Being All You Can Be in the Army

Here is your moment of Zen: significant passages in a core chapter of the Army's much heralded new "Counterinsurgency Field Manual" is littered with unattributed quotes and paraphrases according to anthropologist David Price writing for Counterpunch newsletter. This is just one example from Chapter Three dealing with the role of intelligence in counterinsurgency operations:

"A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects performed to influence supernatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interest." (Counterinsurgency Manual, 3-51)

This is a passage from a 1972 article by anthropologist and conscientious objector Victor Turner:

"a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests."

See Price's article for more examples of about twenty unattributed sources and pilfered passages in the Manual's Chapter Three alone. Price equates the role of the University of Chicago Press in republishing the field manual, thereby giving it an academic imprimatur, to "weaponizing" anthropology. Something similar was perpetrated secretly by the Commerce Department in 1962. Without permission, the department had a French anthropologist's work on the Montagnards, Nous Avons Mange La Foret, translated into English. US Special Forces conducting an assassination campaign in Vietnam's Central Highlands used the ethnographic information to increase their lethality.