Book Review - Anthropologists in the SecurityScape: Ethics, Practice and Professional Identity
Anthropologists in the SecurityScape: Ethics, Practice and Professional Identity
Written by: Robert Albro, George E. Marcus, Laura A. McNamara, and Monica Schoch-Spana (eds),
Left Coast Press, 2011,
ISBN 9781611320138, 277pp
Reviewed by: Scott Flower, University of Melbourne
The importance of understanding the social and cultural dimensions of complex operational environments has become more evident to Western militaries through recent counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2006, American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand forces have become increasingly aware that better understanding of local populations’ cultures and societies is necessary in order to win the battle for ‘hearts and minds’. More recently, socio-cultural knowledge has been sought to help reduce ‘green on blue’ insider attacks by Afghan forces on ISAF troops, a factor which has contributed to improvements in cultural awareness education generally within pre-deployment training.
With anthropologists often perceived as ‘experts’ in the study of culture, it is perhaps not surprising that militaries have actively sought their advice to improve operational effectiveness and reduce casualties. The US military’s increased interest in anthropology polarised and divided the anthropological community in America and contributed to the American Anthropological Association’s Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC). Anthropologists in the SecurityScape evolved in part as a response to the CEAUSSIC process which examined the alleged ‘weaponization of anthropology’ and the ethics of anthropology’s renewed engagement with the US military.
Thankfully, this US-centric book does not rehash the ethical issues previously covered by CEAUSSIC. Instead, the volume provides an informative understanding of the wider role of anthropology and anthropologists by drawing on the discipline’s unique methods of self-reflexivity and ethnography.
The book contains 16 highly granular personal accounts of the complex and varied work of cultural, physical, and linguistic anthropologists and archaeologists employed in their professional capacity to work with and advise the military in both military and civil-military environments. The contributors’ range of roles and backgrounds in the so-called ‘SecurityScape’ include professional military education, intelligence analysis, academia, non-government organisations, government research institutes and positions within the US defense bureaucracy itself.
Anthropologists in the SecurityScape uses an innovative, reflective method with chapters formulaically structured as a dialogue. Each chapter begins with an anthropologist reflecting on his/her own experience working in the ‘SecurityScape’. Each author’s auto-ethnography is then critically appraised by the editors, and followed with a rebuttal by the anthropologist. This process generates a dialogue about the practical, ethical and civic responsibilities that come with scholarly knowledge of other cultures. The chapters are free of discipline-specific jargon and easy to read. Despite the subjectivity of each chapter, I was struck by how seamlessly the chapters talk to one another, a result of careful work by the editors.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan is underway and Western military and intelligence communities are restructuring for the twenty-first century in an era of austerity. This book therefore provides a timely and important contribution to the wider debate on the role and capabilities of social scientists in national security, and their place in a ‘whole of nation’ approach to security.
Anthropologists in the SecurityScape could have been improved in three major ways. First, statistics showing or discussing the total number of anthropologists working in the SecurityScape would have enhanced the reader’s empirical understanding of the scale of anthropology’s engagement with the military. Second, the book could have discussed whether the US military has derived ‘lessons learned’ from its recent closer engagement with anthropology and the study of the cultural dimensions of military operations. Third, the book could have discussed whether the socio-cultural capabilities developed through recent counterinsurgency campaigns will be sustained post-Afghanistan and how current capabilities might be reconfigured for military operations other than war, such as for stabilisation, peacekeeping and conflict prevention (‘phase-zero’).
This book is refreshing in the way it demonstrates the varied and applied ways in which anthropology can be taken as a vocation outside the discipline’s largely academic form. It will be of equal interest to anthropologists following the debate over the discipline’s ‘weaponization’ and to those professionally employed within the national security and defence establishment.
