ABSTRACT
Jessica Glicken Turnley brings a unique perspective to this volume by virtue of her diverse and peripatetic career inside and outside the national security context. As she discusses here, she first interacted with the world of national security as a graduate student, when she interviewed for a position with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). She describes this cultural rift in a paper she gave at a session of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) in Santa Fe. Learning about 'kulture' is easy; learning about culture is hard. Engaging what she calls a "pet anthropologist" on a project does not enable learning about and engaging with the culture concept. Turnley's account is interesting because of the wide array of activities in which she is involved. Although Turnley notes that the CIA interviewed her for employment soon after she finished graduate school, her intersection with the national security community seems to have been a later development in her career.
