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Anthropologist's war death reverberates - The Boston Globe
"In a hostile corner of southern Afghanistan, an American platoon fanned out around a market, forming a protective circle around a petite woman with a notebook. Paula Loyd, a Wellesley-educated researcher, began interviewing villagers about the price of cooking fuel - a key indicator of whether insurgents had hijacked supply lines.
As part of a new military program that uses social scientists to improve the troops' understanding of the local population, Loyd began interviewing a gregarious stranger who approached her with a jug of cooking fuel in his hands. He talked for 15 minutes, thanking her profusely in English. But just as her guards motioned it was time to leave, he lit his jug on fire and engulfed the 36-year-old Loyd in flames.
Minutes later, her fellow researcher shot and killed the man, adding a violent coda to a case that has already increased debate about the worsening conditions in Afghanistan and the military's attempt to use social science to cure insurgency.
The attack on Loyd, who died in a Texas hospital on Jan. 7 after a two-month struggle for her life, has reverberated from the Wellesley campus, where people grieve for the energetic scholar who seemed to be a natural peacemaker, to national academic circles, where anthropologists carry on a heated debate over whether social scientists should be working for the military, to the Afghan mountains, where soldiers vow to give meaning to her death by fighting on.
"In a hostile corner of southern Afghanistan, an American platoon fanned out around a market, forming a protective circle around a petite woman with a notebook. Paula Loyd, a Wellesley-educated researcher, began interviewing villagers about the price of cooking fuel - a key indicator of whether insurgents had hijacked supply lines.
As part of a new military program that uses social scientists to improve the troops' understanding of the local population, Loyd began interviewing a gregarious stranger who approached her with a jug of cooking fuel in his hands. He talked for 15 minutes, thanking her profusely in English. But just as her guards motioned it was time to leave, he lit his jug on fire and engulfed the 36-year-old Loyd in flames.
Minutes later, her fellow researcher shot and killed the man, adding a violent coda to a case that has already increased debate about the worsening conditions in Afghanistan and the military's attempt to use social science to cure insurgency.
The attack on Loyd, who died in a Texas hospital on Jan. 7 after a two-month struggle for her life, has reverberated from the Wellesley campus, where people grieve for the energetic scholar who seemed to be a natural peacemaker, to national academic circles, where anthropologists carry on a heated debate over whether social scientists should be working for the military, to the Afghan mountains, where soldiers vow to give meaning to her death by fighting on.
