Anthropology or Some Shit Like That

Here is some more information that I drudged up about the shit unfolding in Palestine. More shit about the energy crisis.
“Gaza siege intensified after collapse of natural gas deal”, by Mark Turner
“Egypt begins pumping gas to Israel despite Gaza siege”, by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani
“Gaza gas deal divides Israeli politicians”, by Palestine Media Center

In 2001 there was 1.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas discovered off the Gaza Strip under Palestinian coastal waters. Subsequently The Palestine Investment Fund contracted out The British Gas Group to develop the extraction of that gas. As of toady, negotiations are ongoing to deliver that gas to the domestic market of Israel, and NOT the Palestinian people. Palestine has been going without adequate fuel supplies and many regions have been without power. Palestine is facing a humanitarian crisis and the issue has been completely buried from the American public. I have heard one news source bring up this issue. Click here to hear a radio interview by Mark Turner, human rights activist, and international director of Research Journalism Initiative.

Ralph Nader has decided to run again for President. And I support him. And here is why:

I know some of you might think that Nader will grab votes from the Democratic Party, but after having reflected upon this issue I have come to the conclusion that since McCain has been drawing independents to his side Nader will pull votes from both parties. Moreover, I believe that this country needs more parties. Sure, we do not have a parliamentary system that seats representatives according to popular, and delegates are won on an all or nothing basis, but we need more voices, and choices than our political binary offers. I am tired of our two-party system and the triangulation tactics that they use to conflate the two.

I like Obama, and before Nader entered the race I supported him. But here are several reasons that I have reconsidered my support for him. Obama used to be for a single payer healthcare system. Now, he is not. Nader will push for a single payer system. Obama used to be critical of Israel. Now he is a supporter. The truth about Israel is that they have been practicing systematic genocide against the people of Palestine since World War Two. Currently there is 1.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas off Palestinian coastal wasters that the Palestinian authority has contracted out to the British Gas Group to develop the extraction of, and currently negotiations are ongoing to have that gas delivered to the Israeli domestic market and NOT to the Palestinian people. The Gaza strip has gone without power in many places and all the while Palestinian gas is en route to Israel. Ralph Nader will do something about the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East. Obama has expressed no interests in curbing our use of nuclear fuels, although he campaigned in Nevada on a platform opposing Yucca Mountain. I firmly believe that we need alternative fuel sources and that the majority of American people want them developed as well. Moreover, we cannot continue to criticize Iran and other countries for their development of nuclear fuels and do nothing to curb our own use. I have my doubts about the mainstream party candidates, including Obama.

Obama appears to be waffling on his timetable commitment to withdraw troops from Iraq. Let us not forgot that Nixon ran on a campaign promise to withdraw troops from Vietnam in six months, but after being elected ran into “complications”. I have spent two years studying under Ralph Nader’s sister at Berkeley and I trust Ralph Nader. His word is a word that I trust. Nader will bring to the table solutions to issues that the American people want but the mainstream political agenda will not consider; like putting solar and wind technologies before nuclear and decreasing the swelling military budget. Obama may have been against the war to start but he has voted to fund the war since then. Congress could have ended this war if they stopped funding it; Cheney even challenged Congress to do so (remember?).

As for the other candidates, I have never supported Hillary (for reasons I will not vent in this article, but it suffices to say that all my criticisms of Obama apply to her). I cannot support McCain and his position of the Iraqi War and the Bush tax cuts.

I believe that we must take a strong hard look at the caveat that our first President gave us after he left office, to be wary of a two-party system. Our country has a long history of confusing the two parties. The Democrats used to be the Republicans and visa-versa. Democracy is fundamentally about having choices, and you cannot have choices without options on the ballot. This is why Nader is running for office and why I ask you to consider supporting him. I asked myself the other night an illuminating question that I hope you will all consider. If you were to run for political office one day would you want to be pigeon holed into running as a Democrat or a Republican? We have never had a President who was not Christian, and yet how many people in this country are not Christian? The majority. I am none of the above, and I want my right as a potential future candidate for elected office to not be marginalized if I do not join forces with the mainstream politics.

Nader is running for candidate rights. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate”. Nader is running because he believes in the right for all to participate in government, and fundamentally democracy is about choice. And you cannot have choice without options. This is why I support Ralph Nader.

My main impression with regard to the position of this Government with regard to the Far East is that we are greatly over-extended in our whole thinking about what we can accomplish, and should try to accomplish, in that area. This applies, unfortunately, to the people in our country as well as to the Government.

It is urgently necessary that we recognize our own limitations as a moral and ideological force among the Asiatic peoples.

Our political philosophy and our patterns for living have very little applicability to masses of people in Asia. They may be all right for us, with our highly developed political traditions running back into the centuries and with our peculiarly favorable geographic position; but they are simply not practical or helpful, today, for most of the people in Asia.

This being the case, we must be very careful when we speak of exercising “leadership” in Asia. We are deceiving ourselves and others when we pretend to have the answers to the problems which agitate many of these Asiatic peoples.

Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

For the entire report and insight into the thinking George Kennan, the father of containment, and an instrumental figure in devising the United States Cold War Policy after World War II click here

As of 2007 the AAA has the following to say about its position on the Human Terrain System Project. This statement can be found on the AAA website.

A special initiative launched by the US Military, known as the Human Terrain System (HTS) project, sparked lively debates in the media and the anthropology community at large in fall 2007. The HTS program, first launched in fall 2006, embeds anthropologists and other social scientists in military teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are currently five human terrain teams in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and the $41 million project is set to operate 26 teams in those countries during the next year. The HTS project has been covered in the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other major media outlets.

The ethics of anthropologists working with US military, intelligence, and security organizations has been the subject of debates in the anthropology community in recent months and historically. To facilitate an open and informed discussion on the HTS project, and the broader ethical issues surrounding anthropologists who work as consultants, fieldworkers, or as faculty at military or intelligence colleges, the AAA has issued a report and statement, launched a dedicated blog, and hosted a number of public forums on this subject.

In November 2005, nearly a year before the first Human Terrain Team was deployed, a special commission of the AAA was created to investigate ethical and procedural concerns that arise through engagement with US security and intelligence communities. The Commission researched this subject for over a year, and issued a final report to the AAA Executive Board during the Association’s 106th Annual Meeting in Washington DC. The report neither endorses nor opposes engagement, but outlines the ethical perils and opportunities of such work, and encourages a continued public dialogue on this subject.

On October 31, 2007, The American Anthropological Association’s Executive Board issued a statement on the US Military’s Human Terrain System (HTS) project. The statement outlines the ways that the HTS project violates the AAA Code of Ethics, a code which mandates that anthropologists do no harm to their research subjects. A blog was launched that same date to encourage membership feedback on the Executive Board statement. The blog has received over 150 comments on this topic.

Several sessions and meetings at the AAA’s 2007 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC also addressed issues related to anthropology and the military. Related events included an open forum to discuss the Commission report led by the Committee on the Engagement of Anthropology with US Security and Intelligence Agencies, and the following sessions and panels: The Empire Speaks Back: US Military and Intelligence Organization’s Perspectives on Engagement with Anthropology; Against the Weaponization of Anthropology: Critical Perspectives on the Military, War, and US Foreign Policy; and Anthropologists and War: Non-Participation in Counterinsurgency. Members also voted during the Association’s annual business meeting in Washington DC to reinstate language on secrecy from the AAA’s 1971 Code of Ethics. The resolution will be submitted to the AAA Executive Board as advisory as per AAA bylaws.

For more information on HTS and related issues, see the links below:

AAA Executive Board Statement on HTS
AAA Blog on HTS
AAA Code of Ethics
Info about the Ad Hoc Commission
Media Coverage on the Issue

Last December, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps published a new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24). In policy circles, the Manual became an artifact of hope, signifying the move away from the crude logic of “shock and awe” toward calculations that rifle-toting soldiers can win the hearts and minds of occupied Iraq through a new appreciation of cultural nuance.

Read the entire article at Counter Punch

Noam, welcome to Berkeley. Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Philadelphia, in 1928. I stayed there until I went through undergraduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, then went on to Harvard for a couple of a years in a research fellowship, and graduate school. When I was done with that, went over to MIT, and I’ve been in Boston ever since, around Boston since about 1950.

Read the whole interview here

What follows are a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos—all meant to offer a glimpse at the outline of a body of radical theory that does not actually exist, though it might possibly exist at some point in the future.

Since there are very good reasons why an anarchist anthropology really ought to exist, we might start by asking why one doesn’t—or, for that matter, why an anarchist sociology doesn’t exist, or an anarchist economics, anarchist literary theory, or anarchist political science.

Read the whole text here

In accurately defining the contextual and cultural population of the task force battlespace, it became rapidly apparent that we needed to develop a keen understanding of demographics as well as the cultural intricacies that drive the Iraqi population.

- Major General Peter W. Chiarelli, Commander, 1st Cavalry Division, Baghdad, 2004-2005

To learn more about what the U.S. Army has to say about the Human Terrain System Project click here.

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…. Read the complete article here