WAR, TECHNOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1 Volume 8 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER NATIONALISM’S BLOODY TERRAIN AND GLOBAL CRISIS Racism, Class Inequality, and the Critical Perspectives Politics of Recognition Edited by Bruce Kapferer Edited by George Baca Volume 2 Volume 9 GLOBALIZATION IDENTIFYING WITH FREEDOM Critical Issues Indonesia after Suharto Edited by Allen Chun Edited by Tony Day Volume 3 Volume 10 CORPORATE SCANDAL THE GLOBAL IDEA OF ‘THE Global Corporatism against Society COMMONS’ Edited by John Gledhill Edited by Donald M. Nonini Volume 4 Volume 11 EXPERT KNOWLEDGE SECURITY AND DEVELOPMENT First World Peoples, Consultancy, Edited by John-Andrew McNeish and Anthropology and Jon Harald Sande Lie Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin Volume 12 MIGRATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND Volume 5 TRANSNATIONALIZATION STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR A Critical Stance Civil Violence in Emerging Edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Global Realities Thomas Faist Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 13 Volume 6 WAR, TECHNOLOGY, THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Koen Stroeken Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 7 OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES New Formations of Global Power Edited by Bruce Kapferer W , T , AR ECHNOLOGY A NTHROPOLOGY (cid:37) Edited by Koen Stroeken Berghahn Books (cid:32)(cid:13)(cid:55)(cid:202)(cid:57)(cid:34)(cid:44)(cid:28)(cid:202)(cid:85)(cid:202)(cid:34)(cid:56)(cid:19)(cid:34)(cid:44)(cid:12) www.berghahnbooks.com Paperback edition published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2012 Berghahn Books All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-0-85745-587-1 (pbk) C ONTENTS (cid:37) Introduction: War-Technology Anthropology Koen Stroeken 1 Part I: Perpetuating War Drones in the Tribal Zone: Virtual War and Losing Hearts and Minds in the Af-Pak War Jeffrey A. Sluka 21 The Dead of Night: Chaos and Spectacide of Nocturnal Combat in the Iraq War Antonius C. G. M. Robben 34 World in a Bottle: Prognosticating Insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan Roberto J. González 45 Anthropology As We Know It: A Casualty of War? R. Brian Ferguson 62 vi Contents Part II: Globalizing War Games Without Tears, Wars Without Frontiers Robertson Allen 83 Music, Aesthetics, and the Technologies of Online War Matthew Sumera 94 Humanitarian Death and the Magic of Global War in Uganda Sverker Finnström 106 Resident Violence: Miner Mwanga Magic as a War-Technology Anthropology Koen Stroeken 120 The Magic of Martyrdom in Palestine and Cultural Imaginaries for Killing Neil L. Whitehead and Nasser Abufarha 135 Notes on Contributors 149 I NTRODUCTION War-Technology Anthropology (cid:37) Koen Stroeken The title of this volume, War, Technology, Anthropology, not only refers to war technology as an object of anthro- pological research but also recognizes that anthropology itself can be a technology of war. Of the three forms in which anthropology contributes to warfare, the first and most direct form is collaborating with the army by provid- ing ethnographic data on populations deemed insurgent (NCA 2009). A recent case in point is the militarization of AFRICOM, one of the US’s Unified Combatant Commands, which is present in African countries to pro-actively ‘prevent war’, in part by predicting insurgency through cultural modeling (Albro 2010; Keenan 2008). A second, more insidious form of ‘war-technology anthropology’ is the diffusion of a militarized concept of culture (González 2010) that justifies violent intervention by attributing ‘tribal customs’ and ‘harmful cultural practices’ to certain populations, as opposed to the ‘democratic values’ of the occupying forces. The third and least acknowledged form in which anthropology supports the occupying forces is through silence on the matter of culture. Whether in dis- course on human rights or debates on poverty and conflict, we notice a return to universalism. There is a tendency to 2 Koen Stroeken give in to globalist pressures and disregard the concept of radical difference. How can one explain the transition, beginning around 1989, from covert CIA operations during the Cold War (e.g., sponsoring groups to overthrow democratic yet non- allied governments) to the post–Cold War series of ‘just’ wars in Muslim countries that present no direct threat (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya)? Some aspect of pres- ent-day society assures the military-industrial complex of public approval. Historically, one could point to the way in which Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have imposed their antagonistic definition of culture on American foreign policy since the 1980s (Hunter 1992). But the approval has been more widespread. It went hand in hand with Western audiences increasingly identifying themselves with values such as gender equality and democracy, in the name of which war was waged, while anthropology—‘the’ understanding of humanity—increasingly avoided the culture concept. In a media-ruled world of pundits eager to intervene publicly, the anthropologists’ silence condones for the larger public the hierarchy of cultures that is used to justify military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon Africa. The condoning effect should not be underestimated when the silence comes from a socio-scientific discipline performing the state-salaried function of dissent in order to reassure the public that the state’s policies are being monitored. The 300,000 soldier reports from the Iraq and Afghani- stan wars published by WikiLeaks (2010a, 2010b) are instructive as to the problematic position of the coalition forces in relation to the local population. The picture emerging is that of an invader, alienated from the popula- tion and mystified by foreign ‘human terrain’, that is, an occupier suffering from Western exceptionalism. If we check the WikiLeaks Web site for the 20 incidents rated as Introduction: War-Technology Anthropology 3 most significant by visitors (as of 30 January 2011), the geographical locations of critical actions in these wars all appear to be roadsides, which suggests engagements in the least human of terrains from the disengaged position of armored vehicles. Moreover, in response to the growing critique about civilian casualties, the military has more recently undergone something of a cultural turn. In the WikiLeaks war logs, the references to culture dramatically increase in soldier reports after 2007; however, they are invariably of the stereotyping, dehumanizing kind: “It is in their culture to ….” In brief, the politico-economic structure of warfare has a cultural component. This small bundle of pithy essays offers an update on the cultural and structural components of war-technology anthropology. Anthropology, Culture, and War The fights in Iraq and Afghanistan together add up to over 100,000 civilian casualties (Burnham et al. 2006), a num- ber that continues to grow. The wars are the outcome of a decision-making process undertaken by US and European democracies. Between the decisions and the killings runs a long but unbroken line. This collection of essays retraces that line, which ranges from war technology, including the use of drones, night vision goggles, and war games, to the more oblique levels of warfare, such as hierarchical dis- tinctions used in the media, the sensory language of the entertainment industry, the new magic resorted to by poor African miners, and ethnographies that objectify other cultures rather than having their perspectives rebound on the authors’ own culture. There are indications that recent social theories are no less collusive with imperialism than was functionalism in 4 Koen Stroeken the days of colonialism. For one thing, post-critical theo- ries have emerged that no longer question the logic of the state apparatus. In Latour’s (2005) ‘actor-network-theory’, agency is dispersed in nature-culture hybrids. The maneu- vers of the corporate elite are refracted by the network. There is no political structure supporting the chaotic and proliferating interactions of man and machine; the seem- ingly decentered Internet exemplifies the network (see Joxe 2002). In this view, cultures resemble the US Army’s Human Terrain Systems (HTS) Project,1 appearing to be interactive regimes devoid of perspective. Any claim to social critique is hopelessly ‘asymmetrical’. This post-critical position is understandable in terms of the dominant, constructiv- ist approach of science and technology studies, in which networks of users and designers together decide on the norms to be implemented in technology (Feenberg 1999). The constructivist approach prides itself on squarely over- coming the substantivism of twentieth-century dystopias, which warned about technological developments serving the status quo in function of a global political structure. This volume revisits the substantivist hypothesis on what was once called the ‘ghost in the machine’, namely, the tendency of technology to standardize behavior and sideline criticism and hence to sustain those in power. Realizing an era announced since the late nineteenth cen- tury by various dystopias, the ‘ghost’ or the ‘magic’ (an invisible influence through this-worldly means) has, rather than replacing it, become an integral part of the machin- ery called science and technology. The substantivist idea of such a lethal ‘structure’ refers to the current transition of nation-states (non-collaborative empires regulating the lives of their citizens) into oligarchic ‘corporate states’ (ver- satile networks privatizing the commons), as described by Kapferer (2005: 16). Social negotiation is handed over to technocrats and to autonomous, anonymous apparatuses.