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Ashraf Ghani—the now deposed president of Afghanistan—holds a PhD in anthropology (Columbia '83).  In addition, prior to moving to the World Bank in 1991, he was a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins.   There is evidence—from his academic publications in the 1980s and from what folks who “knew-him-when” say—that Ghani once thought and taught valuable anthropology grounded in both the lived experience of ordinary persons and democratic social theory.  And here it ’ s worth recalling that the Hopkins department of his time was rightly recognized as distinctly on the left and opposed to US neo-imperialism, having been founded and led by Sidney Mintz .  I myself found no such evidence of a democratic and anthropological consciousness the  one time I interacted with him, which was during his years at the World Bank.  The occasion was an annual meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology; Ghani was the keynote speaker, and I was serving, at the t...

The killing last week of Anwar al-Awlaki by a high-tech drone makes abundantly clear what was not, in fact, stated clearly enough when President Obama ran for president in 2008--which is that the Obama alternative to the type of wars waged, with gusto, by G. W. Bush is to greatly expand the use of drones to kill persons identified as US "enemies."  In this context, I do not find myself overly moved by the idea that the rightness or wrongness of such a killing hinges on the citizenship of the person killed.  I get that there is some value in holding up the ideal of the rule of law, but there is also a risk that this concern with the rule of law will take the place of--rather than bolster--a commitment to act ethically (and not merely "legally"). One point that does seem crucial to me is to note just how willing both the Obama administration and the media have been to replace asking whether such ...