From ANTH100 lecture, Fall 2024.

Today we are looking at the anthropology of war. Specifically, the cultural ideas that drive (1) military decisions and (2) how gender is constructed in the context of warfare.  We do so by exploring two papers, the first by Antonius Robben on asymmetrical warfare in Iraq, 2000-2006. The second by Maria Malstrom on the ways young male recruits to Hamas develop and centre an idea of masculinity born of violence and suffering.  For each example I will say something about the anthropologists and then look at how their work speaks to these questions.

 Antonius Robben is a Dutch anthropologist, now retired. His first book, Sons of the Sea Goddess, was an ‘interpretive’ economic anthropology of small scale fish harvesters in Brazil. He focussed on discursive conflicts within and without the network of fish harvesters. From there he turned his interests to conflicts on a more harmful scale – looking at political violence in Argentina in which he described a violence-trauma-violence process. What we are looking at today is his work on the Iraq war and how cultural models have a role in intensified violence and harm.

Conventional industrial warfare involves large numbers of troops, air forces, and naval fleets under the control of nation states engaged in territorial conflicts.  The current Russian/Ukraine war could be seen in this light. Over the course of a decade Russia has engaged in a number of territorial advances and annexations leading up to their February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. This is different from when a state or an occupying army faces an insurgency and the war is between a coordinated state armed force and a non-state combatant.  This is referred to as asymmetrical warfare.

What US forces faced in Iraq, following the collapse of Iraq’s armed force and Saddam Hussein’s regime, was a network of non-state actors engaged in an insurgency designed to undermine the US forces.

As Robben notes via quotation ‘all the people, anywhere – are the battlefield.’  Regular state armies face ‘nonstate opponents who are hiding among civilians, fight with low-tech means, and exploit mobility and surprise to the fullest.’

Iraqi insurgents were so effective that US military strategists made a shift from large-scale to small-scale operations that increased the battle space uncertainties for insurgents.

This conflict resulted in massive civilian casualties – it’s estimated that at least 40,000 civilians were killed between 2003 and 2006 according to Iraqi news sources, a demographic survey estimated around 600,000 civilians died from the violence, about 2/3^rd at the hands of the insurgents themselves. 

Robben identifies two cultural models in the Iraq conflict between 2004 and 2006:

• Mimesis – a process in which rivalries arise between individuals and groups sharing the same goals of action. In war mimesis makes enemies interpret each other’s operations and yields tactical representations that steer them toward a growing similitude.
• Manichaeism – a cultural model by which people use to structure and clearly delineate the other into mutually exclusive categories of good and evil, Manichaeism enhances the chances of enemy dehumanization.

Robben documents how the US forces shifted tactics from large scale movements, so called ‘shock and awe tactics, to those more aligned with the tactics the insurgents themselves where using – small mobile forces, acting at random and unpredictably.  Conceptually, both insurgents and Americans conceived of themselves as good and their enemy combatant as evil, leading to a situation in which combatants no longer considered their enemies as people.

Both cultural models increased the spiral of death and violence making resolution and reciliation difficult to achieve and parts of Iraq today are outside the governance of the central and formal Iraqi state

Maria Malmstrum is a Swedish anthropologist currently based at Bard College. Here work has focussed on gender in Egypt and the wider middle east.  Her first book, The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt, is an ethnography of life and politics in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in 2011. Branching out from Egypt, the paper we are talking about today is based on research Malmstrum conducted with young male recruits to Hamas’ armed force, Qassam, the Islamic Combat Force.

Malmstrum’s field research in the west bank, was with young men who had been members of Hamas’ military branch and had served prison terms. Malstrum tells us that this is the only way one knows who is in the Qassam as once recruited members are not to reveal their membership. Only once they have been arrested or killed does their involvement become more publicly known.

This is about how young men develop their mature sense of masculinity. It is a profoundly androcentric variant of masculinity, cultivated through the intersection of traditional west bank cultural values and the pain and suffering experienced as a consequences of decades of political strife and violence.

Malmstrum explains her paper “explores constructions of masculinities in a complex interplay of violence, political Islam, suffering and loss.”

She describes liking the young men she meets and notes their overt acts and demonstrations of desiring to protect and care for her during her field work in what she describes as a dangerous site, but more so for her respondents she feels than for herself.

In the west bank Malmstrum says idealized masculinity is closely linked to themes of brave action, resistance, risk taking, assertiveness, toughness, virility, potency, sacrifice, self-control, paternity, generosity, sociality, respect, dignity, and honour.

The recruits’ sense of being a real man, a man who engaged in resistance and the political struggle, was set against feminized non-political men who were seen “as total failures, as ‘faggots.’ They did not care about anything, they had long hair and a sickly sweet style of dressing.”

Malmstrum was told about one of her interviewee’s neighbours had made the journey “from a gay to a real man” by joining the resistance after the death of on older brother.

For these Hamas youth being a man was tied notions elsewhere in the course we have called hegemonic masculinity, it shares ideas of male power and sees those men who don’t fit the mould as less than male, in these examples as being gay, rather than procreatively straight.

Part of the defining experience for each of these men Malmstrum spoke with was there period in Israeli jails, what she said they called ‘the university’ It was in prison that they found themselves schooled in how to be men by their elder jail-mates. Here is it important to highlight that the social process for constructing identity is shaped by many constraints – so while the young men Malmstrum spoke with had agency they were constrained in their actions by their own cultural heritage and the Israeli occupation. But like the US forces and the Iraqi insurgents they also entrapped themselves in Manichean world view of their enemies as evil and that vantage point can only lead to what Robben describes a violence-trauma-violence cycle.

As we sit in a world run by men who thirst after the blood of others, cloaking it in righteous anger and religious hate, we more than ever need to find a way off this violent merry-go-round.