Ethical Questions about Who Counts as an “Anthropologist” in Military Organizations
Ethical Questions about Who Counts as an “Anthropologist” in Military Organizations
by Kerry Fosher[i]
When I first started working with the U.S. military in 2006, military organizations were desperate to hire anthropologists. Leaders in these organization had a very basic sense that anthropologists understood culture and could help their personnel interact with people in areas of operation, particularly Iraq and Afghanistan. Ethical questions about military anthropology have been extensively examined elsewhere.[ii] Here, I want to examine some ethical questions that have arisen for me in relation to anthropological identity—who counts as an anthropologist—in the U.S. military context.
The Department of Defense is a large organization, comprising more than three million people. Military personnel often stay in a short time before going on to second careers. The perceptions they develop during their military service get carried into other parts of government, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and, on occasion, even academia. So, the way military personnel perceive anthropology has implications not only for how the military thinks about the discipline, but also for how we are perceived in other sectors.
In traditional academic settings, you are an anthropologist by consensus of your peers. Your credentials matter, but not every person teaching in an anthropology department has a PhD in anthropology. Some come from other disciplines but use anthropological theories and methods and are generally accepted as members of our discipline. Conversely, somebody with a PhD in anthropology who has spent the last 20 years working as realtor or chef might not be considered an anthropologist by university faculty. In short, in academic circles we maintain fuzzy boundaries around our disciplinary identity, but we self-police by both subtle and overt means.
In other settings, your identity as an anthropologist may come from your position, or even simply by assertion, rather than from the perception of academic peers. In the most common U.S. federal government hiring plan, the official position description for an anthropologist at any level requires only that they have 24 undergraduate credits in anthropology or a related field.[iii] So, somebody with an undergraduate minor in psychology and a few language classes could be hired as a senior level anthropologist. Likewise, many government contracts prohibit organizations from specifying the credentials they want. They can say only that they need an anthropological capability. So, the company can choose to provide the capability with somebody who has only an MA in international relations or some other field. Hiring managers rarely have the expertise needed to understand or value disciplinary education, and in military organizations social scientists tend to work in multi-disciplinary settings where leaders are unlikely to focus on the credentials of individual employees. So once hired, someone can come to be considered an anthropologist by position regardless of credentials or experience.
In my experience, it is common for people to simply assert an anthropological identity in this context. Especially when the military was focused on recruiting anthropologists, many people presented themselves that way whether or not their backgrounds supported the claim. I would hear somebody say, “I’m a degreed anthropologist” when all they had was a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, or even a bachelor’s degree in something else but had taken one or two anthropology classes 15 years ago. I even encountered “anthropologists” who had never had any formal anthropological education, but who felt the label fit because they were widely traveled. A few times I met somebody with a PhD in another field who was hoping to cash in on the military anthropology boom and assumed, often correctly, that government officials would not review their credentials. I encountered this appropriation of anthropological identity at least weekly in meetings and correspondence across the Department of Defense from 2006 through 2012, when the demand signal for anthropology started to taper off.
This combination of bureaucratic factors, lack of knowledge of academic credentials on the part of military officials, and opportunism created situations in which ethical questions arose for me.
For example, at one point, one military service decided it wanted to hire cultural anthropologists into senior level positions in all its schools to integrate culture-related material into the curricula. I believe this decision was well-intended, but it was driven by a senior official’s somewhat hazy sense of what anthropologists do. So there was little guidance about what these faculty were supposed to accomplish, the hiring process did not specify the sorts of credentials they should have, and the people hired had a broad range of backgrounds. The consequences were predictable. Some of the people hired had backgrounds with