Complicity?

There is a conceptual issue in using an ethnographic approach to understand jihadis which is also, potentially an ethical issue of the opposite kind to most of those discussed above. When audience researchers started looking ethnographically at fan communities they were accused by some of becoming too complicit in their subject matter. Jenkins and Tulloch observe339 how Tania Modleski has argued that enthographic fan researchers ‘may unwittingly wind up writing apologias for mass culture and embracing its ideology’. In a similar vein, Walter Laqueur complains that the rise of casualty rates in terrorist attacks may be the outcome of an insistence on explaining evil, rather than condemning it.

As a critique of the ethnographic approach in general, this is (as Jenkins and Tulloch go on to point out), misplaced.340 Ethnography is not about uncritically accepting the world view of those studied, but rather about developing the skill of moving between ‘critical distance’ and mutual knowledge’.341 As Boellstorff observes, cultural relativism is about methodology, not necessarily about the conclusions that one draws. As he vividly illustrates, in the hypothetical example of the tribe who slay every third born child, it still makes sense to try to see the cultural logic that makes this acceptable, even if one will never come to accept it oneself.342

But indeed it is possible, out of such assertions, to make a more proactive case both for ethnographic understanding of this subject in general, and the validity even of the sorts of limited, covert approach it necessitates employing. A little ethnography is better than none at all. For even if the types of methods implied in studying jihadism on the Internet, (which ultimately come down, as Kozinets puts it, to the ‘coding exercise’ of analysing text, image and moving image) are in the end nothing more than ‘culture at a distance’, yet even so, one might argue that even the sort of compromised, second-hand insight which Mead, Benedict and their team were capable of achieving remains sorely lacking in its equivalent exercises today.

For the sake of comparison, let us consider on the one hand the work of Reid, Salem and Chen in analysing the content of jihadi extremist groups’ videos with that of a member of the University of Columbia ‘culture at a distance’ team on the contents of Nazi propaganda film. In the former case, the concern is almost exclusively with issues such as audience and ‘groups’ communication

approaches’, with actual discussion of the thematics of the visual content itself limited to comments such as that: ‘The majority of the videos fell into the group-oriented violent acts [category], which include documentary, beheadings, and hostage takings. This finding supports the Western media descriptions of extremist groups’ videos as “callous” and “insensitive” for displaying brutal attacks that are morally repulsive.’343 By contrast, an anthropological researcher such as Gregory Bateson approached a film like Hitlerjunge Quex from the perspective not simply of trying to understand what media effect the propagandist behind the film was trying to achieve, but of trying to decode the symbolic language of the work in order to understand deeper tensions within Nazi and, by extension, wartime German culture. Thus, for instance, in this film’s portrayal of licentious, animalistic disorderly communists, as opposed to the almost ‘empty’ life of clean living,

strenuously disciplined Nazi youth, Bateson sought to read a statement about the Nazis’ own fears of what they might become.344

As ‘overdetermined’ as Bateson’s analysis may perhaps be, the contrast in terms of ambition between his work and that of Reid is striking. If anthropologists in the context of a real war, facing a real existential threat, with far less access to data than their 21st century successors were capable of making such comparatively nuanced and penetrating enquiries, then it seems that the limitations to gaining access to a phenomenon such as the culture of jihadism on the Internet - significant though they may be - can hardly be taken as an excuse.

4.

In Search of ‘the Jihadi’

4.0 Introduction

At the outset of this dissertation, I used the word ‘jihadism’ to describe my object of study. In using this word, my intention was not to present some monolithic notion of Islam-flavoured militancy. Rather, I hoped to foreshadow a problematic. Indeed, I used the word as much to avoid terms such as ‘Al Qaida’, ‘Islamic terrorism’, ‘radical Islamism’ on the one hand, and ‘jihad’, or simply ‘Islam’ on the other. What I wanted to stake out was a space for enquiry which was neither ‘terrorist’ in the sense of having clear affiliation to a particular violent actor, nor unproblematically ‘Islamic’ in the sense of being specifically explicable with reference to Islam, whether as theology, or as ‘cultural system’.

Having demarcated things in this way, it is now time to consider how this conceptual space can be justified, and what it is that we may find within it. The main problem here would seem to be that the terms of the enquiry are paradoxical. Having spoken earlier of looking for a more ‘emic’ approach, am I not – in looking for something called ‘jihadism’ – imposing my own conceptual boundaries from above?

Adopting the perspective of fandom, and, methodologically, of ‘netnography’ offers, I propose, a solution to this, by focusing the discussion around the activity of consumption. For Kozinets, who claims to have originated the term, the ‘culture of consumption’ is first and foremost about the ‘material culture’ of a particular consumption activity and only secondarily about the ‘tribes’ that it forms.345 Thus the idea of the ‘culture of consumption’ effectively turns the problem of bounding the object of enquiry on its head. Rather than trying to determine how we define ‘jihadism’ or ‘a jihadi’ on the Internet, and then considering how jihadism expresses itself, it forces us to begin with content. We must ask first, ‘what constitutes “jihadi” content?’ Only then can we move on to consider what sorts of putatively ‘jihadi’ consumption behaviours occur in relation to this content.

Surprisingly, the question ‘what is jihadi content?’ is one that still does not seem to have been explored in so many words. There are, of course, numerous studies of jihadism, or ‘jihadi’

phenomena on the Internet, a number of which have already been referred to. But all of these appear to be based on prior assumptions about what the term means. Even Bunt, who extensively discusses the sort of material which refers to itself as ‘jihadi’, seems to be applying his own definition.346

In this chapter, I shall consider two questions: how the word ‘jihadi’ is used in Arabic Web content, and what it means for content to describe itself as ‘jihadi’. The aim is not, of course, to produce an exhaustive understanding of either of these. Rather, the purpose is to produce an exploratory study which, it is to be hoped, will adequately demonstrate that it is possible, working up from the basis of content which self-identifies as ‘jihadi’ to reconstruct a notion of online ‘jihadism’ which adequately resembles conceptions of ‘jihadism’ and ‘salafi-jihadism’ put forward in existing academic typologies.