Anthropology has had a long history of studying cultures at a distance. In fact, anthropology began in the nineteenth century with the study of travel and missionary accounts, memoirs of explorers and sailors, and surveys conducted by colonial administrators. This armchair anthropology made way for in situ research by the pioneering work of early ethnographers of Native American cultures such as Schoolcraft, Morgan, and Cushing, as well as the British Haddon expedition to Torres Straits. Anthropology professionalized under the domineering influence of Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, who turned ethnographic fieldwork into the discipline’s defining research strategy. Their students traveled...

Most of us try not to think it: the sky raining paper and ashes; a couple holding hands as they step off the ledge of a skyscraper; sleek modern towers billowing fire, smoke, debris, and human bodies; rescue workers climbing stairs to their end; a skyline gouged by an atomic plume; an unmatched shoe lying on the ground; survivors suited in dust and blood, the living dead; a crushed stroller; the smoldering graveyard of twisted steel and debris that became “Ground Zero”; unclaimed cell phones used by air passengers making their last calls; the smell and taste of the acrid...

Women’s rights and women’s liberation have been part and parcel of the justifying rhetoric of proponents of the so-called war on terror. The U.S.-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have similarly identified the need to “liberate” women from the barbaric practices of the Taliban and the Saddam Hussein regime, respectively. Simultaneously, women have been promoted as the “heroines” of the reconstruction of post-Taliban and post–Saddam Hussein societies (Pratt 2005). The concern for women implicitly justifies military intervention in these countries. Yet the degree to which this rhetorical support is translated into actual support for women’s involvement in reconstruction is...

By the summer of 2006, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Lebanon were sites of intense conflict. With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, U.S. secretary of state Rice in a widely televised interview baldly stated, “these are the birth pangs of the new Middle East.” Viewing the larger “war on terror” from a spatial and experiential perspective in Palestine provides a lens through which to view the extraordinary whirlwind of violence engulfing the region. This essay advances a comparative regional approach to these birth pangs, focusing on Iraq and Palestine. For Palestinians in the West Bank and displaced Iraqis, the vision of...

According to the great theorists of guerrilla warfare such as Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Tom Barry, insurgent conflicts, unlike other forms of armed conflict or war, are fundamentally political rather than military struggles for the “hearts and minds”—that is, the popular support—of the civilian population (Taber 2002). That population includes four expanding levels of popular consciousness: first, the local population in the war zones; second, the encompassing national population; third, if the situation is imperialism and the government supported or controlled by a foreign power, the population in that country; and...

When by 2004 U.S. forces had become bogged down in the hostile Sunni Triangle, the buzzwords “shock and awe” of the March 2003 aerial bombing of Iraqi troops and infrastructure were replaced by “swarming” as a trendy term to describe what was becoming an ordinary counterinsurgency war in a high-tech jacket. Superior firepower has always been a characteristic of American warfare, and the “shock and awe” strategy seemed to surpass, at least in word and imagination, all previous campaigns. However, one year after the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, American counterinsurgency units were swarming around cities such as...

Prior to 1980, Iraq and Afghanistan provided fascinating case studies for anthropologists. By the 1980s, the Baʿth government of Saddam Hussein had consolidated power and declared war on Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had sparked a tenacious resistance movement. Both conflicts resulted in chronic instability that would preclude anthropologists from conducting fieldwork in those countries for decades. As a result, the study of both countries by anthropologists declined, in addition to that of other academic disciplines. When the United States went to war with Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, there were perhaps no more than a...