Anthropology student’s military service prompts new scholarly interests and a search for connections
When Bethany Kibler enlisted in the Army Reserves in 2003, after graduating from Pomona College, she was looking for new ways to challenge herself. “I knew it would be different than anything I had ever done, and that being in the army would be hard in ways I didn’t know,” Kibler says.
After spending several years as an instructor at Fort Huachuca, the Army’s military intelligence training facility, she was deployed to Iraq in May of 2006. She was eventually put in charge of a team that gathered intelligence from the local population in order to support a military unit.
Now a first-year PhD student in the Anthropology Department, Kibler says that her experience in the military undoubtedly shaped her professional trajectory, albeit in unexpected ways. She had initially been accepted to a PhD program in comparative literature at the University of Toronto, but she did not return from her deployment in time to enroll in the program. She deferred, but used the opportunity to explore new options. When her deployment ended, she applied to Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies as a master’s candidate. “Pursuing a master’s was an attempt to change fields, but I didn’t know where it would lead. Now when you look at my resume, it looks like I had this plan where everything inevitably led to everything else, but becoming an anthropologist had not been a part of any plan initially,” Kibler says.
She had never taken an anthropology course before coming to Harvard, but she took two during the first semester of her AM program and was instantly hooked. “I came here thinking I was interested in the so-called clash of civilizations. That was the common currency that I had picked up but soon had pleasantly destroyed by classes that encouraged me to question analytical categories.” She applied to the PhD program in anthropology during the final year of the AM program.
Not surprisingly, Kibler’s interest in the Middle East arose directly from her military service, during which she learned Arabic. Her time in Iraq naturally gave her a more personal connection to the region, but her experiences also encouraged her to consider the pressing need to understand societies that are different than our own. “I didn’t feel like there were strong mechanisms in place to communicate [cultural] differences effectively. I also got a sense of how big of a gulf there can be between the academic world and the government,” she explains.
Her current research interests were inspired by the year she spent in Syria on a fellowship through the Center for Arabic Study Abroad. Kibler seeks to examine concepts of masculinity and the so-called marriage or youth crisis in the Middle East.
“In the wake of 9/11, much of the popular press about political Islam focused on the idea that there’s a young male population that’s unemployed, unable to get married, and frustrated and therefore they become Islamists. It’s a narrative that is being rehashed now to explain the Arab uprisings, but to me it raises more questions than it answers.”
Events on the ground continue to shape the direction of her research. “Originally, I intended to focus my dissertation research in Damascus, but unfortunately the current conditions make it unlikely that I’ll be able to return. So in the meantime, I’ve shifted my research to Tunisia, where I hope to explore similar sets of questions in that fascinating and complex country.”
Kibler is intent on taking full advantage of her reentry into university life. “I was out of school for a very long time, so being around students who are passionate and serious about what they study has been great,” she says. The opportunity to get to know students from different fields drew her to live in the GSAS residence halls, and she soon decided to apply to become a resident advisor. “Being part of a small program made me realize how enriched my life was by all the amazing conversations I had in the residence hall with people from many different disciplines.” Despite a calamitous interview experience — on a trip back from Syria, the airline lost her luggage, so she had to wear COOP-purchased Harvard apparel — she was accepted, and she now lives as an RA in Conant Hall.
Kibler has also reached out to fellow veterans across Harvard’s many schools. She has been working with Crimson Serves, an organization dedicated to strengthening ties between Harvard and the military, on an outreach program to encourage enlisted veterans to apply to Harvard.
“In the military, whether you’re enlisted or an officer is a big distinction. It’s a division that historically has had class, education, and socioeconomic assumptions entailed in it. But that’s changed a lot; now you have people with bachelor’s and master’s degrees choosing to become enlisted as well as highly qualified enlisted veterans going on to finish their bachelor’s degree after they get out. When they look at graduate and professional schools, I’d like for them to think about Harvard.”
But she notes that enlisted personnel often do not have the networks that officers do, and an enlisted person’s credentials may seem unintelligible to admissions committees. “People may not know what it means for an enlisted individual to graduate first in his or her class at the interrogator school, for instance. Or that a person had to score extremely high just to pass a Defense Language Aptitude Battery. Unlike with officers, enlisted soldiers do not have a long history of seeking admission to Harvard, so one of the goals is to translate those credentials into something more intelligible for people unfamiliar with the military.”
Of course, such outreach efforts aren’t simply about getting veterans into Harvard. For Kibler, it’s important to educate civilians about life in the military. “When it comes to what it’s like to serve in the military, people are often influenced by what they see on TV or in movies, but the tasks that people do in the military and the world they live in remains widely unknown to many Americans,” she says. In an era of ongoing military engagements around the world, “it’s important to translate that experience for many reasons, not just to get into Harvard.”
Story credit: Joanna Grossman
Photo credit: Leah Davis