Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War

by David H. Price
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2008
400 pp. Trade, $89.95; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-8223-0-8223; ISBN: 0-8223-0-8223.

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

jonathanzilberg@gmail.com



Anthropological Intelligence is an extraordinarily timely book for the discipline. It appears at a time when anthropologists and social scientists are being increasingly drawn into the “war on terror” or more commonly to work against the mobilization of the social sciences for purposes of national security. Indeed, in November 2007, the American Anthropology Association’s Executive Board following upon the Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with U.S. National Security and Intelligence Communities concluded that though anthropologists are “obliged to help improve U.S. government policies”, working with the U.S. military or intelligence projects, particularly with the Army’s newly instituted Human Terrain Systems constitutes a violation of the AAA Code of Ethics. The reasons for this are that such engagement contradicts the principle of informed consent, to doing no harm to those we study in terms of identifying military targets, and above all that it makes the discipline complicit with US global militarism. Considering this backdrop, specifically the criticism that HTS is a 21st Century version of the Vietnam era CORDS counterinsurgency program and that these code of ethics came about as a reaction to CORDS and Project Camelot in Latin America, the book provides a groundbreaking study of the ethical complications facing anthropologists who would work for the state. In finally breaking the silence on the unknown story of the hidden or unstated connections between anthropology and government in the 20th century, and the lessons it provides for this century, it may well become the most critical disciplinary text of its time.

As a central figure in the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, David Price is struggling to prevent the “weaponization” of anthropology and the threat to anthropology by the state as in his earlier study Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (2004). However, for those very few conservative academics who to the contrary see a more robust role for social science in government and in this case for a more effective use of military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan, it may well have the opposite effect intended. For instance, as reported in the Armed Forces Journal on the occasion of the anthropologist Michael Bhatia’s death during deployment, one learns that HTS was established in 2006 as the military realized that more effective counter-insurgency required anthropological knowledge in order to “minimize the use of force” so as to reduce civilian mortality and thus more effectively achieve peace and stability than would be the case otherwise. In fact, Bhatia’s HTS team was responsible for a 70% reduction in lethal operations. It can therefore be argued that anthropologists have an essential role to play as they did during World War Two and in the Cold War, and that this is not so simply portrayed as “hit-man anthropology” which deliberately gains informants trust in order to betray it. All in all then, for those struggling with this dilemma, for those who are fundamentally opposed to the engagement and for those who would prefer a robust engagement with the state in terms of educating a more culturally informed and linguistically competent state department and intelligence service, this book is essential reading. In all this, contrary to what one might expect, Anthropological Intelligence may well come to serve as a timely reminder that anthropology specifically and the social sciences in general can and arguably should play a vital role in contributing to a better educated and more effective state precisely so as to work towards mitigating the damage of ill informed foreign policy and its disastrous counter-productive implementation.

With its apt subtitle The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, we finally have a history of how anthropologists lent their service to the war effort through working with the Office of Strategic Services that subsequently became the Central Intelligence Agency. We now have a stunning behind the scenes picture of the long engagements that this resulted in against which we can better understand the historical reason for and importance of the area studies centers and the associated foreign language studies programs which were built up during the Cold War, experienced a decline in relevance in the 1990’s and now are once again poised for expansion in a new era of crisis and conflict. For the first time, we have a sweeping view of this larger history, of how after the war anthropology became compromised during the Vietnam War with the CORD counterinsurgency program and later with Project Camelot in Latin America. Little wonder then that the discipline is by and large so opposed to working with government and up in arms over the interconnected relevance of HR3007, NSEP and PRIS, the HTS initiative and the Minerva project at a time when public and global sentiment against the militarization of US foreign policy is reaching unprecedented levels. For instance, even Robert Gates recently acknowledged concern that U.S. foreign policy is experiencing “creeping militarization”, if ever there was an understatement, and that diplomacy and foreign development aid, that is, soft power, needs more support.

And yet this book shows us that anthropologists have provided useful services to the state and the world during times of both war and peace despite the murky ethical dilemmas involved. Moreover, for those working outside of the university as a largely liberal critical fourth estate, the notion that universities should not be working to create more informed and more effective members of the Foreign Service, and defense and intelligence community is quite simply bizarre. In all this, Anthropological Intelligence comes out at the same time as two other books which are fundamentally complementary, namely Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007) and Ashley Dawson and Malini Schueller’s edited volume Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (2007). In classes on post-colonialism and anthropology’s complicity with colonialism, read together with the likes of the late Michael Bhatia’s published works, Karl Meyer’s The Dust of Empire (2003) and Rory Stewart’s The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq (2006), they will be sure to make anthropology more relevant to the state than ever before.

For myself as a graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and as someone who revered iconic figures in this book such as Demitri Shimkin and Julian Steward, the most fascinating aspect of this book is what we learn about such ancestral figures in American anthropology who led this war time engagement with the state. For instance, who amongst us knew that they had broken ranks with Franz Boas and that despite his anti-Nazi work, Boaz had opposed Roosevelt as a warmonger or that Oscar Lewis had worked for the National Indian Institute and been hounded by the FBI as a suspected communist. We learn a great many interesting things here such as how the Cosmos Club in Washington, a social club for D.C.’s intellectual elite, served as a social context for recruiting anthropologists into the intelligence community, so much so that in 1942 the AAA held its “unofficial” meeting there. By then almost 100 anthropologists, that is, over one-half of the nation’s anthropologists were already working for the government.

It was with a great sense of regret that I read these pages and realized just how much I had missed out on in this regard in graduate school. I knew nothing at all of this connection between anthropology and the state though I knew full well how proud Demitri was of his war time work, for as a father figure of sorts he related that to me at Passover in his home – particularly the overland supply of the Russian army with US tanks across the Bering Straights. Therein this book leaves me with a more profound appreciation of the significance of my own most senior professors’ lives and works and why it is so significant that Demitri was buried in Arlington National Cemetery and not in Champaign-Urbana. One would only hope that this book will thus inspire my other elders at the University of Illinois to eventually record their complex histories of engagement with or against the state rather than carry their stories to the grave. And for those anthropological ancestors who have long since passed away, this study provides even those who work within the contexts of museums and archaeology with astounding revelations about anthropology and espionage. There we can only wait with bated breath for fuller accounts of the said “depraved” lives and works of the like of Carleton Coon, Edmund Leach, Gregory Bateson and Samuel Lothrop.

Finally, as Price concludes: “The war’s fight against fascism was a noble one, but those who committed anthropology to warfare in this context were unaware that their actions were releasing a genie from a bottle, unleashing forces that they could not control in new, unimagined Cold War contexts”. Eloquently using the poet John Ciardi’s concept of “ricochet formations”, he concludes that the success of World War Two and the consequences of the Cold War led to the spawning of imperial ambitions in which anthropologists who worked for the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA) had radically compromised the profession by misusing their knowledge and putting their informants in harm’s way. Perhaps it was this general unease that resulted in the situation in which senior anthropologists have long since maintained a self-imposed silence on their war time work with the OSI and the interests’ of the state thereafter. The consequence is that until now we had very little understanding of what Price terms the “weaponization” of American anthropology, a topic of critical contemporary relevance today. In breaking that silence, this book will become the canonical text for those interested in the relationship between the state and anthropology, particularly as regards intelligence and war.

References:

See the AAA report at http://www.aaanet.org/pdt/EB_Resolution_110807.pdf
See http://www.armedforcesjointcom/2008/07/3569397.
For official information on the human terrain system see http://humanterrainsystem.army.mil/index.htm.
See also Michael Bhatia and Mark Sedra Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict: Armed Groups, Disarmament and Security in a Post-War Society(2008), Bhatia’s edited volume Terrorism and the Politics of Naming (2007), his article “The Future of the Mujahideen: Legitimacy, Legacy and Demobilization in Post-Bonn Afghanistan” in International Peacekeeping 2007, 14(1): 90-107 and his earlier work War and Intervention: Issues for Contemporary Peace Operations.

See “Anthropologists Up in Arms over Pentagon’s ‘Human Terrain System’ to Recruit Graduate Students to Serve in Iraq, Afghanistan” at
http://www.democracynow.org/2107/12/13/anthropologists-up-in-arms-over-pentagon.
On PRIS (the Pat Robertson Intelligence Scholars Program) and its predecessor NSEP (the National Security Education Program), see “The Intelligence-University Complex: CIA Secretly Supports Scholarships” at
http://www.democracynow.org/2005/8/3/the-intelligence-university-complex-CIA-secretly.
On the Department of Defense’s Minerva project and the growing realization of the importance of “soft power”, see “Anthropology Association urges Government to Tread Cautiously with ‘Minerva’ Project” in the Chronicle of Higher Education 27, 2008 at
http://chronicle.com/news.article/4560/anthropology-association-urges-government-to-tread-cautiously-with-minerva-project.
On the battle over HR 3077 for reform of federal subsidies to area studies and the original purpose of Title VI to create experts on foreign culture of use to the state and business, see Stanley Kurtz’s “Boycott Exposure: Area-studies abuse revealed” at
http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200404010914.asp.

“Gates cites ‘militarization’ of U.S. foreign policy”. The Jakarta Post Thursday, July 17, 2008, p. 12.