Stone, Nomi. Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire . Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022. 308 pages. Paperback $29.95
If Old Empire racialized and commodified, and enslaved, indentured, and exploited the “other” for capital accumulation, the New Empire too has automated her and turned her into an instrumental machine, for the same purpose. Comparing classical colonialism with the militarized world of the present brings out resonances with Nomi Stone’s argument in her remarkable study Pinelandia. The book explores the intersectionality of poetics and anthropology to explicate the shift in warfare to another genre of role-playing games of the everyday, since the launching of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). The author’s intriguing approach to interrogating Empire’s war tactics since the counterinsurgency of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq points out that the American military’s total reliance on machine technologies has “militarized human beings” (16). Culture, like information, is being manipulated by the military, compressed into “observable operational possibilities,” to learn and understand culture as “a surgical machine implementing US policies downrange” (22). Although the text, both ethically and analytically, is a representation of a “broader archipelago” rather than one site alone, Stone had conducted fieldwork across the US, between 2011 through 2013, during which time she observed mock villages and training classrooms (23). The book comprises six chapters, with a Field Poem preceding each chapter, an introduction, a conclusion, and an epilogue.
The idea of Pinelandia, an innovative, dynamic structure that was launched in 1952 and expanded since 2000, consists of physical sites across the US that simulate enemy villages – with 15 sites in central North Carolina. The sites focus on the “Cultural Turn” (11), which reconceptualizes the knowledge of culture into “warfare’s accomplice” (22). The simulation of all the details of a real-life Iraqi (or Afghani) village is complete with signs in Arabic: houses with prayer rugs and fake bullets, a corner store, mosque, hospital, and cemetery with Iraqi residents as role-players. Having aided the US during the war in Iraq as interpreters, contractors, or laborers, their entry into the US was facilitated by Washington. Allowed to enter in return for their services, they are hired as cultural role-players, “helpful tools” (16), to train American Special Forces Community (Green Berets) and the Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations, in preparation for deployment. Dressed in traditional garb and enacting simulated actions of a warzone, they inform and coach future American combatants in “cultural literacy” of wartime, while distancing the outcome (9). Stone concedes that essentialized cultural knowledge is not new, for militarism has been intertwined with culture and the human sciences since the 1950s. But she hopes that Pinelandia will demystify America’s engagement with its unending wars and interrogate anthropology’s complicity with militarism, which seems to accept and normalize America’s commitment to war. As one training soldier informed Stone, both American soldiers and Middle Eastern role-players are enlisted into the larger apparatus of Empire. Embedded into the new imperial projects are the old Empire’s conjunction of “settler colonialism, racism, economic hegemony and political interventions” (15). Pinelandia will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, history, empire and war studies, and global and cultural studies.