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Ethnography, Silence, Torture and Knowledge


Neil L. Whitehead Version of record first published: 01 May 2012

To cite this article: Neil L. Whitehead (2012): Ethnography, Silence, Torture and Knowledge, History and Anthropology, 23:2, 271-282 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2012.674913

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History and Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 2, June 2012, pp. 271 282

Ethnography, Silence, Torture and Knowledge


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Neil L. Whitehead

This paper considers the interrelationships, historically and culturally, between ethnography, silence, torture and knowledge. As a key methodology for anthropology, and increasingly other academic disciplines, ethnography has also become a broader cultural value. In the context of the emergence of anthropology as a professional discipline the epistemology implicit in ethnography is discussed with reference to he cultural meanings of silence and of torture. The inuences of Classical and Enlightenment ideas of the foundation of truth in agonistic performance on modernist science and social research provide a context for discerning the pragmatic convergence between ethnography and torture, especially in recent attempt to weaponize culture and recruit social scientists to military counter-insurgency campaigns. Keywords: Ethnography; Science; Silence; Torture; Anthropology Ethnography and Anthropology as Science Anthropology is in high demand these days, along with other social sciences, particularly amongst military planners in the USA, recruiting for the Human Terrain Systems initiative HQ at Fort Leavenworth (Gonzalez 2009). Moreover, it is not just anthropologists who use ethnography in the context of academic research, but also sociologists, literary scholars, geographers and so forth. In these ways, it has become apparent that ethnography, or the idea of the ethnographic has become a twenty-rst century cultural value. From embedded journalists to the experiences sought by eco-tourists and the rise of the ethnographically-themed reality show, the importance of being there as a token of truth or knowledge is widespread (Hoestery 2012). Perhaps as anthropologists, our sense of relevance is as much a result of that widening interest

ISSN 0275-7206 print/1477-2612 online/12/02027112 # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2012.674913

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in things ethnographic as it is the perfection or astuteness of our analyses. Such attention is no doubt welcome, but it is also apt to blind us to some of the consequences of too eagerly embracing non-academic agencies and institutions in search of ethnographic understanding. This widespread cultural interest in ethnography is, therefore, also an opportunity to examine some of the fundamental features of knowledge production as a cultural act and in particular the origins and unintended consequences of employing the kinds of methodology that underpin ethnographic inquires. In current circumstances, then the question can be put quite succinctly: do the ethical assumptions behind current ethnography, that we should do no harm, endanger or prejudice the wellbeing of our subjects, override the duties of loyal citizens under the extreme circumstances of civil emergency, natural disaster or war? A commonly held view within the Western intellectual tradition is that the pursuit of knowledge is supposedly disinterested in the sense of being non-partisan. Knowledge or science itself thus becomes a cultural commodity and is represented as indifferent to personal or cultural wishes, hopes or desires. In this way, the plea for academic neutrality is often cast as an ethical situation that relates only to the individual. But this obscures potential disciplinary ethical issues that frame individual ethics, such as the colonizing methodology of eldwork or the epistemological heritage of ethnography as an adjunct to political power. The history of anthropology shows us that anthropologists have often engaged in covert and overt work for various government agencies (Price 2008). So the issue is not whether academia should ever work with or for government, since they are mutually supportive institutions, but under what conditions this occurs and how such decisions might affect the ability of anthropologists to conduct ethical research. This kind of re-evaluation of the political and ethical consequences of doing ethnography necessarily starts by acknowledging that there is a widespread refusal by local populations to become legible to the State or its institutions of government. For example, James Scotts recent book on Southeast AsiaThe Art of Not Being Governedresonates with a vast literature from the Americas that underlines how avoidance and retreat, as well as confrontation and resistance, are important ways in which others have historically reacted to the imminent threat of incorporation into the political and economic structures of the Western-modern-global (Ferguson & Whitehead 2000). The panacea of sensitive ethnographic research as a solution to such issues looks very different from the subjects point of view, to quote one such informant, an Amazonian caboclo (river nomad)Research is a thing that does not declare what it is. Research hides many things.1 This is both a wonderfully ironic formulation and an astute understanding of the fact that the apparent transparency of research may occlude rather than reveal truths (West and Saunders 2003). Resistance to the surveillance of government and its research is also made apparent through popular support for the criminal, rebel or insurgent. In such contexts exotic, marginal, rebellious, and insurgent peoples must be read despite their self-occlusion and the intimacy of ethnography can become the means to achieve that. Although

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deploying ethnography for purposes of colonial occupation or the enforcement of State power need not be a self-conscious or a politically overt aspect of the agency of the State or the researcher, since ways of knowing, as much as the knowledge they produce, are culturally shared amongst the agents of State power, this does not mean that scholars and academics need be complicit in such exercises. Certainly many anthropologists such as Evans-Pritchard (1940) and Asad (1973) have broached such issues before. As Evans-Pritchard (1940) wrote: When the Government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan asked me to make a study of the Nuer I accepted after hesitation and with misgivings (7). Evans-Pritchard also makes clear the basis for such misgivings:
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A Government force surrounded our camp one morning at sunrise, searched for two prophets who had been leaders in a recent revolt, took hostages, and threatened to take many more if the prophets were not handed over . . . It would at any time have been difcult to do research among the Nuer, and at the period of my visit they were unusually hostile, for their recent defeat by Government forces and the measures taken to ensure their nal submission had occasioned deep resentment. Nuer had often remarked to me, You raid us, yet you say we cannot raid the Dinka; you overcame us with rearms and we had only spears. If we had had rearms we could have routed you; and so forth. When I entered a cattle camp it was not only as a stranger but as an enemy, and they seldom tried to conceal their disgust at my presence, refusing to answer my greetings and even turning away when I addressed them. (1940: 11)

The contention here is that there is a systematic, not just occasionally unfortunate, connection between the cultural forms of Western knowledge (especially ethnography) and the colonial and coercive revelation of the lives of others (especially threatening others). This is directly reected in the fact that the professionalization of anthropology and ethnography in the early twentieth century precisely aimed to detach ethnographic information gathering from this kind of governmental project and to re-invent it as a systematic, objective and scientic technique. But the result is then that ethnography can be re-appropriated by government as a scientic methodology without requiring the political co-option of anthropologists or sociologists. This is neatly exemplied by the British social programme Mass Observation that ran from 1937 until the 1960s and which ultimately failed to negotiate these ambiguities as to anonymity and government power.2 Although initiated as an independent project by, among others, an anthropologist, Tom Harrison, the Second World War caused Mass-Observation to do contract research for the British government in support of military recruiting and war-time propaganda, part of a burgeoning human science and media panopticon for the regulation of citizenry. At the time, Mass-Observation was also criticized as an invasion of privacy, since participants were not only reporting on their own lives but also on those of neighbours and friends. Nonetheless, this creation of an atmosphere of surveillance, the emergent issues of privacy and anonymity, the hidden and occult nature of political threats such as communism, and the rising culture of espionage after the Second World War, all highlight the tension between knowledge and power inherent in the idea of revealing others through intimate kinds of knowledge. The ethnography of selves and others was also linked in Harrisons

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biography since, during the Second World War, he was also recruited for a plan to use the native peoples of Borneo against the Japanese military. He was attached to Z Special Unit (also known as Z Force), as a part of the Allied Intelligence Bureau in the South West Pacic region (Dennis 2006). Nonetheless, this sort of unsystematized cultural knowledge and its pragmatic interpretation by agents of the government apparatus was not considered a professionally scientic and scholarly way of doing anthropology, and was relegated to the status of travelogue, memoir or as simply lacking credible cultural, if not military,3 insight. Certainly these were valid criticisms in their day, but it is the genealogy of ethnographic knowledge that is relevant to consider here, as well as the way in which the newly scientic voice of ethnography might, under other circumstances be reattached and recruited, to the purposes of government. As with the British Z Force this is currently the case for the US Armys HTS programme as well as other projects for utilizing social science knowledge, such as the Pentagons MINERVA programme for funding basic academic research (Ferguson Forthcoming). Whether or not anthropology has been critically engaged in this legacy to a sufcient degree is, therefore, tested in considering the difcult and perhaps unwelcome questions as to why we pursue the knowledge goals we do, and the nature of the methods we use to full those goals. In this way, more conscious decisions could be made as to whether or not those goals are the appropriate ones for a post-colonial anthropology that is not to become unwittingly entailed in the projection and inscription of State power. In short, there is a need for a better contextualization of our need to know, be that the lurid scenario of an imminent terrorist attack or more subtle issues of the purposes of ethnological collection and retention of Native American artefacts and human remains as raised by the NAGPRA Legislation in the USA. The co-option of ethnographic research data into military planning or even enhanced interrogation is, therefore, an alarming prospect for most anthropologists, but is also a reection of the epistemological character of ethnography itself as scientic research. Indeed, I have recently discovered that my own research, published in the volume War in the Tribal Zone (2000), has become part of the architecture of military understanding in Afghanistan. However, the prevailing professional assumption (which I also shared) would be that the progressive, advocacy or human justice goals of most ethnographic representation would insulate and inoculate ethnography against being used in this way. But it would seem that despite this, we may still be blind to the epistemological origins and character of the anthropological research agenda which historically informs our practice. In which case, anthropology remains unaware of the way in which the ethnographic interview might imperceptibly slide into an enhanced interrogation technique. As a University of Wisconsin study-abroad student of mine, who spent the 2009 summer in India, was told candidly during one of his ethnographic interviews, the only reason you are here is to better your understanding of us and our language. The more you understand us, the easier it is for you to kill us. Certainly the work of many anthropologists engaged with issues of the military and warfare are exemplary in their search for new ethnographic strategies and this has uncovered new objects of ethnographic interest and new forms of ethnographic

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engagement with military and security worlds as well as the virtual battle space and the broader social contexts of armed conict. This work on war, violence and its cultural components thus pointedly demonstrates that it is the character of our participation in other cultural worlds, not just of our observation, that needs to be examined. In a scene of violence and war observation is not a neutral or objective position; rather it is one in which one does nothing. The laudable purposes of observation or witnessing are inaction in the face of critical ethical issues, as both journalists and ethnographers already know.4 However, with a greater emphasis on thinking about how we participate in other cultural situations, as well as what our knowledge goals are in such situations, such scenarios may be avoided. In particular ethical issues as to participation in a military Human Terrain team, or other such military/security programmes, become less of an abstract question of moral commitment to the idea of democratic government or academic scholarship, and more of an intersubjective question as to how one conducts oneself as a person in the world, in whatever social roles we perform.

Science, Silence and Torture Professional anthropology is not an excuse for ethical retreat or amnesia, as is true for other academic disciplines that interact with people. Without doubt, anthropology is only publicly comfortable with certain kinds of inquirybroadly those that do not entail deception and physical or mental harm. For these reasons, there are US federally mandated Human Subjects Review Panels that operate in all universities which receive Federal grant funding. The overarching Institutional Review Board for a given university oversees not just human but also animal experimentation and research, and so functions as a form of licensing for the acceptable parameters of research. But, as the public debate in the USA over the use of torture showed us, we can easily revise those preferred parameters if the urgency and need is thought to be sufciently pressing. The just published report by Physician for Human Rights illustrates very clearly the malleability of state-sponsored forms of regulation of human subjects research.5 Indeed, in October 2010, the Secretary of State Hilary Clinton6 publicly apologized to Guatemalans for US participation in secret medical experiments during the 1940s in which US Government researchers infected patients with syphilis and gonorrhea without their consent in the 1940s. In fact, this kind of experimentation was but one of a number of earlier programmes, like Mass Observation, as well as being contemporary with other secret experiments within the USA itself, such as the notorious MK-Ultra programme and related projects, in which both the Canadian and British governments were also deeply invested. MK-ULTRA was the code name for a covert CIA interrogation research programme, run by the Ofce of Scientic Intelligence (Ronson 2005). The programme used USA, UK and Canadian citizens as its test subjects and involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental

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states and to alter brain function. On the Senate oor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:
The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an extensive testing and experimentation program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign. Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to unwitting subjects in social situations.7

MK-ULTRA also funded The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology whose grantees included such notable academics as Margaret Mead. The interrogation experiments were also exported to Canada when the CIA recruited Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, creator of the psychic driving concept. His experiments resulted in victims incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents (Klein 2007: 39 41). His work was inspired and paralleled by the British psychiatrist Dr William Sargent at St Thomas Hospital, London, and Belmont Hospital, Surrey, who experimented extensively on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage (Thomas 2009: 210). It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide as the rst chairman of the World Psychiatric Association as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron had also been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 194647. So, as in the case of the MK-Ultra programme, it is evident that we do not need the excuse of active war to countenance all kinds of special or extraordinary governmental actions. Although this medicalization of torture is supposed to challenge many received understandings of what might constitute torture as opposed to the enhanced interrogation technique, in fact, as Lazreg (2007) writes of the Algerian insurgency, discussions of what degree of physical punishment rises to the level of torture . . . generally constitute preliminaries to defending torture as a legitimate form of interrogation (6). What is unsettling here for anthropologists and other forms of the ethnographer is that, as with torture, the purpose of ethnography is the gathering of information, data and knowledge of others, who might be either enemies or allies of the government apparatus in the ethnographers homeland. So we can ask again: how then is ethnographic interrogation different from enhanced interrogation, or is there actually hidden epistemological convergence between torture and ethnography which would in part account for the persistent ambiguity that anthropology has shown towards the practice of state-sponsored research and more importantly an inability to resolve such questions at the professional level? This analogy, although very difcult to countenance, given the way in which ethnography has been used to produce so many key insights into many forms of oppression and exploitation world-wide, cannot be lightly dismissed. At stake is our right-to-know things, even where such things are kept hidden purposefully (kinship), are only talked about with pain (memories of war, killings, witchcraft,) or where there is a cultural silence and knowledge that is as yet unarticulated, such as personal motives, life-histories, collective purposes:

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This was what made the Atchei savages: their savagery was formed of silence; it was a distressing sign of their last freedom, and I too wanted to deprive them of it. I had to bargain with death; with patience and cunning, using a little bribery. . . I had to break through the . . . passive resistance, interfere with their freedom, and make them talk. (Clastres, 1998: 97; my emphasis)

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In this passage from the Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, Pierre Clastres stresses the profound signicance of Atchei-Guayaki silence in the face of ethnographic inquiry, seeing it as the foundation of their continuing autonomy, health and freedom:
The society of the Atchei . . . was so healthy that it could not enter into a dialogue with me, with another world. And for this reason the Atchei accepted gifts that they had not asked for, and rejected my attempts at conversation because they were strong enough not to need it; we would begin to talk only when they got sick. (1998: 97)

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Indeed, we do have a terror of the silence of the savage other, which the torture of terrorists, if not the ethnography of tribal subjects, must rupture. Silence, the absence of explanation or rationality, is part of what is terrifying about both terrorists and savages. In Western cultural tradition, our desire to speak and to be heard stems from the Enlightenment understanding of the cultural and historical foundations of our Cartesian notions about individual existenceto think (that is, to speak) is to be human. As a result, the absence of speech, or its failure to become intelligible (a literal barbarism), means that silence potentially operates as a form of terror and resistance. Silence threatens our ideas about the humanity of being and may even suggest non-being, or inhumanity. Silence is also a sign of death, but perhaps also the prelude to re-birth as in the monks vow of silence that leads to spiritual rebirth, or the rehabilitatory silence enforced on prisoners. So too the anthropologist becomes silent culturally through travel to exotic places, and the anthropologists return is, therefore, marked by an excessive narration of the other in the form of doctoral texts and panel presentations. In this way, the establishment of professional ethnographic credentials takes place through the unsilencing of the now researched other. Like the ethnographic interview then, enhanced interrogation overcomes the silence of the resistant other, and like torture, the results of ethnography are epistemologically problematic, notwithstanding the undergirding justications of professional academic research and scientic knowledge.8 For these reasons, the broader signicance of ethnographic interrogation as a token of power relations entails that the agonistic process of inquiry, underlying both torture and ethnography, can never produce the kinds of knowledge we culturally desire. The Greek term for torture was basanos, literally meaning an assay or testing of metals for their purity. This agonistic view of how true knowledge was produced became a central axiom of the Enlightenment revival of Classical thought. The ancient Greeks routinely tortured slaves to extract evidence for legal trials. They considered truth obtained from slaves by torture to be more reliable than the freely given testimony of free men (DuBois 1991). However, the importance of this Classical attitude to suffering and truth is part of a wider legacy. By this token, the marvels of modern medicine are also intellectually rooted in the violent agon performed by

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such key gures in the history of medicine as Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Chios who personally vivisected over 600 live prisoners of war in order to derive their understanding of human anatomy (Lutz 2002: 37). So one may question whether recollection of this fact is merely a curiosity that allows us to marvel at our progress from the past, or whether our very idea of truth, the truth of the philosophical tradition founded by the ancient Greeks, is caught up in the logic of torture, in which truth is conceived of as residing elsewhere, requiring violence and suffering as necessary for its production. Neo-classical anatomy, reviving the works of these early Greeks, also undertook agonistic experimentation, including animal vivisection and human public dissection and display. As part of such human sciences direct ethnographic observation and ethnological writing are also part of this agonistic legacy of intellectual inquiry. For example, the early modern discoverie of witchcraft throughout Europe was in essence an ethnographic exercise directly serviced by the information gathered through systematic torture in forms that recall our own current techniques of waterboarding (Scot 1989; Summers 1971). Indeed, even outside Western traditions, governments may also deploy ethnography to such ends and nearly all empires of the past generated some form of ofcial ethnography. For example the Manchus used a long-lasting tradition of depicting their tributaries and minority peoples in just such a fashion (Deal & Hostetler 2007; Hostetler 2005). Just as did Europe in its colonialism of the last 500 years from Columbus to the present day (Hulme & Whitehead 1992). In the nineteenth century, the scene of torture and torment as a fount of truth was relocated to the agonies of creative and intellectual production, as in the emotionally intensity and even self-destruction of the Romantics. The gure of the tormented and tortured genius, like Edgar Allan Poe, was a staple of the nineteenth and twentieth century imagination, just as human or animal suffering in scientic experimentation can also be pictured as the (acceptable) price of progress. Such examples signal the continuing cultural importance of founding truth in agonistic performance, as is the case with the witnessing of twentieth century genocides (Guyer 2007), or with the continuing cultural centrality of the crucied Christ to Western thinking. This then is also the import and truth of the human qualities revealed in other cultural practices such as the Classically inspired Olympic Games, which themselves originated as an explicit proxy for war. The massive cultural and economic presence of sport world-wide replays this ideology weekly if not nightly in the sport sections of every news outlet, to say nothing of the global industries that service consumption and participation in sport and physical recreation. No pain, no gain in these cultural realms, or in the torture room. It is quite correct to point out that as a device for collecting particular and accurate information, the theatre of torment we know from such contexts as Algeria, Guatemala, Chile, or Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib, simply does not work. These violent performances are a form of a ritual meant to dramatize and empower the state or its agents, while marking and ontologically possessing the victims, as Scarry (1987) has pointed out. In this way, our displacement of bodily torment into other cultural realms appears as a progressive and enlightened cultural development, or at least it

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did until Abu-Ghraib and Guantanamo. However, the eruption of support in the USA for the need to torture, or to use enhanced interrogation techniques, suggests that the ritual of torture might also validate and discover truth in a different waynot the truth to the torturers questions but the truth of the ideas and institutions for which the victim is tortured. Debates as to the effectiveness of interrogation techniques must take into account not only this performative element but also the relation between agony and truth, or risk becoming akin to those debates as to what degree of mental or physical suffering rises to the level of torture. Expressed through a lexicon of terror these ghoulish debates are the direct intellectual descendants of the manuals of ethnography and torture through which earlier imaginaries of covert and unreasoning social opposition and physical threat were discovered and interdicted. As Sartre observed of French torture in Algeria, in his introduction to Henri Allegs banned text La Question, it was a means for the creation of an Other. In the case of contexts like Abu-Ghraib or Guantanamo, the creation of an insurgent, terrorist other, whose coming into existence is facilitated through torture, then validates the truth of a Mission Accomplished for American democracy in its War on Terror. It thus seems as if the passionate but passive witnessing of the testimonies of the tortured, and social suffering more widely, may appear as no more than an ethnographic nger in the wound (Nelson 1999), that is, a liberal prurience masquerading as scientic or humanistic interest. The ethnographic production of narratives of victimhood and the possibility of inscribing others into such ethnographically constructed identities may only provoke a psychological mimesis of the original moment of violence, but it is a source of suffering nonetheless. Professionally, the response of anthropologists has often been to seek collaborative and overtly dialogical forms of ethnographic engagement, but relations of domination cannot be contested through the uncritical application of the ethnographic method. Meanwhile the advent not just of the reality TV and game shows that imitate the Malinowskian ed context, but even of ethnography itself as a form of reality TV, signals the way in which the ethnographic agon has itself been raised to the level of dening cultural value. The embedded journalist thus produces a simulacrum of ethnographic investigation whose authenticity is given, as in the case of the anthropologists, by the act of being there, but not a way of being there. Such a generalized ethnographic methodology simply reproduces the type of relations of knowledge (as power) that the ethnographic or journalistic is supposed to have contested through such an intimate garnering of facts on the ground in the rst place. In which case, it is the interest and attitudes of those studied as much as the questions that drive doctorates and advanced research programmes that need to come into play. Whether or not the knowledge so generated is worth anything on the academic market as it now exists is a different question, since the fundability of particular kinds of research obviously inuences professional choices and career success, and this is why the Pentagon is so interested in intervening in academia in this way. Rather the critical question for the issue of anthropologys potential military and governmental involvement, or the wider practice of ethnographic methods of fact collection and

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analysis, becomes one as to whether or not these kinds of collaborative methodological practices are ethically sufcient to avoid the practice of torture as ethnography. As Clastres (1998) reected on the historical silence of the Atchei, I remembered what Alfred Metraux had said to me not long before: For us to be able to study a primitive society, it must already be starting to disintegrate (96). Perhaps then what is required is exactly that kind of symmetrical anthropology called for by Latour (1993), in which the Western category of the human itself also disintegrates. Symmetrical anthropology then precisely opposes the military doctrine of asymmetric warfare for which the US Army is trying to recruit social scientists as human terrain ethnographers. The notion of the human has been central to Western epistemology so that the unravelling of the colonial epistemological project also suggests the simultaneous unravelling of anthropologys central subject/object, and the ethnographic investigation of the logos of anthropos around which the discipline formed. Thus, aside from the agon of knowledge, post-Enlightenment frameworks of thinking have given us both an epistemology rooted in empiricism, and a Cartesian self-conscious subject who occupies its centre, from which the individual mind knows and acts on the world. This historical legacy in Western thought in turn underpins social and political theory as to the meaning and role of law, legal responsibility and criminal justice, as well as the ideas of life and health as medical categories, the institutions of democracy, and the exercise and defence of human rights. This discourse of the human is then crowned by the articulate human subject whose agonistically created insight and inspiration becomes the source of historical change and progress. However, such grand narratives of modernity have been critiqued and even abandoned in the last 20 years as the spectres of post-modernity and post-humanism have come to represent increasing dissatisfaction with the consequences of this intellectual and historical legacy (Whitehead 2009). At the same time, the limits of scientic forms of knowledge and the ethical issues its pursuit has engendered, the apparent intractability of cultural others in realizing their destiny as rational individualized subjects, and our own deep cultural pessimism as to the perfectibility of society or individuals, leads us to the key question of what the human is. Perhaps, as we pass beyond the moment of modernity, we have entered a post-human, or more darkly, a pre-apocalyptic age of corporations-as-persons and in which our on-line and off-line corporealities are but points of marketing departure for the relentless expansion of all-consuming consumer markets. In the nal sentence of Les Mots et les Choses (1966) Michel Foucault suggested that:
As the archaeology of our thought easily showsthe Human is an invention of a recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end . . . If those arrangements were to disappear, as the ground of Classical thought did at the end of the eighteenth century, then one might predict that Human would be washed away, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea. (Foucault 1966: p. 398, my translation)

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As we stand on that beach where we rst discovered humanity through encountering, like Defoes enlightened Crusoe, the mysterious and threatening footprint of Others, we might now seek to imprint a vision of plural ontologies that can allow

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us to move along that shoreline and into new worlds of ethnographic engagement in which the agon of inquiry is as redundant as the formerly human subjects it was designed to objectively reveal. Notes
[1] [2] [3] Brasilino quoted by K. Wisniewskipersonal communication. The archive is available at http://www.massobs.org.uk/index.htm. Cited by Afghanistan Research Reach Back Center, White Paper TRADOC G2Human Terrain System. United States Army Fort Leavenworth, KS, September 2009. The case of the war reporter Kevin Carter is a sad illustration of this. Carter took a Pulitzer prize winning photo of a dying Sudanese infant menaced by a vulture, but his suicide a few years later referenced the futility of such reportage, while its lack of ethical understanding is reected in the fact that he did nothing to help her. Certainly an individual could have done very little to help, but then what is the point of being there? http://www.physiciansforhumanrights.org/torture/. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39456324/ns/health-sexual_health/. Opening Remarks by Senator Ted Kennedy, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Subcommittee on Health and Scientic Research of the Committee on Human Resources. 3 August 1977. http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1950/mkultra/Hearing01.htm. My discussion here is inspired by George Mentores brilliant 2004 essayThe Glorious Tyranny of Silence and the Resonance of Shamanic Breath, in Whitehead & Wright (2004).

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[4]

[5] [6] [7]

[8]

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