I think the way in which Human Terrain falls into both the somewhat personal and the more 'universal' provided a smooth transition to fill the gaps between the strictly fiction (avatar) to the nonfiction (the spectrum as I envision it is : fiction to nonfiction (personal) to nonfiction (universal)). It was fascinating the extent to which my experience watching human terrain has altered the way I conceived of avatar. On the other hand, for some reason I cannot explain, avatar has given center stage to human terrain (it seemed to me that avatar was the marginal, the background that primarily shed the light on human terrain and not the opposite).

To begin with, avatar has made me all the empathetic, all the more engaged, with those who simply had a desire to change, to help, in Human Terrain. It inspired me to conclude that once a certain nation, certain people, arrive with guns, it makes it somewhat impossible for 'culture' to be on the other side of the equation. 'Culture' manifests itself 'naturally' (not in the sense that it is not culturally constructed. Rather, that it can be easily [naturally] seen in all aspects of one's life). And once you have a gun, power dynamics dramatically change and cultural norms are broken (for example, in human terrain, a new norm is introduced when the boy flies the pigeon as it is intended to signify that the 'enemy' has arrived. So a culture of war is introduced that can't be taught to the 'invaders' as such culture is largely in the process of being molded. New signs and symbols are introduced that sometimes wipe out the previous meanings). So perhaps the trajectory in avatar (the hard-core war between human being and 'the blue monkeys') was inevitable, as opposed to being a single scenario chosen from infinite options.

Though as I mentioned before, avatar has set the stage for Human Terrain to be seen as the core (and I don't think it's due to the chronology of watching the movies).I also think that watching avatar before Human Terrain has made me somewhat skeptic from the beginning of the project of human and cultural terrain. In the very beginning of Human Terrain, cultural and human terrain is introduced side to side with the physical terrain. Well, when you start with unrealistic assumptions, you will get at the very least unanticipated outcomes (if not tragic outcomes). The human terrain is not to be coded and cannot be simply sketched out like the physical terrain. To simply put it, a military cant 'operationalize' culture because it will turn against them ( part of the movie portrayed how military personnel were being deceived by Iraqis. For example, Iraqis would smile and shake hands and then turn with a gun. Since culture is constructed, it can be reconstructed to suit the present conditions). So I think if I watched Human Terrain only, perhaps I would approach the documentary from a less biased stance (and I suppose if I didn’t read all those newspapers and watched all those news shows on the Iraq War. So other texts have also molded me as to have a skeptic eye even before the second part of the documentary unfolded).

But what was the strongest element is when young bright motivated scholars get into such a project, and the result is devastating. Avatar leaves us with a , more or less, 'happy' ending but with Human Terrain, it is rather a question, an opening, an invitation. It's because ultimately it’s a dialogue and once you start it, you can't hold it back from being echoed, transmitted and reshaped.

I think there are 'good' movies and there are 'bad' movies. Avatar was a 'good' movie. But then there are those movies that you respect, and Human Terrain was exactly that. And for that, I am awed.

Intertext: Human Terrain and Avatar
Human Terrain and Avatar explore modern warfare practices of the US military, addressing, in particular, questions of what the military should do when it comes into contact with ‘populations.’ In Human Terrain, these populations are Iraqi civilians, often living in urban environments where US forces carry out many of their combat operations. In Avatar, these are the Na’vi people, whose dwelling center lies over the deposits of US-coveted unobtanium. Both films suggest that the military wants to learn more about these populations due to realpolitik considerations (although some of the anthropologists working in the field argue that understanding ‘the other’ will allow the military not to dominate, but instead to cooperate with these individuals). Both films suggest that the military funds humanitarian projects such as schools and hospitals in order to make these populations more docile, and perhaps to bring them over to the US’s side. For the American military, neutralizing ‘enemies’ among the other will allow it to obtain the unchecked power it needs to carry out its operations.
Avatar makes the underlying neo-imperialist designs of the US Army explicit. The military and corporate leaders are working together to abstract unobtanium from Pandora. Human Terrain draws upon suggestions of ulterior motives behind the US invasion of Iraq undermine the official rhetoric of the generals, which focuses on winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of Iraqis. One anthropologist makes these allegations explicit, arguing that the military are an occupying force of “pragmatic realists,” who use the liberalist notions about spreading peace and democracy to “guild the lily” and obscure the fact that the invasion was “an imperialist venture to secure access to resources.” His critique offers insight into the motivations behind Iraqi suicide bombers and the weapons of the Na’vi: “they hate us because we’re invading their country.” He thus unmasks the realpolitik at work in the actions of the military, and reframes the “terrorist” actions of the Na’vi and Iraqis alike as self-defense mechanisms against the material power of the United States military.
Yet Human Terrain provides a more nuanced critique than does Avatar of the military’s intentions. It allows for the possibility that some soldiers, some military leaders, and some anthropologists believe that they are developing ‘culturally sensitive’ approaches not as a source of propaganda, but instead as a way to connect with the people they encounter. The movie, by juxtaposing the testimonies of these individuals with scenes from the ground and more critical perspectives, suggests that these individuals may not be acting upon an unspoken will to power, but that their attempts may miss the mark by defining the Iraqis in terms of difference, instead of recognizing the humanity that they share.
In both films, the directors engage with representations of the military, and representations of the foreign other. In Avatar, the military are realist actors who frame Pandora as an anarchy that the US forces must tame. In this dog-eat-dog world, the military justifies its destruction of the ‘aggressive’ Na’vi. The general tells his troops that diplomacy has failed, and then, between sips of coffee, proceeds to take great pleasure in bombing the tribe’s Hometree. All those who remain in the military seem to commit to these policies without questioning them, and those who do question end up leaving the ranks. The film suggests that, with the military, you’re with them, or against them.
Human Terrain complexifies this image, drawing upon a tension between representations of military members (who are, at least in the film, mostly male) as hired killers (in keeping with realist representations of the material forces of the war), and the interviews with these men, along with camera shots of them paying attention to the training sessions that represent them in more humane terms. One marine officer describes the men as “fundamentally killers,” while another claims that they are “just like animals.” Yet these hired killers encounter non-enemy combatants, and in particular, civilians. Some military officers have joined a group against the military’s engagement in Iraq (reminiscent of the few deflectors in Avatar who are seeking to undermine the state’s power structure). Another former marine describes how this tension between the military directives and empathy for other human’s affected a friend of his, who worked in Abu Ghraib. He argues that this empathy made his friend able to manipulate, but also made it impossible for him to go on living in the wake of the war.
This discussion of Abu Ghraib also brings up the question of how the military represents the other. If they are terrorists, and our warfare is legitimate, than killing them is in keeping with traditional laws of war. If the ‘us’ is human, and the other is an animal, then ‘we’ can justify the policies that deny these people their human rights. The military members in Avatar engage in this dehumanizing rhetoric, referring to the Na’vi tribes in dehumanizing terms, calling them on various occasions ‘aliens,’ ‘monkeys,’ and ‘savages.’ They employ the anthropologists to learn how to convince the Na’vi to move off of the deposits of unobtanium, and silence the anthropologists when they try to complexity the image of the Na’vi with stories of their religious practices, the neural networks of their trees, or any other information that would bring to a halt their imperialist venture.
Jake provides a vehicle through which we enter into the world of the Na’vi tribes. While the US military operations have rendered him paraplegic (and with references to Nigeria and Venezuela, Cameron suggests that the US has conducted many military operations since the present day), life as a Na’vi offers him not only a new pair of legs, but also a position of leadership and union with Neytiri, who is next in line to be spiritual leader of the Na’vi peoples. Yet, even as Jake enters this tribe, the ‘us’/’them’ distinctions continue. He cannot exist in both worlds at once, and so the audience jumps back and forth between Jake in the human world, and Jake in the Na’vi world. The end of this movie makes this distinction complete, as Jake enters fully into his Na’vi form, no longer an Avatar.
Moreover, the process of Jake’s transition is sexualized. From the beginning, we can guess that much of his desire to explore Pandora comes from an attraction to Neytiri, who, topless and dreadlocked, wields her arrow (in a manner reminiscent of legends of Amazonians), to save Jake from the rabid dog-like creatures. Much of Jake’s quest to be a warrior, it seems, rests in proving his masculinity to her, and winning her over from her promised husband. She is the Malinche to his Cortez, until Cortez finds his heart (and satisfies his desires), reversing the Malinche story so that, in the end, Jake spearheads the efforts to liberate the Na’vi from the yoke of US imperialism.
Cameron’s representation of the Na’vi tribes encourages this exoticized, ‘west vs. the rest’ perspective of the other. The words that the military officers use to refer to the Na’vi allude to derogatory terms that have been used historically as racist slurs for Native Americans (‘savages’), for people from Africa (‘monkeys’), and most recently for Hispanic minorities living without legal papers in the United States (‘aliens’). Cameron seems to blend together multiple different ‘ethnic’ identities into one. He uses the term Avatar, which borrows from Hinduism. He creates mountains to resemble ones he has seen in China, and fills the forest with tropical plants of the Caribbean and Central American forests. The people’s religious worship echoes stereotypical notions of Native American worship (a la tree mother in Pochohontas), and the god, Eywa, has a name reminiscent of Yemaya, the mother god of the Yoruba pantheon whom slaves from Africa brought to the new world, and whom people continue to worship in Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, and parts of the United States. The Na’vi themselves have decidedly non-European facial features. The captains of the military, on the other hand, are white. Cameron’s ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ takes on racial undertones, and the ‘we’ become a white nation (despite the fact that Census results predict that minority ethnic groups will no longer be a minority within 100, let alone 150 years).
The critical voices on Human Terrain cast doubt on cultural representations that present the other in such terms of difference. As Human Terrain addresses the attempts to bring cultural studies into the military, it raises questions of how the military conceptualizes culture, and how it utilizes this cultural perspective. The debate on Human Terrain as a program has raised support for that idea that the Iraqis have a particular ‘truth’ to represent, and that, be it for reasons of realpolitik or for liberal ideals, the military should increasingly recognize this truth. Those who argue in favor of the Human Terrain project claim that this increased attention to culture has allowed the military to think less in black and white terms, and to engage with the shades of grey, which include relations with civilians, and the ‘culturally sensitive’ reactions that certain military actions may insight.
Yet some of the anthropologists who critique these policies argue that the military has failed to understand culture as a variable. They maintain that the military has created the foundation in Iraq for the Foucaultian ‘knowledge-power’ relations in which ‘knowledge’ of the other increases the military’s power over this other. Moreover, these theorists take issue with the way that the military understands culture as a static category of difference (thus indirectly critiquing Cameron’s representations as well). Working from a post-structuralist perspective, they argue against the commoditization of a culture, constructing more fluid notions of identity in which those studying other groups cannot essentialize these groups as ‘different.’ The focus on difference itself proves dangerous, as such representations run the risk of shifting to representations of deviancy. Moreover, as the editor of the Paris Review argues in Human Terrain, this focus on difference obscures a common humanity, and gives the US the license “to do things to them that you would not do to us.” While these critics, like Cameron, argue against the US military’s imperialist designs, they move away from a post-colonial narrative that frames Western powers as liberators of backwards civilizations, and they acknowledge the complex identities at work in these civilizations of ‘others.’
Yet the story of Michael Bhatin undermines our ability, as an audience, to view the military’s actions in purely negative terms. His image disaggregates the single rational actor model, allowing the audience to understand that, while the military may have an official policy, many people with many different intentions fill its ranks. Unlike Jake, who ends up renouncing his identity as a member of the marines all together (in favor of an identity as a warrior of the Omaticaya clan), Bhatin leaves academia to enter the service, bringing a commitment to building better relations with Afghanis and a critical skepticism against forces that might manipulate his ‘knowledge’ to increase their power. Watching Michael’s story, we can continue to believe the anthropologists who argue that the military commanders are pursuing illegitimate ends with their Human Terrain project, but we can no longer see theirs as the only narrative thread.
The epilogue of Human Terrain argues that we should turn the lens of scholarship back onto ourselves, and that our challenge is not our failure to understand the other, but a failure to understand ourselves. If we cannot make war more humane, Professor of Anthropology Lutz suggests, then perhaps we should devote our resources towards avoiding war, and, to begin, address the elements in our culture that lead us into war (and, one can imagine that they may be the elements that led us to destroy the green on planet earth, and to invest vast amounts of resources and energy in extracting unobtanium from Pandora). If we can cease invading, then we will allow for the co-existence of multiple cultures.
Avatar does not allow for this possibility of co-existence. Jack recognizes the negative implications of our imperialist logic, but seems to think that it is impossible to temper this force. He calls upon the Na’vi to fight fire with fire (facilitating, once again, a realist reading of the narrative), and in the end, the Na’vi secure their continued existence by destroying the US forces. Perhaps the defeated US forces who leave Pandora for their dying planet will begin to self-reflect, but Jack doesn’t seem to have much faith. Instead of returning with them, he becomes fully Na’vri. If Jack is the one American with a more nuanced understanding left by the end of the film, then we can assume that any knowledge he has dies with his human form.
Human Terrain, in contrast, engages in the aftermath of Bhatin’s death, and demonstrates the extent to which, while he has died, his commitment to increasing cross cultural conversations has not died with him. We watch the soldiers who worked with him, his family members, and his former colleagues, all meditate on his life, and the larger project that he was a part of when he died. By arguing, in the end, that it is inappropriate to view his death through the lens of nationalism, the film moves beyond such hegemonic constructions of ‘culture.’ The mixed media sources throughout the documentary, and the closing story of Bhatin, argues against the fixed conceptions of identity that allow us to make less human, or to essentialize the other. And instead of destroying ourselves, we have the option to work to change ourselves, by questioning the ‘truth’ and by entering into the debate with empathy.

Avatar and Human Terrain both present very similar portrayals of understanding the Other in situations of war and diplomacy. Both films portray the US military as attempting to use anthropologists to further their own goals, but Avatar has a much more simplistic view of anthropological work: anthropologists, Sigourney Weaver and cultural understanding, good; military, bad. In Human Terrain, good and evil is set aside for a more nuanced debate about the anthropology itself, as soldiers are presented as pragmatic and just-doing-what-they-have-to-do, at once pointing guns and posturing at little kids while they donate soccer balls and practice sipping tea in mock huts. It is the anthropologists themselves who face an internal dilemma, the controversy of the film’s drama, which features the moral question of aiding a military in occupying a nation.
The biggest and most important difference between the movies is the chronology of events; Avatar presents a choice between anthropology and military action, while in real life, and in Human Terrain, kinetic operations come first. The country is invaded, capitals sacked, soldiers disarmed, and then comes the real work. As Genghis Khan put it: “Conquering the world on horseback is easy; it is dismounting and governing that is hard.” Before the invasion of Iraq, the US military didn’t sit in Kuwait and wait for the anthropologists to try and understand Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people, becoming impatient and antsy for action. In fact, this probably did happen in the buildup to the Iraq War, but it wasn’t anthropologists and nerdy scientists, but rather CIA agents infiltrating the population and soaking up cultural data. In Iraq, the Hometrees have already been destroyed, innocent family members killed, and the Trees of Voices bulldozed. Anthropological efforts begin in an environment where the kinetic operations have already taken place, but Iraqi insurgents would like to see them continue, and the US military wants them to stop so they can leave. This is a remarkably different scenario from Avatar, where the anthropologists, though portrayed as good and helpful, are undoubtedly aiding in the subjugation of the Other.
What is “doing good” in these two scenarios? The anthropologists of Avatar claim some moral high ground because they focus on wanting to learn, conduct science and, most importantly, because they represent a choice: the diplomatic solution as compared to the US military’s messy solution, which suggests a decidedly realist view of world (galactic?) politics. The US is going to oppress the Na’vi and mine the unobtanium; the only question left is whether they will do it through force or through the gentler, but no less subjugating practice of diplomacy. It is no wonder then that the anthropologists appear good: they are offering a non-violent solution to getting what the US wants. But in Human Terrain, there is no such choice, and it is here that the supposed “controversy” of the anthropological community seems confused and erratic. The US has already conducted its kinetic operations; it has ousted a dictator and spread democracy and freedom, and now it would like to leave, to stop the violence, and it would like some help.
The one area where anthropology might be immoral is that if they are successful, it might encourage the US military that it can topple countries and then let the anthropologists sort it out. This sort of moral hazard could be compared to the current issues of economic regulation: if the scientists bail out these too-big-to-fail militaries, then won’t they be tempted to fall back on the insurance of the scientists in the future? This question seems so comical in its overstatement of the hypothesized power of academia that it needs no answer. If there ever is a day when academics and social scientists can solve a country’s problems, heal psyches, and build nations, we will as a society have so little about which to worry that this moral hazard problem will be a welcome distraction.
In Human Terrain, numerous talking heads make the point that the US military does not succeed in winning hearts of minds not because soldiers don’t understand Iraqi hand signals or rules of eye contact, but because the US is occupying their country and killing its citizens. The point is driven home over images of Abu Ghraib, as one anthropologist explains that it is not a particular quirk of Iraqi culture that they resent being tied to a wall naked and attacked by German Shepherds, but rather that this is a generically human trait. The Na’vi in Avatar then, do not need to be understood or reasoned with. They would like to live in their Hometree, and learn in the Trees of Voices, and prey in the Tree of Souls, and this is not a particular trait of these strange alien beings, but rather a generic trait of the living.
In a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, an old-school Colonel tells us that: “We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.” His racism, choice of wording, and cultural illiteracy aside, the colonel could have played Sigourney Weaver advising the military (or logging industry) in Avatar: inside every alien, every human, every tree, there is a living thing trying to stay alive. Would we have been happy then if after uprooting their homes and destroying their cultural monuments, the Marines had built hospitals, handed out soccer balls, grown tails and mustaches, and convinced the Na’vi of their shared humanity/alien-ity/aliveness? I doubt it. The real tragedy, the real drama of these stories happens far before the camera turns on and the choices are offered: choices between kinetic and non-kinetic, between anthropologists and soldiers, between hostile and non-hostile, between a smile-and-a-wave and the muzzle of a gun, between peace and war.

But, sure, now that you’ve asked, peace, please.

With similarly hazy goals of "understanding" and "helping kids just like you," the U.S. Military's Human Terrain System (HTS) is one of the government's recent anthropological endeavours. That is to say, it's attempt to "know the other." Through their similarly titled documentary -- Human Terrain -- brothers Michael and David Udris investigate the many hazy moments in which anthropological and military goals are blurred, specifically in Iraq, the locale for which HTS was started in 2005.

Yet for our assignment's purposes, the most interesting points in the documentary occur - as Michael Udris described to our Global Media Class last week - when "social engineering"comes into play. It is here that a particularly steady dialogue with James Cameron's latest Hollywood hyperHit, Avatar, emerges.

Whereas even through its title, Avatar gives away its literally dual nature, Human Terrain, begins somewhat ironically on more unstable ground: at the 29 Palm's training center, where HTS marines are presented with mock Iraqi villages and scenarios that they must enter to "prepare" them for the "real world". The "others," the strangers here, are Iraqis straight out of San Diego, CA. Just like Sigourney Weaver's Stanford-t-shirt-clad avatar (Grace) in the film, who's team vainly attempts to familiarize themselves with the language and culture of the Na'vi people, these mock Iraqis too, hardly simulate reality. Instead, they (mis)shape perceptions and seem to cement a sense of black vs. white, good vs. bad in the minds of trainees. (And unfortunately no, there is no Jake Sully-to-the-rescue-character in the Army.) A slow, pensive shot of an off-duty mock Iraqi sitting alone in a door-step as other marines josh around 30 feet away highlights this. And, as one military personnel explains, there are few to no moments of grey in military life: "[the moments will] never happen," and if they were to, he surmises, "we'll probably get shot ourselves."

Thus as within Avatar, the social engineering of "the (Iraqi) other" takes place in the American physical and mental landscape. As one mock Iraqi filmed in the documentary explains, his task on the base is to "teach [the marines] the Iraqi way, what religion they have..." Yet the realities of Iraq have indeed proven to be distinct from those of 29 Palms.

So it seems that again, like the team lead by Grace Augustine in Avatar, actual penetration of the Na'vi's culture -- in Human Terrain paralleled by that of the Iraqis -- proves far more problematic than one naively expects. Cameron resolves this with a somewhat less-realistic, more "WohlFühl" ending, where the handicapped Jake Sully's nimble avatar charms his way into a new culture, falls in love, and saves the population by riding a red dinosaur-bird.

But there are no such birds in California, least of all in the Middle East.

Ultimately, it seems that even when academia and anthropology team up, even given Richard Holbrooke's confirmation that this is "... a different kind of war," those on the ground have the triumphant powers of immediate action, privatized perception (which, as the interviewed Urban Warfare Director noted, "is frequently more important than actual truth"), and government-backed force. The frightening thing is that those on the ground - for example the former interrogator of the U.S. Army interviewed in Human Terrain - seem to be largely of the mindset that "The enemy was [and is] always the enemy."

Now that doesn't seem to leave much room for discussion.

ps.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2010/feb/14/west-bank-barrier-avatar-protest

The intertext arising between Human Terrain and Avatar centers equally on the militarization of science and on the implications for the military of coming to know the Other. The application of social sciences to military conquest raises several questions: Does understanding the Other obstruct the soldier’s legitimation of murder and thus pacify the soldier, or, conversely, does understanding the Other militarize peacemaking? Jake Sully's character in Avatar presents us with the utopian ideal that cultural understanding results in a soldier who comes to fully understand and empathize with the Other. In Human Terrain, by contrast, we observe the real world weaponization of academia in the service of military domination and the failure of cultural knowledge to humanize the Other.

On our bespectacled, IMAX journey with Jake Sully, we watch and participate in the character’s ascent from cultural informant for the military to cultural insurgent against the military. This ascendancy follows a process of cultural learning through which the Other as a construct of total difference disintegrates beneath meaningful interaction and prolonged cultural exchange. The Na’vi are initially presented to Sully as entities of pure Otherness. As an audience, we are brought through the same succession of awarenesses; our first visual evidence of Na’vi life takes the form of an enormous military vehicle riddled with proportionally enormous Na’vi arrows. This unsettling introduction, colored by unseen violence and unimaginable menace, is followed by an aggressively cautionary monologue by the intense Colonel enumerating the physical strength and combative brutality of the Na’vi. At this point of the film, the indigenous peoples exist as a precise conception of the Other – mysterious, deadly, threatening, powerful, invisible, in all ways different. And yet, as the film progresses, Jake Sully overcomes the barrier of Otherness, inhabiting the body and spirit of the Na’vi so fully as to eventually renounce his identity as human. Cultural understanding triumphs over military indoctrination.

But now a moment of intertext. Der Derian’s and the Udris brothers’ Human Terrain topples the utopianism and fantasy of this notion of the essentially good soldier pacified through empathy and cultural learning. Indeed, the HTT, as enunciated in Human Terrain, operates upon the basis of sustaining the Otherness of the enemy while augmenting military efficiency.

The scientists of the Human Terrain Team want to ‘do good.' They want to help. They want to reduce the pain, suffering, and death of their research subjects. They want to spread a sense of respect for the Other among the US military. And yet, they fall tragically short of their goals. They become lubrication for the military machine. We have to ask, as an interviewee of the film does, how do we do good? For whom do we do good? To what ends do we do good? The weaponization of anthropology destroys the intention at the heart of anthropology, namely to dignify the Other, to learn about him and her and thus humanize the Other.

Between the avatar program of Pandora and the HTT program of the US military we can observe a crucial difference. Jake’s understanding of the Na’vi and his subsequent defection is presented as an inevitable consequence of his cultural education and the dissolution of his conception of the Other. In the HTT, this process is necessarily obstructed. The academics are embedded with the military, wear military fatigues, carry arms. At no point do they cohabitate with their research subjects – at no point does their cultural learning pose a threat to their loyalty. They remain outsiders. Their subjects remain foreign. This kind of anthropological learning is predicated on maintaining the barrier of Otherness, rather than violating it. HTT, despite any kind of rhetorical bid to ‘understand the people,’ seeks only to perpetuate the Other (http://www.army.mil/professionalwriting/volumes/volume4/december_2006/12_06_2.html). Thus, HTT circumvents the kind of operational risk presented by a Jake Sully situation. As suggested in the Human Terrain film, the duty of the soldier – that is, to carry out state-sanctioned murder in the name of his or her country and its military progress – comes to be challenged. The military, in order to maintain operational effectiveness, is forced to subject the research of the Human Terrain anthropologist to violent essentializations in order to maintain the Other and maintain legitimized violence. The life in the firearm’s scope is easily terminated when that life is displaced by a figure of Otherhood. When the Other comes to be seen as a person, the distinction between military action and murder is destabilized.

Avatar & Human Terrain

From their seemingly different lenses—one a work of science fiction, the other a documentary film—Avatar and Human Terrain depict the ways in which the United States military (and its academics) deal with what they unapologetically allude to as the other and hints to the ulterior motives revolving around their interest in learning about their cultural practices and language.

Avatar makes clear allusions to the concept of US’s current quest for imperialism in Iraq and furthermore, this notion of the white man’s burden. But then the question is how do we pacify the other? That’s when Avatar and Human Terrain start talking.

The Human Terrain System in San Diego, CA is a mock setting of Iraq for the United States Marine Corps to learn how they should be interacting with the people there. The large strip of desert is peppered with “mock” Iraqis in order to train the troops in order to navigate not only human terrain but also “cultural terrain”. This idea of navigating cultural terrain is at the crux of Cameron’s Avatar—which is made clear at the get-go with its title. In order to understand the Na’vi people, Sigourney Weaver and her academic cronies make avatars of themselves but that look and act exactly like the Na’vi—in the hopes that they are showing the Na’vi some sort of cultural competence and understanding.

But the problem with completely understanding another’s culture through mock interactions and/or making an avatar of one’s self is that you can’t create a formula for understanding culture—particularly, since, it doesn’t come up in either one of the films, but that culture is not a stagnant concept. Culture is constantly changing and evolving in relation to what is happening, as a way in which to deal and cope. No military computer program that looks like a video game is going to teach a troop about the right types of interactions with Iraqis. In one of the interviews, the interviewee refers to the military version of culture as “fool’s good”—culture can’t fit into a program or wallet.

And this is when Avatar is separated from Human Terrain as a work of fiction. It turns out that in Avatar, you can understand the other’s culture and fully immerse yourself, and also save their planet of Pandora without abstracting unobtanium. Jake Sully, the paraplegic former military man, almost seamlessly integrates into the Na’vi culture throughout the movie. At first, the audience sees him switching back and forth from his true body and his avatar. But at the end he comes full avatar, and is accepted by the Na’vi people. Oh, and this happens right after he saves them from the evil US military trying to dig up the Na’vi’s life tree and gets the Na’vi princess. But I don’t think Iraq is going to have the white savior, Jake Sully, telling all the Iraqis to fight back because the US is there to take their oil… and have him marry a nice Iraqi girl. And that’s when the story of Michael Bhatia comes into play, to albeit tragically, juxtapose the outcome of academics working to help fight a “smart” war, so to speak.

Furthermore, the way in which the other is painted in both pictures is one that needs to be lead by the US. In Human Terrain, the intention we are all too familiar with on the military’s part is to bring Iraqis a democracy. In Avatar, they need Jake Sully to show them what to do and mobilize (the Na’vi couldn’t have done it on their own, according to Cameron. They needed the white former military man to lead them to victory). The other is constantly painted as primitive and particularly in Avatar, exoticized. The mother has a head full of dreadlocks and everyone is near nude—the women often do not wear tops. For some horribly bizarre effect, most of the Na’vi have Jamaican-esque accents. Avatar often looks like a take on Pocahontas (another film about white man’s burden and US imperialism at its earliest stages) or Fern Gully—the people are somewhat primitive in that they have a very serious connection with nature and the earth (or maybe Cameron is just telling kids to renew, reuse, recycle?). This exoticism is seen when in Human Terrain they detail the events that occurred at Abu Ghraib, in which officers exploited certain fears they thought were exclusive to Iraqis. What gives them the right to do that to those Iraqi men? As Professor Der Derian mentioned in class, of course that any man would be scared as hell to be stripped down naked, unable to see, and having German Shepherds near their private parts. And then the military wonders why the Iraqis hate them.

The question remains. Can we ever truly and fully understand the culture of another?

Although Avatar takes place on the fictional planet of Pandora with large blue inhabitants, the plot similarities it shares with the U.S. military documentary Human Terrain are striking. Both films chronicle military occupation on foreign soils rich with desirable resources. Through understanding the customs, behaviors, and mindset of "the other," the militaries in Avatar and Human Terrain hope that they will be accomplish their missions. Though one film is fiction and the other is factual, they parallel each other in tone and action, and they illustrate the brutality of war, the complexity of culture, and the audacity of the U.S. military.

Avatar and Human Terrain each follow the progress of military operations designed to learn about the "native." In Avatar, this is done through the creation of "avatars," or Na'vi bodies genetically specific to the human operating it through the control center. The humans hope that through using the avatars, they can build relations with the Na'vi and learn the location of the highly valuable mineral unobtanium. In real life, we witness a similar controversial initiative in Human Terrain. The film centers on the Human Terrain System, a U.S. operation that embeds anthropologists with the military in Iraq and Afghanistan with the task of gaining understanding of the local population and cultures. The anthropologists’ research is supposed to increase the cultural sensitivity of the military, improving its relationship with the Iraqi and Afghani people and minimizing unnecessary conflict. The actual use of the information provided by the social scientists and the motive behind the program, however, are unclear, leading many academics to question the morality and efficiency of the work.

Oil has long been believed to be a major motivation for the U.S. occupation in the Middle East. Thus, the parallels between the United States’ desire for oil in Iraq and the American military’s desire for Na’vi resources in Avatar are undeniable. For me, watching Avatar first helped to illuminate the kind of exploitation that is happening in Iraq. The political overtones are overt and helped me view Human Terrain with a very specific and critical mindset. Although the news is filled with stories about Iraq each day and liberals have long been decrying oil as the reason behind the Iraqi occupation, watching Avatar forced me to recognize the extent of injustice and audacity of the United States’ actions at a new level. So while I still do not know how I stand on the Human Terrain System, I could not help but feel that the "cultural knowledge" being provided by the anthropologists was the United States' own way of creating Avatars -- not to build sincere ties with the local people, but instead learn how to better exploit the land for its own benefit.

Culture. What is culture? As a Development Studies concentrator, it's hard for me to find a reading that doesn't speak about "culture." I was glad that our treatment of this ambiguous concept was problematized in the films. They grapple with our desire to understand other cultures, and consequently, our need to reduce and neatly package these cultures into simple sound bites. Culture seems to get thrown around frequently as an explanation for foreign behavior. It renders difficult situations easier for us to understand. Instead of looking at structural inequalities and the repercussions of colonialism, we prefer the blanket answer, "It's their culture." I really appreciated the remarks of George Mason University Professor Hugh Gusterson, "They hate us because we're occupying their country, not because we don’t understand their hand signals." He goes on to say that if you ask the wrong questions, you get the wrong answers. I thought this was incredibly poignant and voices one of my major concerns about the Human Terrain System. We try to absolve ourselves of responsibility for our violent actions when we ask questions like, “What is it about their culture that we don’t understand that is leading them to hate us so much?” We ignore the mistakes we have made and we overlook the fact that it is not their culture, but our unjust behavior.

The act of taking advantage of a native population and exploiting their land has long been a subject of history and film. In school, we read about the mistreatment of Native Americans in our textbooks and the destruction of rainforests in Scholastic News. I saw it happen in Pocahontas and in FernGully, a film remarkably similar to Avatar. The rainforest of FernGully is occupied by fairies. A female fairy befriends a male human who has been shrunk down to a fairy, and the movie chronicles their relationship as humans attempt to destroy the rainforest. In Avatar, this type of romance between the native and the seemingly "superior" race that is working to destroy the land also occurs, but now, 18 years later, it resonates more than ever.

I am thankful that Avatar and Human Terrain have challenged us to think critically about the U.S. military. However, I took issue with the very American framework and perspectives through which both films were presented. They did little to present equally the stories and experiences of the "native" population. In all fairness, in Avatar the Na'vi people were an active part of the plot and a female member of the Na' vi was a central character. The Na'vi's criticism of the humans was also presented in several scenes. Even so, the representation of the Na'vi included the usual crudely stereotypical tribal rituals, hierarchies, and clothing (or rather lack thereof). In Human Terrain, the most we encounter Iraqi civilians is through video games (another digitized reductive version of the native) and American role playing.

In Avatar and Human Terrain, the only casualties that were adequately acknowledged and mourned were those of our own race. I by no means want to be disrespectful or undermine the tragedy of Michael Bhatia's death. However, I was disheartened that Human Terrain never presented any personal stories of Iraqis who have died as a result of U.S. occupation. We heard the opinions of the Academics and Privileged. I understand that this was a deliberate choice made by the filmmakers. They wanted the film to be very "American." Filmmakers Michael and David Udris wrote, "We have not ventured to Afghanistan or Iraq looking for an authoritative voice, a ‘native’ speaker to rebut an ethno-imperialism or neo-colonialism, but rather, our fieldwork is done in the United States." But doesn't this kind of approach only perpetuate "othering?" I felt as if it made the Iraqi experience even more foreign, distant, and hard for me to imagine. It is difficult for me to formulate an opinion about the Human Terrain System when I have no idea how Iraqis feel about it and what their experiences have been like since the program began. The film neglected to hear the voices of the very people on which the program is centered. Moreover, I was disappointed in the traditional "white hero comes to save the helpless natives" storyline of Avatar. While I don't think that Human Terrain presented Michael Bhatia as the "white hero,” there was still something frustrating about the fact that the only person whose story we became invested in and whose death we were impacted by, was a white American.

Ultimately, I'm glad I saw both films, especially Human Terrain. I had never heard of the Human Terrain System and Michael Bhatia's story. Learning about Bhatia and hearing Brown professors speak about the program really brought the war close to home.

That Avatar and Human Terrain tread similar ground, though in different ways and with different projects, speaks to the timeliness of issues of international relations of power, cultural education and manipulation, exploitation, and imperialism. The story told in Avatar is a familiar one (at least to those who have a consciousness of imperialist histories), and it is told in an obvious and easily accessible way. Its agenda is to denounce cultural exploitation for the profit of powerful entities, and its mode of doing so is through the eyes of a white male who takes us through his journey from Exploiter to one with the Other. We are to relate to him as he begins his quest to defend the Na’vi; we are to feel his and Sigourney Weaver’s rage at their exploitation and the heartlessness of the men in power. If the agenda of Avatar was to make the spectator feel empathy for an exploited group, then perhaps it did that to some level, but if it was trying to challenge a notion of Otherness as well as the system of imperialism, then I believe it failed. I don’t believe it leaves much up to the audience in terms of “exploring” the subjects of Otherness/imperialism/exploitation and their intricacies -- it seemed to me that an agenda and direction was fixed and not incredibly successful. Its approach was somewhat simplistic and generally remained Western-centric. The Other always remains the Other for the spectator, even as we hold Jake Sully’s hand in crossing over to their side.That we are all on the side of the Na’vi and against the destruction of Pandora is set from nearly the beginning of the film through exotifying shots of the Na’vi’s land and nature-loving culture (barely masking its similarity to Native American and African tribal cultures). And the fact that Jake Sully becomes something of a God to them puts us somewhere above the Na’vi as well, even while we are part of them, essentially entrenching their Otherness.

Human Terrain, addressing issues of knowing the Other in the context of military missions, deals with some of the subjects touched upon in Avatar in a more exploratory and nuanced way. There is no clear agenda to this film, and though I personally watched it and came out with strong critical feelings towards the Human Terrain project, I felt that I was given a legitimate glimpse of why anthropologists would feel good about the project, why one might feel that they are helping the situation even for Iraqis by educating the military in this way. It is hard for me to see a cultural education project with a militaristic and fundamentally imperialist agenda as anything other than basically exploitative and manipulative, but the film did show me how it is possible to legitimately believe in such a project as ultimately positive. The short-term and daily effects clearly do make a positive difference in terms of culturally sensitive social interactions, yet at the end of the day what is the mission at hand? To be sure, the issue of cultural education in such a context is very complicated. I felt that perhaps Human Terrain didn’t give much of a history and context for such a program in terms of other wars and imperialist ventures that might have been important to show, but as it was not attempting to push an agenda perhaps the decision was made that such histories shouldn’t be part of the film. I do go back and forth on the goal of neutrality for the filmmakers; though I understand it from a documentarist point of view, the issue is incredibly political and current. I am not so sure that I could make a neutral film about the topic.

The issue of cultural education and becoming “one” with the Other in a militaristic context is a controversial issue. Avatar presented it as both a manipulative project by the military and as a path to “going native,” to realizing that you want to fit in with the Other, to become the Other in some sense. Human Terrain presented it as a sort of solution-less problem where on one hand it ameliorates an already bad situation and on the other hand it is an issue of putting on a kind face for the purposes of exploitation. I do believe both incite a great amount of dialogue, though to be honest, for me Avatar created more of a dialogue in terms of the quality and effectiveness of its agenda, and Human Terrain created more of a dialogue in terms of the actual subject at hand.

Avatar and Human Terrain are very different films. This much is immediately clear at a cursory glance at the blockbuster with a total budget close to 400 million dollars and a documentary film produced by three university professors. Yet taken together, the two films reveal much about the way the Other is conceived of and presented in 21st century America. To be specific, they suggest that traditional imagery and thinking from Orientalism and its offshoots is still ever present in modern cultural discourse.

Avatar is an undeniable spectacle; every piece of music, sound effect, image, and (occasionally) dialogue is meant to be an awe-inspiring new plateau for the entertainment industry. At the same time, however, it presents the viewer with a problematic depiction of the Other. This is not so much as a result of the Na’vi’s style, dress, and culture (although much of it is reminiscent of traditional depictions of Native Americans), but as a result of the dichotomy between the actors who are tasked with representing the Na’vi and those playing the humans. Almost every actor or actress- with the exception of Wes Studi, an American Cherokee Indian- who plays a Na’vi is African-American. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of the humans in Avatar are played by Caucasians. This dichotomy between the white anthropologists and soldiers and the African-American natives evokes colonial era discussions regarding the fantastical orient and the noble savage, and is highly problematic.

At the same time, the system of military thinking regarding Iraqis as portrayed in Human Terrain, while carefully promoting cultural sensitivity, still falls into the trap of oversimplifying the Other. The military’s policy of bringing in Iraqis from San Diego to be representatives of an incredibly fragmented and multi-cultural nation is at best ineffective. Throughout the first section of the film there is a constant referral to the “Iraqi” by the US military. Yet such a vague reference to a complex nation of peoples only further obfuscates the idea of engaging with the Other in any meaningful sense, and replaces a complex society with a monolithic culture. The idea of a video game that teaches soldiers how to engage with the Iraqis only reinforces such notions.

To be sure, the makeshift Iraqi town in the Californian desert was an early development in the military’s cultural awareness program; it would be unfair to judge the entire anthropological program from a clearly developmental setting. Yet the whole documentary shows that a certain amount of simplification of the Other is an inevitable result of the US military’s program. To a degree this is purposeful; it is argued in the film that “shades of grey” makes it harder for the military to effectively train and engage in the Iraq war. Yet no matter the justification, it is nevertheless clear that the Human Terrain program does engage in a simplification and consolidation of the Other which is echoed in James Cameron’s Avatar.

Human Terrain only drives this point home by purposively denying a voice to one side of the conflict. Thus, the debate in the film is only between Americans; it reinforces the idea of Iraqis as the Other. This is a crucial moment of divergence between Avatar and Human Terrain. While in Avatar the viewer is shown the society and point of view of humans and Others, in Human Terrain the viewer is purposefully denied the Other’s point of view and presented with only American opinions. Yet while in Avatar James Cameron simplifies the Other- as well as the human- in Human Terrain the viewer is given no chance to see the non-American’s perspective, no matter how complicated or simple it may be.

So what are the repercussions of such portrayals? To be sure, such simplification of the Other is, to a degree, expected. It would be unrealistic to expect a nuanced depiction of the Other in a blockbuster movie such as Avatar; the military, to some extent, has to remain a fighting force, whose main goal is not cultural understanding. Yet the simplification of the other in Avatar and in the US military as shown by Human Terrain does speak volumes about 21st century America. What it primarily shows is that despite the success of Said’s Orientalism and other similar works, there is still a tendency to mystify and simplify the Other. While Avatar revives the notion of the noble savage, Human Terrain reveals the struggles of the US military in trying to deal with cultural conceptions in the midst of a war. It is this difficulty of understanding and conceiving of the Other- in both fiction and reality- that makes for the most interesting dialogue between the two films.

“The goal of the program really is to use the knowledge and wisdom and methodology of social science to enable the military to complete their mission more effectively …” (Montgomery McFate in Human Terrain)

“The avatar program is a joke -- buncha limpdick scientists. But we have a unique opportunity here, you and I. A recon Marine in an avatar body could get me the intel I need, on the ground, right in the hostiles’ camp.” (Quaritch in Avatar) *

“Once cultural knowledge becomes commodified, once it becomes objectified, it becomes a way of manipulating those cultural ‘others’” (Hugh Gusterson in Human Terrain)

A high-stakes game of cultural telephone is one of the many tendons linking the high-budget fictional action movie, Avatar, to the lower-budget documentary, Human Terrain. We live at a point in time where war is fought less over territory and more over the control of information and time. In this form of modern warfare, the power gained from the ability to understand and interpret the ‘enemy’ cannot be overemphasized. However, such power is a double-edged sword, as it puts the cultural translator in the middle of two opposing approaches. The first is the (necessarily) black and white interpretation of signs that soldiers need while in the field to differentiate the ‘cooperative’ from the ‘uncooperative’, the ally from the enemy. The second approach is that of the social scientist, in which the goal is to understand the ‘other’ so as to enhance “the dignity of the ‘other’” (Gusterson in Human Terrain). Familiarity and sameness are then used as a way to differentiate. The social scientist is used as a way to filter the ‘good other’ from the ‘enemy other’, to reclassify a broad category of ‘others’ into more specific black and white military language.

In essence, Avatar is a science fiction fantasy tale taking the viewer so far away from Earth in both space and time that it suddenly serves as a mirror in which the viewer sees him/herself – the parallels to American imperialism are painfully obvious. The viewer is transported to another world where earthly forms are augmented and combined to create a world appearing at once completely foreign but also strangely familiar. The ecosystem is given to the audience in a language we, as Earth-residing humans, speak. The story line is also familiar: a handsome yet broken and culturally ignorant white man starts the movie on the wrong side, only to have a transformative experience in identifying with the humanoid species found on planet Pandora. He ends up saving their species and, emancipator that he is, becomes their leader. Not to mention, he also ends up with a sexy exotic lady he wouldn’t have a chance with on earth. Life has definitely improved for Jake Sully.

That only life really did imitate art. If Avatar is the military interpretation of that story (black and white, good and bad), Human Terrain is decidedly a social scientist’s foray into the issue of what it means to ‘know the other’ – although ironically, in the movie we are never introduced to the Iraqi or Afghani ‘other’, but are instead introduced to the social-scientist-working-for-the-military ‘other’. The viewer, while watching the documentary is left steeped in moral and analytical ambivalence. Is it ethical for social scientists to participate in the Human Terrain System’s strategy to assist the military in warfare? Well, it’s debatable. Has the new approach (however controversial) been a success? Well, it depends on whom you ask and then how success is defined. The first two thirds of the documentary stitches together the opposing viewpoints on the use of academics as cultural translators – a strategy in which social scientists train members of the military how to conduct a better counter-insurgency operation through embedding with the military and a variety of games and simulations. In the last third, the viewer is introduced to Michael Bhatia, a colleague and friend of the film’s producers who attempts to use his experience and expertise to translate Afghani culture for the military in order to save both Afghani and American lives. In trying to mediate these two worlds, Michael Bhatia is killed, leaving in his wake more questions than answers about the role social scientists have in warfare.

The problem, it seems, is that this game of cultural telephone only works when, in fact, it doesn’t work. Or more precisely, it works when real empathy and understanding of the ‘other’ are not obtained. Through the process of cultural translation, empathy gets re-written into a language where its comprehension would destroy anyone who really understood. In Human Terrain, Michael Ritz explains how empathy destroyed his friend and fellow interrogator “because he was put into a situation where he felt bad for the Iraqi people, he felt bad for the American soldiers and he wanted to fix everybody and he couldn’t fix anybody” (Human Terrain). If the game of cultural telephone actually succeeds, it destroys its purpose in the first place. In Avatar, Jake Sully encounters the same problem of how to straddle two opposing worlds and worldviews: “I was a warrior who dreamed he could bring peace. Sooner or later though, you always have to wake up...” (Jake Sully in Avatar).

How does the army actually use the information they get from social scientists? Does how it’s used make any difference or does the problem reside in the principle of the matter? These are hard questions to ask, with answers that shift depending on the circumstances. Perhaps the most frustrating part of Human Terrain was that it failed to address exactly what impact Michael Bhatia’s contribution to the military had on the Afghani people. The last third of the documentary speaks more on Bhatia’s death and his reasons for choosing to go than on exactly what was done with the information he provided. However, this may be an unfair complaint, as it is quite likely that the question is impossible to answer. In Avatar, it was clear to what end the information that Jake Sully provided would be used. However, as Hugh Gusterson points out in Human Terrain, the US’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been cloaked in rhetoric of freedom and liberation, making it all the more unclear what purpose the information serves. We will never be given the image of a man stroking a vial of crude oil (unobtainium), claiming that the ends justify the means. That kind of subtlety is only found on Pandora. Rather, our military invasion gets named “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, disguising our other, more nefarious purposes for being there.

Human Terrain seems intentionally ambivalent on social scientists’ relationship with the military. In a sense, one could say that this documentary intended to humanize an issue by giving doses of empathy and disagreement for each side presented. Rather than aiming for a change in the viewer, it enters the game of cultural telephone, this time interpreting for the audience. In a world where so much of what we watch ends up feeling like ideological warfare (have an opinion, choose sides, stick to it, never question it), Human Terrain roams the issue in a cloud of ambiguity. And that’s exactly the point. To lose the mental malleability needed to understand opposing viewpoints and dialogues is to lose a pathway of comprehension. The language of war combined with the language of social science acts in the same way that Avatar’s ecosystem is formed: a mosaic of the familiar scrambled with the foreign make it different enough to lose the defensive self-blindness we carry with us while also providing solid footing on which to stray far enough to turn around and see ourselves.

* All quotes from Avatar were taken from a pdf of the movie script found on wikipedia.

Avatar and Human Terrain explore the potentiality of cultural knowledge, as a commodifiable military tool and as an intellectual, ethically-driven desire to comprehend the Other. Both films complicate the distinction between these two approaches through narratives that juxtapose the worlds of academia and war. Avatar relies heavily on a good (science) / evil (military) paradigm, perhaps for cinematic drama. Human Terrain, rather, maintains an ambivalent stance in order to problematize the military's desire for cultural knowledge as well as the social scientists' desire to “do good.”

Avatar presents caricatures of the individuals working to understand or profit from Pandora. Grace, the passionate, ethical researcher with infinite knowledge of Pandora and deep personal connections with the Na'Vi people, is constantly at odds with the ruthless, money-minded corporate leader and the bloodthirsty general. Jake, scientifically unskilled and militarily useless, neatly bridges these opposing worlds and initially serves as a cultural informant to both. However, cultural understanding (and love, of course) transforms the way Jake views the Pandoran problem: he joins the Na'Vi side and fights their battles against the encroaching American military. Once again, the film returns to a good/evil dichotomy – the essentially good Na'Vi, led by betrayer-turned-god Jake, win the rights to their land, and the evil military is forced off the planet. Cultural understanding allows a select few (Americans) to humanize the Other and thus thwart military operations.

Human Terrain suggests that cultural understanding can do a number of things: increase military efficacy, promote “ethical” warfare, and humanize the Other in ways that are simultaneously problematic and just. The film shows trainees in simulated physical and digital middle-eastern environments, rudimentary attempts to commodify culture into a set of rules that can be learned and internalized. It then proceeds to outline the Human Terrain system, in which social scientists are literally embedded into military teams as arbiters of cultural knowledge. The story of Michael Bhatia, an academic who joins the Human Terrain Team and is killed in the field, provides the human context through which HTT can be examined. Bhatia, like Jake Sully, bridges the academic and military worlds, yet his participation in both raises complex questions behind the Human Terrain operation. Bhatia proclaims himself a social scientist yet does not embed himself in the community of the Other – he joins the military. Though his intentions originate from a desire to humanize the Other and teach understanding, he is on the side of the American forces and his work produces ethically questionable outcomes. What does cultural knowledge actually do for the military? Does it allow the military to obliterate cultural frontiers and thus sharpen their ability to penetrate the Other, get what they want, and achieve victory? Or does it allow the military to more precisely distinguish enemy from civilian and more justly achieve their goals? Does cultural understanding, and thus a humanization of the Other, make the act of warfare more difficult? Does cultural understanding seek to lessen the need for war?

In both films, anthropologists work to understand the Other, yet their relations with the military still further the operation of WAR. Developing relations with the Na'Vi becomes a means to gain access to resources – if peaceful, culturally sensitive negotiation fails, the military quickly returns to violence. Michael Bhatia's attempts to help soldiers navigate a cultural field means that he is participating in the practice of war, however good his intentions. Though Human Terrain presents multiple perspectives on the HTT project and Bhatia's story, it is difficult to forget that behind the quest for cultural knowledge lies an inherently destructive, 21st century manifestation of imperialism.

Avatar's story is familiar, yet it does little to challenge a white-supremacist, imperialist narrative in which an indigenous group is infiltrated, exploited, and then reconstructed by the colonizer. Jake's voyage of cultural discovery provides information which the military uses to exert its power over the Na'Vi. Rather than depicting a narrative in which the Na'Vi mobilize together and rise above the Western military forces, Jake must switch sides from evil military informant to good cultural protector. With this switch the film reinscribes ideals of white supremacy. Jake's entrance into the world of the Other creates conflict and disrupts the natural order – Tsu-tey's power as a leader is jeopardized, Netiri's loyalties to the tribe are challenged. When the military exerts itself, Jake capitalizes on the weakened tribe to become the godlike hero who mobilizes the Na'Vi. Rather than allowing the Na'Vi to exercise agency and control over their situation, the film demonstrates their need for Jake. They need the white man to tell them what to do. Even more problematic is that Jake is a white man who in his own society is disabled, ineffective, and cast aside. This broken, second-tier white man is still able to lead the Other (characterized as premodern, uncivilized, black). Additionally, the peaceful, nature-centric Na'Vi are forced to become killers in the face of their enemy. Though they succeed in the end, thanks to Jake having pleaded to Eywa for help from Pandora's animals, their world is still destroyed and they are being led by a disguised white man.

Both films demand an exploration of intention and practice in knowing the Other. When academia and war are intermingled, what is the eventual objective? Arguably, both films suggest that the ultimate goal is to negotiate/force (through comprehension or violence) a relinquishing of power (of space, of integrity, of identity) on the part of the Other. In commodifying a culture to teach “understanding” in ways that are systematic, goal-oriented, and far from authentic, perhaps the West/military/white world is able to reinforce a distance from the Other – a distance that is crucial to exercising warfare and maintaining an imperialist position. When coupled with war in practice, cultural understanding becomes manipulatable, powerful, exploitable – a weapon.

Avatar is as much about American Imperialism as it is about special effects and technological advances in filming. In Avatar, a large American corporation, with support from the military, steals resources from an indigenous people and shows a willingness to go to war (or to murder) for these same resources. The movie is far from subtle as it presents a distasteful colonialism and imperialism that implicitly references exploitation of third world countries by first world nations, though Avatar stops short of enslaving the indigenous population. Everything is black and white, there are good guys and bad guys, the exploiters and the innocent exploited. The use of Avatars facilitates communication between the humans and the Na’vi, but it becomes very clear that the corporation’s goals are selfish and harmful, making the enterprise and the American occupation of Pandora easily deplorable.

In Human Terrain, the good guys and the bad guys are harder to discern, as the story weaves deeper then the documentary itself. Outside of the documentary, the Iraq war is ambiguous, likely unjustified, and has proven to be more complicated then initially expected. The Americans are again occupiers, but they are fighting towards the “greater good” by protecting the United States from Al Queda and improving Iraq. And the Army is employing anthropologists, “Avatars” of sorts, to help them in their counter insurgency efforts.

Human Terrain presents the Human Terrain System as both smart and unethical, as an obvious use of academic knowledge and as manipulation. There is no clear resolution. As opposing sides argue their positions, the war continues and an academic is killed. That this death plays so prominently in the movie magnifies the differences between the world of academia and the military; Unfortunately soldiers and civilians die in Iraq with frequency, including in the very attack that killed Michael Bhatia. The movie also hints at the possibility of a future where the United States Army would use cultural information and anthropological knowledge in order to achieve their goals, which might continue a knowledge and power based subjugation of Iraqis.

The idea of the other permeates both films. In Avatar, the more simplistic of the two, the Na’vi are dismissed by the corporation without second thought, seen by the army as inferior and savage. But that image is slowly torn away as Jake Sully integrates into their community and starts to understand their way of life. In Human Terrain, the other are the Iraqis that the Human Terrain program will help the Army to understand and therefore to subdue. This can be seen in the unquestionable authority the Army has over the Iraqis—they burst into homes and the people must obey them, opening whatever locks they request for example. The army learns how to ask nicely and with respect to culture, but they also learn to ask with force if the polite method is ineffective. The Otherness in the movie was particularly glaring in the training scenes, which showed the Army’s hand build model Iraqi village, which featured Californians of Iraqi decent imported to act for the army. They dressed as Iraqis would, talked loudly in Arabic, and behaved suspiciously so the soldier could train in a stressful and unfamiliar atmosphere. Human Terrain plays to by deciding not to use Iraqi voices in the film and leaving the talking heads to argue amongst themselves.

Othering is practically a requirement in warfare, as one of the talking heads, a former military man, points out. If othering is not maintained things might get confusing, and like the Jake Sully character in Avatar, who falls in love with Neytiri and leads the Na’va to rise up against the Americans, individual soldiers would dismantle their negative perceptions of the Iraqis, and start seeing people instead of enemies. The realities of war, which include murder, would become hard to justify and stomach. Chaos might ensue.

The documentary Human Terrain is a necessary complication of an issue inappropriately dichotomized in the movie Avatar: the issue of anthropologists working for the military. Interestingly, however, the documentary suggests that part of what makes the issue complex is that things might need to be black and white.

A brief summary in order to emphasize the simplicity of Avatar’s plot: the (United States) military wants to move the spiritual tribe referred to as the Navi because they live above the richest stockpile of the expansive natural resource, unobtainium. Rather than initially moving the Navi by force, the military hires anthropologists to study and learn enough about the Navi culture in order to exploit it: “you better find me a carrot or its gonna be all stick”.

The key point here is that the anthropologists are hired for no other reason than to help the military with its one objective: obtaining unobtainium. The movie does not allow the viewer to consider the motivations or potential benefits to a more peaceful military; it chalks the whole effort up to an attempt at avoiding bad PR. The military is plainly bad and the Navi are plainly good. The fate of the anthropologists lie in the balance for some of the movie but are neatly put in the good camp as soon as Jake Sully commits the team to the Navi. Avatar does not delve into the complexities of why the anthropologists joined the military in the first place or why the only service they ever provided to the Navi was teaching them English; these questions are too messy.

Fortunately the documentary Human Terrain takes these questions more seriously and does not take the categories of good and bad for granted. In fact, the documentary starts with the assumption that categorization is almost impossibly complex. Ironically, however, Human Terrain gives a strong argument for delineating falsely simple roles for soldiers, civilians, and anthropologists. The most honest argument for simplicity comes from a former soldier who explains that soldiers need to be able to think in black and white terms in order to risk their lives and in order to kill. Attached to this point is the suggestion that the Human Terrain program is asking too much of soldiers; they are asked to be both fighters and nation builders, more simply: destroyers and builders.

The professor from George Mason University argues for simplicity from the point of view of the civilian. He explains, soldiers are occupiers and civilians should be allowed to resist occupiers. The Human Terrain program gives soldiers the wrong impression that they are doing good for the country and that they should be welcomed with open arms. Soldiers then regard civilian resistance as ingratitude, understanding is corrupted, and more lives are lost.

The role of the anthropologist would certainly benefit from greater clarity of duty. We see throughout the documentary many anthropologists who explain that complicating the anthropological role by joining forces with the military contradicts the original mission of the anthropologist. The military is essentially paying for cultural knowledge, commodifying understanding. Furthermore the military asks anthropologists to take the study of the fluidity of culture and sell them a stagnant formula. In this sense, working with the military defeats the role of the anthropologist.

So, perhaps simplicity is the answer. Perhaps having anthropologists in the field muddles lines that should be kept clear. In a sense, the Human Terrain program does, as Professor Der Derian suggests, “Militarize peacemaking”. If we need simplicity, however, we need to reach it only after understanding the true underlying complexity of roles and events. The simplicity in Avatar is reached only by ignorance.

Finally, I would like to return to the point in Avatar that the military wants to move the Navi peacefully in order to avoid bad PR. Ignoring the military’s additional reasons that are clearly in play, as seen in the documentary, this single reason deserves more attention. The viewer is expected to accept that this is not a justifying reason, but that should not be so obvious. Public relations in modern warfare have far greater implications than just whether some general looks good or bad. Public relations affect everything from global sentiments, to number of recruits, to foreign policy, to mass awareness of a situation, a culture, and a problem. Enough bad PR can end a war; this is more powerful than Avatar admits.

In a lecture on William Gibson’s Nueromancer, MCM0230 Professor Wendy Chun referenced Darko Suvin, a literary critic and McGill University professor who has written primarily on science fiction. According to Suvin, science fiction, often set in the distant future, is actually about the present. In science fiction, our present is transformed into a melancholic past that is recognizable, but also slightly disorienting. Something about that past is wrong, and in this wrongness is a call to act. Before us we see a possible and somewhat undesirable future that calls upon us to act to transform the present. Avatar, in many ways, provides us with a sense of “cognitive estrangement” that allows us to see our present more clearly. Around the globe, audiences saw in the conflict between the Na’vi and the RDA corporation analogies to current global and national events. Viewers in China saw in the film allusions to the struggle between nail house residents and real-estate developers (http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/01/08/a-chinese-take-on-avatar/), while in this Global Media course, we are asked to compare the film to a documentary on the U.S. military’s Human Terrain project in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If we do indeed see Avatar as a kind of warning, what exactly is its message? The year is 2150 and Earth (as far as I can remember) is still in existence but ecologically ravaged, as Jake Sully tells the Na’vi, warning them that humans will probably destroy Pandora as well. Pandora, on the other hand, is an ecological paradise, a world in which plants, animals, and the native bipedals live in perfect harmony in part through the neural network that creates a kind of collective consciousness (1). Avatar, then, is in part a warning about our current less-than-environmentally-friendly practices. The main reason for the presence of humans and the RDA Corporation on Pandora, however, is a highly valuable mineral called uobtanium. The administrator of the RDA mining operation, Parker Selfridge, has no problem admitting that extracting as much of the mineral as possible and pleasing the shareholders are his only objectives. Sure, Parker would like a diplomatic solution to get the Omaticaya tribe to move out of their Hometree and off of the rich deposit of unobtanium on which it sits, but he’s more than willing to force them off the land. The U.S., in its current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would like to wave the banner of democracy and liberty, but the analogy between unobtanium and oil is too blatant for us to ignore. Avatar forefronts the U.S. military’s objective to secure access to resources in the Middle East.

Against what possible future does Avatar warn us, exactly? Certainly, if the greedy RDA Corporation had never landed on Pandora in the first place, the eventual bloody struggle would never have taken place. But the humans did invade and in the end they were repelled and sent back to Earth with their tails between their legs. Diplomacy failed and the anthropologists/avatars sided with the indigenous Na’vi. What does this say about the future of U.S. military operations in the Middle East and the military’s Human Terrain Project? In Human Terrain, we see the U.S. military using anthropologists for ends similar to RDA’s employment of the Avatar program, and we know how that turned out.

Anthropologist in Hugh Gusterson says in Human Terrain that the U.S. military “sees culture as a sort of language,” believing that it is possible figure out the “rules” of a culture in order to write a kind of “cultural grammar book.” This 1950s view of culture provides the military with the mistaken belief that if they follow these ‘cultural rules’, they can achieve victory (whatever ‘victory’ may mean, though it certainly includes securing access to oil) in a diplomatic manner and with minimal loss of life. Colonel Miles Quaritch, head of Sec-Ops, recruits ex-Marine turned unlikely anthropologist Jake Sully to a similar task in Avatar. “Find out how they think, what they want, and how to get them to give us what we want,” is essentially Quaritch’s order to Sully.

As Sully finds out, and as anthropologists Lutz and Gusterson point out in Human Terrain, understanding the culture of the Na’vi (Iraqi and Afghani people) doesn’t make them like the humans or welcome them with open arms. “There’s nothing we have that they want,” Sully says in his video diary. The Na’vi don’t want to learn English or wear Levis jeans. There is nothing the (occupying) humans can do to make them give up Hometree. Speaking the language and understanding the culture (following ‘cultural rules’) can’t get the humans what they want. Even Sully, who manages to go further than any real-life anthropologist by becoming the ultimate participant observer through his avatar (which allows him to physically become the Other) is powerless to diplomatically enact the objectives of the RDA corporation. In fact, Sully chooses to side with the Na’vi, leading their defense of the sacred tree, Eywa.

How can anthropologists with the Human Terrain project, who could never achieve the level of understanding or closeness to the Other that Sully achieves, expect to do any better? Gusterson doesn’t expect that they will. The U.S. military and the Human Terrain Project operate on the misguided premise that cultural understanding will lead to the Iraqi and Afghani people “liking” Americans, which in turn will lead to cooperation. The problem is that the answer to the question “why do they hate us so much?” isn’t that we don’t understand their culture. “They hate us because we’re occupying their country,” Gusterson says, “not because we don’t understand their hand signals.”

And if Sully’s allegiance ultimately lies not with RDA Corporation and Sec-Ops but with the Na’vi, what are the possible implications for the loyalties of the social scientists to the Human Terrain Project? Most anthropologists would prefer that social scientists stay away from the project. “It’s a seductive idea,” Catherine Lutz says. We like the idea that we can help. “But help what?” Lutz prompts us to ask. “Help whom to do what?” The Human Terrain Project certainly helps to “recast the U.S. military as more approachable.” What are the ultimate objectives of the U.S. military and do anthropologists want to be involved in that? Though the military hopes to use the Human Terrain Project to wage a “more humane war”, it is war nonetheless and this makes anthropologists uneasy. The fact of the matter, however, is that the U.S. is already in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unlike the RDA Corporation, the U.S. cannot simply pull out; the situation is more politically complex than the situation in Pandora, even if RDA shareholders would have been up in arms. If anthropologists can do something to reduce the loss of life, if “cultural understanding” could somehow help, should they offer their services?

In James Cameron’s story, those we first see as the Other are cast as “good” and “win” in the end. Jake Sully and the rest of the Avatar team promote the anthropological goal of empathy for the other. Gusterson says that anthropologists want to show the dignity of the Other, and once Sully recognizes this dignity, he can struggles to reconcile his duty to RDA with this empathy (and love) for the Na’vi. The story of Michael Bhatia began to shed light on a similar struggle. Cameron’s ending to Avatar is triumphant. The good guys win. Never mind that countless lives were lost on both sides. We almost don’t feel bad about all the humans that were killed, and we almost forget that Jake Sully’s anthropological/diplomatic mission was a failure. Sec-Cor and RDA didn’t listen to the anthropologists. There was no diplomatic solution. The Avatar team did not mitigate the loss of life. We felt empathy for the Other, but in doing so we began to feel a sort of self-loathing. Avatar’s ending may feel just in its championing of the Other, but when we think of it terms of the Avatar project and the Human Terrain Project, it should only make us feel uneasy.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_universe_of_Avatar

The Human Terrain System (HTS), introduced by the US Army in 2005, places the social scientists within counterinsurgency brigades in order to improve military strategies in urban warfare. The program becomes a complex and intriguing space for intersection between the academia and the military, whose relationship to the “other/enemy” differ vastly in approach and purpose. The documentary, Human Terrain, takes an in-depth and focused look at both the program and its critics; yet, simultaneously, it becomes an actor within and reflector of the dynamics in the intersection.
In comparison, recent blockbuster, Avatar, takes on the issue of HTS through a fictionalized, fairytale-esque story of Jake Sully, who embodies, to differing extents, the conflicting images of the military, America, anthropology, and the “other”. The intersection of academia and warfare occurs within Avatar through the physical, the temporal and the mental: Sully’s encounters with the Na’vi people the idealistic possibility of seeing the other without completely becoming the other.
Human Terrain purposefully encloses itself within the American military infrastructure, in order as the Udris brothers explained, to focus on the perspective of the American military and the conflicts within American perspectives on HTS. While this narrowing of representation (and the elimination of true Iraqi voices) can be criticized as America-centric, I do believe that the film itself becomes an investigation of the culture of American security apparatus, which Hugh Gusterson point to as appropriate focus for exploring causes of the war itself. The contradiction of military combatants as “professional killers” versus “soldier-diplomats” highlights the confusion within the military for a proper definition of its role within Iraq and Afghanistan.
As the documentary navigates through the opposing views, the idea of militarizing culture and turning the study of culture into a weapon in its own right becomes the focus of the debate. The concern with militarization itself represents the anxiety of the current global situation—we fear that war has slowly spread into our homes and can be no longer held at the door, as exemplified by the death of Michael Bhatia. Bhatia’s identity as “civilian-solider” which Tom Garcia refers to as “getting dirty”, shows that military operations are no longer confined to professional combatants or to “foreign” populations. The documentary itself is preoccupied the structure of the military: from the very beginning with the radio recording, to face-shots of the soldiers in the battalion, to the ending shots of Bhatia’s military funeral. Even the anthropologists criticizing the HTS program, their voices, lacking the coherency and unity of diction seen from the supporting side, feels disparate and extrageneous. Furthermore, the concern with militarization also reveals America’s obsession with “imperialism”, and our utmost fear of having such a weighted label placed upon our own actions; the acceptance of the label denies America of any legitimate claim to liberty, to democracy, to peace. The engagement of anthropologists with the military through the HTS highlights such issues, --for such are the issues anthropologists study, but also the engagement itself is a further testimonial to the militarization of our society.
Avatar presents a possible ideal to the issues grappled by the viewpoints in Human Terrains: Sully, in the final scenes, has merged with the Na’vi people culturally and physically. However, I would not argue that he has lost the perceived characteristics of an American: heroic individualism, the English language, the natural “leadership”. Is it then possible to ever know the other? Yes.
However, in the intersection of intersection of the academic with the military, the film becomes more problematic, for Avatar repackages the process into a heroic, happily-ever-after tale for mass consumption. The professional anthropologist, Grace, is immediately brushed aside into secondary status. Sully, however, is a Marine by trade, and the detail thereby reinvents the intersection to be military, the structure, versus military, the individual—the shift then glorifies the individual and glides past deeper issues within anthropology with the HTS program. In other words, while Avatar brings in greater visual and narrative engagement with the “other” and seems to exist outside the military structure, its focus on the heroic Marine leading and saving an foreign people remains heavily American and most importantly, heavily militaristic. In some ways, Avatar almost becomes a seductive packaging for the HTS and the goals of the American military.
Human Terrain and Avatar form two vastly different explorations on HTS, through style, perspective and purpose. However, the two combined presents an entertaining and engaging view of the conflicts between academia and the military within the Human Terrain System.

Who can one trust and how can one gain ‘the other’s’ trust? In my mind, these are the two principal questions connecting two drastically different movies.
Avatar, a science-fiction epic film which broke several worldwide box office records, is all about graphics, new technology and action-adventures. Using groundbreaking technology, James Cameron (director), tells the story of an alien planet called Pandora in the year 2154, that falls victim to American imperialism. Untouched by human waste and pollution, Pandora is a beautiful, thriving environment in which the Na’vi people live in harmony with nature, until American forces disrupt local land and customs in search of a valuable mineral called unobtanium. With mass destruction and devastation of the Na’vi culture, the references to the US-Ied invasion to Iraq are undeniable and obvious. Avatar depicts the Na’vi’s as the good guys and the US army as the bad guys.

Human Terrain, on the other hand, is a low-budget documentary made by university professors, which investigates the US military program called the Human Terrain System. Giving us a much more complex version of themes brought up in Avatar, Human Terrain illustrates the impersonal nature of mechanized warfare but it also delves into some of the moral questions and more important issues at stake when dealing with warfare.

Both Avatar and Human Terrain highlight a new type of warfare: social engineering. Anthropologists (ie. Academics), are now considered key tools for defeating the counter-insurgency and consequently are embedded with combat brigades to help commanders understand local culture and customs. Granting the power of knowledge and trust in the hands of anthropologists, the US army places ‘empathy’ and social understanding at the forefront of their tactics. Academics understand citizenship and culture. As a result, the war becomes about navigating not simply geographical and cultural terrain, but also now human terrain.

Both movies view the ‘enemy’ as ‘the other’, and therefore it is a game of trust. The US army operates with deception and confusion in unfamiliar terrain. The objective is that with the help of intellectuals, soldiers and commanders can succeed and win the war. James Sully, the main character in Avatar, spends the whole movie attempting to fit into the Na’vi culture and gaining the trust of the people by becoming one of ‘them’. The US soldiers that we meet in Human Terrain, explain their goals of building relationships of trust with the local Iraqis and Afghans. It is no longer a killing game; it is about building A relationship of trust. But US military officers can never become one of ‘them’ – differences in skin color, language barriers and cultural norms all separate the two sides. Therefore, in both scenarios, with such a distancing between the two cultures and the condescending nature of the US army, these aspirations seem to be a lost cause. Therefore, the fascinating aspect of these two pieces is the idea of ‘pacifying war’ or ‘military peacemaking’.

Soldiers are asked to rid themselves of their previous school of thought with regards to warfare and become social engineers who are ‘culturally aware’. As one academic points out though, “Can you take tough guys and turn them into diplomats?....No they are riflemen.” Soldiers are killers. How can you tell soldiers who have trained their whole lives to kill (in warfare which involves no trust or emotions towards ‘the other’) to learn how to interact with ‘the other’ on friendly terms in a social science context? On the flip side as well, how can you send academics into combat, with no experience or training?

By the end of Avatar, one is left in despair with the US army. The social scientists, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore), lose their battle with the US army and fail to persuade them to stop the invasion and destruction of the Na’vi land. You watch as they annihilate Pandora, with no care or feelings towards ‘the other’. Human Terrain, however is a different story. The documentary ends with the death of Michael Bhatia, an Oxford-trained political scientist. One is left with an unclear sentiment towards the Human Terrain program. As you read the emails Bhatia sent to his fellow companions, you cannot help but believe in the system. Of course – those who are ‘experts’ should help the army in order to prevent deaths and win the war in the most humane way possible. But at the same time, one cannot help but wonder if soldiers (intimidating men holding guns and wearing bullet proof vests) will ever be able to gain the trust of the locals or trust ‘the other’ at all. There is always going to be a barrier between the two sides.

For me, Human Terrain clarified and explained Avatar. Avatar is a fictional, extreme and graphic film with underlying tones of imperialism and questions of warfare. Human Terrain is the real deal.

The relationship between James Cameron's 'Avatar' and the Udris/ Der Derderian production' 'Human Terrain' is unmistakable. The origins of both these narratives lies in the desire (achieved or attempted) to embody the other. In Cameron's 'Avatar' Jake Sully, the protagonist of the film , a former marine who has lost the use of his legs, is embedded with in the population of the native people of the fictional planet, Pandora. Jake patrols Pandora in the guise of the native population, the Na'vi, through the use of an avatar who is made to resemble the ten-foot tall, aqua-toned, indigenous peoples. While Jake's avatar looks similar to the Na'vi, it is important to note that the replication is not exact, as Jake's avatar retains his own Anglo-American features rather than taking on the African/ Indigenous facial construction of the Na'vi. While his prerogative is at first to gather information about the Na'vi for the military so they can discern the best way to remove them from their homes, over the course of the film Jake comes to sympathize and understand the culture of the Na'vi, and ultimately, after being cast out of the good favor of the Na'vi, eventually comes to, not only mate with the future spiritual leader of the Na'vi, but lead the Na'vi in a deadly rebellions against the corporate military forces as a god. Finally, at the conclusion of the visual epic, Jake trades in his own damaged human form for that of his Avatar, and in the first instant of his life as the other the movie ends.
'Human Terrain' is a much more nuanced exploration of the United State's military's attempt to understand the and prepare for that which threatens them in the “War Against Terror” in the Middle East. The film critically analyzes the attempt to commodify the culture of the Iraqi/Afghan for the uses of the military. The film raises important questions about the ability to commodify culture and, should culture be able to be commodified, who, if anyone, has the right to use that information? Is it appropriate to build trust with local populations, and then use that trust to rage a war against them? What if that war is to help them towards democracy? What if that war is for imperial reasons? All these delicate questions 'Human Terrain' raises and ultimately the 'Human Terrain' simply leaves the viewer with their own thoughts.
The discourse between these films illuminates the nuances surroundings the attempt to truly understand the other. 'Human Terrain' raises many important issues surrounding commodification of the other and the culture of the other; issues that go utterly without mention in 'Avatar'. The difference for this is that 'Human Terrain' is a thought-provoking examination of a topic an the controversies surrounding that topic, and 'Avatar' is, above all else, a fantasy. Because “Human Terrain' covers real issues it raises insightful observations as to why understanding 'the other' is at once essential and dangerous; how the uncovering of intention is crucial, and may ultimately change the circumstances of the engagement. 'Avatar', though perhaps thought provoking to those who have never contemplated imperialism and colonization, is ultimately a parable about white penance. Though it may seem as if it may be very progressive because “this time the native people win!” in reality it is the story of white outcast who comes to comes to be an idol for a native population. It is ultimately a story about Jake Sully and how he comes to be the champion of the Na'vi. 'Avatar' triumps the Jake and fails to address Jake Sully's usurpation of the Na'vi culture, or the problems that may create.
When asking the questions that are raised in 'Human Terrain' about 'Avatar' it is clear that 'Avatar' offers less then answers, it does not even offer an examination. If 'Avatar' had attempted to answer such questions it would be a much longer film than the nearly three hour epic that it is. Instead 'Avatar' is just one more film confirming the weakness of indigenous cultures who need the “(white) Man” to swoop in and save them.

      Who would have expected James Cameron’s latest Hollywood blockbuster and a low-budget academic documentary to have common underscoring themes? Both confront the values of attempting to understand the Other within a military paradigm, while questioning the complexity of this venture.
      The title of Cameron’s film puts this idea in the fore from the beginning, and in the most absolute terms. Avatar is defined as “an incarnation in human form; an embodiment often in a person” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. This plays out as human scientists have found a way to psychologically enter alien Na’vi avatar bodies in order to understand their culture, language, traditions and environment.
      One of the most interesting aspects of this process of “becoming the Other” is that while academics spend countless hours learning the language and cultural nuances prior to entering an avatar, in the end, an untrained soldier accomplishes the task before anyone else. And yet we are not to believe that this is your run-of-the-mill Rambo but rather somewhere in between military and civilian worlds due to a disability that excludes him from total inclusion. Thus Avatar seems to suggest that an individual who has experienced social exclusion among “his own” people will be the most successful when attempting to relate to and become the Other; especially when by winning acceptance into the Other culture he will win acceptance into his own (i.e get new legs). It is not linguistic prowess or scientific interest but a combination of personal uncertainty and self-interest that promotes cultural understanding in Cameron’s film.
      Human Terrain engages becoming the Other from the other end of the spectrum. Where Avatar uses cutting-edge animation and 3D technology to pull the audience into a futuristic and extraterrestrial (though not fully incomprehensible) world, Human Terrain attempts to call attention to an unfamiliar reality. That is, the entrance of anthropology and social science into military operations under the Human Terrain System. The similarities are obvious: academic experts partnering with the military in order to try to make the situation more bearable through increased awareness of cultural differences.
      However, while in Avatar academia is infiltrated and overpowered, the documentary reveals a far more complex story of anthropologists divided along a hazy boundary between morally sound research and dehumanizing military tactics. Human Terrain allows the viewer to see both sides in a more objective light (although the story of Mr. Bhatia’s death inevitably pulls a heart string in the direction of disapproval). In the end, there is no winner, no hero, no resolution. Some anthropologists have spoken out against involvement in the Human Terrain System and others have voluntarily become involved.
      Thus, while Human Terrain provides a critique of the current American military operations and interaction between intellectuals, the industrial-military complex and the international community, the viewer is left with the final decision to make. “Do I support these procedures or not? Do I believe that anthropological methods are being used to save civilian lives and American reputation? Or is this an immoral attempt to influence and undermine foreign cultures?”
      Cameron’s critique of the current global situation, if less nuanced, is more cutting. Colonel Quaritch and Parker Selfridge clearly embody the malicious military-industrial complex as well as historical imperialist natures. Rambo lives on in the Colonel, who will stop at nothing to complete his mission. Parker seems to represent the mood of imperial colonialism: conquer and plunder.
   Finally, there is a certain anxiety produced by the paradox between these two films. The war of the worlds that Cameron has imagined in the year 2154 could only occur if the Human Terrain System fails completely. To explain, experts interviewed suggested that HTS was created as a response to the inability to win wars using technology alone. When bigger guns didn’t equate to a shorter war, the military took alternative action in the form of HTS. Fast forward to Na’vi in 2154 and the army is still trying to win a war based on technological mastery: massive human powered robots, tons of explosives and remarkable helicopters. The question becomes whether we are more anxious about a current complex co-optation / co-operation between military and academia, or by the possibility of a future where there is nothing holding the military-industrial antagonist back from free-for-all destruction?

James Cameron’s Avatar, arguably the most visually immersive film ever made, utilizes cutting edge technology and special effects to embed the viewer in his fantasy world. Creating a sort of meta-Avatar experience, we are inserted into the action much like Jake Sully into his genetically engineered Na’vi body. Packed with not-so-subtle allusions to modern U.S. imperialism, our military conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our treatment of “the other” in these cultural interactions, Avatar left me with an unsavory aftertaste. Where it succeeds in blockbuster storytelling, it fails in equal magnitude to capture, address, and impart the complexities of its thematic context. Fortunately there are films like Der Derian and the Udris Brothers’ Human Terrain that, while sacrificing the millions of dollars raked in by Hollywood special effects, do explore the nuances and controversial nature of these issues through the lens of reality. Leaving me with more questions than answers, Human Terrain opts to take the viewer on a mentally intensive and immersive journey that can prove much more rewarding and revealing than the purely physically immersive one presented in Avatar.

Once we delve beyond its surface-level entertainment value (which is, in my opinion, reason enough to watch and enjoy it), Avatar falls short of inspiring in the average viewer a meaningful and necessary reflection on the thorny issues it attempts to tackle. Instead, its opts to spoon-feed its audience an idealized, cliché, and black-and-white normative judgment (somewhat ironically juxtaposed alongside a very colorful visual setting) on issues such as cultural understanding and empathy, commoditization of cultural knowledge about “the other,” and the appropriate (or inappropriate) use of that knowledge to accomplish some desired end. This is where Human Terrain steps in to fill the gap between fact and fiction.

Der Derian and the Udris Brothers explore the ethical gray area of the “Human Terrain System,” a relatively new U.S. military program that attempts to insert cultural understanding into the arena of the modern warfare. They use documentary to study the initiatives of “Human Terrain” that include hands-on cultural sensitivity/awareness training for the common soldier as well as the embedding of social scientists into military units in war-zones (strikingly similar projects to those of the Avatar program on the fictional planet of Pandora). The creators of Human Terrain show us, however, that we need not to travel light-years through space to open Pandora’s Box. With interviews of military officials and academics, they tell the story of the Human Terrain program from a variety of viewpoints and outline its formation, evolution, and the ongoing controversy that surrounds the program. Laying out the normative dilemmas and potential physical dangers (including the death of social scientists such as Michael Bhatia) implicit in using social science and cultural knowledge to achieve some purpose in the realm of warfare, the directors instead encourage the viewers to form their own opinions without presenting an overt personal judgment on the matter.

While Avatar closes by showing us with certainty that cultural empathy is good, cultural commoditization is bad, and leaves little room for further discussion because everything ends tied up neatly with a big Hollywood bow, Human Terrain presents a much more realistic account. The best part about this film is that it resonates. We, the audience, are left with an experience much more rewarding than a simple two hour spectacle. Instead, we are challenged by the film at its close. It immerses us in a normative dialogue without definitive right and wrong and imparts us with questions that have no easy answers. These are questions to be studied and answered over years and lifetimes, and, therefore, Human Terrain with its comparatively minuscule budget and limited popular reach is a much more powerful film because it deals in the complexities of reality.

It is unfortunate that Avatar, while extraordinary and entertaining, oversimplifies issues that cannot afford to be simplified to a mass audience in our society. Thankfully, Human Terrain is able to pick up some of that slack. Because of the limited scope of this response as well as my limited knowledge of these difficult issues and the nuances surrounding them, I would like to close by articulating what I consider a few of the more important questions that this film has made me reflect on in the week since I viewed it:

Does the Human Terrain program actually present the prospect of a more humane, understanding, and culturally aware method for conducting warfare? Is this a paradoxical and unattainable aspiration? Can empathy be taught in military training and, if so, does empathy for the other undermine the overall military goal in war? How does the individual soldier view this training (as utilitarian or valuable in and of itself)? How can we make war less likely rather than more humane?

Can cultural understanding be used as a powerful and harmful weapon against the other? Is the military trying to commoditize cultural knowledge? Are we trying to win over hearts and minds or is the purpose of the program to help us defeat the other?

Where do the goals of embedded social scientists harmonize and/or clash with those of the military? Does the military co-opt and exploit the services of these individuals? Is it possible to alter the strategy and policy of a military war-machine from the inside-out? Can the social scientist negotiate a space in which he/she has the freedom to follow personal ethics at the expense of the military’s goal? Where does the social scientist fit in the arena of battle and combat?

What is the ultimate goal(s) of the Human Terrain program and the individuals involved in it?

“I see you”. While being undoubtedly the line that stands out most from James Cameron’s film Avatar, it also sums up the plotlines of both Avatar and Human Terrain Project by the Udris brothers and James Der Derian. The former is based in fiction, created with spectacular use of advanced technology, forever altering the way films are made; the latter is a documentary, presenting the different opinions of a new strategy employed in the US war in Afghanistan. Yet, both films – whether based in a different country or a different planet – present a unique approach to engaging with native populations in a foreign land: one in which there is greater human contact forging understanding between diverse cultures as opposed to immediate military action.

Even with this common thread between both films, they depart from each other in terms of the objectives of each war, the ultimate outcomes, and the opinions that each tries to impart to the viewer. The invasion of the Omaticaya people in Avatar is based on the premise that their sacred home sits atop a valuable mineral (ironically called “unobtanium”) and that humans will stop at nothing to get to it. The film leaves the audience convinced that developing a cultural understanding of the native people is a much better path to take than going in laden with guns, as it bridges understanding across differences. Throughout the film, by demonizing humans and victimizing the natives, we become persuaded to side with one party. Certainly, at the conclusion of the film, we are left convinced that ‘good’ will triumph over ‘evil’ if we continue to pursue strategies that involve the extensive use of arms.

Human Terrain Project, on the other hand, serves to complicate this simplistic evaluation of war. The documentary does not mention the objectives of the war – this insertion would likely only divide the audience. Rather, it serves to focus on presenting the different viewpoints about a specific project – the Human Terrain Project. By including opinions from all angles, the film does not dichotomize between ‘good’ and ‘evil’; rather, it leaves the decision up to the viewers who are often discomforted and unsure where they stand. Even one of the casualties, Michael Bhatia, who we get to know intimately in the third part to the documentary, does not serve to sway our opinion in any one direction. Rather, by inserting the viewpoint of an academic who the audience would not think of as someone who would be traditionally involved in a project of this sort, we are left questioning whether we agree with his objectives.

The question then, is not which film works better in conveying the use of anthropology in war; rather, we should ask what purpose does each film serve and how successful is it at doing so? For the general public, Avatar presents not only a form of entertainment (captivating storyline, accompanied with unbelievable 3D effects), but also questions the premise of war and our objectives of going into a war at all. In this manner, Avatar is largely effective in convincing the audience that war – especially in the form of pillaging a foreign land – is never the right option. On the other hand, Human Terrain Project does the opposite – as a documentary, it is grounded in a current event, and educates us on a new strategy that the US is currently employing in Afghanistan, asking us whether we think anthropologising war is really necessary. The documentary, then, does not serve to question war at its root, but, instead, to challenge the way we approach war, and, to this, we are never given a sure answer; instead we are encouraged to rethink our biases. Thus, the former film questions the very justification for war, while the latter accepts war as a given and challenges the strategies employed within war. Which film is more effective to the individual depends on whether you view Avatar as optimistic or idealist and Human Terrain Project as pessimistic or realist.

Personally, I enjoyed the plotline of Human Terrain Project more than Avatar as it presents, in my opinion, a more accurate depiction of our world today: at this stage, it is hopeless to attempt to stop every war; instead, a better strategy is to think about how we are approaching war. The documentary not only educated me about a project that I had never heard of previously, but it also challenged me about my opinions on anthropologising war. While I have still not come out on any one ‘side’ of this debate, it seems too disingenuous to attempt to “see” someone and thereby create a culture of understanding while simultaneously being laden with weaponry and thereby assured an upper-hand.

Both Avatar and Human Terrain look at issues of war and diplomacy and speak to the theme of understanding “the other” to allow for more effective warfare. But I think the biggest difference between the two is that in Avatar, war and diplomacy/military and anthropology are seen as two almost completely separate and conflicting modes of dealing with the Other. This is evident when the belligerent Colonel Quartich tells Jake Sully “You haven't got lost in the woods, have you? You still remember what team you're playing for?” In Avatar, the military only wants the anthropological/cultural intel to enable it to inflict maximum damage on the Na’vi. On the other hand, in Human Terrain and in reality, there is no such clear-cut distinction between the choice of aggression and anthropology. I also believe that the intention of the HTS is in most part grounded in a genuine desire to understand the Other’s culture to help the US army win over the hearts and minds of the people and reduce military and civilian conflict.

To know the other is to understand the other; and understanding is not possible without a sense of empathy. However, as empathy develops, it becomes increasingly difficult to view the other as the enemy to be killed. In Avatar, the result of developing a sense of empathy towards the Other leads to Jake Sully’s choice to eventually join the Other and leave his original world. This is clearly a simplified outcome. Life for Jake Sully seems infinitely better in the Other world—the ability to walk once again, the chance to marry the love of his life, to be heralded as a legendary hero, to be fully accepted, integrated and respected by his ex-enemies, to live in complete peace and harmony with his magical environment, etc. In Human Terrain and in reality, choices are a lot more complex, motivations more mixed, and the shades of grey infinite. As an ex-interrogator at the Abu Ghraib facility mentions in Human Terrain, a fellow marine/interrogator ended up “destroyed” and with a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder because of the internal conflict that stemmed from his strong sense of empathy—which is precisely what made him good at his job.

Human Terrain spends a lot of time exploring the internal dilemma faced by the anthropological community—whilst they are in a strong position to help the war effort and lessen its negative impact, this still engages them in the conflict, politicizing and weaponizing their discipline. They are interested in “how to make the war more unlikely, not more humane,” says one of the interviewees. Whilst I fully acknowledge the validity of this statement and the dilemma that they face, I cannot help but question their stubborn adherence to their ideological standpoint. The reality remains that killing and war are ongoing and the army should not be operating in a vacuum with zero understanding of the culture and social structures. Yes, the army still has a long way to go in terms of plain human understanding (their treatment of detainees in Abu Ghraib—having a German Shepherd sniff and bark at blindfolded, prostrate prisoners, shows a fundamental lack of this) but this is precisely why the army needs the expertise and insight of the anthropological community.

Human Terrain left me with such a deep, deep respect for Michael Bhatia, who was willing to set aside ideological oppositions, with the intention of helping and bettering the military operation and reducing conflict. While he invited discussion and criticism of his decision to participate in HTS and embed with the US army in Afghanistan, he also said there was much about HTS which the anthropological community didn’t understand. If there aren’t more anthropologists like him to bridge that knowledge gap; if HTS isn’t given a chance to be refined; if war went on with no cultural understanding—what progress can be made? Perhaps the anthropological community needs to take one step backwards to eventually take two steps forward. And unlike in Avatar, where Gracie, in referring to the military quipped, “It’s hard to fill a cup that’s already full,” I have greater faith that the US military and soldiers are willing to learn, to try, and to test new methods.

Perhaps my faith is misplaced, and perhaps the system will never allow for anthropology and cultural studies to have significant influence on military policies; but unlike the black/white, oversimplified world of Avatar, reality presents a wider range of options and outcomes. And in comparing the two films, I feel the HTS deserves a fighting chance.

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