The Network's Founding
The Network of Concerned Anthropologists was formed in the summer of 2007 when eleven like-minded anthropologists began corresponding and searching for ways to express concerns over recent efforts to militarize anthropology. We decided to take collective action and produce a statement of our objections to developing trends in the militarization of anthropology. This statement was loosely modeled on a document circulated by physicists, computer scientists and engineers in the mid-1980s opposing Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and pledging to decline funding to participate in it. The two physicists who originated that statement, David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund, went on to work for the Union of Concerned Scientists; hence the name we chose for ourselves.
Our own statement, worked out over a period of weeks through intense email exchanges, clarified our shared objections to military and intelligence agencies’ uses of anthropology in the present political context. We circulated the statement among colleagues and posted it on our website*, collecting over 1,000 signatures from like-minded anthropologists and other scholars. (The website was mysteriously taken down on the final day of the 2007 American Anthropological Association meetings, but was soon restored). Like other historical movements within American anthropology (such as the Anthropologists for Radical Political Action of the early 1970s), we work for change within professional organizations such as the AAA or the American Association of University Professors.
Not all members of the network have the same critiques of military uses of anthropology. Some members of the network are opposed to all forms of military employment by anthropologists, while others limit their critiques to specific relationships, particularly those involving secrecy or those that risk betraying standard relationships that emerge when we do ethnography. These differences and our ability to make common cause over larger issues is a fundamental strength of the network.
The network generates public critiques of new developments and policy proposals. We do not oppose engagement with military and civilian policy makers; we want to expand public debates to include informed critiques that use scholarship and political and ethical critiques to move toward better policies and practices. We strive for a form of public anthropology that engages the public and policy makers on topics that include the ethics and efficacy of the Human Terrain System, the Minerva Consortium, counterinsurgency, and abuses of anthropological research.
We encourage others to join with us and to seek their own ways, as anthropologists and as citizens, in which to undo the damage done to Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. military intervention and to join us in the struggle to contest the militarization of anthropology.
- González, Roberto J., Hugh Gusterson, and David Price. 2009. “Introduction: War, Culture, and Counterinsurgency.” In The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, edited by Network of Concerned Anthropologists, 1–20. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.
Our own statement, worked out over a period of weeks through intense email exchanges, clarified our shared objections to military and intelligence agencies’ uses of anthropology in the present political context. We circulated the statement among colleagues and posted it on our website*, collecting over 1,000 signatures from like-minded anthropologists and other scholars. (The website was mysteriously taken down on the final day of the 2007 American Anthropological Association meetings, but was soon restored). Like other historical movements within American anthropology (such as the Anthropologists for Radical Political Action of the early 1970s), we work for change within professional organizations such as the AAA or the American Association of University Professors.
Not all members of the network have the same critiques of military uses of anthropology. Some members of the network are opposed to all forms of military employment by anthropologists, while others limit their critiques to specific relationships, particularly those involving secrecy or those that risk betraying standard relationships that emerge when we do ethnography. These differences and our ability to make common cause over larger issues is a fundamental strength of the network.
The network generates public critiques of new developments and policy proposals. We do not oppose engagement with military and civilian policy makers; we want to expand public debates to include informed critiques that use scholarship and political and ethical critiques to move toward better policies and practices. We strive for a form of public anthropology that engages the public and policy makers on topics that include the ethics and efficacy of the Human Terrain System, the Minerva Consortium, counterinsurgency, and abuses of anthropological research.
We encourage others to join with us and to seek their own ways, as anthropologists and as citizens, in which to undo the damage done to Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. military intervention and to join us in the struggle to contest the militarization of anthropology.
- González, Roberto J., Hugh Gusterson, and David Price. 2009. “Introduction: War, Culture, and Counterinsurgency.” In The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, edited by Network of Concerned Anthropologists, 1–20. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.
