Human Terrain System, or a New Anthropology in a New Era

Abstract

Contemporary warfare seems to have great influence on the way the social sciences position themselves within the socio-political contexts of today. This is being implemented in many cases through the geopolitical context of 9/11 and the fall of former centres of power (the end of the Cold War). Cultural anthropology, which shared a similar dilemma in the formative period of its own history, provides us with one of the most controversial examples in this matter. A program initiated by the U.S. Army in 2006 called the Human Terrain System (HTS) started a wide-ranging debate on the ethical issues involved in carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in a militarized landscape. HTS thus became the focus of an intellectual and political polemic between certain groups of researchers. Within the academic and political debate on HTS, the program seems to have been placed in a post-colonial context as a new form of mixing of science and ideology. This paper tackles the problem of the emergence of a new type of anthropological understanding of the cultural Other as well its own methods and ethical standards in a situation where crisis seems to be the permanent state of the discipline and the world it is trying to describe.