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Monday was a full day of activities that stared with the opening general assembly (at 8 am) which was followed by a series of sessions and forums right though until the late evening.  I was a participant in a session called “Documenting the northern landscape.”  The participants were Thomas Thornton, Lynne MacDonald, Brenda Parlee, Janelle Baker, Alvin Many Chief, and myself.  Leslie Main Johnson was the session organizer.

In the afternoon I sat in on a panel discussion of biocultural diversity.  I was left wondering about the nature of the ‘actual’ link between cultural diversity and biological diversity -a link assumed and asserted through much of the discussion.  Aside from a graph showing the decline of languages and a statement that a similar graph could be produced that would show the same ‘trend’ line for the decline of species the link between biological and cultural diversity seemed to be accepted as a first principle without the need to actually document a causative linkage between the two.

I am not certain that one can definitively ‘prove’ one way or the other the existence of this link.  I suspect that there are as many examples of biodiversity co-existing with cultural uniformity as there are with cultural diversity.  There is likely a gradient of situations.   At the core, at least as presented by the panelists and in comments from the floor, seems to be a belief that small-scale indigenous societies represent a diversity of culture and that associated with these cultures is a diversity of lifeforms.  As a corollary, large-scale industrial society tends toward a mono-culture of human society and associated ecologies.  When belief systems govern research practice, however, the utility of the results is limited to the circle of believers.

The Human terrain system (HTS) was not as big an issue at this year’s AAA as it was in previous meetings.  The issues has, it seems, been decided.  Most anthropologists seem to agree that there are serious ethical issues involved with using anthropologists with military operations such as the HTS.  From Franz Boas’ criticism of US archaeologists spying on behalf of the US Navy in Central America during world war one to Eric Wolf and Joseph Jorgensen making similar criticisms of anthropologists working in Thailand in the late 1960’s/early 1970s.

The AAA’s report on the HTS was released during the annual conference.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has this to say on the report:

In the shadow of President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan, social scientists remain deeply anxious about the roles they are being asked to play in American counterinsurgency strategy.

A report released here Thursday during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association expresses serious doubts about the Human Terrain System, a three-year-old military program that embeds scholars within military units in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program’s creators argue that it has improved the military’s ability to understand local cultures and social networks. But skeptics have said that the program has been severely mismanaged and that it has not established clear ethical guidelines for its participants.

“Where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment,” the report says, ” … it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”

And the program’s aims are murky, the report continues. Is it a research program? An intelligence program? A program for improving the cultural awareness of military commanders? Ask three different Pentagon officials, the report suggests, and you will get three different answers.

During a news conference on Thursday, Robert Albro, the chair of the 11-member committee that wrote the report, suggested that anthropologists might be able to productively cooperate with the military in other ways—but the human-terrain program is probably best kept at arm’s-length, he said. Read full article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.