Montgomery McFate’s article “Anthropology and counterinsurgency” re-triggered quite some debate within anthropology. See e.g. Dustin Wax’s entry at Savage Minds and the appending discussion [references below]. Now McFate has re-surfaced and last monday spoke at the Women in International Security Conference. UPI Correspondent Lucy Stallworthy has written an article on that, called ↑Experts apply anthropology to Iraq. Here’s a snippet: […] Montgomery McFate, a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses, argued for an increased understanding of the tribal nature of Iraqi society. She suggested this would benefit the U.S. forces by enabling them to adapt to the … Continue reading
Daily Archives: Saturday, 4th February 2006
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Call it vanity, utilitarian pragmatism, idealism, or anything in-between—the full spectrum is ready to be used for your judgement. Via the ↑Anthropological fields and subfields section of ↑Wikipedia’s article on anthropology I stumbled over the article ↑Cyber anthropology, which then only consisted of one sentence: “Cyber Anthropology is supposedly a field of Anthropology dealing primarily with computers in human society.”—but the article already had a horrific history of revisions and changes. Once it read: “Cyber Anthropology is different from the other fields of Anthropology because it has to do with the finding and searching of information using computers, rather than … Continue reading