Osama Bin Laden and the man-eating sorcerers: Encountering the 'war on terror' in Papua New Guinea

Moretti, Daniele

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8322.2006.00438.x

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…Commendable are the considerations about the safety of our research participants from powerful threats, a commitment to anti-Eurocentrism and the very important campaign against anthropologists becoming hired mercenaries for the global 'war on terror'. These debates fi lled the pages of our disciplinary journals, including Anthropology in Action, which dedicated an entire issue (AiA December 2005) to a close examination of scholarly collaborations with government and the military throughout the twentieth century; how they have shaped anthropological interpretations of wars (Harper 2005, Price 2005b, Ross 2005, Ross and Price 2005, Scha 2005, Skinner 2005) and the differing positions being debated in Anthropology Today about the ethical and scholarly implications of anthropologists' involvement with government and military agents in support of 'The War on Terror' (Gusterson and Whisson 2005, Kürti et al 2005, Moos and Gusterson 2005, Price 2005a, Houtman 2006, More i 2006, Schaumberg 2006, Sebag-Montefi ore and Price 2006, Ellis and Keenan 2007, Gusterson 2007, Keenan 2007, McNamara and Houtman 2007, Wright 2007.…”

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confidence: 98%

'J'accuse...!' Crisis in the Reproduction of Anthropological Scholarship

Schaumberg¹

2009

Anthropology in Action

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The recent wave of important anthropological critiques of the global 'war on terror' is in danger of being undermined by a disciplinary vision that disregards challenging an institutional culture of fear and compliance with injustices and inequality, which is more likely to nurture discrimination and professional malpractices than commi ed scholarship. I am drawing an analogy with Zola's 'J'accuse…!' about how institutional rules of accountability in the tick-box form of neoliberal auditing can serve the purpose of oppressing the rights they are nominally intended to protect. The article argues that debates about disciplinary crisis should be reframed as one about a crisis in the reproduction of scholarship. The discipline needs to employ the anthropological tools of enquiry consistently in its practices and theory, 'at home' and in the wider world. Fundamental questions regarding discriminatory practices and professional ethics in the everyday academic workplace need to be addressed not silenced in order to nurture not only critical but also credible anthropological challenges to important contemporary historical processes.

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