Intervention and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Peace Operations

Culture is increasingly an important consideration in peace opera-tions. Efforts to ameliorate culture-based difficulties between organi-zations participating in missions and between mission elements and local populations are proliferating. These focus on providing guid-ance about what to expect and how to act toward individuals from other cultural groups. This article shows that such advice is insuffi-cient for understanding how culture affects peacekeeping. A general framework is presented for linking cultural elements to a deeper symbolic level from which peacekeeping derives its legitimacy, stand-ing, and authority. The importance of the root metaphor of the United Nations as an institution for creating a world in which national inter-ests and cut-throat geopolitical power relations are trumped by collective action is explicated. Peacekeeping is shown to be linked to this root metaphor through a number of behavioral inversions. When those inversions are not part of a peacekeeping mission, the entire instrument of peacekeeping is destabilized. Keywords Peacekeeping • United Nations • intervention • symbol system • cultural inversion SINCE THE MID-1980s, multilateral peacekeeping has become theresearch focus for an increasing number of anthropologists. This is notsurprising. Peacekeeping has always brought together people from a variety of different backgrounds, thus creating challenging conditions for cultural interaction. As a consequence, peacekeeping provides a site for exploring a variety of questions about how culture affects social life. For instance, bringing together troops from different national militaries creates opportunities for cross-cultural misunderstanding between members of different military organizations, as does placing these troops among a people with whom they are culturally unfamiliar (Rubinstein, 1989, 1993). When peace missions involve nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) o