Perpetual War
Perpetual War Text by Katherine T. McCaffrey. Photos by Bonnie Donohue. Vieques Island, Puerto Rico, is home to 107 abandoned military bunkers, a legacy of the U.S. naval presence on the island. Designed to contain ammunition and high explosives, the bunkers were constructed during the build up to WWII, when the German threat to the […]
Sebastian Junger’s The Last Patrol, A Dialogue
War does not simply shape, shepherd, and injure bodies, or mold and undermine psyches in a unidirectional fashion. Through countless contradictory and incomplete processes, war excites bodies, cultivates capacities, gives value to things, provokes subjective interpretations of surprising behaviors, and forms connections. —Kenneth T. MacLeish, Making War at Fort Hood The first things I noticed […]
Throw a Survey at It: Questioning Soldier Resilience in the US Army
The banquet hall at the Philadelphia hotel hosting the 2011 Second World Congress for Positive Psychology was packed as keynote speaker Martin Seligman approached the podium. As the unofficial spokesperson for the bourgeoning field known as “the science of human happiness,” the former head of the American Psychological Association does double duty as both a […]
The Lily-Pad Strategy
Check out David Vine’s groundbreaking piece at TomDispatch.com: "The Lily-Pad Strategy, How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War." Anthropologist David Vine, author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, has spent the last three years exploring the […]
Anthropologists Write on Afghanistan
The New York Times Sunday Book Review discusses the books of Noah Coburn and Thomas Barfield, two Boston University anthropologists who conducted fieldwork at Afghanistan: Ten years after the Taliban’s leaders fled their country in apparent defeat, the war in Afghanistan has become what one observer calls “a perpetually escalating stalemate.” As in Iraq, the […]
Bearing Witness
CNN runs a two-part story on the traumas of rape in wartime. The first part highlights the work of Vitoria Sanford among Mayan women in Guatemala: It began as a headache. Then her throat started to feel tight. A dull pain welled in her chest and her joints ached. But Victoria Sanford continued to do […]
Bin Laden is Dead
Susan Hirsch, a Professor of Anthropology and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, talked to NPR’s Melissa Block about Bin Laden’s death. Susan Hirsch’s husband was killed in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Melissa Block: I was wondering if over time, if Osama bin Laden did come to […]
Côte d’Ivoire
Mike McGovern, a professor of political anthropology at Yale University, “remembers Ivory Coast in calmer, more prosperous times, when the country was flush with cocoa profits and the city of Abidjan was at its busy peak.” He talks with NPR’s Linda Wertheimer about the Ivory Coast’s history and the events that led up to the […]
War: Morality vs. Rationality
Scott Atran writes about war at The Huffington Post: “The art of war,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “is certainly the noblest of all arts.” In every culture, war is considered society’s most noble endeavor (recent threat of nuclear war and mass annihilation has made a slight dent in this universal passion), […]
The War in Libya
“The Libyan Revolution is Dead” declares Maximilian Forte in his Zero Anthropology Blog. …this is an autopsy, identifying the weapons used, and the criminals responsible for killing the Libyan revolution. This is no longer a Libyan story–that chapter is now closed. My autopsy is divided into several broad categories of actors: the humanitarians, the rebels, […]