An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline

This set of economic and personnel flows ranges from the mundane the trade in cigarettes and pirated software , through the illicit gems and timber , to the dangerous weapons and illegal narcotics. The trillions generated in these extra-legal financial empires must be laundered to legitimacy, and thus enter global financial markets in uncharted ways. The relative freedom from controls found in warzones and the financial powerhouses found in the cosmopolitan centers of the world combine in ways that tend to merge war and global profiteering. Complex production, transport, distribution, and consumption systems have emerged to move goods and services through the shadows.

Sophisticated banking systems exist to transfer unregulated monies. Highly developed regulatory mechanisms are in place to oversee extra-state trade—from lawyers to conflict resolution specialists. The profits have a substantial impact on the economies of all of the world's countries. And much of this remains invisible to formal state-based accounting systems and theories. We can't, with any accuracy, tell what impact hundreds of billions of dollars worth of illicit weapons gains has on European stock markets; how laundered drug proceeds affect the financial viability of smaller states; how market manipulation of unregulated goods affects interest rates and currency valuations internationally.

Nor, without studying the shadows, can we predict crises such as the Asian market crash in the late s or the September 11, , attack on the USA. The shadows permeate these realms. Extra-state economies are central to the world's power grids. We have grown used to a world where formal texts on military and economic matters deal only tangentially, if at all, with the extra-state. But this is a dangerous habit: What professional discipline can condone understanding only a part of the scope of its field of inquiry?

The consequences of this practice are visible in myriad ways, which the chapters of this book will explore. An example suffices here: But much of what undergirded the assaults took place along shadow channels. The intelligence services, for all their purported interest in the invisible world, function in an epistemological universe that still relies heavily on the classical economic, political, and military texts—texts that take their definitions from the realm of the formal and the state based. If a more developed knowledge of extra-state and extra-legal networks existed, the impending attack—and the activities of those who orchestrated it—would have been more visible.

Solutions are predicated on knowing the whole of the problem, not merely the classically visible parts. This book follows a very straightforward organizational format: Each chapter is devoted to a stage along this continuum: It may be that in the past we could understand a locale solely by focusing our gaze on it. But today, clearly, locales are not islands surrounded by the vast and churning waters of fluid geographical space.

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Today humans feel the tug and pull of societal waves generated in regions far afield; they share the currents, even the riptides, that move across vast global stretches. For example, my experiences in Sri Lanka took on greater meaning when I began to do research in Mozambique. When I saw the same cast of characters selling arms, profiteering, and brokering peace in Mozambique as I had in Sri Lanka, I realized that these international players were not necessarily ideologically linked to the causes defining either South Asia or Southern Africa, nor were they necessarily drawn into a national drama for a specific set of reasons unique to this "locale.

In following the networks brokering war and peace across all distinctions of legal and illegal, I realized that these represent anthropological flows that span the globe both physically and epistemologically—at once dependent on locales and local cultural knowledges but also linking across them. What, then, is ethnography? The answer is not the same for everyone. But for me, and for this particular research, ethnography must be able to follow the question.

It must be able to capture not only the site, but also the smell, feel, taste, and motion of a locale, of a people that share a common space and intertwined lives. It must be able to grasp at least a fleeting glimpse of the dreams that people carry with them and that carry people to distant places of world and mind; of the creative imaginary through which people give substance to their thoughts and lives.

And quite pragmatically, it must be able to delve into why a soldier pulls the trigger against one human and not another; to illuminate how people suffer the ravages of violence and grieving and still craft humanitarian resistance; to chart the realities of how weapons are traded for diamonds and power, and the lives of those who trade them.

Today, such questions can't be encompassed by studying a single site. It was traded through a vast network of agents, "advisors," and alliances—all of whom have a say in how the weapon should be used: Perhaps the weapon was smuggled through the legal world into the shadows, entering another global set of alliances. The soldier who aims the gun aims along years of training, not only on how to kill, but how to draw divisions, hatred, fears, and justifications—a mix of cultural and military lore that has been fed by everything from local grievances through foreign military advisors to global media and music.

It was at the height of the war in Mozambique, itself a long way from Europe and the conflicts in Northern Ireland. The boy and I sat in a bombed-out town in the middle of Mozambique, many hundreds of kilometers from the country's capital and cosmopolitan centers. We were, as traditional scholarship would say, in a profoundly "local" setting. The boy was thin, and dressed only in a pair of tattered shorts and T-shirt. His gun was strung on an old piece of cloth. He had been press-ganged into joining the military, and had never left his home village region until he walked out as a "soldier" about the time he hit puberty.

The boy settled in the sun, and began to talk: You know, these white guys are often a whole lot meaner than we are.

I mean, we fight and we kill and all, but it's like these white guys think killing is the answer to everything. We have so many white guys, so many foreigners, around; training us, getting mad at us, fighting us, making money from us. Some are OK, I got sent to this training camp far away, and there were some who were friendly, tried to make sure we got enough to eat, and worked to teach us. People from all over. Got a whole lot of strange ideas, stuff that sometimes' useful, but a lot of times just didn't make a lot of sense, like it was a lot of trouble to do things that way, and dangerous too.

I think fighting like that gives them weird ideas about fighting. Bruce Lee, he laughs , now that's who they should send out to train us.

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That's where it's at. But who knows, it's all beyond trying to guess. Truth is, I don't think a lot of these guys care if we win or lose. We all see them moving on the mines, doing "business. If I were going to understand this war, and this youth's experiences in it, what story would I best follow?

I could follow his movements; those of his compatriots and the foreigners he interacted with; the media and movies that shaped his ideas; the war merchants and profiteers from around the world that passed through his life, his country, and its war; the various cultures of militarization that move from warzone to warzone around the world; the vast international systems of economic gain that shape political violence.

This "local" youth-soldier was far from "local. Where does war begin and end? Ethnography must be able to bring a people and a place to life in the eyes and hearts of those who have not been there. But it must also be able to follow not a place, but "place-less-ness," the flows of a good, an idea, an international military culture, a shadow; of the way these place-less realities intersect and are shaped by associations with other places and other place-less forces.

And, as this book will explore in discussing shadow powers, ethnography must be able to illuminate not only a non-place, but also the invisible—that which is rendered non-visible for reasons of power and profit. Power circulates in the corridors of institutions and in the shadows. I will in fact argue that ethnography is an excellent way to study the invisibilities of power—invisibility that is in part constructed by convincing people not to study the shadows, convincing them that the place-less is impossible to situate in study, that it is "out of site.

In a study such as this, some things must remain in the shadows, unseen. And this in turn requires new considerations of what constitutes ethnography.

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Anthropology developed as a discipline rooted in fieldwork, and as such it named names and mapped places. In the localized settings in which anthropologists worked, every quote was enmeshed in a web of social relations such that everyone knew who spoke, to whom, and why. It was this "factuality" that lent anthropology an aura of objectivity; and alternatively, the respect of the subject. But war and the shadows change this equation. Local knowledge is crucial to understanding, yet quoting local informants can mean a death sentence for them. When it comes to massacres, human rights violations, massive corruption, and global profiteering, even situating one's quotes and data in a "locatable" place and person can be dangerous.

Academic responsibility here rests in protecting one's sources, not in revealing them. Traditional scholarship might say that leaving out the names and the places behind the quotes waters down the impact of the research. Having struggled with this question for years now, I have come to disagree. Part of the reason so many aspects of war and extra-state behavior are "invisible" to formal accounting is precisely the problems and dangers of the research: The systems of knowledge and action that undergird these realities resonate around the world.

Exposing the name of the poor peasant who saw his family murdered will not shed light on the circumstances surrounding that murder—it will merely endanger his life; and exposing the name of the general who is profiteering from war will not illuminate the international networks of extra-legal economies and power—it will merely endanger my ability to return to this field site.

This is not to leave a study hanging in mid-air. The field data presented in my work is all firsthand. In lieu of naming specific names, it sheds light on roles found from one conflict to the next; it maps the flux and flow of violence, shadow powers, and peace-building along connected sites to larger transnational patterns. The quotes throughout this work are from people who populate the immediacy of these realities.

In protecting these people and their larger stories, I have given considerable thought as to how to present each story: When asked to provide more concrete and situated data—the names and places of traditional scholarship—I must respond that endangering those with whom we work endangers the very integrity of our discipline. Weaving together these layers and levels is the best way I know at present to explore, and begin to expose, the visible and invisible realities that attend to war, peace, and shadow powers that are shaping the course of the twenty-first century. I'll never know why my friend in Sri Lanka left her handbag, wrap, and suitcase in the roadway, yet carried a watermelon as she struggled to get home through the rioting.

She says she doubts she will ever figure it out herself. But we speculated about this for months: You know, she said , it seems illogical to leave what I might most need in the midst of a life-threatening night. But, when you think of it, it seems illogical to kill people for an identity: It seems illogical to target people on their jobs and associations, voter registration designations, and location of their homes. My handbag was filled with such "identity": It just occurred to me: Leaving my glasses, my keys?

Perhaps I just didn't want to see what was going on; and what are keys but an illusion of safety shattered by mobs who just break windows and enter houses?

What did I care that night if I broke my window to get into my home? If I had to break in, that would be wonderful, it would mean my house had not been attacked. It was heavy, and when your life is on the line, all those pretty saris and comfortable shoes don't mean a whole lot. But I think it was more: What have we humans become, I believe I worried that night, that we will feast on the dead for a television or a trinket?

When did we begin to value goods above good? My suitcase, filled with my goods, became heavy in more ways than one. I left those behind. I left behind the presents I bought for my family. Somehow I think they seemed to embody the religious strife that was tearing my country to shreds that night.

It was heavy, and unwieldy, and I can't imagine what I looked like, an old mother struggling down burning streets covered in dirt and ash carrying a large watermelon in her arms. But it was something pure of violence; a present for my family that cost no one their life; something that seemed to represent sanity and succor in a world gone mad.

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A watermelon carries its own seeds for the future. Perhaps that is what I was trying to do. Patricia Pinnock, Skyline Johannesburg: David Philip Publishers, , The riots reflected larger and more enduring religious, ethnic, and political fissures in Sri Lanka. The population of the country is 30 percent Sinhalese Sinhala speaking Buddhists, and approximately 12 percent Tamil Tamil speaking Hindu.

Government and military positions are predominately held by Sinhalese Buddhists. The Tamils, a majority of whom live in the North of the country, have long sought better representation in government and policy—either by democratic process or by the creation of a separate state. In , an armed Tamil faction retaliated against government repression of Tamils by a guerrilla attack that killed thirteen soldiers. The riots were ostensibly sparked by this: Tamils did not riot against the Sinhalese in return.

The violence spread nationwide and lasted a full week, during which time thousands of Tamils lost their lives and one-sixth of the country's infrastructure was destroyed. Wildcatting, as I use the term here, is based in international business concerns that can be legal, indeterminately legal, or downright illegal—but yield quick, and often vast, profits, commonly in the context of political instability.

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War so little matches classic accounts of war that a truism has emerged for me through the years I have studied violence at its epicenters: Amsterdam University Press, , Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites London: Virago, , Avner Greif, "Contracting, Enforcement, and Efficiency: World Bank, , These shadows are not peripheral to a country's economic and political systems, but deeply enmeshed in them, as the following quote addresses: It is an astonishing and lamentable chapter in the history of American law enforcement that almost until the end of a half century as Director of the FBI, J.

Edgar Hoover denied the existence of "mafia" or "Cosa Nostra" and refused to devote any special intelligence or law enforcement resources to this species of American criminal.

An Anthropology Of War Views From The Frontline

It is not only law enforcement that has failed to come to grips with organized crime. The American political system has not set itself against organized crime, in part no doubt because organized crime is active in politics. The Final Report of the N. New York University Press, , xxvi-xxvii. The work presented here is not traditional ethnography, though it may well become traditional along the course of a continuously interconnected twenty-first century. It addresses questions that flow across borders and neat distinctions.

The idea that ethnography might expand from its committed localism to represent a system much better apprehended by abstract models and aggregate statistics seems antithetical to its very nature and thus beyond its limits. Although multi-sited ethnography is an exercise in mapping terrain, its goal is not holistic representation and ethnographic portrayal of the world system as a totality. For ethnography, then, there is no global in the local-global contrast now so frequently evoked. The global is an emergent dimension of arguing about the connection among sites in a multi-sited ethnography.

Princeton University Press, , We can no longer separate images of Vietnam from rock'n'roll era music, stories of the rebels in Sierra Leone from the movie Rambo: About the Book In this provocative and compelling examination of the deep politics of war, Carolyn Nordstrom takes us from the immediacy of war-zone survival, through the offices of power brokers, to vast extra-legal networks that fuel war and international profiteering.

The Presidential Recommended Reading List: Reviews "This should be made into a movie! This is a major achievement. Her eyewitness reporting, when contrasted with the official histories later compiled of the same events, is a revelation. The amount of 'extra-state' activity surrounding any war is vast, and Nordstrom evokes and analyzes it so fully, so deftly, that no one who reads this book will look at war news quite the same way again. Meanwhile, the extra-state itself, typified by Al Qaeda, has begun to drive world politics and generate wars with terrifying success.

The Harrowing of Mozambique "A gripping account of what the author calls 'research into the shadows' -- the often dangerous world of the powerful and wealthy who inhabit global extra-governmental organizations. It is also about the dehumanizing effects of war and violence on the victims. I recommend it highly. Money laundering, blood diamonds, gun running -- Nordstrom puts faces on each of these.

Seeing the faces makes the moral dilemmas of war not simpler, but more realistic. The contributorsrecount not only what they have seen and heard in war zones but alsowhat is being read, studied, analyzed and remembered in such diverselocations as Colombia and Guatemala, Israel and Palestine, Iraq,Afghanistan, and Haiti. In detailed reports from the field, theyreflect on the important issue of "accountability" andoffer explanations to discern causes, patterns, and practices of war. Through this unique lens, the contributors provide the insight andanalysis needed for a deeper understanding of one of the greatestissues of our times.

Rather than emphasising boundaries and territories by examining the 'integration' and 'acculturation' of the immigrant or the refugee, this book offers insights into the ideas and practices of individuals settling into new societies and cultures. It analyses their ideas of connecting and belonging; their accounts of the past, the present and the future; the interaction and networks of relations; practical strategies; and the different meanings of 'home' and belonging that are constructed in new sociocultural settings.

The author uses empirical research to explore the experiences of refugees from the successor states of Yugoslavia, who are struggling to make a home for themselves in Amsterdam and Rome. By explaining how real people navigate through the difficulties of their displacement as well as the numerous scenarios and barriers to their emplacement, the author sheds new light on our understanding of what it is like to be a refugee. Reviews "This is the best book on the anthropology of war I have ever read That, combined with the collection's obvious contemporary political relevance and the exemplariness of the chapters as examples of the contemporary anthropology of war, makes it ideal for both university courses and even the public at large.

If you want to read a book on the anthropology of war, or use one in your teaching, this is the one you should. Each chapter shows in poignant and powerful ways how anthropologists can marshal evidence against war and related conflict. Harry Potter Years by J. Rowling , Hardcover Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 1 by J.

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