comment
PATAI and Abu Ghraib
Many of us have wondered, following
Seymour Hersh’s (2004) allegations, how
exactly Raphael Patai’s outdated ethnography
The Arab mind (1973), which one journalist
dismissed as best used ‘as a doorstop’,1 was
implicated in briefing those establishing war
policies – policies that in practice led to the
torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The
account of Tony Lagouranis, who served as a
US Army interrogator between 2001 and 2005,
now provides a first-hand account of this con-
nection in his recently published book Fear
up harsh: An army interrogator’s dark journey
through Iraq.
In June 2007, following the publication of
his book, I contacted Lagouranis. He confirmed
that knowledge about Patai’s book was ‘really
widespread’ among intelligence agents and
it was frequently included on recommended
reading lists.2 Lagouranis’ description of Iraqi
detention centres reveals a world in which a
‘culture of abuse’ developed and spread.
After an initial assignment at Abu Ghraib
in January 2004, Lagouranis joined an intel-
ligence gathering team that conducted inter-
rogations throughout Iraq until January 2005.
His book describes how ordinary men and
women were persuaded to brutalize prisoners.
He highlights how instructors exposed inter-
rogators to negative stereotypes about Arabs,
including a description of a lecture titled
‘The Arab mind’ presented by a US Army
psychiatrist:
We kicked things off with a few items of cultural
sensitivity. Don’t show an Arab the sole of your
foot. Don’t humiliate a man in public. Men
should not touch Arab women – and female
soldiers should avoid touching Arab men…
Arabs, apparently, can’t create a timeline. They
don’t think linearly or rationally. They have a
different relationship with the truth than we do.
They prefer the beautiful to the true. They rely
on metaphor instead of facts. They think through
association, not logic or reason… Lying is not
taboo or dishonorable to Arabs… So you can’t
trap them in a contradiction or force them to
admit they’re lying. They’ll consider you impolite
and uncultured. I rolled my eyes and looked
around the room to share my dismay with others.
But most were nodding in understanding and
agreement. Very few of us recognized this as
racist bullshit. (Lagouranis 2007: 17)
Lagouranis made an explicit connection to
Patai’s ethnography:
Our instructor wasn’t relying on a very large body
of research to produce these ‘facts’. He essentially
borrowed everything he said from a single book,
The Arab mind… The central problem with The
Arab mind, and with the lecture we got, was with
the way they both set up the Arabs as distant
from and alien to the ‘Western mind’... We
reason – they tell stories. We use facts – they use
metaphors… There was no attempt to understand
Arabs on their own terms. It was strictly us versus
them. And so, while the intention of this lecture
was to help us appreciate this alien culture and
work with it, the effect it had was to reinforce
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 23 No 5, October 2007 23
prejudice and give many soldiers an excuse to
give up on ever understanding or improving Iraqi
society. That’s just the way they are. Nothing we
can do about it. (ibid.: 18-19)
In 2005, the news programme Frontline
asked Lagouranis how such stereotypes
affected interrogators:
Frontline: What was the effect of that kind of
information on [US interrogators]?
Lagouranis: They believed it, and they continued
throughout the whole year that we were there with
that idea about Arabs, that they’re liars and they
don’t make sense; they’re not rational.
Frontline: And so what happens in an
environment… where that becomes the way you
feel about the people in your control?
Lagouranis: Well, partly that lends to the
frustration. Because they’re blaming their lack of
ability to get intelligence on the fact that a logical
argument presented to somebody, or whatever
psychological way that you’re going to back them
into a corner isn’t going to work on an Arab…
I think it added to the frustration and probably
contributed to this culture of abuse.3
It is high time we ask ourselves searching
questions. Although Patai’s book may not
have been used as a torture ‘handbook’ at Abu
Ghraib, it evidently provided an important
component in the necessary stereotyping and
distancing that underlay this ‘culture of abuse’.
Had he still been alive (he died in 1996), Patai
might have been shocked by the way his book
became ‘essential reading’4 for US officers,
and implicated in human abuse and in training
for strategic warfare on the Middle East.
The entire episode should give us pause,
for it illustrates how easily scholarship can be
subverted for propaganda purposes. In a com-
mentary published several days after Hersh’s
article in the New Yorker, Patai’s daughters
noted that their father ‘was always sympathetic
to the people among whom he did his research,
and attempted to provide a balanced perspec-
tive… In nothing that he wrote is there the
slightest hint that exploitation of perceived
weakness (especially a vulnerability as near-
universal as sexual shame) for political ends is
ever justified’ (Schneider and Patai 2004).
Given the deployment of research by
anthropologists in this way today, we need to
be careful that, if we do consult for the army,
our work is not deployed to help facilitate
the occupation of other countries on spurious
grounds or to create conditions under which
torture takes place, as occurred with Patai’s
work.5
Quite apart from the inhumanity, what dis-
concerts us more? Our credibility as anthropol-
ogists in the eyes of military and intelligence
agencies, as McNamara (2007) suggests? Or
our credibility among those with whom we
work? We do not have much time left to make
up our minds.l
Roberto J. González
San José State University
roberto_gonzalez@netzero.net
1. Whitaker, Brian: ‘Its best use is as a doorstop’.
Guardian Unlimited, http://www.guardian.co.uk; accessed
24.5.2004.
2. Personal communication with Tony Lagouranis, 20
June 2007.
3. See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/
interviews/lagouranis.html#4 for full transcript of interview.
4. Colonel Norvell B. DeAtkine, a Middle East Studies
instructor at the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare
School, wrote a foreword to the 2002 edition of Patai’s book
describing it as ‘essential reading’.
5. For example, one only has to follow Marcus Griffin’s
blog to see where things are heading: ‘there probably is no
Other anymore. The Other is Us… This is the underlying
reason why I am trying so hard to immerse myself in Army
culture…’ and ‘I am about a month away from deploying
to Baghdad as part of the US Army’s new Human Terrain
System and have almost gone completely native… I cut my
hair in a high and tight style and look like a drill sergeant…
I shot very well with the M9 and M4 last week at the
range… Shooting well is important if you are a soldier
regardless of whether or not your job requires you to carry
a weapon’ (http://marcusgriffin.com/blog/)
DeAtkine, N.B. 2002. Foreword. In: Patai, R. The
Arab mind (revised edition), pp. x-xviii. New York:
Hatherleigh Press.
Hersh, S. 2004. The gray zone. The New Yorker, 25 May.
Lagouranis, T. and Mikaelian, A. 2007. Fear up harsh: An
army interrogator’s dark journey through Iraq. New
York: NAL Caliber.
McNamara, L. 2007. Culture, critique and credibility.
Anthropology Today 23(2): 20-21.
Patai, R. 1973. The Arab mind. New York: Scribner.
Schneider, J.P. and Patai, D. 2004. ‘Misreading The
Arab mind’. http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2004/2004-
June/011964.html; accessed on 27 August 2007
Evolutionary biology
and human culture
A comment on Ingold (AT 23 [2])
Much as I sympathize with the aims of
Mesoudi et al. (2006), their ambitious project
fails to gain serious attention from social
anthropologists because it does not address the
central concerns of social anthropology from
within evolutionary biology.
Why does social anthropology currently
reject evolutionary biology as a possible
explanatory framework for the understanding
of human cultures? It has been variously
proposed that man had a soul, tools and then
language, whereas animals did not. These bas-
tions of human uniqueness have fallen one
by one and we may wonder whether human
culture could not eventually be understood
through evolution, but until biologists con-
vincingly prove, with evidence, that human
culture can be so explained, social anthropolo-
gists claim this as their specialist realm of
discourse.
My background on the interface between
evolutionary biology and social anthropology
(after a degree in anthropology I did a PhD
in primate social behaviour) helped me in my
attempt to delineate the biological underpin-
nings of human action in the Weberian sense
of behaviour plus meaning (Reynolds 1976).
Later, Duane Quiatt and I tried to indicate
how the gap between primate and human
social behaviour might be bridged (Quiatt and
Reynolds 1993); we tried psychological, bio-
logical, evolutionary and informational expla-
nations. We compared monkey matrilines and
in some cases patrilines with matrilineal and
patrilineal human societies. We also compared
mating and marriage (Reynolds and Kellett
1991).
Animals are different from humans in that,
whereas animal social structures arise out of
the behaviour and relationships of individuals
(Hinde 1976), human social structures arise
from the mental constructs of participant
members of the society. If this is also true of
animals, it has yet to be demonstrated.
Human kinship has been given an evo-
lutionary dimension by Nick Allen (2000,
2004), who described the origin of kinship
systems from a hypothetical ‘tetradic’ model
that makes possible generation of social order
within which individuals are allocated unam-
biguously to precise categories by means of
rules of marriage and recruitment. What is
central to Allen’s highly original perspective
is that he sees not lineal organization (central
to my own model) but the transfer of marriage
partners between recognized subgroups in
society as creating the conditions for perma-
nent structures over generations.
Social anthropologists have long studied
such structures in other societies: for example,
in cross-cousin marriage women move to live
with their husbands in their husband’s clan
or village. Barnard (2000) gives a simple and
easy-to-understand description of this system
among the Kachin and the Purum. But matters
become more difficult when the objects
of study are concepts such as ‘purity/pollu-
tion’, as studied at length by the late Mary
Douglas (1966). In the Indian context, for
example, Brahmins must make puja after
any contact (even shadow contact) with an
Untouchable. Such concepts can perhaps be
tangentially included in the field of evolu-
tionary biology, e.g. as evidence of an adaptive
social hierarchy, but that misses the point of
social constructs, and their many ramifications
in the social world of Hindu India. This is
what interests social anthropologists.
The word ‘construct’ helps us move closer
to the cause of what Dennett and McKay, in
their comments on the paper by Mesoudi et al.,
call ‘the intensity of distaste with which many
researchers in the humanities and social sci-
ences view any attempt to introduce Darwinian
thinking into their domains’ (p. 353, italics in
original). Again, Barkow, referring to socio-
cultural anthropology in his open peer com-
mentary, writes that ‘very few of the field’s
practitioners are interested in modeling their
endeavour on any science, whether biology
or meteorology’ (p. 348, italics in original).
The social construction of reality (Berger
and Luckmann 1967) involves the construction
and transmission of mental structures which
organize ideas, actions and relationships of
people in any society. From construction we
can move on to the concept of deconstruc-
tion, the picking apart of social concepts and
actions. It is a fundamental tenet of social
anthropology that the social realities we per-
ceive as we go about our lives are created by
people, not givens to be studied like land-
scapes or other features of the natural world.
24 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 23 No 5, October 2007
The question I put to social anthropologists
is: if you don’t believe in separate realms of
discourse, how would you try and describe the
ideas and thinking of the tribe of evolutionary
biologists who suggest that human culture can
be explained in biological terms? Would you
see them as a group whose social constructions
are based on the ideas of Darwin, Hamilton,
Trivers and the like? I think the answer is yes.
If so, the next important question is why
anyone would want to adopt that world view
rather than any other? And here, I fear, we go
our separate ways, for some of us are more
impressed by the explanatory power of evolu-
tionary biology than others.
I sympathize with the aims of Mesoudi et al.
I cannot see justification for a separate realm
of discourse for human society, human ideas
and human actions, setting them apart from
the rest of the biological world. I agree with
Ingold’s call for a change in the parameters of
biology to incorporate the human dimension
and the very peculiar nature of human culture,
based as it is on complex constructs
of the human mind, on our awareness of
history and of the future. However, neo-
Darwinism is not locked in a ‘hermetically
sealed, intellectual universe of its own’ as
Ingold states (2007a: 17). It simply requires
evidence and proof (preferably mathematical)
before it will embrace new paradigms, which
makes it appear resistant to change. The
answer must be to find links, maybe in cogni-
tive science, between the concepts and con-
structs that guide human action and human
society on the one hand, and the tenets of evo-
lutionary biology on the other.
Such links have yet to be delineated and
described in sufficient detail to convince.
Mesoudi et al. write that Plotkin (2002) ‘has…
argued that “social constructions”… require
a fundamentally different explanation…
and have no real equivalent in the biological
domain. Like Plotkin, we do not believe that
this invalidates an evolutionary approach to
culture; rather, it requires a different evolu-
tionary treatment from the one developed
within biology’ (2006: 345). A start has been
made, with the idea of ‘niche construction’
(Laland et al. 2000, Odling-Smee et al. 2003),
in which the changes made by species to their
environment in return influence their own evo-
lution. Other recent work (Mesoudi and Laland
2007a) has shown how culturally constructed
beliefs in ‘partible paternity’, which specify
that children can have more than one ‘true’
father, can have significant effects on both
biological and cultural human evolution. These
are exciting ideas that extend the parameters of
biology into aspects of the social construction
of reality we find in our own species.
Ingold wants to extend the conceptual range
of evolutionary biology. He writes ‘By all
means let us seek a way of embracing human
history and culture within a wider concept
of evolution… allowing us to understand
the self-organizing and transformational
dynamics of fields of relationships among
both human and non-human beings’ (op. cit.:
17). While most of us would agree with this,
to bring social anthropology and evolutionary
biology together presents a challenge because
it demands a huge knowledge base and clear
focus. A few trained in biology, cognitive
psychology and social anthropology may
endeavour to encompass these but it is difficult
even for them. Perhaps we need new univer-
sity courses and a new generation of under-
graduates to do it. At present things fall apart
because the enterprise is seen as a ‘turf war’,
but that need not be the case.l
Vernon Reynolds
Professor Emeritus of Biological
Anthropology, Oxford University
Roaring mice
A comment on Ingold and Mesoudi,
Whiten and Laland (AT 23[2])
Mesoudi, Whiten and Laland seemed taken
aback by Tim Ingold’s impassioned rejec-
tion of their proposal for the ‘rehabilitation’
of social and cultural anthropology through
its wholesale restructuring according to the
established templates of Darwinian evolu-
tionary theory (Mesoudi et al. 2006; see also
Mesoudi et al. 2004), and felt themselves
misrepresented (Mesoudi 2007b). Modern
proponents of evolutionary theory seem inca-
pable of understanding why anyone would
carry out academic research in any way other
than their own. Such myopia has a tendency
to lead to what Daniel Dennett refers to as
‘greedy reductionism’ (Dennett 1995): built
on a wholesale transposition into the study
of culture not only of the logical constraints
imposed by biology (which is fine), but of the
very mechanisms, theories and methods of
evolutionary biology (which is not fine).
There is no successful precedent for this
kind of hierarchical transposition of explana-
tory structures anywhere else in the sciences.
Even Richard Dawkins was forced to retreat
from his earlier speculations about memes to
acknowledge only a suggestive correspond-
ence of principles between genetic and cul-
tural evolution (Dawkins 1982, 1986). While
Mesoudi et al. may be noted for their loyalty to
the Darwinian canon, most of the figures they
list as ‘eminent’ in evolutionary theory have
long ago recognized that cultural evolution
does not work in the same way as biological
evolution. Difficulties include the problem
of directed or intentional evolution and trait
combination (explicitly if very weakly rejected
by the authors on the grounds of being ‘un-
Darwinian’ – Mesoudi et al. 2004); the distinc-
tion between semantic content and syntactic
presentation of cultural traits (generally seen
as one and the same thing in biological evolu-
tion); widespread cultural transmission across
cladistic lineages (see Gould 1991a); and
the low level of fidelity between ‘input’ and
‘output’ in cultural transmission, which under-
mines the capacity to model cultural trait evo-
lution in any meaningful way (Dennett 1995).
Taking these problems into account produces a
theory very different from Darwin’s.
Moreover, while many might accept
Mesoudi et al.’s claims to ‘progress’ in com-
parison with the social sciences, these are