-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Anthony King, Social science goes to war: the Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan. Edited by Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence, International Affairs, Volume 92, Issue 6, November 2016, Pages 1525–1526, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12765
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Conflict, security and defence
Social science goes to war: the Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan. Edited by Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence. London: Hurst. 2015. 320 pp. Pb.: £18.50. ISBN 978 1 84904 421 9. Available as e-book.
There is nothing new about the involvement of anthropologists and anthropology in western military campaigns. As a young anthropologist, Edmund Leach, who would go on to hold a personal chair in social anthropology at Cambridge, was drafted into the British Army during the Second World War; he worked in Burma, persuading the Kachin tribes-people in the Highlands to fight against the Japanese invaders. Edward Evans-Pritchard, professor of social anthropology at Oxford and fellow of All Souls College, played a similar role in Sudan with the Anuak. Although he did not contribute to the French war effort, Pierre Bourdieu, perhaps the most eminent French sociologist of the late twentieth century, conducted anthropological fieldwork among the Kabyle during the Algerian war. With no colonies, anthropologists in the United States have traditionally had less interaction with the armed forces, though after the Second World War, Ruth Benedict wrote an important study of Japanese culture which influenced US policy towards the defeated power.
