Boston Marathon Bombing Via Anthropology

One week ago marked a very special anniversary. It was not the kind of anniversary that we celebrate with smiles, laughter, and our drinks held high. Rather, it marks a somber and dark day in the history of the United States that will never be forgotten.

On  April 15^th 2013, there was a loud blast. Then, another one shook the streets. Five people were murdered in cold blood, close to 300 people were injured, and a city was knocked off its feet. The Boston Marathon was disrupted by two detonated bombs, which were thought to have been planted by the Tsarnaev brothers. The two brothers were Islamic fundamentalists that did not proclaim any connection with terrorist cells in Chechnya, their site of birth. Rather, the motive pointed towards individual disgust with the American government and its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such a case begs for anthropological attention.

While such an event can be linked to a cohort of anthropological theories concerning the underlying societal cause of the bombings, few sectors of the academic discipline relate more closely with the bombings as public anthropology.

As noted by anthropologist David Edwards in “Counterinsurgency as a Cultural System,” the American government has employed Human Terrain System, where academic anthropology (through ethnographic methods) is implemented to help the American government in their counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Afghanistan. Ethnography is used to understand local people and their customs with the intention of “winning over the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.” Anthropology had rarely been in such an influential spotlight, yet anthropologists quivered at the idea.

Despite its rather unproven success, if employed effectively, the HTS system could render important information from Chechnya to understand why cultured individuals would bomb a marathon. Moreover, it could help save future lives by preventing further violence from occurring on American soil. However, does the American military really want to get involved in Chechnya as well, especially after little action was taken with Syria?

Despite the questioned effectiveness of the aforementioned topic, it also important to understand how such violence originated, this time through a different lens. Globalization theory and its connection with anthropology has the premise of generating crucial information in association with the bombing.

Through “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” by Arjuan Appadurai, some valuable insight may be rendered in figuring out how such an occurrence took place in Boston and how to prevent future attacks. Appadurai argues that there are five new domains for cultural flow around the world: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes. The majority of these “scapes” yield valuable insight in explaining how our world helped facilitate the bombing.

Through ethnoscape, which examines moving groups of people and their effects on new locations, the two brothers were able move from Chechnya and attend college in Boston. With the feasibility of international travel, more people are moving, and cultural ideas (such as Islamic extremism) are manifesting themselves in new locations, such as the United States.

Through technoscape, which shows the fast movement of technology around the globe, it is possible to explain how the brothers learned how to construct a bomb, which undeniably was composed of different materials constructed in different countries.

While there was not a large corelation in financescape in this piece (because capital was not a central tenant of the bombings), mediascapes brought this bombing to an international stage. Reports of the emergency appeared in newspapers around the world, and international security was heightened once more due to the feasibility of the dissemination of the news.

Finally, ideoscapes are emphasized through the massive pride resulting in Boston after the bombing. The “Boston Strong” campaign was a central part of the identity of the city, and it was transmitted via social media, the internet as well as other technologies.

“Boston Strong” surely caught on in the city, and it made everyone feel assured by fulfilling Malinowski’s basic need of safety.

While, hopefully no other terrorist incident occurs on American soil, by tracing ideas and events through public anthropology as well as globalization theory, new and unique methods of thinking will surface. From those, effective solutions may surface to prevent further attacks.