Anthropologists in the Securityscape

As the military and intelligence communities re-tool for the 21st century, the long and contentious debate about the role of social scientists in national security environments is dividing the disciplines with renewed passion. Yet, research shows that most scholars have a weak understanding of what today's security institutions actually are and what working in them entails. This book provides an essential new foundation for the debate, with fine-grained accounts of the complex and varied work of cultural, physical, and linguistic anthropologists and archaeologists doing security-related work in governmental and military organizations, the private sector, and NGOs. In candid and provocative dialogues, leading anthropologists interrogate the dilemmas of ethics in practice and professional identity. Anthropologists in the SecurityScape is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand or influence the relationship between anthropology and security in the twenty-first century.

Robert Albro is an assistant professor of international communication in the School of International Service at American University. He is a widely published expert on social and indigenous movements in Latin America, transnational civil society, cultural rights frameworks and cultural policy. He is chair of the Committee for Human Rights of the American Anthropological Association and a member of the Science and Human Rights Coalition of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and a fellow at the Library of Congress, the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and the Smithsonian. George Marcus, Chancellor's Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, is among the most influential anthropologists in the world. He is founder of the journal Cultural Anthropology and founder and director of the interdisciplinary Center for Ethnography. Books such as Writing Culture (edited with James Clifford) and Anthropology as Cultural Critique (with Michael M. J. Fischer) had revolutionary impacts in the social sciences; recent publications include Ethnography through Thick and Thin and Critical Anthropology Now. Laura A McNamara is a principal member of the technical staff, Exploratory Simulations Department, Sandia National Laboratories. She is co-editor (with Ray Paton) of Multidisciplinary Approaches to Theory in Medicine and lead editor for the Elsevier Science Publications series Studies in Multidisciplinarity. Monica Schoch-Spana is a senior associate at the Center for Biosecurity, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and assistant professor in the School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases. She is also faculty for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism and has served on key committees for the National Research Council. She has published extensively on emergency planning for bioattacks and epidemics, testified before congress, and is quoted and interviewed frequently in national press.