Sensing, territory, population: Computation, embodied sensors, and hamlet control in the Vietnam War. (October 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Belcher, Oliver
• Is Part Of: Security dialogue. Volume 50:Number 5(2019)
• Page Start: 416
• Page End: 436
• Publication Date: 2019-10
• Subjects: Computation -- development -- embodied sensors -- Hamlet Evaluation System -- security -- Vietnam War; Security, International -- Periodicals; International relations -- Periodicals; 327.05
• DOI: 10.1177/0967010619862447
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0967-0106

Abstract

This article analyses a mid-20th century computerized pacification reporting system, the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), used by the US military to measure hamlet-level security and development trends in the Vietnam War. The significance of the HES was its capacity to translate US Military Advisor observations of Vietnamese hamlet life into a machine-readable format used by US military systems analysts to disclose 'patterns of life.' I show how US Military Advisors operated as 'embodied sensors' within the HES, producing a distinctive location-based event ontology – a 'view of below' – accompanied by rudimentary digital maps in-formation from incoming hamlet-level observation streams. I argue that acts of translating the rich texture of hamlet and village life into an objectified information format constituted a unique form of 'epistemic violence, ' rooted not so much in the narrative subjection of the 'Other, ' but in the pure abstraction of life into a digitally stored data trace.