This book includes a variety of chapters that consider the role and importance of anthropology in small wars and insurgencies.
Almost every war since the origins of the discipline at the beginning of the 19th century has involved anthropology and anthropologists. The chapters in this book fall into the following myriad categories of military anthropology.
Anthropology for the military. In some cases, anthropologists participated directly as uniformed combatants, having the purpose of directly providing expert knowledge with the goal of improving operations and strategy.
Anthropology of the military. Anthropologists have also been known to study State militaries. Sometimes this scholarship is undertaken with the objective of providing the military with information about its own internal systems and processes in order to improve its performance. At other times, the objective is to study the military as a human group to identify and describe its culture and social processes.
Anthropology of war. As a discipline, anthropology has also had a long history of studying warfare itself.
This book considers the anthropology of small wars and insurgencies through an analysis of the Islamic State’s military adaptation in Iraq, Al Shabaab recruiting in Somalia, religion in Israeli combat units, as well as many other topics.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Small Wars & Insurgencies.
Edited by:
Montgomery Mcfate
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9780367538200
ISBN 10: 0367538202
Pages: 242
Publication Date: 25 September 2023
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction: Considering anthropology and small wars Montgomery McFate 1. Combat anthropologist: Charles T. R. Bohannan, counter-insurgency pioneer, 1936-1966 Jason S. Ridler 2. Archaeology and small wars Christopher Jasparro 3. Identity wars: collective identity building in insurgency and counterinsurgency Heather S. Gregg 4. Lost in translation: anthropologists and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan Paula Holmes-Eber 5. Beyond faith and foxholes: vernacular religion and asymmetrical warfare within contemporary IDF combat units Nehemia Stern and Uzi Ben Shalom 6. Doing one’s job: translating politics into military practice in the Norwegian mentoring mission to Iraq Kjetil Enstad 7. ‘The perfect counterinsurgent’: reconsidering the case of Major Jim Gant David B. Edwards 8. Francis FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, state legitimacy and anthropological insights on a revolutionary war Paul B. Rich 9. Accidental ethnographers: the Islamic State’s tribal engagement experiment Craig Whiteside and Anas Elallame 10. The anthropology of Al-Shabaab: the salient factors for the insurgency movement’s recruitment project Mohamed Haji Ingiriis
Dr. Montgomery McFate is professor at the US Naval War College. Dr. McFate received a BA from UC Berkeley, a PhD in Anthropology from Yale, and a JD from Harvard Law School. She is the author of Military Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2018) and editor of Social Science Goes to War (Oxford University Press, 2015).
