Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) - CIA

CHAPTER SIX
As an observer, I missed the cultural context that was necessary to view the
events as an actual conflict and could not convince myself that a violent solution
was a possibility. I had discounted the hypothesis that violence would
occur, because I could not imagine it occurring in the United States. This led
me to discount raw data that would have refuted a hypothesis that the two factions
would reach a compromise. In addition, at that time, I had no formal
grounding in Chinese studies, nor had I been to China. Thus, I had not
acquired information that would have helped me create a meaningful context
for the event.
Years later, my wife and I were in China doing ethnographic fieldwork on
the socioeconomic effects of the spread of the English language and American
culture in urban and rural China. 4 While there, we spent a great deal of time
talking with others about the events of Tiananmen, and we decided to include
in our research questions about the student protests, if for no other reason than
to satisfy our own curiosity.
What we found stood in contrast to media reports and the opinions
expressed by many pundits and scholars in the US and the West. After hundreds
of interviews with a wide variety of people in and around Beijing, we
found a consistent preoccupation among the “silent majority.” That was the
Cultural Revolution, which had affected all of the people we interviewed.
They had been participants, observers, or survivors, and, often, all three.
In the mid-1960s, Mao Zedong sought to recapture power from reformminded
opponents within the Communist Party. Using radical party leaders as
his instruments, he created the Red Guard, which was made up primarily of
college students (although others followed suit in time). The image of the Cultural
Revolution was not simply the image of Mao; it was also the image of
angry, violent, and powerful college students, who were the most visible proponents
of the “Cult of Mao.” According to the people we interviewed, it was
the students who had chanted slogans, raised banners, paraded in public
spaces, resisted older forms of social control, and seized power. With that
power and the blessings of Mao, the youth and university students had committed
many of the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution and plunged China
into a decade of chaos, during which many institutions, including schools,
were closed and many of the country’s cultural and historical artifacts were
destroyed.
4
American anthropology is based on the ethnographic method and direct interaction with the people
who are being studied. This interaction includes direct and participant observation and interviews,
or fieldwork, where one lives with the people being investigated. Continental European
schools of anthropology are not as obsessed with methodology and hands-on experience and tend
to the more theoretical.
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