Overview
Global events of the early twenty-first century have placed new stress on the relationship among anthropology, governance, and war. Facing prolonged insurgency, segments of the U.S. military have taken a new interest in anthropology, prompting intense ethical and scholarly debate. Inspired by these issues, the essays in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency consider how anthropologists can, should, and do respond to military overtures, and they articulate anthropological perspectives on global war and power relations.
This book investigates the shifting boundaries between military and civil state violence; perceptions and effects of American power around the globe; the history of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice; and debate over culture, knowledge, and conscience in counterinsurgency. These wide-ranging essays shed new light on the fraught world of Pax Americana and on the ethical and political dilemmas faced by anthropologists and military personnel alike when attempting to understand and intervene in our world.
Editorials
Choice
"This book encompasses far more than the title suggests. The twenty-two short articles discuss the complex engagement--now and in the past--of social science and the military. . . . This informative, well-crafted, meticulously documented compendium could become a benchmark publication."
George Marcus
“This extensive compendium of critical ideas, information, and narrative accounts makes for an absorbing reading experience. Beyond its cogency for present debates, it might well serve as a historical marker for future researchers, likely to become as important as an expression of a certain epoch of anthropological relevance to events as Reinventing Anthropology has been in the context of the 1960s.”
Catherine Lutz
“This collection deeply and creatively challenges many forms of received wisdom about the nature of security and of U.S. power in the age of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Its diverse points of view, its productive comparisons, and its lucid ethnographic and historical examples are a feast for anyone concerned with where the history of this turbulent, portentous moment is headed.”
Marshall Sahlins
“When U.S. counterinsurgency strategy took a ‘cultural turn,’ it incited another form of resistance in addition to those it was already fighting, namely from anthropologists who objected to the enlistment of their discipline in the global military projects of Pax Americana. For the great majority of anthropologists, the integrity of other peoples’ existence is at once an intellectual premise of their discipline and its moral imperative. They will not put the peoples they live and work with at risk of bodily harm, foreign domination, or cultural destruction. Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency is a rich and profound exploration of the contradiction between a human science of culture and its militarization.”