Jomo Kenyatta, Louis Leakey, and the Counter-Insurgency System

Jomo Kenyatta, who held a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics, became the first president of Kenya. Kenyatta successfully employed his knowledge of anthropology – the so-called ‘handmaiden of colonialism’ – against a colonial regime, using that knowledge to pinpoint British political weaknesses, unify the Kikuyu and other tribes of Kenya, and construct an ethnographic Trojan Horse that undermined the British edifice upon which colonial law had been built. On the other side, the British counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau also utilized anthropology, both in theory and in practice. As this chapter describes, Louis Leakey’s conceptualization of Kikuyu culture influenced how the British fought the war and demonstrates how elements of the host nation culture – in this case, the Kikuyu practice of oathing and counter-oathing – may be employed in a security strategy. In this intersection of two lives – Jomo Kenyatta and Louis Leakey – many of the themes of this book become apparent, including the danger of fantasy ideologies, the limits of anthropological knowledge, and the asymmetry of cultural knowledge.

John Useem and Governance Operations

This chapter concerns the wartime civil affairs experience of John Useem, a US Navy officer who became the military governor of a small island in Micronesia. While the post-World War II, military government established in Germany and Japan are often offered as examples of successful governance operations, the partially successful case of Micronesia better exemplifies the paradoxes at the heart of the military government enterprise. These issues which plagued the US military government in Micronesia, and which John Useem wrote about in the 1940s and 1950s, were the exact same issues that have plagued the intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq more than a half century later. What happens when the policy of democratization is incompatible with the existing social order? What happens when American social norms conflict with the society they intend to govern? What happens when the core principle of military government non-interference cannot be implemented in practice and outright contradicts the imperatives of ‘nation building’?

Ursula Graham Bower and Military Leadership

This chapter asks: how does a young, British woman succeed in leading a group of patriarchal, hierarchically organized, tribal head hunters? In Burma during World War II, Ursula Graham Bower recruited, trained and led a group of Naga head hunters successfully against the Japanese. She was the only woman to hold a de facto combat command in the British Army during WWII. This chapter distinguishes between transactional and transformational models of leadership, discusses some of findings on the role of gender in transformational leadership and then examines the literature on cross-cultural leadership, which indicates that roles and norms of leadership depend on the cultural context. If desirable leadership traits are culturally dependent, then it seems likely that the Naga would not have accepted Bower as a leader under any circumstances. Yet, in a society where leadership was hereditary, male, and based on the collective, Ursula Graham Bower was able to lead the Naga successfully against the Japanese. This chapter considers the topics of cultural difference, cultural congruence, rapport and cultural adjustment in cross-culture in extremis military leadership.

Robert Sutherland Rattray and Indirect Rule

This chapter begins with a description of how Captain Robert Sutherland Rattray, an anthropologist working for the British colonial government in what is now known as Ghana, may have averted a war between the Ashanti Empire and the British colonial government. This chapter offers a brief discussion of the origins of European colonial expansion and the various modes of European rule. Indirect rule is described as an administrative system, which (in theory) used indigenous institutions for governance. This chapter then explores how implementation of foreign policy creates a variety of knowledge imperatives, including the need for empirical, scientific research (instead of the impressionistic research of untrained administrators) concerning African social, political, economic and legal systems and the relationships between them. Lacking the requisite information, the mutual incomprehension between British colonial officers and the African societies they encountered resulted in a variety of unanticipated cultural disjunctions. Three disjunctions of indirect rule are then discussed, including the dangers of exporting western models, the problem of self-defeating policies and third, the tyranny of the paradigm.

Introduction

This chapter begins by describing Gerald Hickey’s experience in Vietnam working with the US military, especially his frustration that Americans imposed their own cultural frames on what they encountered despite his recommendation that military decision-making must take the society as a whole into account. This chapter then describes the conditions during which culture matters most to the military: engaging a culturally distant adversary; operating in close contact with civil authority in a foreign country; operating under limitations on the use of firepower; and when the strategic objective is not primarily military. This chapter then lays out five themes that emerge in the book. First, the increasing complexity of war results in a need to simplify reality in order to manage time and tasks. The simplification of reality through heuristics enables the military to execute its kinetic missions but also limits understanding of human beings. Even when military personnel seek to understand their environment, they often discover that the culture of their own organizations creates barriers to understanding. In attempting to use social science downrange, the military often discovers that the models, theories and concepts of how a society actually works do not exist in the required form.

Don Marshall and the Strategic Objective

Under the fluorescent lights of the Pentagon and in the villages of Vietnam, Donald S. Marshall brought an anthropological perspective to bear on the most pressing national security issue of his day – determination of the ‘kind of war’ upon which the US had embarked, and the most expedient way to fight it. In the PROVN report and later in the Long Range Planning Task Group, Marshall outlined a ‘whole society’ approach to warfare, with a focus on directed social change as an element of strategy. Marshall’s most significant contribution as a military anthropologist was his approach to Vietnam: viewing local culture and social structure not as an externality of war, but as a crucial factor. Marshall’s concern in this regard was uncommon; very infrequently does the military actually consider the wellbeing of the host nation society as the ‘object beyond war.’ One might ask, why not? This chapter begins by making the case that though war always involves social change, the post-war condition of the host nation society is generally omitted from the end state envisioned by policy makers, and is thus omitted at the military planning level.

Tom Harrisson and Unconventional Warfare

This chapter asks: what can we learn about unconventional warfare from the experience of Tom Harrisson – anthropologist, soldier and hell-raiser extraordinaire who led an army of Kelabit warriors against the Japanese in Borneo during World War II? Harrisson’s military expertise was unconventional warfare, a form of conflict in which soldiers work ‘by, with, and through’ indigenous forces. Working alongside local people to fight an illegitimate government or occupation force requires rare and unusual personal attributes and skills, even beyond the ordinary military virtues of intelligence, courage, expertise with weapons, etc. Unconventional warfare necessitates three things in soldiers who practice this form of warfare: deep local knowledge; acculturation to the local society, and adaptation to the indigenous way of war. Harrisson’s remarkable experience in the jungles of Borneo not only illustrates the importance of these personal skills and attributes, but also the dangers inherent in using them.

Gregory Bateson and Information Operations

Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in New Guinea; worked for the OSS; introduced the concept of cybernetics into social science; developed the double bind theory of schizophrenia; and was a figure in the 1970s California counterculture. What can we learn from the life and legacy of Gregory Bateson with relevance to information operations? This chapter suggests how three of Bateson’s concepts might be employed. The first concept discussed is Bateson’s idea of the premise, cultural ‘facts’ considered to be true and axiomatic for members of a culture that weave together to create a coherent, intrinsic logic. The second concept with applicability to information operations is Bateson’s concept of schismogenesis, the patterns inherent in a social system that produce either equilibrium or disequilibrium and which, Bateson believed, could be manipulated to produce intended effects. The third and final concept considered in this chapter is the frame, a heuristic mechanism for organizing experience and guiding action that affects how we understand the world and how the world understands us.

Conclusion

The story of David Prescott Barrows – an anthropologist who served in the Philippines and during the US invasion of Siberia – captures many of the points raised in this book. Specifically, Barrows’ life experiences demonstrate that military intervention always interferes with the local society; that strategic objectives must take social conditions into account; that problem framing determines problem solution; that framing a problem incorrectly will frequently result in an unworkable policy; that military personnel conducing operations in close proximity to local nationals should adapt to the social context; that the instrumentalism of national security often negates the objective; that adversaries always seek knowledge of their opponent and in certain contexts anthropological knowledge has great efficacy to combatants and so on. Barrows is important to the story because he the only US Army general to have a PhD in anthropology.