to us that the Washington Consensus is defunct, or that endings and beginnings are so easily definable anymore. Deregulation marched on in areas of policy kept under wraps by officials in the waning weeks of the Bush administration. At the same time, elements of a new Keynesianism seem to be emerging. Our analytical vocabularies are inadequate to capture this. We need a return to practice, alongside the practitioners who have been thrown into this situation with little to fall back on. The ideological questions should be put aside as we delve into practices that people are using regardless of ideology to do basic, yet for anthropologists and many others, still opaque tasks like assigning value to things and figuring out just what, exactly, has happened in recent months. The winks of financial micropractices speak to the epistemologies swirling chaotically around finance and everyday life. What can anthropologists do? Read Robin Blackburn in New Left Review, Nouriel Roubini on RGE Global Monitor, the excellent research of the Corner House UK, the last issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY. Make your students study the history of economic thought, political economy and please forgive us neoclassical economics. Julia Elyachar and Bill Maurer University of California, Irvine elyachar@uci.edu; wmmaurer@uci.edu

Springing a leak

A comment on the Human Terrain Team handbook On 11 December 2008, an electronic copy of the US Armys Human Terrain Team (HTT) handbook was posted at Wikileaks, an online archive containing thousands of anonymously leaked documents.1 The 122-page handbook though labelled unclassified was previously unavailable to the public. It surfaced only hours after the journal Nature published a scathing editorial calling for the end of the Human Terrain System, following a series of scandals in the programme.2 Much of the document consists of general guidelines for HTTs operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. It reviews teams responsibilities, interview techniques, and how to effectively brief commanders. The handbook also confirms accounts about the everyday workings of HTTs: teams accompany units on patrols to gather census data, to uncover kinship, religious and political networks, and to collect a great deal of unintended information (pp. 5-6); they are attached to the unit and belong to the Commander, who employs the team as he needs them (p. 28); they use the MAP-HT toolkit software to capture, consolidate, tag, and ingest human terrain data (p. 34); and they undertake cultural preparation of the battlefield, following the same doctrinal principles and four-step methodology of traditional IPB [Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield] (pp. 49-50). The efforts of HTTs should at all times be OPERATIONALLY RELEVANT to commanders (p. 61). The handbook is filled with glaring omissions. For example, there is no mention whatsoever of BAE Systems, the corporation that has been granted the lucrative contract for managing the programme (and training HTT members) since its inception in 2006. Nor is there any guidance about how team members might reconcile conflicting obligations to their employer (BAE Systems), US Army commanders, and Iraqi and Afghan research subjects. In conducting interviews for my forthcoming book (Gonzlez 2009), former employees of the Human Terrain programme told me that such conflicting obligations were leading to disastrous situations. The handbook avoids discussing dilemmas that team members might face in wartime. What should HTT social scientists who belong to the Commander do if the commander requests field notes or targeting information in preparation for an attack? Are HTT members obliged to identify Iraqis or Afghans suspected of having ties to threat organizations (p. 37)? How is it possible for team members to obtain voluntary informed consent from research participants if HTTs are attached to armed units conducting door-to-door patrols? Such omissions are deeply troubling. As David Price (2008) notes, the handbook makes [only] fleeting suggestions that issues of research ethics are being dealt with by someone or something else [] I remain skeptical that this has in fact been implemented in any meaningful way.
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More disconcerting is the fact that the handbook (in an extraordinarily defensive manner) insists that HTTs do not gather intelligence teams only explain and delineate the nonlethal environment (e.g. tribal relationships and local power structures) (p. 82). An imaginary division is made between intelligence/ lethality on the one hand, and ethnographic data/non-lethality on the other. But the handbook reveals that HTT personnel are in frequent contact with intelligence agents: HTTs will typically interact with the S3 Effects Cell (PRT, CA, IO, PSYOP, Law Enforcement Professionals, USAID, etc), the S2 [intelligence] staff section [] Human terrain information comes from and is provided to all of these elements (p. 29).3 Does it really matter that the handbook instructs team members to refrain from lethal effects targeting when they are in constant communication with units that engage in precisely that? Further indication of links between HTTs and the S2 intelligence section comes from cryptic battle rhythm tables (pp. 32-33). One page depicts a presumably typical week of activities including daily HTT meetings with O&I operations and intelligence staff. Such information is alarming in the light of comments made by Lieutenant Colonel Gian Gentile (2007), who commanded an armoured reconnaissance squadron in Iraq: These Human Terrain Teams, whether they want to acknowledge it or not [] do at some point contribute to the collective knowledge of a commander which allows him to target and kill the enemy [] stop sugarcoating what these teams do and end up being a part of; to deny this fact is to deny the reality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Another point that emerges from the handbook is the striking resemblance between some suggested HTT methods for example, the appropriately named SPIIEOP (pp. 70-71) and methods employed during the infamous Vietnam War-era CORDS/Phoenix Program.4 Specifically, CORDS/Phoenix census grievance teams collected census and ethnographic data and interviewed people about their needs, complaints and sentiments towards the Viet Cong in much the same way that HTT members are instructed to do. Census grievance data was submitted to databases that Phoenix operatives used to detain, torture and kill 26,000 suspected Viet Cong supporters. This is certainly not a gentler counterinsurgency. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates fond recollections of CORDS in a November 2007 speech, followed by lavish praise for todays anthropological counterinsurgency advisors,5 present a further cause for anxiety to those concerned about the human tragedies associated with the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Lamentably, President-elect Barack Obama has asked Mr Gates a stalwart supporter of the Human Terrain System and a key participant in whitewashing counterinsurgency to continue serving as Defense Secretary, while simultaneously calling for an escalation of the Afghanistan war. Despite its failures, the $200-million Human Terrain System is likely to survive in the immediate future. It is left to citizens of conscience to demand the abolition of Human Terrain Teams and the end of the imperial wars that employ them. Roberto J. Gonzlez San Jose State University roberto_gonzale@netzero.net

1. http://wikileaks.org/wiki/US_military:_Human_ Terrain_Team_Handbook,_Sep_2008 2. Anonymous 2008: Failure in the field. Nature 456(7223): 676. 3. Acronyms denote Provincial Reconstruction Teams, Civil Affairs, Information Operations, Psychological Operations, and US Agency for International Development, respectively. 4. Acronyms denote Security, People, Infrastructure, Issues/Friction Points, Economy, Opportunities for Engagement, Perceptions, and Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support, respectively. 5. Robert Gates speech delivered at Kansas State University, 26 November 2007. http://www.defenselink.mil/ speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1199 Gentile Gian. 2007. Comments posted at Small Wars Journal blog, 27 October. http://council. smallwarsjournal.com/showthread.php?t=4184 Gonzlez, Roberto J. 2009 (forthcoming). American counterinsurgency: Human science and the human terrain. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Price, David 2008. The leaky ship of Human Terrain Systems. CounterPunch, 12/14 December. http://www. counterpunch.org/price12122008.html

letters
Topical AT
CONGRATULATIONS! At long last, ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY has come

up with an issue that has anthropological comment on todays issues. For many years the discipline has been griping that it doesnt get a hearing. Im glad you have stopped the belly-buttongazing, and got on with where were AT (if you will pardon the pun!). Gillian Hansford gillian_hansford@sil.org

news

send short calendar and signed news items to anthropologytodaynews@gmail.com initiative, blog.wired.com, 26.12.2009). A third Human Terrain social scientist has died. Paula Loyd, who had been doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire, died after two months fighting for her life. Don Ayala, a Human Terrain Team colleague was charged with second-degree murder of the Afghani perpetrator. Also, a translator employed by the Human Terrain project has been indicted of having spent a dozen years working as a Saddam spy in Washington DC. (Shachtman, N. Third Human Terrain researcher dead. blog.wired. com, 8.1.2009; Human Terrain contractor indicted as Saddam spy, 1.12.2008). DAME EDNA, anthropologist? Dame Edna Everage, alter ego of comedian Barry Humphries, describes herself (tongue-in-cheek) as probably the most popular and gifted woman in the world today: housewife, investigative journalist, social anthropologist, talk-show host, swami, childrens book illustrator, spin doctor, megastar, and Icon. (http://www.dame-edna.com/biography.htm). THE FINANCIAL CRISIS Milton Friedman, who died in 2006 at age 94, defined the Chicago School in 1974:.Chicago stands for a belief in the efficacy of the free market as a means of organizing resources, for skepticism about government intervention into economic affairs. The academic world is reassessing the Schools reputation, however. On 14 October University of Chicago students and faculty debated an administration-backed plan for a $200-million research centre to be named after Friedman, with protesters arguing that the institute would enshrine policies that have brought economies near collapse. Marshall Sahlins is quoted as saying: When Friedmans Platonic ideas of free-market virtues are put into practice, they have too often generated a systemic orgy of competitive greed whose remedies, ironically, entail countermeasures of nationalization. Can President-elect Barack Obama meld Chicago Universitys free-market heritage with todays nonstop intervention to bring order to uncharted times? (Lippert, John. U. of C. economist rips federal bailouts: Critics say schools philosophy led to financial collapse. Chicago Sun-Times, 26.12.2008). RAI NEWS A fascinating Wellcome Medal Lecture was delivered on 8 December by Professor Luigi Capasso of Chieti University, Italy, on The paleobiology of the victims of the volcanic eruption of Herculaneum on 25 August, 79 AD. The event was jointly organ-

SOCIAL VS EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY The Times Higher Educational Supplement carried a somewhat exaggerated piece proclaiming that anthropology is at war with itself as the result of a division emerging between socio-cultural and evolutionary anthropology that, seemingly, cannot be reconciled. This elicited a number of responses, including a published letter by Tim Ingold arguing that it is because anthropologists are such a considerate bunch that these debates can flourish without becoming mired in the factionalism of warring camps. (Fearn, H. The great divide. THES, 20.11.2008). ARTICLE FOLLOW-UP Seven projects selected in the first round of the controversial Pentagon Minerva initiative (highlighted by Catherine Lutz in our October issue) have been announced. This includes a project by Mark Woodward, an anthropologist from the University of Arizona on Finding allies for the war of words: Mapping the diffusion and influence of counterradical Muslim discourse. The other projects were awarded to specialists in: political science, arms control, foreign relations and social psychology. (http:// www.defenselink.mil/news/d20081222minerva1.pdf; N. Hodge A closer look at the Pentagons Minerva
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