Chronical of Higher Education, Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Anthropologists Discuss Where to Draw Ethical Lines in Dealing With National-Security Agencies

By DAVID GLENN

American military and intelligence agencies have increasingly been turning to anthropologists and other social scientists for “cultural knowledge” about actual and potential adversaries. But many anthropologists are deeply anxious about offering such assistance, fearing, among other things, that their insights might be used simply to help torture and kill people more effectively.

At a panel discussion that was Webcast from Brown University on Monday afternoon, several members of a temporary committee of the American Anthropological Association discussed how and where the discipline should draw ethical lines when anthropologists engage with national-security agencies. (An archive of the Webcast should be available later this week.)

“How do we balance the costs? What potential damage is done to our reputation as scholars, as a discipline, when we do engage?” asked Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College and a member of the committee.

The committee, which is formally known as the Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology With the U.S. Security and Intelligence Communities, was created last year, and it has been asked to provide recommendations to the association by the end of 2007. The panel is meeting this week, largely in private, at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

Ms. Fluehr-Lobban cited the danger that all anthropologists might come under suspicion if some anthropologists were known to be employees of national-security agencies. All scholars doing fieldwork in certain countries might find it more difficult to develop relationships with people who provide cultural information, and they might all be at higher risk of being arrested for espionage, she suggested. “When you say ‘CIA,’ when you say ‘military,’ flags go up,” she said.

But Ms. Fluehr-Lobban also said that it might be worthwhile for anthropologists to bring their expertise on “cultural complexity” to national-security agencies, where such insights are sometimes lacking.

Indeed, Ms. Fluehr-Lobban’s husband, Richard Lobban, who has done fieldwork in Sudan for nearly 40 years, spoke from the audience about his reluctant decision to lecture occasionally at the Naval War College after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Despite his dislike of the military, Mr. Lobban said, he had decided that Osama bin Laden was “a much greater evil.” Mr. Lobban is also a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College.

One topic that came up repeatedly was the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, a pilot project that began in 2004, in which the CIA and other intelligence agencies paid for graduate education for scholars in certain scientific and social-science subfields, in exchange for a commitment to work for the agencies for a certain period of time. The recipients were not required to disclose to their professors or their fellow students that they are intelligence analysts in training (The Chronicle, March 25, 2005). The program, Ms. Fluehr-Lobban said, raises a number of questions about informed consent.

Another contested topic was the journalist Seymour Hersh’s assertion, in an article published in The New Yorker in 2004, that the American soldiers who sexually humiliated prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were inspired directly or indirectly by The Arab Mind, a 1973 book by the late anthropologist Raphael Patai.

One committee member, Laura A. McNamara, an anthropologist employed by the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories who studies decision making among nuclear scientists there, said there was no strong evidence linking Mr. Patai’s book to the Abu Ghraib torture, and warned her fellow panelists that “we need to be cautious about ruining our credibility with false accusations.”

Ms. McNamara is one of two committee members who are working closely with national security agencies. In a recent essay, she argued that too many conversations about anthropologists and the military tend to “recycle the same issues” about secrecy and informed consent. Anthropologists who work with military and security issues today, she wrote, often face different, more subtle ethical challenges than did Vietnam-era social scientists.

In a comment from the audience, James Der Derian, the director of the Watson Institute’s Global Security Program, asked whether there was a danger that the anthropology association would “become ethically pure but intellectually impoverished.”

Mr. Der Derian suggested that even if anthropologists tried to keep their hands pure, military and intelligence agencies would turn elsewhere to seek information about the cultures of their nations’ adversaries. “Who’s going to rush in where anthropologists fear to tread?” he asked.

In a telephone interview on Sunday, Alan H. Goodman, the association’s president, said he did not expect the committee to reach any conclusions during this week’s meeting. “I don’t expect anything to be resolved,” he said. “We want this to be very open. This is our first real chance to talk to each other.”

Mr. Goodman, who is a professor of anthropology at Hampshire College, added that the committee’s work was part of a larger conversation about the rise of “applied anthropology,” in which scholars are employed by corporations, public agencies, or nonprofit organizations.

The association needs to think about “the increased degree to which anthropologists are working for corporations that want some control over the dissemination of results,” he said. “And that’s related to what this committee will discuss. Is working with intelligence agencies really just a continuation of the same types of things that one might be doing for a corporation, or is there really something special about working in intelligence that makes it entirely different?”