Thus, while cultural awareness is extremely important, we also need to be aware of the complexities and the ethical issues its use raises when providing support to troops and intelligence.Īnother interesting idea we brought up in class today was the idea of the enemy as this amorphous entity which is not clearly perceived by the main character. Some have also argued that “counterinsurgency can never be humanitarian” and thus, such a project can never be successful. While the introduction of HTS was seen as a step forward toward more effective counterinsurgency in war zones, it faced significant backlash with accusations of harming anthropology’s reputation of being an academic rather than a military discipline and of violating basic principles of ethical research such as informed consent. Army, a support program employing social scientists such as anthropologists and political scientists to provide military leaders with advice and understanding of the local population in the regions where they are deployed. It reminded me of an article I read in a class I took last year, “Cultures of the Contemporary Middle East.” It was about the implementation of the Human Terrain System in the U.S. We talked a lot about the importance of cultural awareness and the role it needs to play in insurgency. In the end I do not think I managed to completely understand what led him over the “abyss” and why he did what he did.
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While reading the novel, I was constantly trying to understand his motives and justify his actions, fully aware of the limits of my cultural understanding. In class today we talked a lot about the relatable nature or lack thereof of the main character. The first-person narrative thus ‘forces’ us to follow the journey of the protagonist even if we cannot or do not want to relate to him. We are being emerged in the protagonist’s head from the very start when he is just an innocent Bedouin who detests violence and avoids confrontation to a frustrated and angry man who is determined to “avenge” his family and defend his and their honor. The first-person narrative affects the objectivity of the conflict especially given the fact that there is no historical context or an exploration of the American soldiers’ side of the story but it is exactly what makes the novel so powerful.
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In my opinion, I do not think this is necessarily the right question to ask rather we should focus on what his account of the story can tell us about his experience and motivations to join the fundamentalists.
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We talked a bit in class about the reliability of the narrator and whether his account was biased or not. I had never before read a fiction novel about Islamic fundamentalism from the point of view of the ‘fundamentalist’ himself.