Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Dynamics of Cultural Training in the U.S. Military

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

For over a decade, the U.S. Army focused enormous energies and resources on creating a culturally-aware military. This objective was officially and repeatedly linked to the unique demands of contemporary warfare, generally, and the Middle Eastern operational environment, specifically. New doctrine was written. Old strategies were recast and revised. New cultural and language training programs, the emphasis on culture in field and technical manuals, the expansion of military cultural research centers, and a massive increase in human intelligence, special operations, and other military fields deemed to be cultural subject matter experts all helped realize this vision organizationally. A highly-public discourse made it clear that cultural awareness would be key to contemporary soldiering. This project, which trains a student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, explores the role of culture in the operational and institutional objections of the military. In addition, the project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings outside academe. Bethany Kibler, under the supervision of Dr. Steven Caton of Harvard University will explore the production and circulation of knowledge around the concept of culture within the operational and institutional objectives of the military. Since 2003, the emphasis on culture and cultural awareness has shaped the lives and experiences of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers. In contrast to other social scientific work on the so-called cultural turn, which has tended to document how the discourse around cultural awareness may have served to reframe the war in less objectionable terms to the American public, this research examines this discourse in a more open-ended and empirically grounded way. The researcher investigates the training sites, team rooms, and patrol routes where culture and cultural awareness are learned and put into practice by soldiers themselves. Over 18 months and across three communities of military cultural subject matter experts I will ask: What notion of culture is mobilized when culture becomes a military tool? What alternative knowledges and/or epistemologies about war, culture, and cultural competence are produced as soldiers operationalize this high-level and ever-changing vision? Most importantly, what can a study of cultural awareness tell us about how soldiers navigate and shape military institutional structures? In pursuing this line of questioning, this research tests the anthropological premise that institutions of all kinds are shaped by the human agents that represent and embody them, often in ways that high-level leadership or policy-makers fail to recognize or anticipate. Indeed, as the nascent ethnographic literature on the military shows, soldiers are often savvy consumers and invested actors who negotiate, resist, and recast aspects of the military's norms and messaging. By looking at the military production of cultural knowledge from the ground up, the competing epistemological commitments soldiers bring to bear and generate in confronting that knowledge, and the ethics of soldiering through cultural difference (cast as both morally and physically dangerous by trainers and soldiers alike), the research aims to contribute to current conversations in Middle Eastern studies, military studies, and the anthropology of ethics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.