David Vine

We’re Profiteers: How Military Contractors Reap Billions from U.S. Military Bases Overseas

“You whore it out to a contractor,” Major Tim Elliott said bluntly. It was April 2012, and I was at a swank hotel in downtown London attending “Forward Operating Bases 2012,” a conference for contractors building, supplying, and maintaining military bases around the world. IPQC, the private company running the conference, promised the conference would “bring together buyers and suppliers in one location” and “be an excellent platform to initiate new business relationships” through “face-to-face contact that overcrowded trade shows cannot deliver.” Companies sending representatives included major contractors like General Dynamics and the food services company Supreme Group, which has won billions in Afghan war contracts, as well as smaller companies like QinetiQ, which produces acoustic sensors and other monitoring devices used on bases. “We’re profiteers,” one contractor representative said to the audience in passing, with only a touch of irony.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Introducing Public Anthropology Reviews, September 2011

Welcome to the third installment of American Anthropologist’s new “Public Anthropology Reviews” section. We hope the section is fast becoming an important resource and space to present, constructively critique, and debate cutting-edge anthropological work that seeks to reach nonacademic audiences and influence critical issues of the day. If you missed the section’s first two issues, we encourage you to revisit those reviews (available in the journal and open access at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/ 123301409/PDFSTART) and our introduction to the section (Checker et al. 2009). In this issue, we begin with our first “dialogic review,” which will generally feature an anthropologist and an interlocutor offering two perspectives on the impact and import of a work of public anthropology. In this case, we feature Vibrant, the six-year-old biannual international journal of the Association of Brazilian Anthropologists (ABA), which is seeking to increase the global accessibility of Brazilian anthropology by publishing in English, French, and Spanish— rather than just in Portuguese—and by making Vibrant available free online. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, who oversaw the launch of Vibrant as president of the ABA and remains an editorial board member, offers an overview of the linguistic, technological, and political-economic complexities of expanding the diversity of anthropological voices and disseminating anthropological knowledge around the globe. Then interlocutor Janet Chernela critiques the journal from the point of view of a reader. Eric C. Thompson discusses another effort to introduce anthropological perspectives into popular discourse in his review of “Ini Budaya Kita” (lit., this Is Our Culture), Julian Lee’s regular column for a Malaysian art and lifestyle magazine. As Thompson explains, Lee and a number of anthropologically inclined guest writers bring anthropological insights to contemporary Malaysian life while questioning popular, and generally narrow, understandings of “culture” that are frequently used by political conservatives “to rail against all manner of things—from music to political protest—by disparagingly commenting. . . . this is not our culture” (this issue). Next, Robert Rotenberg discusses Jared Braiterman’s Tokyo Green Space blog on “microgardening.” The blog is documenting efforts to use gardening in the smallest and most unusual urban spaces—rooftops, walls, schools—“to support biodiversity in the world’s largest city” (this issue). Of particular interest to environmental and urban anthropologists, not to mention gardeners, Rotenberg’s review describes a blog that combines design anthropology, lush color photography, and the eye and imagination of the flâneur to explore a transforming Tokyo. Finally, Edward M. Maclin brings us an analysis of anthropologists’ presence at the 2009 global climate change talks in Copenhagen, Denmark. Drawing on his own, at times harrowing, research at the talks, Maclin describes some of the challenges faced by anthropologists studying climate change and environmental activism in both conducting research and disseminating research findings about an issue of such obvious global significance beyond academia. In future issues, we intend to review a broad range of topics including the U.S. military’s Human Terrain program, anthropologists’ response to the earthquake in Haiti, service learning, new publishing experiments, and changes to tenure requirements. We continue to welcome submissions for work to be reviewed as well as the names of potential reviewers (e-mail publicanthreviews@gmail.com). We also welcome your suggestions, critique, and other feedback as we develop this important new section of American Anthropologist.

Taking on Empires

The Chagossians are a little-known part of the African diaspora, originally living halfway between continental Africa and Indonesia as the indigenous people of the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Archipelago. Members of the community are the descendants of enslaved Africans, mostly from Madagascar and the southwestern Mozambique coast, and, to a lesser extent, indentured Indians, brought to the previously uninhabited islands beginning in the late eighteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, this diverse group had become a distinct people of around two thousand with a vibrant society and generations of ancestors buried on islands described by many as idyllic.