Anthropologists.. Quick March..!

American foreign policy, whether friendly or not, dominates the international news on an almost daily basis. This is something that I have come to expect, though not necessarily look forwards to. The USA is a huge country with an even larger foreign presence and influence, so of course any policy changes or comments the government make will be reported.

However, it seems that lately American foreign policy has also come do dominate the American anthropological journals. The latest issues of American Anthropologist and Anthropology News contain between them 12 articles about war, veterans or American presence abroad. Anthropologists are generally seen as being politically left-wing and this is reflected in the arguments made in the articles themselves. The perspectives that they provide are really interesting, in particular Schwenkel's article on the US' historical unaccountability. Many of the articles in Anthropology News focus on the emotional or psychological problems faced by returning veterans. The number of these may relate to Memorial Day and Armed Forces Day both being celebrated in May (this journal issue).

Although military domination of the journals is not something that I relish (not having a particular interest in the armed forces), I welcome this movement towards a more current, more germane aspect to anthropological publishing. Now, I know that anthropology is becoming more current, particularly in respect to globalisation. However, compared to most other social sciences, such as sociology, politics and economics we are still paying very little attention to current affairs. There are very few anthropological publications or articles being written about the credit crunch or Iraq war, and these are generally only found in the more populist journals. Rather than academic anthropologists looking down on such a perspective shouldn't we be making the most of it? Anthropology can no longer operate in closed, far flung cultures (they simply don't exist any more), yet instead of lamenting this and accepting the end of 'true' anthropology we should be around us, at the new societies and cultures that are being constantly created as the world changes.

As a final note, I would definitely recommend 'From John McCain to Abu Ghraib: Tortured Bodies and Historical Unaccountability if the US Empire' by Christina Schwenkel. This looks at the American government's portrayal of their soldiers abroad as victims and the 'enemy' as torturers. Although this was written in response to the Vietnam War, with the claims of torture mounting against American troops in the Middle East and Guantanamo Bay, we could be seeing a very similar thing happening again.