Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (review)

George Lucas's book was published at a moment of high controversy in the American Anthropological Association as its membership actively debated what role—if any—anthropologists should play in the U.S. military's ongoing efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The controversy still lingers. This debate reacquainted the discipline with long-standing and not altogether resolved tensions over the relation between academic and practicing anthropologists; appropriate sources and applications of disciplinary knowledge; the discipline's relationship to and critique of both power and the state; and, of course, the interpretation of disciplinary ethics.

Entering the fray, Lucas—who hangs his hat at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership of the U.S. Naval Academy—uses the methods of applied philosophy and the tools of a professional ethicist self-effacingly and often sensibly to engage the discipline about how it conducts its own internal dialogues and construes its ethics. Not an anthropologist himself, Lucas provides a timely and often helpful extra-disciplinary account. He is well informed and treats anthropological preoccupations with respect. But given his critical distance, he does not accept these at face value. Instead, he compares the terms of anthropology's with other conceptualizations of academic, civic, and social responsibility, just wars, and the ethical standards of other disciplines.

While anthropologists are unlikely to agree with everything Lucas has to say, he does the discipline a service, as an informed observer conversant with disciplinary concerns while subjecting its sometimes parochial internal debates to broader assessment. In this process he helps to widen the universe of discussion by encouraging us collectively to scrutinize the basic assumptions underlying our sense of our moral responsibilities: as anthropologists, social scientists, citizens, and as human beings. For this work, Lucas should be commended.

Lucas is most provocative when examining the ways in which the discipline chooses to tell its own story. He describes this as a "collective self-consciousness" (69) that includes a "litany of shame" (25) about supposed complicities with the military that in his view have an "outsized mythological significance" (56). In point of fact, he gently suggests, our history is not what we have made of it. Despite regular invocation of the infamous Vietnam-era Project Camelot as a key historical precedent, for example, no anthropologists were in fact integral to it.

Lucas is at his most helpful when discussing the disciplinary prohibition against "secret and clandestine" research. Most notably in chapter 6, Lucas examines disciplinary convictions about secrecy and sets them alongside secrecy's evident role in our discussions of disciplinary history. He points out that a long-standing concern among anthropologists about secrecy appears in fact to be a concern about the possibility of espionage, which is not the same. He also suggests that in principle, secrecy cannot simply be dismissed as unprofessional. Lucas differentiates between secrecy per se and the often morally objectionable intentions behind it. He discusses the appropriateness and inappropriateness of clandestinity, deception, not being public, espionage, classified work, an intention to victimize, an intention to protect anonymity, the complete withholding of research (including results), and uses of "double blind" experiments in other social sciences, among other nuances.

By unpacking the prohibition against secrecy while considering different varieties of secrecy, Lucas encourages a productive redirection of our discussion of this bugbear, from its status as a self-evident ethical dictum toward greater attention to what people actually do, and how varieties of secrecy might play a part (though often not in ways we might assume). In short, Lucas's is a concern with our "practice," while noting a perceived disconnect with how we talk about what we do. This book helpfully reminds us that our debates are often insular ones, with too much time spent talking to ourselves about ourselves. These nuances lead Lucas to question the apparent elision by anthropologists of the rejection of all forms of secrecy with a rejection of government work. Many anthropologists might not reach the author's...