Montgomery McFate

"[A]nthropology has had a long, fruitful relationship with various elements of national power" - Montgomery McFate

Montgomery McFate

Montgomery McFate (born 8 January 1966) is a cultural anthropologist who works on defence and national security issues.

Education and Career

McFate received a B.A. from University of California at Berkeley, a Ph.D in Anthropology from Yale University. Her Ph.D dissertation concerned British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland. According to The New Yorker the thesis was based on 'several years she spent living among supporters of the Irish Republican Army and then among British counterinsurgents,' where she discovered that 'insurgency runs in families and social networks, held together by persistent cultural narratives'.

After receiving her doctorate in 1994, McFate joined Harvard Law School, where she earned her juris doctor (professional qualification) in 1997. She took a clinical internship on the United States Attorney's Office Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Squad, and a fellowship at Human Rights Watch. In 1997 she became a litigation associate at the law firm of Baker & McKenzie in San Francisco. That year she married a soldier, Sean McFate, and left Baker & McKenzie when he was posted to Germany.

Before being awarded a fellowship at the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research McFate worked as a social scientist in RAND’s Intelligence Policy Center, where she studied North Korean society. She was subseqently awarded a fellowship at the Office of Naval Research. In 2004 she says she got a call from a science adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was asked to advise on Iraqi society. According to George Packer, writing in The New Yorker, he 'turned for help to one of the few anthropologists he could find in the Defense Department'.

Views

McFate is one of a number of figures within the US military establishment who advocate the use of cultural anthropology as a means of military domination (other notable figures include John Nagl and David Kilcullen). In 2006 The New Yorker wrote that: 'For five years, McFate...has been making it her “evangelical mission” to get the Department of Defense to understand the importance of “cultural knowledge.”'

In early 2007 McFate told the San Francisco Chronicle that she was worried that the occupation of Iraq would be "delegitimized" and that the Army would "fall back on what it had before...technology and firepower. But if you can figure out how a society is wired," she said, "you don't need to do that. That's what the game is. That's what Petraeus is going to do. But you can't do that if you don't have information."

Resources

• Matthew B. Stannard, 'Montgomery McFate's Mission. Can one anthropologist possibly steer the course in Iraq?', San Francisco Chronicle, 29 April 2007
• Montgomery McFate,(2005) ‘Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship’, Military Review, March-April 24-38