Good Anthropology, Bad History

The Cultural Turn in Studying War

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20138693
AutoresPatrick Porter (autor correspondente)
Ano2007
Volume37
Fascículo2
Data de publicação2007-05-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe US Army War College Quarterly Parameters (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0031-1723 • E-ISSN: 0031-1723
EditoraUnited States Army War College Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.55540/0031-1723.2356
OpenAlexW2290841466
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas17
Referências citadas11

To wage war, become an anthropologist. Lose the fascination with Clausewitz, and embrace culture as the way to understand conflict. Or so argue a number of strategists, historians, and officers on both sides of the Atlantic. From the academy to the Pentagon, fresh attention is being focused on the value of knowing the enemy. Those who take this view assume that different ways of life produce different ways of war. They see today’s global war on terrorism as a clash of profoundly different cultures, between American-led forces on one side, and jihadist warriors or tribal warlords on the other. To make sense of recent military failures, they have turned back to cultural knowledge of the adversary. This also often influences their reading of history. They project the same themes back into the past. Today’s military confrontation of “the West vs. the rest,” they argue, replays ancient differences between strategic cultures. This new anthropology has good intentions. It aims to foster greater cultural awareness and sophistication among militaries and governments. And cultural agility is surely important. It matters at every level—strategic, operational, and tactical. It matters particularly at a time of volatile occupations of foreign soil, where soldiers are being asked to act as police officers, nation- builders, and peace brokers. And today’s Iraq war demonstrates the costs of misunderstanding the enemy strategically. America was misguided by its narrow conception of war and victory. It assumed that its opponents shared the view that hostilities ended when Iraq’s field army was defeated. It neglected post-invasion strategy as a second-order administrative task separate to war and refused for too long to admit the existence of an insurgency. For his part, Saddam Hussein wrongly calcu

Cultural anthropology · Cultural turn · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration