In discussing the role of anthropologists in the battlefield I’ve argued that what is needed isn’t so much anthropology as common sense. I find it hard to see how the expert opinion of anthropologists will be taken seriously in an organization which fires Arab experts simply because they are gay. If an organization doesn’t take local knowledge seriously, how much help can an anthropologist provide? This short video by Guardian journalist John D McHugh makes clear what I mean.
The video shows what happens when coalition forces attempt to speak to a Pashtun elder. The elder tries to use a story about how it is impossible to stop ants from eating the wheat in order to explain why the community can’t help them, but the translator is either incapable or unwilling to translate the elder’s words. Instead he makes up something completely different which only serves to upset the soldiers and make them angry at the elder for not cooperating.
Now, it is true that an expert who had a deep understanding of Pashtun oral traditions would do a better job of translating between the old man and the forces. But so would a simple literal translation. The elder’s words are not particularly difficult to understand given the reporter’s subtitles, but the soldiers don’t hear that version. (I don’t know if the reporter told them how bad their translator is.)
I’m now reading Deborah Cameron’s The Myth of Mars and Venus, about which I will write more later, but one point she makes is that much of the literature on miscommunication between men and women lets men off the hook for their inability to understand women’s speech, even though the actual linguistic evidence implies that men use the same linguistic strategies (such as indirect requests) when it is convenient to do so. The point being that such miscommunication is treated as a cultural problem when it is really a problem of unequal power relations. The same woman who fetches her husband’s ketchup when he asks “Is there any ketchup?” will treat a similar question from her daughter as a factual query, replying: “Yes, dear, its in the cupboard.” Cameron argues that treating such communication problems as a matter of intercultural miscommunication (as Deborah Tannen does), obscures the real problems.
I feel the same way about the use of anthropology in the military. Treating the military’s lack of respect for local cultural knowledge as a cultural problem which can be solved by hiring anthropologists ignores the very real ways in which the military itself operates as a system for producing knowledge about the world, and the role of local knowledge in that system. It may be a useful PR to convey the impression that we are winning the intellectual arms race, but when I see video footage like this I find it very difficult to believe that the military is an institution capable of taking local knowledge seriously in any systematic way.
(Note that similar stories about inadequate translation have been circulating since the very beginning of the war. Also, I should make clear that Cameron takes Gumperz research on crosstalk seriously, even if she questions its applicability to gender relations. Thanks to Craig Campbell for the link!)