Anthropologist Fazia Rizvi points to an article by Maureen Dowd where she argues that the White House should hire an anthropologist:
Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign policy team doesn't understand any of the markets where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.
(...)
It's stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded. The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.
One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that "mirroring" - assuming other cultures think like us - doesn't work would be a lot more helpful than all of the discredited intelligence agencies that are costing $30 billion a year to miss everything from the breakup of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to no WMD to Osama's hiding place to the Hamas victory.
>> read the whole story in the SGVTribune
This entry was posted by admin and filed under politics, corporate & business anthropology, applied anthropology, anthropology (general), ethics. 
made a similar argument in a 2004 commentary piece I wrote on the Bush administration’s policy regarding the Middle East and terrorism. For those interested, you can see it at: http://culturalcommentary.blogspot.com/2006/03/bushs-battle-with-science.html