Tuesday, July 27, 2010
12pm-1pm
Middle East Institute
1761 N St. NW
Washington DC 20036

The Middle East Institute is proud to host Rochelle Davis, professor of Anthropology at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, to discuss US military conceptions of culture and the war in Iraq.

Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the proposal of a new counterinsurgency doctrine in late 2006, culture has been named as a key to the success and failure of US military operations. Nevertheless, cultural training material has provided erroneous information about Iraq and Iraqis and has fundamentally shaped US troops' attitudes about Iraqis.  More recently, all four branches of the US Military have established new culture-centered institutions which are producing significantly different material, suggesting a fundamental shift in their approach to cultural training.

Davis' research, based on analysis of cultural training material and interviews with US troops and Iraqi civilians, suggests that military decision makers, current policy makers, and troops on the ground face fundamental challenges when approaching the role of culture as it relates to tactics of war.


BIO:
Rochelle Davis is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. Her most recent research project examines the US military's conception of culture in the war in Iraq. In addition to collecting cultural training material, she has conducted in-depth interviews with US servicemen and Iraqis. Her other research interests include refugees and displaced populations, and her forthcoming book manuscript, entitled Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced, addresses how Palestinians today are writing their histories of village life before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.