by CAMERON FENTON
Canada’s military academics in the Afghan war and at home
MONTREAL—In the age of counterinsurgency and the battle for “hearts and minds,” cultural knowledge is valuable currency for the military intelligence business. The desire for cultural intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq has led Canada and the United States to implement hybrid military-academic programs meant to mimic anthropological research, mapping the “human terrain” of a battlefield.
These programs have led to serious concerns among social scientists in general, and anthropologists in particular, about the possible militarization of their practice, and the erosion of the creditability of their work.
According to Robert Albro of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), there is a fear among academics that the military wants to “plug into” anthropological knowledge without engaging in a dialogue that respects the work, ethics and history of the discipline. Anthropologists in Canada and the United States worry that their discipline could go the way of physics after the creation of the atomic bomb in World War II, weaponizing knowledge at a cost to anthropology as well as the cultures and people it studies.
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