Word: hts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...HTS is not the first instance of anthropologists' involvement with war efforts. Before the First World War, the field techniques of the discipline were used by the British to administer and subdue the different cultural groups at the edges of its empire. Later, in World War II, anthropologist Ruth Benedict played a key role in President Franklin Roosevelt's decision to allow the Japanese Emperor's reign to continue as part of Japan's surrender to the U.S. According to Price, who has written a book on the use of anthropology during World War II, the majority of American anthropologists...
...office implicated a number of social scientists in clandestine counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand. These two scandals created an uproar at the AAA, and many anthropologists grew wary of military-funded programs. Over the past 30 years, according to an article by Montgomery McFate, the senior social scientist at HTS and a trained anthropologist, "the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its ivory tower...
...counterinsurgency strategy, cultural knowledge has become a foremost Pentagon concern. They know historically the record for winning a short-term counterinsurgency is not good, so they've once again sought out cultural expertise. The discipline's checkered history, however, has made many anthropologists sensitive to the parallels between HTS and the colonial era. "Anthropology was used in much the same way to help colonial militaries and colonial occupation," says David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University...
...help. "What's been missing is the insight and the experiences that social scientists bring to these kinds of conflicts," Fondacaro says. The traditional Army, he says, is good at treating "the symptoms of insurgency" - fighting armed violent groups or reducing the number of IEDs, for instance - but "what HTS is focused on is the disease. There's a reason why the population tolerates and sometimes actively supports groups that advocate violence." That, says Fondacaro, is what HTS is trying to diagnose and ultimately cure...
...When it comes down to it, the AAA has no sanctioning power, and the decision whether or not to join HTS comes down to the individual. For now, at least, the Pentagon wants to leverage the cultural insights of academics to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but whether HTS has brought more top scholars into the military fold or only widened the schism between academe and the military remains unclear. James Der Derian, a professor of political science at Brown University who recently finished a documentary on HTS, and whose friend and colleague Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan...