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Assistant Professor Mike Wesch produced and posted a video on YouTube.

"It took me three days to actually make it - but it was months of actually thinking about what the web is all about and how it's changing," Wesch said.

Journals such as Military Review (published by the US Army’s Combined Arms Center) and the online Small Wars Journal have featured articles explicitly advocating a more ‘anthropological’ approach to war fighting, and some retired generals have even called for ‘culture-centric warfare’:

Testifying before the US House Armed Services Committee in 2004, Major General Robert Scales argued that ‘during the present “cultural” phase of the war… intimate knowledge of the enemy’s motivation, intent, will, tactical method and cultural environment has proven to be far more important for success than the deployment of smart bombs, unmanned aircraft and expansive bandwidth’ (Scales 2004: 2).

American anthropologists have been surprisingly reluctant to learn their lesson from the past, David Price reminds us in another article in Anthropology Today June 2007. Though largely unexamined, he writes, the extent of covert CIA funding of American-funded social science research during the 1950s and 1960s was extraordinary:

In the mid-1970s the US Senate discovered that a surprisingly large proportion of research grants issued during the escalation of the Vietnam War and other military Cold War incursions were either directly or indirectly funded by the CIA. Without having to account for their actions, these agencies were left free to set covert research agendas, to influence the direction in which scholars took their research, and to appropriate research for covert ends. (...)

Unwitting participation by reputable scholars channelled what appeared as innocuous academic research into covert unethical programmes. Through this practice the CIA helped build up the careers of some academics, influenced social science and behavioural research, and generally attempted to create informal networks they could tap for information to provide input into their covert goals. By their own admission, CIA money-laundering was at its most effective when funds flowed through seemingly innocent private foundations like the Human Ecology Fund.

(...)

Given that the ‘war on terror’ once again finds intelligence agencies seeking help from academia, we need to consider and evaluate these past interactions and be mindful that intelligence agencies have at times been silent consumers of our research.

He concludes:

If we do not want to go into history as collaborators with such coercive covert agencies, who may use our research to dominate and exploit the peoples we work with, then we must take decisive action now, identify and expose such programmes wherever we can, and advise our professional associations to recommend our colleagues not touch them.

Dame Mary Douglas, DBE, (born March 25, 1921 - died 16 May 2007) was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism.

Her area was social anthropology; she was considered a follower of Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.

Mary Douglas is best known for her interpretation of the book of Leviticus, and for her role in creating the Cultural Theory of risk.

In Purity and Danger, Douglas first proposed that the kosher laws were not, as many believed, either primitive health regulations or randomly chosen as tests of Jews' commitment to God. Instead, Douglas argued that the laws were about symbolic boundary-maintenance. Prohibited foods were those which did not seem to fall neatly into any category. For example, pigs' place in the natural order was ambiguous because they shared the cloven hoof of the ungulates, but did not chew cud.

Douglas claims that rituals of purity that focus on sexuality are meant to mark the boundaries of the human body, in the same way by which the boundaries of society are marked.

She begins "Purity and Danger" by stating what she considers obvious, that “ambiguous things can seem very threatening” (xi) and claims that “taboo is a spontaneous device for protecting the distinctive categories of the universe… taboo confronts the ambiguous and shunts it into the category of the sacred”.

A Brief Interview with Michael Wesch (The Creator of That Wonderful Video...)