Tracey Rosen forwarded me her very smart response to an article in last week’s NYT that reports the U.S. Army’s use of anthropologists in Afghanistan. (It should be obvious, but Tracey is not the Tracy of the article.) Her response was originally addressed to her colleagues (of whom the B. in the last paragraph is one), but she’s agreed to let me post an excerpt below.

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I’d like to bring up a couple of articles that have stuck with me as I begin to encounter my own political/existential dilemmas that get raised by fieldwork because I think that they are also relevant to this discussion.

The first is by one of our (controversially) activist brethren, David Graeber, who wrote a piece in last January’s edition of Harpers. The title: “Army of Altruists: on the alienated right to do good,” and the link.

His basic point can be gleaned from the title: viz., the “right” for Americans to engage themselves in the socially oriented “good” has been alienated from most of the population. Contra the prevalent notion, held by both sides of the political spectrum, that the nation is largely constituted by apathetic idiots with the wrong sorts of values, Graeber entertains the idea that we just might all be frustrated altruists instead. And he understands the US military as providing the sort of meaningful existence to a huge number of individuals who haven’t had the opportunity to feel that they are helping to contribute to something bigger than themselves.

Now, as the NY Times article helps demonstrate (and as I have been able to derive from my own experiences and conversations) anthropologists are by no means excluded from this category. And getting to “the field,” as I have just done—where its sometimes very difficult to maintain a grander vision of what the hell it is that you are doing and sometimes very difficult to convince yourself that you are doing something more than just using your “informants” so that you may someday be referred to as “Professor”—seems only to amplify this tension created by the privileging of observation over action.

I think this is why many anthro grad students become (as years roll by) more and more excited at the prospect of teaching. It satisfies our (by now ravenous) craving for action and purpose. But, curiously enough, pedagogy doesn’t seem to be what most grad students set out to do from the get go.

So what is happening in the years in between? From my perspective, it seems that grad students assume their roles as educators only as they begin to grapple with the difficulties of the disciplinary field: including the pettiness of academic infighting, the accompanying terror involved in choosing the “right” side, the incredibly small audience of our highly specialized and dense research, lack of more than perfunctory encouragement/mentorship from one’s committee/advisor, accumulating student loans, lack of monetary support and desired recognition from external funders, productive first time experiences in t.a.-ing and teaching.

Finally, there is the quickly approaching darkness at the end of the tunnel (the job market) where we must come to grips with the fact that while what kind of job we get may have some connection to our research, we are not actually getting paid to do research but to teach.

John Kelly constantly refers to the pursuit to undergo training in anthropology as a “calling.” I think this is exactly the right term to describe the “this-worldly asceticism” of what it is that we do. But what is the “other world” that legitimates our practices in “this world”? I think this question is often times willfully disavowed, and pedagogy slowly and unwittingly fills up the void of our social-orientation. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing – only that I feel it would be productive to reflect upon.

And this brings me to the second article I would like to briefly mention. It comes from this September’s edition of Harper’s and was written by Peter Schrag, who has written a number of books on education. Like Graber’s piece, Schrag’s piece undertakes to understand a logic that is held by both the right and the left: viz., our schools are failing us and we should be terrified.

Written in wake of the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik–where Americans first learned to be terrified about our failing educational system–Schrag argues that through all of the policy changes of different administrations throughout the years, it is actually very difficult to get a real sense of decline. But because public schools are really the last bastion of public welfare, we heap enormous amounts of psychic and physical responsibility on them that schools, as centers for education and only education, are not and should not be equipped to handle. The point is that education does not alone a people make and that we have to think more holistically about treating social problems.

Anyway this is a long digression, but I wanted to emphasize how neglected the questions that B. raises have been, and also how serious and complicated they are, and why—no matter how much we may not agree with Tracy’s decision—it is something that we should not at all be dismissive of because it is symptomatic of a larger situation that we are all in one way or another forced to deal with.

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Tracey’s comments are even more interesting in light of Christopher Hitchens’s new article for Vanity Fair, in which he describes his reactions on learning that Mark Daily, a young man from Southern California, volunteered for military service after reading Hitchens’ articles in support of the war. It’s been a long time since I recommended someone read something by Hitchens, and there’s something disturbing about the lengths to which he goes to convince us that Daily is a real hero—a Real American Hero, even—as if the effort were a way to exorcise his obvious feelings of guilt. Nevertheless, the piece is worth reading.