The employment of anthropologists in time of war is a subject that has become deeply controversial since World War II, in lock step with the application of greater ethical scrutiny to all sciences. The essential conflict is between an anthropologist’s duty to her country and her government, her duty to her discipline and humanity as a whole, and her duty to the subject peoples she studies and who have subjected themselves to study by researchers before her.
Bomb it back to the stone age from the… iron age?
This controversy simmered throughout the Vietnam War when some anthropologists assisted the US government in cultural consulting and even intelligence gathering. The fall-out led to the adoption of a code of ethics by the American Anthropological Association forbidding anthropologists from, in essence, taking sides in conflicts, even ones in which their nation of origin is participating.
Well, the issue flamed over once again with the inception of the US Army “Human Terrain Teams,” which brought social scientists of various disciplines to Iraq and Afghanistan to try to help the army gain understanding and cultural sensitivity in interacting with the local people. And it’s back, with the recent call by the World Archaeological Congress to refuse any military requests to identify culturally important sites in Iran, in case of bombing.
I’m not going to try to deal with Human Terrain Teams here, because, honesty, it’s a much more complex issue that I would have to do more research to handle intelligently. But the suggestion of the World Archaeological Council does pique interesting questions in and of itself.
How does refusing to help the military identify sensitive sites violate any of the anthropologist’s natural duties? What about the duty to the subject people? The issue is that the Iranian people, at various times, let archaeologists into their country to study and understand Iranian sites of interest to all humanity, and then allowed the information to be published around the world. They themselves also did some studying and publishing, again with the same implicit trust that none of that information would be used to hurt them.
Now naively it would seem that the Iranian people would be better served by the preservation of their historical sites than by their destruction. But when archaeologists briefed US officials on important sites in Iraq before the coalition invasion there, they got the most widespread archaeological destruction in recent history. So, if archaeological consulting ends up being ineffectual in stopping damage to Iranian sites, then in some respects archaeologists could be said to be betraying the trust given them by Iranians in the past by softening the PR impact of an attack on their country.
Duty to the discipline? The archaeologist’s duty to his discipline has two needs: the preservation of the integrity of the field so archaeologists from any country can continue to work at any site in the world, and the preservation of archaeological data, in the form of both research and material remains of all sorts. So here we have something of a conflict within a conflict! Arguably, helping a government legitimize aggression against a subject people would damage the implicit assumption of anthropological objectivity and hinder Western archaeologists from working in some countries. But in terms of the preservation of data, the balance in clearly in favor of helping any invaders not destroy important sites.
And does the archaeologist has a duty to humanity beyond what he contributes as an archaeologist? I would say certainly he does. So he should also consider whether his actions are really helping or hurting people. It seems unlikely mere scientists can actually do anything to hinder US military policy, but by diligently assisting military forces to protect precious historical resources, archaeologists can help give the Iranian people a continuity of cultural identity that might be essential to them in the aftermath of the humiliation of an invasion and defeat, or even just the chaos of widespread bombing.
Duty to country is the most deceptively simple requirement of the three, and it’s the most problematic in application. Should anthropologists even consider duty to country? This is an issue few other scientists grapple with so intensely. Anthropologists embrace (to some extent, at least) the ideals of cultural relativism and reject ethnocentrism and simplistic comparisons between cultural practices. So can they thus judge their country to be more worthy of aid and support than any other? And finally, what does that support actually mean?
If an archaeologist believes in good faith that war with Iran would be bad for his country, is he duty bound not to aid his government in making that war happen? That’s what makes the charge that this call by the World Archaeological Council is simply political so interesting. Does it lose legitimacy because it’s motivated in part by political beliefs?
Alright, I suppose at this point I should step back and make clear that there hasn’t actually been a call by any military for information on Iranian archaeological sites (at least as far as any of us know), and the World Archaeology Congress’s statement doesn’t at all reflect some sort of massive archaeological rebellion against being drafted into a war against Iran. The potential ethical dilemmas are still interesting, though, and that’s really what I sat out to explore here. What’s the answer? Well, I’m not sure.
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