Peter Mclaren

Informed Comment
Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Sunday, October 21, 2007
The Sadism of the Israeli Occupation
The Guardian reports on a building scandal in Israel over the extreme brutality of its occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Excerpt:

‘ According to Yishai Karin: ‘At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.’ In the words of one soldier: ‘The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That’s when I enjoy it. It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah, and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.’ . . . One described beating women. ‘With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can’t have children. Next time she won’t throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn’t have what to spit with any more.’ ‘

The idea that these sorts of actions derive from ‘lack of training’ is absurd. They derive from hatred and from being able to act with impunity. They are a burden of the strong who have the opportunity to abuse the weak.

The US political elite and media that conceals the brutality of the Israeli occupation for sectional political gains are accomplices to this sadism, and their silence endangers the security of the United States. When we cannot understand why Arab audiences, who are perfectly aware of what the Israeli army has been doing to Palestinians for decades, are outraged, it leads us into policy mistakes in dealing with the Middle East. No one in the US media ever talks about Zionofascism, and the campus groups who yoke the word ‘fascism’ to other religions and peoples are most often trying to divert attention from their own authoritarianism and approval of brutality.

Enough is Enough!

Nooses at Columbia

By SUNSARA TAYLOR

http://www.counterpunch.org/taylor10102007.html

2006: A noose is hung from a “Whites Only” tree in a Jena, Louisiana high school.

September 20th, 2007: tens of thousands descend on Jena in an outraged and joyful protest.

October 9, 2007: a noose is hung at Columbia Teacher’s College as part of a spate of nooses, racist threats and brutality lashing back across the country. A white supremacist website has published the home addresses of the Jena Six, encouraging people to take “justice” into their own hands.

TODAY: Time for everyone who refuses to go backwards and worse to stand up, resist, and take the future into OUR hands!

What are NOOSES?

NOOSES — are an open threat of racist terror rooted in generations of slavery: children auctioned out of their mother’s arms, feet mutilated to prevent against escape, backs scarred with welts from whips.

NOOSES–are in line with a whole system of white supremacy enforced by courts that have warehoused nearly a million Black people into prison, carried out by brutal police who see “driving while Black” as a crime punishable by death, and reinforced through countless daily insults and discrimination large and small.

NOOSES–are a message to Black people as a whole, but particularly Black youth, that the U.S., the so-called “leader of the free world,” has no future for them other than massive criminalization, gangs, dead-end and disappearing jobs, imprisonment, early death or know-nothing-bible-banging.

The hanging of this noose at Columbia also takes place after the appearance of racist graffiti lashing out at communists and advocating “nuk[ing] Mecca, Medina, Tehran, Baghdad, Jakarta, and all the savages in Africa,” and a whole atmosphere of fascist intimidation and thuggery being whipped up and mobilized in the upcoming “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” October 22–26th initiated by David Horowitz. This week involves over 100 campuses, speakers like Ann Coulter, Daniel Pipes, Rick Santorum and is ominously being called “the biggest conservative protest ever.” Invoking progressive themes like “free-speech” and combating “the oppression of women in Islam” as a cover, they plan to harass Muslim Student Associations and Women’s Studies departments, and silence anyone that questions the Bush regime’s official narrative, including even those concerned about global warming.

The people planning this week are the ideological foot-soldiers of a whole fascist clamp-down on society right at a time when the Bush regime is neck-deep into a deeply unpopular and genocidal war in Iraq and is preparing a new potential war against Iran. David Horowitz himself waged a campaign against reparations by crowing that Black people should be grateful for slavery! Horowitz is planning to come and speak at Columbia, along with Fox News host Sean Hannity on October 26th.

This fascist assault will not “just go away” and cannot be ignored. It must be exposed, confronted with the truth about who the real fascists are, and politically defeated.

If anything cried out with urgency for a revolutionary movement and massive political resistance it is the world today: the nooses, the legalized torture, the wars for empire, the moves towards a dark ages theocracy for women and gays and science, and the massive grinding up of human lives and human potential in the vast sweatshops, swelling shanty-towns slums, and whole regions left to waste in disease and disaster.

We have learned from the righteous history of rising up and fighting against the oppression of Black people, against unjust wars, the oppression of women and from revolutionary struggles for emancipation the world over–power concedes nothing without a struggle!

Two futures are being posed for this generation…what will you do? The direction of the whole world is being fought over–campus life cannot go back to normal.

It is time for a new generation to wake up and fight for a whole different world!
What could be more important than that?

Who Is David Horowitz?

It is worth reprinting this description from Revolution Newspaper:

Horowitz is a self-described “battering ram” against any thinking in academia that challenges a whole range of lies this system has perpetrated. He’s played a major role in slandering, hounding, and even ending the careers of progressive teachers. Horowitz established his credentials with the ruling class by renouncing his involvement in the 1960s movements for social change in a series of slanderous articles, books and conferences. He “made his bones” in the ’90s, by waging a high-profile campaign against reparations for African-Americans, with the theme that Black people should be grateful for slavery! Horowitz took out huge ads in campus newspapers proclaiming this vicious lie and to this day makes it a major part of his attack. He wrote a book on the “art of political war” that Karl Rove distributed to key Republican campaign operatives. He is a vitriolic defender of everything from the extermination of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people, to the savage and criminal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture of those whom this regime deems to be terrorists. He has set up a website that clamors for the arrest and imprisonment of revolutionaries, radicals, dissenters and liberals and reports every slander, rumor, lie and innuendo that comes his way. And, bankrolled from the ruling class, he has organized the falsely named “Students for Academic Freedom,” which literally takes notes on lectures and rips things out of context in an attempt to get professors who do not sufficiently bow down to the Bush agenda fired. The modern-day Nazi-type student groups inspired by Horowitz organize so-called “games” like “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” on campus. In short, Horowitz defends every crime that this system has ever committed and is now preparing to justify even more, and to intimidate and silence any who would question or resist this.

Sunsara Taylor writes for Revolution Newspaper and sits on the Advisory Board of The World Can’t Wait–Drive Out the Bush Regime. She can be reached at: sunsarasworld@yahoo.com

October 7, 2007
Colonial anthropology
Filed under: Academia, imperialism/globalization, science — louisproyect @ 7:05 pm

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/10/07/colonial-anthropology/

Last Friday the New York Times reported that anthropologists have been working alongside the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to make the occupation more effective:

In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

This is not the only instance of professionals becoming handmaidens to the Bush White House. It has recruited psychologists to fine-tune interrogation techniques in Guantanamo over the protests of some members of the profession.

David Price

Anthropologists have also intervened to challenge the misuse of their skills. Chief among them is David Price, who has launched a Pledge of Non-participation in Counter-insurgency. Background articles can be found here. A number of them were written by Price and are included along with others in his excellent website. One of them that originally appeared in the Nation Magazine quite rightfully lauds Franz Boas:

On December 20, 1919, under the heading “Scientists as Spies,” The Nation published a letter by Franz Boas, the father of academic anthropology in America. Boas charged that four American anthropologists, whom he did not name, had abused their professional research positions by conducting espionage in Central America during the First World War. Boas strongly condemned their actions, writing that they had “prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies.” Anthropologists spying for their country severely betrayed their science and damaged the credibility of all anthropological research, Boas wrote; a scientist who uses his research as a cover for political spying forfeits the right to be classified as a scientist.

Franz Boas 1858-1942

While there are many reasons to admire Boas’s courage, his academic record was not entirely unblemished. While at the Museum of Natural History, Boas decided that Eskimos were suitable objects for study, because they represented a kind of “living fossil” that demonstrated a connection to Ice Age hunters in Europe. So eager was he to have some useful specimens that he commissioned Robert Peary to bring back some back from an Arctic expedition on his ship “The Hope.” Some 30,000 New Yorkers paid 25 cents each in 1896 to view the six Eskimos that Peary retrieved from their home. Later on they were transported to the basement of the Museum in order to be studied. When a reporter asked Boas how they were kept busy, he replied:

Oh, we try to give them little things to keep them busy. Their work doesn’t amount to much, but they have made some carvings, and occupied themselves either indoors or around the place with any employment that suggested itself to them. They do not seem discontented.

Only 8 months after their arrival, four of the six Eskimos had died of tuberculosis. One returned to Greenland and the last, a young boy named Minik who was the son of Qisuk, one of the deceased, remained in the custody of William Wallace, the Superintendent of the Museum. When Minik learned that tribal customs required the bones of ancestors be interred in their homeland, he was convinced by Boas and Wallace that a burial of the bones in New York City would suffice. When he reached the age of 15, he learned that Boas and Wallace had lied to him. The skeleton was being warehoused in the Museum’s basement, alongside hundreds of other bones that belonged to indigenous peoples. In “Skull Wars,” a book focused on the Kennewick man controversy, David Hurst Thomas, a curator of anthropology at the Museum of Natural History, recounts Boas’s flippant attitude toward the entire affair:

Pressed as to why the museum could claim Qisuk’s body when relatives were still alive, Boas replied, “Oh, that was perfectly legitimate. There was no one to bury the body, and the museum had as good a right to it as any other institution authorized to claim bodies.” When an Evening Mail reporter wondered if the body didn’t actually “belong” to Minik, Boas bristled “Well, Minik was just a little boy, and he did not ask for the body. If he had, he might have got it.”

Minik in New York

Minik’s lifelong struggle to retrieve his father’s skeleton and return them to his native soil has been documented in Ken Harper’s “Give Me My Father’s Body: The Story of Minik, the New York Eskimo.” A review of this book by Rhode Island College professor Russell A. Potter includes this observation on the cold-blooded “scientific” stance of Boas and Alfred Kroeber, a student of Boas’s who became famous for his writings on “Ishi”, the last hunter-gatherer in California.

They were brought to a damp basement room, and as might have been foreseen, most of them soon came down with tuberculosis, against which they had little resistance. Studied, even as they were dying, by some of the most prominent anthropologists of the day, including Franz Boas (also remembered as Zora Neale Hurston’s thesis advisor) and Alfred Kroeber (”discoverer” of Ishi and father of science-fiction novelist Ursula K. LeGuin), their last days were spent in agonizing pain without benefit of meaningful medical attention.

Considering that Franz Boas was one of the foremost critics of racial doctrines in the US, as well as a fierce opponent of the kind of misuse of anthropology now on display in Iraq and Afghanistan, one must surely wonder about the nature of such a social science. It is fairly easy to understand why an ardent Zionist and cultural anthropologist like Raphael Patai would write trash like “The Arab Mind.” But what explains Boas’s callous attitudes?

I think the key to understanding this kind of tunnel vision is unequal power relationships. No matter how enlightened the scientist, there is a built in imbalance in the way that one side is doing the studying and the other side is being studied. This imbalance rests on economic inequality. “Primitive” peoples simply lack the capital to fund scientific expeditions of the sort that Boas thought useful. Historical laws of capital accumulation made it impossible for Eskimos to send ships to countries like the United States to retrieve specimens to be studied in Greenland or Alaska. Fundamentally, anthropology rests on imperialist inequality no matter the good intentions of the scholars involved.

Some of the earliest attempts to institutionalize anthropology reflect this tendency, no matter the benign goals of those involved with the enterprise. In an article titled “The Discipline and its Sponsors” that appears in the collection “Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter” edited by Talal Asad, Stephan Feuchtang describes the birth of British anthropology as having an umbilical cord in the Empire.

Formed in February 1843 as a breakaway group of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, which had been founded in 1837 in the aftermath of the early 19th century Quaker campaign against the African slave trade, the Royal Anthropological Institute was to be “a centre and depository for the collection and systematization of all observations made on human races” as the RAI describes itself on its website.

Incorporating Wilberforce’s evangelistic fervor, the RAI sought “not to halt European colonisation overseas, but to change its character.” Feuchtwang sums up their approach:

The scientific aim, repeated into the present day, was archival, historical, and an academic reason for focusing on small-scale social units and not on large-scale systems, namely to record data from peoples vanishing through contact with Europeans—the aborigines of Australia, Oceania and the East Indies, the so-called tribals of India and tribes of Africa, not the so-called civilisations of the Far East and India, Malaya, Burma, Siam, the Middle East. The administrative aim was to co-ordinate information on the subject peoples for the preparation of colonial administrators so that they would not make anew the mistakes of the past.

Lord Hailey, a colonial administrator and member of the RAI, was a perfect symbol of this marriage between social science and social control. While in South Africa, Hailey employed a staff of anthropologists to conduct surveys of native peoples intended “to study the problems of culture contact and the application of anthropological knowledge to the government of subject races.” Feuchtwang describes Hailey’s mission in terms that will be instantly recognizable in terms of the tasks facing General Petraeus and his right-hand man, an Australian Lieutenant Colonel named David Kilcullen who has a PhD in anthropology with Islamic extremism in Indonesia his research topic.

Lord Hailey was obviously central in the articulation of colonial administration and professional anthropology. Writing from the vantage point of 1944 he described colonial development as passing through three stages, the first being introduction of law and order and creation of basic infrastructure for the economic development (i.e. extraction) of natural resources, the second, which he judged had then been reached, being one in which the colonial administration is faced with the ‘problem of assisting the indigenous communities to advance their social life and to better their standard of living.’ This would lead to the next stage, which he envisaged as the political advance of indigenous peoples. So his practical and effective interest in anthropology coincided with his second stage of colonial development. The anthropology which took his administrative interest was not the study of human origins, it was the study of how societies work. And the societies with which he thought administrators needed most help from anthropologists were not societies where an easily understood and compatible system could be incorporated easily to colonial rule using native personnel. These, we may note, were the ‘civilisations’ and ‘despotisms’ of the East, given to another set of academic disciplines and institutions altogether —namely, Oriental studies. Anthropology could help with another kind of people and imperial problem, tribal peoples of India and Africa and the Pacific ‘where administrators encountered cultures which were to them of a novel type, and where they did not find personnel of a class which they could readily associate with themselves in the formation of the legal administrative institutions of the country’ (i.e. colony).

Montgomery McFate

One of the odder figures to emerge out of the controversy over anthropologists and the US military is the oddly named Montgomery McFate, a Yale professor, who tries to strike an unconventional image no matter how conventional her ideas about American foreign policy. In an April 29, 2007 SF Gate profile, she is described as a “a punk rock wild child of dyed-in-the-wool hippies, a 41-year-old with close-cropped hair and a voice buttery with sardonic amusement, a double-doc Ivy Leaguer with a penchant for big hats and American Spirit cigarettes and a nose that still bears the tiny dent of a piercing 25 years closed.”

McFate also attracted the attention of New Yorker contributor and liberal hawk George Packer, who reported on her and David Kilcullen in an article titled “Knowing the Enemy: Can Social Scientists redefine the ‘war on terror’“. Although Packer has arrived at a somewhat pro forma opposition to the war in Iraq, it seems obvious that he would revert to his original pro-Bush outlook if people like Kilcullen and McFate produced results. Packer writes:

McFate grew up in the sixties on a communal houseboat in Marin County, California. Her parents were friends with Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and one of her schoolmates was the daughter of Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. Like Kilcullen, she was drawn to the study of human conflict and also its reality: at Yale, where she received a doctorate, her dissertation was based on several years she spent living among supporters of the Irish Republican Army and then among British counterinsurgents. In Northern Ireland, McFate discovered something very like what Kilcullen found in West Java: insurgency runs in families and social networks, held together by persistent cultural narratives—in this case, the eight-hundred-year-old saga of “perfidious Albion.” She went on to marry a U.S. Army officer. “When I was little in California, we never believed there was such a thing as the Cold War,” McFate said. “That was a bunch of lies that the government fed us to keep us paranoid. Of course, there was a thing called the Cold War, and we nearly lost. And there was no guarantee that we were going to win. And this thing that’s happening now is, without taking that too far, similar.” After September 11th, McFate said, she became “passionate about one issue: the government’s need to actually understand its adversaries,” in the same way that the United States came to understand—and thereby undermine—the Soviet Union. If, as Kilcullen and Crumpton maintain, the battlefield in the global counterinsurgency is intimately local, then the American government needs what McFate calls a “granular” knowledge of the social terrains on which it is competing.

Meanwhile, the NY Times cited at the beginning of this article is clear that the real Montgomery McFate has far more in common with Condoleezza Rice, no matter the outre appearance. It reported:

The process that led to the creation of the teams began in late 2003, when American officers in Iraq complained that they had little to no information about the local population. Pentagon officials contacted Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the Navy who advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy.

Ms. McFate helped develop a database in 2005 that provided officers with detailed information on the local population. The next year, Steve Fondacaro, a retired Special Operations colonel, joined the program and advocated embedding social scientists with American combat units.

Ms. McFate, the program’s senior social science adviser and an author of the new counterinsurgency manual, dismissed criticism of scholars working with the military. “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology,” she said. “But we’re really anthropologizing the military.”

If nothing, McFate is certainly familiar with the anti-imperialist wing of her profession. In an article titled ” Anthropology and counterinsurgency: the strange story of their curious relationship” that appeared in the March-April, 2005, Military Review, McFate cites Feuchtwang’s article in notes 21 and 22:

In Britain the development and growth of anthropology was deeply connected to colonial administration. As early as 1908, anthropologists began training administrators of the Sudanese civil service. This relationship was quickly institutionalized: in 1921, the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures was established with financing from various colonial governments, and Lord Lugard, the former governor of Nigeria, became head of its executive council. The organization’s mission was based on Bronislaw Malinowski’s article, “Practical Anthropology,” which argued that anthropological knowledge should be applied to solve the problems faced by colonial administrators, including those posed by “’savage law, economics, customs, and institutions.” (21) Anthropological knowledge was frequently useful, especially in understanding the power dynamics in traditional societies. In 1937, for example, the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Standing Committee on Applied Anthropology noted that anthropological research would “indicate the persons who hold key positions in the community and whose influence it would be important to enlist on the side of projected reforms.” In the words of Lord Hailey, anthropologists were indeed “of great assistance in providing Government with knowledge which must be the basis of administrative policy.” (22)

Citing Feuchtwang is of course not the same thing as agreeing with him. Indeed, she obviously views his aversion to colonial administrators exploiting the services of his profession as a hangover from the Vietnam era:

Although anthropology is the only academic discipline that explicitly seeks to understand foreign cultures and societies, it is a marginal contributor to U.S. national-security policy at best and a punch line at worst. Over the past 30 years, as a result of anthropologists’ individual career choices and the tendency toward reflexive self-criticism contained within the discipline itself, the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its Ivory Tower…

The retreat to the Ivory Tower is also a product of the deep isolationist tendencies within the discipline. Following the Vietnam War, it was fashionable among anthropologists to reject the discipline’s historic ties to colonialism. Anthropologists began to reinvent their discipline, as demonstrated by Kathleen Gough’s 1968 article, Anthropology. Child of Imperialism, followed by Dell Hymes’ 1972 anthology, Reinventing Anthropology, and culminating in editor Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter.

It is this “reflexive self-criticism” of course that David Price wants to keep alive, over and against the efforts of people like David Kilcullen and Montgomery McFate. Against their unseemly desire to keep the academy out of the business of killing, McState urges reconciliation:

DOD [Department of Defense] yearns for cultural knowledge, but anthropologists en masse, bound by their own ethical code and sunk in a mire of postmodernism, are unlikely to contribute much of value to reshaping national-security policy or practice. Yet, if anthropologists remain disengaged, who will provide the relevant subject matter expertise? As Anna Simons, an anthropologist who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, points out: “If anthropologists want to put their heads in the sand and not assist, then who will the military, the CIA, and other agencies turn to for information? They’ll turn to people who will give them the kind of information that should make anthropologists want to rip their hair out because the information won’t be nearly as directly connected to what’s going on on the local landscape.”

The goal of this reconciliation would be to destroy the insurgency in both Iraq and Afghanistan and to consolidate puppet governments that would be obedient to the will of the American ruling class, although McState puts in a somewhat different manner:

Successful counterinsurgency depends on attaining a holistic, total understanding of local culture. This cultural understanding must be thorough and deep if it is to have any practical benefit at all. This fact is not lost on the Army. In the language of interim FM 3-07.22: “The center of gravity in counterinsurgency operations is the population. Therefore, understanding the local society and gaining its support is critical to success. For U.S. forces to operate effectively among a local population and gain and maintain their support, it is important to develop a thorough understanding of the society and its culture, including its history, tribal/family/social structure, values, religions, customs, and needs.”

To defeat the insurgency in Iraq, U.S. and coalition forces must recognize and exploit the underlying tribal structure of the country; the power wielded by traditional authority figures; the use of Islam as a political ideology; the competing interests of the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds; the psychological effects of totalitarianism; and the divide between urban and rural, among other things.

My guess is that colonial anthropology will meet with the same success that it met with in Vietnam, for after all the problem is not us understanding the native, but the natives understanding us all too well.

6 Comments »
Thanks for this sharp piece on the rather sordid history of anthros. and governments. There’ve been recent revelations about the struggle within the psychologists’ assoc. over collaboration with the military—and presumably “contractors”—branches of government. It’s enough to make me want to run out and buy Naomi Klein’s new book.

Comment by talapus pete — October 7, 2007 @ 8:33 pm

It is interesting that McFate did her PhD at Yale, which is where the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber was a faculty member before he was booted out, possibly for being too activist outside of class hours. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber). Apparently McFate did not publish her PhD on the IRA due to ethical reasons - obviously ethics did not, however, prevent her from moving on to working for the military.

Comment by Ed — October 7, 2007 @ 10:29 pm

Really good post. I like the point about the inequality between studier and subject.

Comment by Renegade Eye — October 8, 2007 @ 4:13 am

You might be interested in some of the discussion over at this blog.

http://savageminds.org/

Comment by Sheldon — October 8, 2007 @ 4:26 am

[…] Colonial Anthropology discusses Times article on anthropologists enlisted in Army […]

Pingback by » Embedded anthropologists — October 8, 2007 @ 7:57 pm

Never thought of my father as “fashionable” I must say.

Comment by hymes — October 9, 2007 @ 1:46 pm

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Read:

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/10/07/colonial-anthropology/

Also read:

Network of Concerned Anthropologists

Pledge of Non-participation in Counter-insurgency

We, the undersigned, believe that anthropologists should not engage in research and other activities that contribute to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq or in related theaters in the “war on terror.” Furthermore, we believe that anthropologists should refrain from directly assisting the US military in combat, be it through torture, interrogation, or tactical advice.
US military and intelligence agencies and military contractors have identified “cultural knowledge,” “ethnographic intelligence,” and “human terrain mapping” as essential to US-led military intervention in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. Consequently, these agencies have mounted a drive to recruit professional anthropologists as employees and consultants. While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world, protects US soldiers on the battlefield, or promotes cross-cultural understanding, at base it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties. By so doing, such work breaches relations of openness and trust with the people anthropologists work with around the world and, directly or indirectly, enables the occupation of one country by another. In addition, much of this work is covert. Anthropological support for such an enterprise is at odds with the humane ideals of our discipline as well as professional standards.
We are not all necessarily opposed to other forms of anthropological consulting for the state, or for the military, especially when such cooperation contributes to generally accepted humanitarian objectives. A variety of views exist among us, and the ethical issues are complex. Some feel that anthropologists can effectively brief diplomats or work with peacekeeping forces without compromising professional values. However, work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another violates professional standards.
Consequently, we pledge not to undertake research or other activities in support of counter-insurgency work in Iraq or in related theaters in the “war on terror,” and we appeal to colleagues everywhere to make the same commitment.

http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home

http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article576

Education
Socialist Educators and Capitalist Education
Dave Hill

Dave Hill, Professor of Education Policy at the University of Northampton asks what does education do in capitalist Britain, in the capitalist world? What can Marxist educators do about it? Recognising the limitations - but also the opportunities of efforts by socialist and critical educators, by socialist teachers, who try to work as critical organic public transformative intellectuals, where should we put our efforts?
It’s not easy. The limitations on socialist action through the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the state, such as schooling, that work for the most part on behalf of capital, are considerable. Non-promotion, sidelining, denigration, even dismissals, are common among socialist activist teachers. Lots of us have been there. [1]
Capitalist Teacher Education
How far has education got the potential to fuel the flames of resistance to global capitalism, as well as the passion for socialist transformation? The transformative potential of teachers can be exaggerated. How far can intellectual workers, knowledge workers, or political journalists, and the ideas they develop, change the world, or indeed, change some of our students, colleagues, readers?
The amount of agency, autonomy we have, has always been circumscribed. Critical Marxist voices always have been. And in England and Wales, since the 1988 Education Reform Act and National Curriculum for schools, and the 1992/1993 restructuring of teacher education (renamed ‘training’), spaces within the subject curriculum and within pedagogy - the methods we use - have been narrowed.
Detheorized Teacher Education
Part of this clamping down is the detheorization of initial teacher education (ITE). Study of the social, political and economic contexts of schooling and education has been hidden and expunged. In England and Wales, and elsewhere, ITE is now rigorously policed. ‘How to’ has replaced ‘why to’ in a technicist curriculum based on ‘delivery’ of a quietist and overwhelmingly conservative set of ‘standards’ for student teachers. This has had a major impact on the teaching force, and thereby on schooling. Teachers are now, by and large, trained in skills rather than educated to examine the ‘whys and the why nots’ and the contexts of curriculum, pedagogy, educational purposes and structures and the effects these have on reproducing capitalist economy, society and politics. [2]
Of course, many teachers and students resist, and, by virtue of the material conditions of their own and their families’ and communities’ existence, see through the common sense acceptances of capitalist society and a quietist schooling system. But many don’t. Here, the roles of organization and solidarity, in trade unions and other movements and organizations - and the roles of ideas and counter-hegemonic ideology – of socialist ideas and analyses and plans - are both necessary. The latter for advancing labour, economic and work practice issues to wider ideological interpretation, discussion, development. The former for making sure that ideas don’t remain in ivory towers, on CVs, or people’s front-rooms.
Some people are brilliant organisers, devoted attenders and motivators at meetings. Others write well! Others try to develop theory, to analyse what’s going on, to apply, question and develop Marxist analyses, strategy, tactics and programmes. That’s what our newspapers and leaflets and theoretical journals and books aimed at the public, or at teachers, or at academics, try to do. To develop class consciousness, critical awareness, anger at capitalist (and racist/ sexist/ homophobic) oppression, to develop passion, commitment.
Both organisers and theoreticians are important. Some are gifted at all of these activities. Many can act as both, and in a sense we all do. Action informs understanding, and understanding informs action… but not unproblematically so. Work and critiques of ideology is hard work. Some are better at one or the other.
Critical education for economic and social justice - or socialist education - is where teachers and educators try to act as critical transformative and public intellectuals within and outside of sites of economic, ideological and cultural reproduction. Such activity is both deconstructive and reconstructive, offering a politics of anger, analysis and hope that recognises, yet challenges, the strength of the structures and apparatuses of Capital.
The Role of Intellectuals and the Politics of Socialist Education
What role can educators and other cultural workers play in the struggle for economic and social justice? Support the current system? Ignore it? Go along with post-Marxist and Left-Revisionist acceptance of capitalism? Or should education and other cultural workers organise with others in opposition to capital, seeking its transformation and replacement?
Within classrooms socialist educators seek to enable student teachers and teachers (and school students) to critically evaluate – that is, from a Marxist perspective - a range of salient perspectives and ideologies – including critical reflection itself – while showing a commitment to egalitarianism and socialism.
Socialist pedagogy must remain self-critical, and critique its own presumed role as the metatruth - the gospel - of educational criticism. This does not imply forced acceptance or silencing of contrary perspectives. But it does involve a privileging of socialist, egalitarian and emancipatory perspectives. This does mean adhering to ‘critical pedagogy’, as opposed to ‘critical theory’, since critical thinking’s claim is, at heart, to teach how to think critically, not how to think politically. For Marxists, and for (some) critical pedagogues/teachers, this is a false distinction.
Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy
In the USA a new, Marxist development in what is known as critical pedagogy, is revolutionary critical pedagogy. Its principal exponent is Peter McLaren. While not sweeping the shopping malls or indeed universities and schools, it is having a developing impact on a number of new and young educators. This impact is both theoretical and practical, in the cases of some adherents, it is praxis, practice informed theory and theory informed practice at the same time. Some of their work, and some of their praxis in schools and colleges and in wider arenas, is published in online journals such the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies that I edit, Cultural Logic and Workplace, a Journal of Academic Labor. [3] Of course these are drops in the ocean of racist, sexist, individualistic imperialist capitalist media and schooling. But then, so was the Communist Manifesto! And many combine revolutionary critical pedagogy, or socialist education, with activism within the other arenas of activism, within the USA and the UK, and more globally, too, within trade unions, trade union left groups groups such as Socialist Teachers’ Alliance and, in the USA, the Rouge Forum. [4] So what should and can we do within the limitations of our own lives, skills, opportunities, energy?
United States critical educators McLaren and Farahmandpur ask, ‘how do we organize teachers and students against domestic trends [e.g. the deepening inequalities and exploitation under capital] … and also enable them to link these trends to global capitalism and the new imperialism? What pedagogical discourses and approaches can we use?’ Among their suggestions are that it, ‘has to be critical; that is, it must locate the underlying causes of class exploitation and economic oppression within the social, political, and economic arrangements of capitalist social relations of production.’
It must be profoundly systematic in the sense that it is guided by Marx’s dialectical method of inquiry, which begins with the ‘real concrete’ circumstances of the oppressed masses and moves toward a classification, conceptualization, analysis, and breaking down of the concrete social world into units of abstractions in order to reach the essence of social phenomena under investigation. Next, it reconstructs and makes the social world intelligible by transforming and translating theory into concrete social and political activity. It, ‘should be participatory. It involves building coalitions among community members, grassroots movements, church organizations and labor unions.’ [5]
Arenas for Resistance
Arena 1: Within the Education and Media Apparatuses
The first arena is within the sites of education and the media. Educators and cultural workers should develop ‘critical reflection’ and a commitment to critical and egalitarian action - to socialist action. Teacher education, for example, has to be about more than classroom abilities limited to passing out pre-set nationally approved ‘facts’ plus competence in crowd control. Teachers without the capacity to stimulate critical enquiry leave education always on the edge of indoctrination and quiescence.
School and teacher education courses, film and other media need to present equality issues: on racism, sexism, social class inequality, homophobia, and discrimination/prejudice/regarding disability and special needs. And on how Marxist analysis and action can develop insights and action. Many teachers and students are simply not aware of the existence of such data in education and society or the impact of individual labelling, and of structural discriminations on the lives and education and life-opportunities of the children in their classes, schools and society.
However limited in any particular historical, spatial and political conjunction within capital, resistant and counter-hegemonic acts are possible and necessary, as is socialist utopianism (different from utopian socialism of Marx’s era) – the analysis of the present and the vision and planning for an egalitarian, democratic socialist future. Recognition at any time or place of the contemporary limitations on the counter-hegemonic effectiveness of the actions of teachers or journalists need not lead to negativity and despair - it can lead to a realistic understanding that, where possible, broader alliances and other arenas of actions can be the appropriate strategy for socialist transformation of society.
Arena 2: Working Outside of the Classroom!
Using schools and educational sites as arenas of cultural struggle and education in general as a vehicle for social transformation is premised upon a clear commitment to work with communities, [6] parents and students, and with the trade unions and workers within those institutions. This is the second arena of resistance, working outside of the classroom on issues relating to education and its role in reproducing inequality and oppression.
Working ‘with’ means ‘knowing’ the daily, material existence of the exploited class strata and groups. Ideally it means fulfilling the role of the organic and public intellectual, linked to and part of those groups, acting publically, displaying what Gramsci termed ‘civic courage’. This also means working with communities in developing the understanding that schools and education themselves are places of social, economic and ideological contestation, not ‘neutral’ or ‘fair’ or ‘inevitable’, but sites of class domination. It is thereby important to develop awareness of the role of education in capital reproduction and in the reproduction of class relations.
Arena 3: Mass Action as part of a Broader Movement for Economic and Social Justice
Globally and nationally societies are developing and have always developed, to a greater or lesser degree, critical educators, community activists, organic intellectuals, students and teachers whose feelings of outrage at economic and social class and racial and gender and other forms of oppression lead them and us into activism. Thus, the third arena for resistance is action across a broader agenda, linking issues and experience within different economic and social sectors, linking different struggles.
This arena is linked to the other arenas. It is being part of action, part of networks, part of mini - and of mass action. Ideological intervention in classrooms and in other cultural sites can have dramatic effect, not least on some individuals and groups who are ‘hailed’ or, ‘interpellated’ by resistant ideology. However, actualising that ideology, that opposition to oppressive law or state or capitalist action, the effect of taking part in, feeling the solidarity, feeling the blood stir, feeling the pride in action, the joint learning that comes from that experience, can develop confidence, understanding, commitment.
Anti-capitalist protests and events locally, nationally, globally, are/ have been a learning experience for those who thought such mass actions - whether internationally or nationally, were a product of a bygone age. Through well organised and focused non-sectarian campaigns around class and anti-capitalist issues those committed to economic and social equality and justice and environmental sustainability can work towards local, national and international campaigns, towards an understanding that we are part of a massive force - the force of the international - and growing - working class - with a shared understanding that, at the current time, it is the global neo-liberal form of capitalism - indeed, capitalism itself - that shatters the lives, bodies and dreams of billions. And that it can be replaced - by Socialism.
Dave Hill is series editor for the Routledge Series Education and Marxism, and the Series Education and Neoliberalism, both to be published in 2008.

NOTES
[1] For a minor, but typical, autobiographical example, see my ‘Brief Autobiography of a Bolshie Dismissed’, Hill, 2003 at http://www.ieps.org.uk.cwc.net/bolsharticle.pdf.

[2] D.Hill, 2007, ‘Critical Teacher Education, New Labour in Britain, and the Global Project of Neoliberal Capital’, Policy Futures, 5 (2). Online at http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pfie/content/pdfs/5/issue5_2.asp.

[3] See www.jceps.com, http://clogic.eserver.org/, http://www.cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/.

[4] See http://www.socialist-teacher.org/, http://www.rougeforum.org/.

[5] McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005, Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, p 9. See also McLaren, 2005, McLaren, P. (2005) Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire, Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield.

[6] See, for example, Martin, 2005, ‘You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Bus: Critical Pedagogy as Community Praxis’. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 3 (2). Online at http://www.jceps.com/index.php?pageID=article&articleID=47.