As a follow-up to my last post, I am
reposting this entry with more on the new Bowman expeditions, by my friend and fellow geographer
Joel Wainwright:
"[Jerry] Dobson, a professor of geography at Kansas University [KU], is the lead researcher on one of 14 projects to win grants this year from the Minerva Research Initiative , a U.S. Department of Defense effort to learn more about other parts of the world through social-science research. He and other researchers will receive about $1.8
million over three years to study indigenous communities throughout
Central America, with a possibility to apply for renewal and receive a
total of $3 million over five years. […] “There are too many instances where misunderstanding of other areas has cost us,” Dobson said.
From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, the United States may
have fared better in many of its conflicts over the past half-century
with more knowledge about the culture and politics of other parts of
the world." - Matt Erickson, LJWorld
![](http://www.palgrave.com/products/ShowJacket.asp?ISBN=9781137301734&width=155&height=205)
Source:
Public Political Ecology Lab
Yes, the Bowman expeditions are back, rebooted by a Department of
Defense Minerva grant, and soon to arrive in all seven Central American
countries
.
To study which indigenous peoples, exactly? Usually in academia such
things are not secret, but this project involves the US military.After
reading Erickson’s story I wrote Professor Dobson to ask for a copy of
his research proposal
. In reply to my request, he sent me a link to one of his
peevish essays .
I thanked him for the piece and asked for the proposal again; he
replied by asking if I had read his essay—which, I gather, he sees as a
scathing rebuke of critical scholars like me, hence an answer in
itself
. That’s the thing about collaborating with the military: it makes you more cloistered and secretive
.
The fraternal romance of power creeps in. Pretty soon you don’t share
basic information about your research with other scholars, even when
the work is funded from the public and motivated, ostensibly, by a need
to create an “informed public
.”
In fairness to Professor Dobson, he has reason to be defensive
. His work has come under sharp criticism (see
Joe Bryan’s essay , e.g., and its links)
. I recently published a book,
Geopiracy: Oaxaca, militant empiricism, and geographic thought , that examines how Dr
.
Dobson and other geographers from the University of Kansas went to
Mexico to map indigenous lands with funds from the US military and,
according to the communities they studied, failed to mention the source
of their funds and their ties to the US military
. I won’t recapitulate the whole story (you can read
Jeremy Crampton’s review here ),
but it’s worth remembering that the controversy started when
indigenous communities in Oaxaca discovered the ties between the Bowman
expeditions and the US military
.
They rebelled, publishing a trio of public denunciations of the
project, such as this 2009 letter from the community of San Miguel
Tiltepec, Oaxaca:
[The geographers] never informed us that the data they collected in
our community would be given to the Foreign Military Study Office
(FMSO) of the Army of the United States, nor did they inform us that
this institution was one of the sources of financing for the project.
Because of this, we consider that our General Assembly was tricked by
the researchers, in order to draw out the information the[y] wanted. The community did not request the research[;] it was the researchers who convinced the community to carry it out.
Thus, the research was not carried out due to the community’s need, it
was the researchers […] who designed the research method in order to
collect the type of information that truly interested them.
[…] [W]e wish to express to the public […] our complete disagreement
with the research carried out in our community, since we were not
properly informed of the true goals of the research, the use of the
information obtained, and the sources of financing [for the entire
statement, see Zoltan Grossman’s website ].
The ‘Oaxaca controversy’ shocked many by revealing US military collaboration with academic geographers
. With his NSF/Minerva grant, Professor Dobson is again spearheading the military front within the discipline
. Although to read the coverage of his work in LJWorld, it seems the sole motivation is cultural understanding
.
Thanks to the
Public Records Office at the University of Kansas, I was able to obtain a copy of the proposal that won Dr
. Dobson the $3 million. As a scholarly proposal it is not worth serious discussion
.
The text is comprised mainly of recycled bits of Bowman Expedition
doggerel; superficially it resembles an NSF proposal, but the
analytical architecture is just shoddy
.
For instance, their research hypothesis is: “certain land tenure and
land use practices will mean significant level of cultural resilience,
with associated benefits, such as environmental conservation and
tourism development…” (p 4)
.
Yet these “certain” practices are never defined and the brief
theoretical discussion on land tenure relies mainly on a handful of US
military sources
.
Their methodology is to vacuum up as much material about indigenous
communities as they can obtain and repackage everything into one giant
“ArcGIS database of digital maps, data, and statistics” (p 5)
.
Nevertheless, the proposal contains these useful hints about the project
. Their fieldwork is based out of the Department of Anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (or
UNAH ) where they are collaborating with anthropologist Dr
.
Silva Gonzalez (p 5). They aim to study all the municipalities in
Central America where at least 30% of the population is indigenous as
classified by language (p 7)
.
Presumably this means that they will conduct considerable fieldwork in
Guatemala – home to the largest percentage of indigenous people in
Central American – although, curiously, Honduras is the only country
singled out for fieldwork in the proposal
.
Less ambiguous are their promises about the project’s usefulness to the US military
. The proposal’s
one-page ‘abstract’ includes this statement:
Impact on DoD Capabilities and Broader Implications for National Defense: The proposed research addresses recognized deficiencies in U. S. foreign policy, military strategy, and foreign intelligence. DoD will gain new capabilities to conduct human geographic research, similar to but more advanced than those employed extensively in World Wars I and II. DoD will benefit directly and abundantly
from the openly-reported research and the geographic information
disseminated and from a greatly improved pool of regional experts, an
improved labor pool, and a better informed public in times of future
political debates and conflict [my italics].
Never mind a weak analytical argument; this is the stuff that wins Minerva grants
.
The Minerva program emerged out of the DoD circa 2007, i.e. the same era as the Bowman expeditions
. Through Minerva the DoD seeks to derive ideas and data about potential targets from US-based social scientists
. To do so, the Pentagon has teamed up with NSF (which engages the scholars and handles the money)
.
The funding isn’t enormous – a few million dollars per grant – but
these are times when money is scarce and even research proposals rated
as ‘excellent’ are not necessarily funded by NSF
.
Ironically, the competitiveness of normal NSF (scientific) funding
increases the prestige value of the Minerva (military) grants
. And the NSF helps some Minerva applicants assuage their fears that they are not actually conducting military research
. But make no mistake; it is the DoD’s money and they shape the agenda
. They will also certainly get the ArcGIS database being built by the Kansas geographers
.
Geographers have not been at the forefront of the Minerva program; Dr
. Dobson’s was, I believe, the only geography proposal funded in this year’s batch
.
Among geographers there is practically nothing written on Minerva, but
perhaps Dobson’s grant will change that (the Social Science Research
Council has posted a useful
overview on Minerva with some good essays, such as
this one by Priya Satia at Stanford)
.
To grasp something of the psychology of those geographers working with
the US military today, we are best served by studying the recent pair
of extraordinary papers published by
Trevor Barnes on Walter Christaller’s work for the Nazi regime (including
this one, coauthored with Claudio Minca, in Annals of the AAG 103(3)
. And in times of Bowman redux, we should reread the late
Neil Smith’s outstanding biography of Isaiah Bowman,
American Empire :
[C]iting the ‘growing influence of geography among military men,’
[Bowman] even urged the War Department [today’s Department of Defense]
to send some officers to the AGS [sponsor of today’s Bowman
expeditions] to advance their studies in ‘the field of geography as
applied to military operations’. He hedged about whether Latin American governments should be informed. What became of these plans tendering geography for the purpose of government spying is not clear.
There have always been social scientists who have collaborated with
government intelligence organizations, and from the time of the Roman
geographer Strabo to the current CIA [headed by Petraeus], geography as
a scholarly pursuit has traditionally operated as a handmaiden to the
state.
But the great majority of scholars have traditionally frowned on
collusion with military intelligence operations, and scholarly
associations often carry explicit prohibitions against spying.
[…] What is remarkable about Bowman’s injudicious peddling of
geography and the services of the AGS is the lack of any sense that his
eager cooperation with Military Intelligence, the government’s premier
spy agency of this period, in any way compromises his scientific
integrity or endangers scientists (pp. 89-90).
The Bowman Expeditions represent only one side-project for the US state/military and a small one at that
. Thanks to Edward Snowden,
the NSA’s spying has been exposed and we’ve learned how
hundreds of thousands of people in the US have been subject to government surveillance . The situation is much worse when we consider US state surveillance of the rest of the world
.
The task of systematically collecting geospatial data and conducting
routine surveillance around the world for the US state/military falls
to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (
NGA ), an organization that has not received the scrutiny given to the NSA
. (On the NSA revelations and the NGA, see Jeremy Crampton’s
excellent essay at the Society and Space website
.)
No less worrying are the myriad military programs to improve how the
US armed forces – particularly the Army – ‘uses’ human geography as a
weapon
. As I have discussed
elsewhere ,
these are geographical projects of much greater significance than the
Bowman expeditions and led by people who are more dangerous than
Professor Dobson
.
We are witnessing an unprecedented attempt by one state to collect
data – much of it geocoded – from multiple sources (data mining,
satellites, outright spying, and much more), reaching into the most
intimate spaces of our lives and saturating our very means of
communication
.
The US government has constructed an unparalleled platform for
geospatial data collection and analyses, capable of mapping people’s
movements and communications across the entire planet
.
All of this has potential military ‘applications’, meaning the
potential to harm people, including US citizens (since we can have
little faith that these tools cannot be used on civilians through
police, FBI, or other agencies)
.
The capacity of the US state/military to locate, follow, track, and
kill people is without precedent and without equal, and that is the
point
.
Given the extraordinary record of violence carried out by the US
government over the past century – from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan
– one would have to have an almost religious faith in the
infallibility of US leadership and the rightness of their ideology not
to look at the government’s military/intelligence capacities and feel
enraged at the injustices already committed—and the many more to come
.
What are we to do? One way to answer this question, as Professor
Dobson reminds us, is to ask how we can “reduce international
misunderstandings
.” His approach is to militarize those misunderstandings by providing maps and data to the Pentagon
. There is another way, one elaborated beautifully by Edward Said in a 1991 interview
. Allow me to quote at length:
There’s only one way to anchor oneself [as an intellectual], and that is by affiliation with a cause, a political movement.
There has to be identification not with the secretary of state or the
leading philosopher of the time but with matters involving justice,
principle, truth, conviction.
Those don’t occur in a laboratory or a library. For the American
intellectual, that means, at bottom, that the relationship between the
United States and the rest of the world, now based upon profit and
power, has to be altered to one of coexistence among human communities
that can make and remake their own histories and environments together.
… [Unfortunately, even] inside the university, the prevalence of norms
based upon domination and coercion is so strong because the idea of
authority is so strong, whether it’s derived from the nation-state,
from religion, from the ethnos, from tradition.… Part of intellectual work is understanding how authority is formed. Authority is not God-given. It’s secular.
And if you can understand that, then your work is conducted in such a
way as to be able to provide alternatives to the authoritative and
coercive norms that dominate so much of our intellectual life, our
national and political life, and our international life above all.
If we are going to criticize the formation of authority and provide
alternatives to the norms that dominate intellectual life, we have no
choice: we must confront the US military
.