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2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 463–466
BOOK SYMPOSIUM
The impact of militarism
on anthropology
Laura Nader, University of California, Berkeley
Comment on Price, David. 2016. Cold War anthropology: The CIA,
the Pentagon, and the growth of dual use anthropology. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
The Cold War and anthropology has long been a muddled story, so much so that I
titled a 1997 article on the topic, “The phantom factor: Impact of the Cold War on
anthropology.” However, with David Price’s (2016) meticulously researched book,
Cold War anthropology, the Cold War as it impacted anthropology is no longer
a phantom factor. His examination of the CIA, the Pentagon, and more is more
than any other anthropologist to date has done. And there is much that I learned
for the first time. The chapter on human ecology research on forms of mind control and brainwashing was funded by the CIA and involved alliances in and out of
anthropology from medicine to psychology to biology to computer science. Price
documents the dual uses of anthropology more generally. We no longer need to be
“Sleepwalking through the history of anthropology” (Nader 2002).
In my 1997 essay, I noted that the story of the Cold War and anthropology
included the hearings on Un-American Activities, the UC loyalty oath, The Human Relations Area Files, the OSS and then the CIA, counter-insurgency, nuclear
power and the UC weapons laboratories, and the people that we study around the
world. During this period, where an anthropologist was living influenced what
they knew, or thought they knew. Elizabeth Colson was in Africa, England, and the
United States. Nelson Graburn was doing fieldwork in Canada’s north around missile detention stations. Gerald Berreman was examining counterinsurgency, and
John Gumperz documented how such activities impacted Native Americans here
at home. My Berkeley department was deep in disagreement over much that David
his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Laura Nader.
T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.028
Laura Nader
464
Price writes about, especially about the Thai affair he documents. It was personal
for anthropologists both at Berkeley and Harvard, although in different ways.
Graduate work at Harvard University was where I became aware of the search
for communist infiltrators and spies and the banning of communists from the
teaching professions. It was the 1950s and the awareness of the military-industrial
complex as President Eisenhower named it was slowly sinking in. At Berkeley, the
U.C. Regents had added the loyalty oath to the employment contract, an oath that
Cora Du Bois refused to sign, which thereby meant she would not be coming to
Berkeley although she had already accepted the position as the first woman to be
recruited in our department (Nader 2015). Du Bois went to Harvard and shortly
thereafter I came to Berkeley.
The invitation to participate in a cross-disciplinary discussion that would result
in the book The Cold War and the university (Chomsky et al. 1997) was a challenge
because it was comparative and included biology, linguistics, history, earth scientists, political science, and English literature. I ran a seminar on the subject of the
Cold War with ten Berkeley colleagues of different backgrounds, disciplines, and
generations. But my own story in 1997 was about the doing of anthropology and
the military regulations of our research, both known and unknown to us by the
Cold War secret operations. I began to construct the role of funders of anthropological research by the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Rhodes Trust, as well as the federal government. Those funded
were not often aware of the dual uses that Price writes about. Self-censorship was
rampant. At the time anthropologists in other countries described American anthropologists as naive; Cora Du Bois said so of her own participation in her war activity as well as her work in the State Department. Her comment on the University
of California loyalty oath was that she was loyal to the founders of our country. In
1960, I must have signed a loyalty act without giving a thought to the chaos it had
earlier caused at Berkeley. But some anthropologists benefited from technology of
military origins. Trace element analysis, remote sensory, or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) drew archaeologists into institutions not usually frequented by
socio-cultural anthropologists, such as national defense weaponry laboratories. In
physical anthropology, the impact of the Cold War was barely noticed by biological
anthropologists (Nader 1997b). Sherwood Washburn did mention the increased
funding for physical anthropologists and the decreasing amounts for socio-cultural
anthropologists relative to their numbers.
What David Price has achieved in the last of his trilogy and the chronicling of
interactions between anthropology and military intelligence is the refinement of
methodologies for the discovery of the history of our discipline that has never before been achieved by anyone in or out of the field—an ethnographic history. Price
probably knows more about how to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
than anybody in anthropology. He filed hundreds of requests with the CIA, FBI,
and the DOD. As one can see from his acknowledgements, he consulted widely,
has mainly been self-funded, and worked on his project for over twenty years. His
dedication is apparent but his achievement is nothing less than awesome, proving
that one can do such work without big funding—academic freedom at its best. His
conclusion that “anthropologists need to consider the high price of surrendering
intellectual independence for the projects of others with high agendas both known
2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 463–466
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The impact of militarism on anthropology
and unknown,” was in part behind my 1969 essay, “Up the anthropologist—Perspectives gained from studying up.” It was a call to study power, which is what Price
is doing, in part. I say in part because the consequences of studying the CIA, the
DOD, et cetera could be to shame such secret and possibly criminal behaviors, as
not only antidemocratic but as a threat to academic freedom and the trust that the
public has in the academy. Decreased funding of public universities by state legislature in part reflects public distrust, which in turn reverberates into increased costs
of higher education and student debt. We need such comparisons across disciplines
on these issues in order to comprehend the broader consequences.
The Cold War and the university (1997) spoke about a variety of disciplines in
relation to the Cold War, and we need always to place anthropology in a larger
context. The reviews of the book did just that. One such review by Hannah Gray
(1997), former president of the University of Chicago and a historian, titled her review “Cold War universities—Tools of power or oases of freedom?” She notes, “The
history of American University over 50 years cannot be comprehended through a
single theme” and chides us for not celebrating “genuine academic freedom for
all.” Academic freedom, as with a democracy, will always be impacted by politics
as Price notes regarding the post–9/11 situation in the United States. It is not as
Gray suggests either/or, rather a constant struggle as longer histories of American
academics have pointed out (Furner 1975).
Would that David Price be moved to write a fourth book, making his work a
quartet, examining the threat of anthropology as seen in present times. In 1951,
during the McCarthy era, Cora Du Bois proclaimed her loyalty to the founding
fathers of this country, not their present-day enemies (Nader 2015), and we might
make similar moves today. I say this because during the present period of American
exceptionalism and endless wars, the mission of anthropology as Mirror for man
(Kluckhohn 1949) can be seen as threatening to the military industrial process. To
see ourselves with all the warts of a weak democracy challenges the present state
of denial. But should David Price undertake such a project it should not be underfunded. It should be funded with no strings attached—academic freedom from the
funding sources.
References
Chomsky, Noam, Ira Katznelson, R. C. Lewontin, David Montgomery, Laura Nader,
Richard Ohmann, Ray Siever, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Howard Zinn. 1997. The Cold
War and the university: Toward an intellectual history of the postwar years. New York:
Free Press.
Furner, Mary, O. 1975. Advocacy and objectivity: A crisis in the professionalization of American social science, 1865–1905. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
Gray, Hannah, H. 1997. “Cold War universities—Tools of power or oasis of freedom?”
Foreign Affairs, March–April: 147–51.
Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1949. Mirror for man: The relationship of anthropology to modern life.
New York: Whittlesey House.
2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 463–466
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Nader, Laura. 1969. “Up the anthropologist—Perspectives gained from studying up.” In
Reinventing anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 285–311. New York: Pantheon Press.
———. 1997a. “The phantom factor: Impact of the Cold War on anthropology.” In The Cold
War and the university: Toward an intellectual history of the postwar years, edited by
Noam Chomsky et al., 107–48. New York: The New Press.
———. 1997b. “Postscript on the phantom factor—More ethnography of anthropology.”
General Anthropology 4 (1): 1, 4–8.
———. 2002. “Sleepwalking through the history of anthropology: Anthropologists on home
ground.” In Anthropology, history, and American Indians: Essays in honor of William
Curtis Sturtevant, edited by William L. Merrill and Ives Goddard, 47–54. Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 44.
———. 2015. “Review of Cora Du Bois—Anthropologist, diplomat, agent, by Susan Seymour.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review, September.
Price, David, H. 2004. Threatening anthropology—McCarthyism and the FBI’s surveillance of
activist anthropologist. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 2016. Cold War anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the growth of dual use
anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Laura Nader
Anthropology Department
University of California, Berkeley
232 Kroeber Hall, Berkeley, CA
94720-3710
[email protected]
2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 463–466