"Virtual War and Magical Death" is a provocative examination of the
relations between anthropology and contemporary global war. Several
arguments unite the collected essays, which are based on
ethnographic research in varied locations, including Guatemala,
Uganda, and Tanzania, as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and
the United States. Foremost is the contention that modern high-tech
warfare--as it is practiced and represented by the military, the
media, and civilians--is analogous to rituals of magic and sorcery.
Technologies of "virtual warfare," such as high-altitude bombing,
remote drone attacks, night-vision goggles, and even music videoes
and computer games that simulate battle, reproduce the imaginative
worlds and subjective experiences of witchcraft, magic, and assault
sorcery long studied by cultural anthropologists.
Another significant focus of the collection is the U.S.
military's exploitation of ethnographic research, particularly
through its controversial Human Terrain Systems (HTS) Program,
which embeds anthropologists as cultural experts in military units.
Several pieces address the ethical dilemmas that HTS and other
counterinsurgency projects pose for anthropologists. Other essays
reveal the relatively small scale of those programs in relation to
the military's broader use of, and ambitions for, social scientific
data.
"
Contributors." Robertson Allen, Brian Ferguson, Sverker Finnstrom,
Roberto J. Gonzalez, David H. Price, Antonius Robben, Victoria
Sanford, Jeffrey Sluka, Koen Stroeken, Matthew Sumera, Neil L.
Whitehead
General
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