Lawrence Kuznar Chair, Department of Anthropology Indiana University/Purdue University Fort Wayne, IN
"Anthropology of Terrorism: Modeling How Envy, Humiliation and Greed Manifest Violent Conflict in Cross-Cultural Perspective" TIME: Wednesday, August 1 @ 12:30 p.m. LOCATION: Redfish Conference Room, 624 Agua Fria Street, Santa Fe, NM Lunch will be available for $5 purchase ABSTRACT: The rise of ethnic conflict and global terrorism has produced new threats since the end of the Cold War. These threats largely originate in local cultural contexts colored by culturally unique practices, beliefs and organizations. Strategic analysts and military officials have recognized the distributed, culturally based nature of these new threats and have called to add "cultural intelligence" and sensitivity to religious, ethnic, and cultural sensibilities to their arsenal; they have put out a call to anthropology, but there has been frustratingly little progress. A central dilemma researchers and policy makers face is how to generate social theory that is general, but that can explain a bewildering array of specific cultural manifestations. I present a theory of risk taking that holds the promise of explaining the roots of conflict in an extremely wide array of cultural contexts. Key to this approach is a computational methodology that flexibly identifies key, culture-specific values, and measures the degree to which greed or grievance motivates individuals to take risks with respect to these values. Applications of this approach have included coups in ancient states, political mobilization in democracies, revolutions, the rise of nepotistic elites, tribal political dynamics, terrorist movements in Palestine, and the internal dynamics among the 911 co-conspirators. This method permits modeling of complex social systems, and as such, encounters difficult issues for validation, analogous to those encountered when modeling complex physical systems. SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY Dr. Lawrence A. Kuznar is a professor of anthropology from Indiana University - Purdue University, Fort Wayne whose specialties include decision theory, theories of conflict and terrorism, computational modeling, and the ecology of traditional pastoral societies. He has done field research among Aymara herders in southern Peru and Navajo sheepherders and cattle ranchers. He has published articles in journals such as American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, Human Ecology, Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, Social Science Computer Review, and Journal of Anthropological Research, among others. His book publications include Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology (Altamira Press, 1996), Awatimarka: The Ethnoarchaeology of an Andean Community (Harcourt Brace, 1995), and two edited volumes, Studying Societies and Cultures (Pergamon Press 2006) and Ethnoarchaeology in Andean South America (International Monographs in Prehistory 2001). His current research focuses on terrorism, computational modeling and verification & validation issues in modeling. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
