Anth 211a
Janet McIntosh
As of 11/12/2016
Anthropology of Military and Policing (graduate-level course)
Instructor: Janet McIntosh, Brown 207
Contact info: Office: 781-736-2215
Email:
Office Hours: Monday and Wednesday 12:30-1:30 or by appointment
Course Description and Learning Goals:
This course explores cultural dimensions of military and policing organizations, with a particular focus on United States institutions, but including cross-cultural comparison as well (particularly from Europe and Israel, but also Bolivia, South Africa, and so forth). The military and police are institutions through which the state impinges on individual bodies (those of service members and civilians), sometimes through ritual, discourse, and discipline, sometimes through violence. We will explore the ideologically saturated, embodied, sometimes dehumanizing transformations involved in becoming a member of a military or police force. We explore linguistic stances, metaphors, and meaning-making in military and police cultures. We analyze first-person accounts of military and policing experiences, examining relationships between institutions and experiences, as well as examples of troubled cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contact in these accounts. We shift to exploring masculinity, gender, and LGBTQ rights issues in the United States military, and later in the semester we examine how both police and military entities have responded to new anxieties concerning racial and religious diversity. We discuss the effects of violence and trauma on soldiers’ and police officers’ bodies, minds, and identities. And we explore the ethical dilemmas surrounding the recent Human Terrain Team system, in which anthropologists were embedded with military personnel in Middle Eastern war zones.
Learning goals:
Through a range of empirical and theoretical readings, students will gain a greater understanding of modern military and policing cultures (across a range of nations) and an appreciation of an array of social theories. Students will grasp anthropological approaches to state power, gender, discourse, embodiment, ritual transformation, violence, trauma, hegemony, and resistance. Students will also explore institutional responses to new demands for equal rights in Western contexts. Overall, students will gain critical analytical skills for understanding cultural dynamics and dynamics of power, develop oral skills for analysis through discussions and presentation of course materials, cultivate their ability to organize and lead discussion, and develop graduate level writing skills through their written assignments and my feedback.
Success in this course is based on the expectation that students will spend approximately 9 hours of time per week in preparation for the course (including readings, preparing discussion materials, and writing).
Course Requirements:
1) Attendance
2) Participation, including coming to class prepared, leading discussions at least twice during the semester, and posting a VERY BRIEF question, quotation, or provocation inspired by the readings to LATTE by 1:20 before class each day.
3) Midterm paper, 10-12 pages, due in the 7th week of the semester
4) Final essay, 18-25 pages, due a week after the last class. Final essays will require independent research on primary and secondary sources.
Grading:
1) Attendance: 15%
2) Participation: 30% (including helping lead at least 2 discussions, and brief latte postings)
3) Midterm paper: 20% (OR mega-paper- see below)
4) Final Essay: 35% OR: instead of midterm + final, one mega-paper – in which case you must be in touch with me in the weeks leading up to the deadline so there can be some early feedback
Policy on Attendance:
Attendance is mandatory and will be factored into your grade (see above). Each student is permitted one excused absence. Absences beyond this can hurt your grade, but you can mitigate this by submitting a 2-3 page response paper that indicates you have done the readings for that day, and engaged with their implications and their links to other course material. Such make-up exercises are due to the professor within 10 days of the missed class.
Accommodations: If you are a student with a documented disability on record at Brandeis University and wish to have a reasonable accommodation made for you in this class, please furnish me with the appropriate documentation from Academic Services as soon as possible.
Academic Integrity and Plagiarism: You may only submit your own original work in this course; this includes exams, observations, written papers, and other media. Please be careful to cite precisely and properly the sources of all authors and persons you have drawn upon in your written work. Plagiarism (from published or internet sources, or from another student) is a serious violation of academic integrity. Please take special care to indicate the precise source of all materials found on the web, indicating the correct URL address of any material you have quoted or in any way drawn upon. Remember, you must indicate through quotations and citation when quoting from any outside source (internet or print).
PROVISIONAL SCHEDULE- NEEDS LOTS OF UPDATING
Mon Aug 29th
UNIT 1: Defining Military and Policing: Legitimized Force, Fields of Control, and the Role of the State in Military and Police Cultures
*MacLeish, Ken. 2015. “The Ethnography of Good Machines.” Critical Military Studies 1(1): 11-22.
* Fassin, Didier. 2013. “Situation,” in Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Polity Press.
Wed Aug 31st – POLICING; JARA
*Fassin, Didier. 2013. “Ordinary” in Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Polity Press.
*Garriott, William. 2013. “Policing Meth: Police Power and the War on Drugs.” In Policing and Contemporary Governance: The Anthropology of Police in Practice, ed. William Garriott. Palgrave MacMillan
*Bittner, Egon 1970 “Florence Nightingale in Pursuit of Willie Sutton: Towards a Theory of Police,” in The Potential For Reform in Criminal Justice. (SKIM)
(No classes Sept 5th; labor day)
Wed Sept 7- MORE INTRO TO MILITARY/MILITARIZATION; CELIA (Lutz and Agamben)
*Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist 104(3): 723-735.
*Sarah Lamb’s notes on Agamben
*Agamben, Giorgio. Pp. 1-4 of States of Exception.
*Goldstein, Daniel. 2010. “Toward a Critical Anthropology of Security.” Current Anthropology. (SKIM)
*Review of Rosa Brooks’ book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (OPTIONAL)
*Dean, Mitchell. 2006. “Military Intervention as ‘Police’ Action?’” in Dubber & Valverde (eds) The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance. Stanford University Press. (OPTIONAL)
Thurs Sept 8th (Brandeis Monday)
UNIT 2: Recruiting and Becoming:- KRISTINA (esp Strand and Berndtsson, + Verrips)
*Enloe, Cynthia. 2015. “The recruiter and the sceptic: A feminist approach to military studies.” Critical Military Studies 1(1): 3-10.
*Strand, Sanna and Joakim Berndtsson. 2015. “Recruiting the “enterprising soldier”: military recruitment discourses in Sweden and the United Kingdom.” Critical Military Studies 1(1):
233-248.
*Verrips, Jojada. 2004. “Dehumanization as a Double-Edged Sword: From Boot Camp Animals to Killing Machines,” Ch. 8 in Grammars of Identity/Alterity: A Structural Approach, eds. Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Mon Sept 12—MAYA (Sasson-Levy); JOHN (Agelopoulos)
*Agelopoulos, Georgios. 2000. “You’re in the Army Now: An Ethnographic Account of Military Training [in Greece].” Paper presented at the 6th conference of the European Association for Social Anthropology, 26-29 July, 2000.
*Levy, Gal and Orna Sasson-Levy. 2008. “Militarized Socialization, Military Service, and Class Reproduction: The Experiences of Israeli Soldiers.” Sociological Perspectives 51(2): 349-374.
Wed Sept 14—MAYA, continued, plus Janet’s material
NO READINGS; in-class exercises/discussions. Recruiting and training videos for Israeli and US military.
Mon Sept 19- MAYA and CLARA (Cohn for both, also McElhinney for Clara)
UNIT 3: Linguistic Techniques in Policing and Military Contexts
*McHugh, John D. 2008. “Lost in Translation,” The Guardian June 12, 2008. http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2008/jun/11/afghanistan.johndmchugh
*Cohn, Carol. 1987. “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs 12(4): 687-718.
*Haworth, Kate. 2006. “The Dynamics of Power and Resistance in Police Interview Discourse.” Discourse & Society 17(6): 739-759.
*McElhinny, Bonnie. 1995. Challenging Hegemonic Masculinities: Female and Male Police Officers Handling Domestic Violence. In Gender Articulated. K. Hall and M. Bucholtz, ed. Routledge. Pp. 217-244.
Wed Sept 21st
UNIT 4: Experience and Identity: JOHN
*Karen Frewin and Keith Tuffin, 1998. “Police status, conformity and internal pressure: a discursive analysis of police culture.” Discourse and Society 9(2): 173-185.
*Brown, Keith and Catherine Lutz. 2007. Review Essay: “Grunt-lit: The Participant-Observers of Empire.” American Ethnologist 34(2): 322-328. http://www.jstor.org.resources.library.brandeis.edu/stable/pdf/4496809.pdf?acceptTC=true
Mon Sept 26th --KRISTINA (both Reickhoff and Woodward?), SHAWN (esp Woodward)
*Reickhoff, Paul. 2006. Excerpts, Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier’s Fight for America from Baghdad to Washington. NAL Hardcover.
*Woodward, R. and Jenkings, K.N. 2011. “Military Identities in the Situated Accounts of British Military Personnel.” Sociology 45 (2): 252-268.
Wed Sept 28 AND Wed Oct 5th—EVERYONE (Note: No classes Oct 3rd Rosh Hashana)
*MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community. Princeton University Press.
Mon Oct 10--– INTERLUDE: Ritual, Politics, and Power—CELIA
*Kertzer, David. Excerpts from his Ritual, Politics, and Power.
(No classes Wed Oct 12th; Yom Kippur)
(No classes Mon Oct 17th; Sukkot)
Wed Oct 19th —SHAWN (esp Gutmann), JESS (esp. Gill)
UNIT 5: Gender: Masculinities, Men, and Women
*Gutmann, Matthew. “Trafficking in Men: The Anthropology of Masculinity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 385-409. (SKIM)
*Gill, L. 1997. "Creating Citizens, Making Men: The Military and Masculinity in Bolivia." Cultural Anthropology 12(4): 527–550.
*Eastman, Carolyn. 2009. “Fight Like a Man: Gender and Rhetoric in the Early Nineteenth‐Century American Peace Movement.” American Nineteenth Century History 10(3). (Only the first 1/3 really necessary)
(No classes Mon Oct 24th; Shmini Atzeret)
Tues Oct 25th- Brandeis Monday
*Discussion of the articulation between anthropology and the military
*Introduction and Ch. 6, “Human wrongs and rights,” from Leslie Gill’s 2004 School of the Americas
Wed Oct 26- MAYA (esp Sasson-Levy), CLARA (esp. Moon)
*Sasson-Levy, Orna. 2007. “Contradictory Consequences of Mandatory Conscription: The Case of Women Secretaries in the Israeli Military.” Gender & Society 21(4): 481-507.
*Basham, Victoria. 2008. “From Bride to Body Bag: The Death of Corporal Sarah Bryant and the Gendered War on Terror.” E-International Relations. http://www.e-ir.info/2008/06/30/from-%E2%80%98bride-to-body-bag%E2%80%99-the-death-of-corporal-sarah-bryant-and-the-gendered-%E2%80%98war-on-terror%E2%80%99/
*Moon, Seungsook. 2005. "Trouble with Conscription, Entertaining Soldiers: Popular Culture and the Politics of Militarized Masculinity in South Korea" File
*Moon, Seungsook. (2002) "Beyond Equality vs Difference: Professional Women Soldiers in the South Korean Army" (supplementary)File
*McElhinney, Bonnie S. (1994). “An Economy of Affect: objectivity, masculinity and the gendering of policework.” In Cornwall & Lindisfarne, ed. Dislocating Masculinity, pp. 159-171. (supplementary)
Mon Oct 31st—(NOTE: Midterm papers due roughly around here)
UNIT 6: LGBTQ Developments in the Military
*Excerpts from Belkin, Aaron. 2012. Excerpt, Bring me Men: Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898-2001. Oxford University Press.
Wed Nov 2--PAIGE
*Introduction and Chapter 1 of Lehring, Garry. 2003. Officially Gay: The Political Construction of Sexuality. Temple University Press. (SKIM the remaining chapters)
*Introduction and Chapter 2 (“The Gay Gene”) from Laing, John and Page Matthew Brooks, eds. 2013. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Homosexuality, Chaplaincy, and the Modern Military. Eugene, OR: Resource Publications.
Mon Nov 7th--KRISTINA (Weiss and Caldeira), CELIA (Weiss and Caldeira)
UNIT 7: Violence, the Psyche, and Resistance from Within
*Weiss, Erika. 2015. “Beyond Mystification: Hegemony, Resistance, and Ethical Responsibility in Israel.” Anthropological Quarterly 88(2): 417-443.
*Caldeira, Teresa P. R. 2013. “The Paradox of Police Violence in Democratic Brazil.” In Policing and Contemporary Governance: The Anthropology of Police in Practice, ed. William Garriott. Palgrave MacMillan
Wed Nov 9th
*Excerpt, Gusterson, Hugh. 1996. Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. University of California Press.
*Gusterson, Hugh. 2015. “Remote intimacy in drone warfare,” Paper presented at Society for Social Studies of Science Meeting, Denver CO, Nov 13 2015.
UNIT 8: Embodiment, All Kinds of Injury, and Homecoming after Combat
Mon Nov 14th
*Sorensen, Birgitte. 2015. “Veterans Homecomings: Secrecy and Post-deployment Social Becoming.” Current Anthropology 56(12)
*“Moral Injury in Veterans of War.” PTSD Research Quarterly 23(1), 2012. (SKIM)
*Messinger, Seth D. 2009. “Incorporating the Prosthetic: Traumatic, Limb-Loss, Rehabilitation and Refigured Military Bodies.” Disability & Rehabilitation 31 (25): 2130–34.
Wed Nov 16—PAIGE
*Wool, Zoe. 2012. “On Movement: The Matter of U.S. Soldiers’ Being after Combat.” Ethnos (1-31)
*Wool, Zoe. 2016. “Attachments of Life: Intimacy, Genital Injury, and the Flesh of the U.S. Soldier Body” in Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium. Eds. Veena Das and Clara Han. University of California Press.
Mon Nov 21 (no classes Nov 23rd thru Thanksgiving break)
*Excerpt, Sebastian Junger. 2016. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. New York: Twelve.
Mon Nov 28th, Wed Nov 30th
UNIT 9: Anthropologists in the Military
*CSQ. 1987. “Anthropology and Apartheid: The Rise of Military Ethnology in South Africa” in Cultural Survival Quarterly 11(4): Militarization and Indigenous Peoples: Part 2, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
*Mountcastle, Amy and James Armstrong. 2010. Obama’s War and Anthropology: Ethical Issues and Militarizing Anthropology.” Social Justice 37(2-3): 160-174.
*Carroll, Katherine Blue. 2015. “What do you Bring to the Fight? A Year in Iraq as an Embedded Social Scientist.” In Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eds. Montgomery McFate, Janice H. Lawrence. London: Hurst & Company.
*Further excerpts, Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eds. Montgomery McFate, Janice H. Lawrence. London: Hurst & Company.
Mon Dec 5th
UNIT 10: Diversity, Change, Reforms (Race, Ethnicity)—JESS (esp Karpiak), JARA
*Karpiak, Kevin. 2013. “Using George Zimmerman as an Object Lesson in the Anthropology of Policing.” http://savageminds.org/2013/07/16/using-george-zimmerman-as-an-object-lesson-in-the-anthropology-of-policing/
*Passages from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World and Me
*Avram Bornstein - Co-authors Sophine Charles, Jannette Domingo and Carmen Solis. 2012. “Critical Race Theory Meets the NYPD: an Assessment of Anti-racist Pedagogy for Police in New York City.” Journal of Criminal Justice Education 23(2): 174-204.
Wed Dec 7th
*Kristina Stoeckl and Oliver Roy. 2015. “Muslim soldiers, Muslim chaplains: the accommodation of Islam in Western militaries” Religion, State, and Society 43(1): 35-40.
*Journalistic Sources:
-“A Practicing Muslim Soldier Cannot Swear Allegiance to the U.S. Constitution | RSN
Pick of the Day | Editorial - Right Side News.” The Right Conservative News Site.
-Blackburn, Bradley, and Margaret Aro. "Muslim-American Soldier Claims Harassment in the Army." ABC News. ABC News Network, 14 Apr. 2010.
-“Coming to Terms with a Muslim Identity in the U.S. Army.” The Washington Post, 24 Mar. 2010.
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