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. [Read more]