Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the recently deployed programs, institutions and policies which demonstrate the keen interest of the American security establishment in cultural knowledge of populations, and its deployment in counter-insurgency scenarios, while using certain technologies to shape a 'modern', 'civilized' self.

Paper long abstract:

Recently, the use of social scientist teams embedded in American military units in Iraq and Afghanistan has called attention, once again, to the relation between the ethnographic study of populations under military occupation and the instruments of governance through security. In this context, both media attention and academic criticism of these new initiatives has re-engaged old ethical debates about the (re)appropriation of socio-anthropological knowledge in the prosecution of more or less imperial military missions.

While this renewed interest in the 'cultural study' of populations must indeed be contextualized through its historical, often colonial antecedents, one should nonetheless pay close attention to its gradual and subtle reconfigurations, namely in the paradigmatic shift of taking the population as the new 'centre of gravity' in contemporary conflicts, while using certain technologies to shape a 'modern', 'civilized' self.

We shall therefore examine the tense, complex relationship between the militarized production (and use) of anthropological knowledge and American military intervention in three stages: (i) the parameters through which the Pentagon has appropriated cultural knowledge in such scenarios, thus conceiving of a given ethnographic field as a 'human terrain' subject to 'securitization' and 'militarization'; (ii) in which way this process correlates with mechanisms of cultural and racial reification, and the (re)invention of tradition; and finally (iii) a critical reflection on the implications of the ethical debates and forms of resistance which have been generated by this 'cultural turn' in military operations.