Weaponizing Anthropology. David H. Price
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Hamlets Program as well as contemporary economic reformation projects in Afghanistan undermining poppy production and other elements of the traditional local economy.
To provide but a single pre-anthropology example of historical forms of intercultural counterinsurgency, consider American President Thomas Jefferson’s secret briefing to Congress of January 18, 1803 in which, while secretly asking for $2,500 to fund the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Jefferson described plans to undertake what would later become a staple tactic of Twentieth Century counterinsurgency: undermining the traditional economic systems of enemies and then entrapping them in aggressive market-based economies in which they will have difficulty competing on an equal basis. President Jefferson advised congress that:
The Indian tribes residing within the limits of the U.S. have for a considerable time been growing more & more uneasy at the constant diminution of the territory they occupy, altho’ effected by their own voluntary sales; and the policy has long been gaining strength with them of refusing absolutely all further sale on any conditions, insomuch that, at this time, it hazards their friendship, and excites dangerous jealousies [and] perturbations in their minds to make any overture for the purchase of the smallest portions of their land. A very few tribes only are not yet obstinately in these dispositions. In order peaceably to counteract this policy of theirs, and to provide an extension of territory which the rapid increase of our numbers will call for, two measures are deemed expedient. First, to encourage them to abandon hunting, to apply to the raising stock, to agriculture and domestic manufacture, and thereby prove to themselves that less land & labor will maintain them in this, better than in their former mode of living. The extensive forests necessary in the hunting life will then become useless, & they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means of improving their farms, & of increasing their domestic comforts. Secondly to multiply trading houses among them & place within their reach those things which will contribute more to their domestic comfort then the profession of extensive, but uncultivated wilds, experience & reflection will develop to them the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare & we want, for what we can spare and they want. (Jefferson to Congress 1/18/1803)
Jefferson’s counterinsurgency operation recognized that the US government could provide economic incentives for Indians to become more dependent on raising stock, and therefore “abandoning hunting,” which would open more lands for the US government to claim. This planned destruction of the Indian’s reliance on their traditional economy would necessarily erode cultural cohesion. With time, and a certain amount of armed counterinsurgency, as the forests became “useless” to these displaced peoples, they became increasingly dependent as marginal players trapped as latecomers cornered at the edge of a market economy. The lure of increased “domestic comforts,” in modern times promised by an assortment of economic hitmen, remains a central carrot from Jefferson’s time to the present, and those pitching these schemes are seldom held accountable for their failures. Jefferson’s approach contained seeds of the standard tactics of population dislocation and population control.
We are left to wonder how much smoother Jefferson’s counterinsurgency campaign might have been had President Jefferson dispatched a squadron of applied anthropologists to soften the blow of conquest, offering microloans, helping to relocate settlements, and getting to know the names, lineages and traditional songs of those succumbing to the needs of the Republic. On one level Lewis and Clark’s role as agents in this American expansion westward made them like members of a first generation of development anthropologists selling the promises of modernization to those who would be displaced and damaged by the “progress” to come.
The early formalization of anthropology as a discipline occurred in the mid- to late-nineteenth century in a political economy where a mixture of colonialist gentlemen explorers, missionaries, functionaries at colonial outposts, dilettantes and occasional savants slowly came to understand the ways of the “others” that lived within and at the edges of Empire’s borders. Early anthropologists filled that complex hole of empire’s knowledge base with a useful understanding of culture that was both enlightened and mercenary. Anthropology’s roots grew in the soils of established military might in lands conquered by European powers, often some years after military forces laid conquest. The arrival of anthropologists often followed a progression of arrivals that flowed from infantries, to plantation or mining engineers, missionaries, then finally: anthropologists — these at times being self styled ethnographers working as colonial administrators in the hinterlands of empire. As the British, Dutch, French, and German, etc. empires spread around the globe, national traditions of ethnology and anthropology emerged. The needs of colonialism often required some knowledge of the occupied populations they sought to manage, and anthropology was born. As Talal Asad observed almost forty years ago, “anthropologists can claim to have contributed to the cultural heritage of the societies they study by a sympathetic recording of indigenous forms of life that would otherwise be lost to posterity. But they have also contributed, sometimes indirectly, towards maintaining the structure of power represented by the colonial system” (Asad 1973:17).
The early American history of ethnological studies of Native Americans cannot be told as separate from a shameful history of conquest and genocide; and while many early American ethnographers did not conceptualize their work as being part of a larger history of conquest, the federal agencies which most often employed them (e.g., the Bureau of American Ethnology, Bureau of Ethnology) were organized under the Department of Interior which at times had direct commerce with the U.S. Army; agencies relocating, undermining and controlling Indian populations. Disciplinary ancestors like Major John Wesley Powell often mixed the tasks of cataloging the geography and exploitable natural resources on empire’s frontier in ways that added the ethnographic details of the peoples inhabiting these environments as curiosities rather than integrated natural features.
While anthropologists trace their intellectual roots back in a great variety of directions, I remain struck by the importance of the American tradition quietly launched by James Mooney in the late 19th century. Mooney began his work for the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology even as the Department of Interior and U.S. Army were engaged in actions and policies designed to enact physical and cultural genocide against the native Indian people that Mooney was assigned to study. James Mooney first arrived on the Sioux reservation in 1891 just days after the Seventh Calvary had slaughtered Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee. An arrival that forced Mooney to confront the political forces framing and funding his research and to become aware that ethnography is not a neutral act. Recording and reporting cultural information under such circumstances risked making these populations vulnerable. Mooney understood early on that there was no political neutrality for ethnography.
There were mixed motivations guiding Mooney’s bosses at the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ethnology as they sought to make native peoples legible during a period of conquest, but the details of Mooney’s work went against these colonial administrative demands as he produced rich ethnographic reports that instead of providing military and administrative enemies with cultural tools for conquest through counterinsurgency, provided narratives establishing the full humanity, equality, and cultural richness of these peoples who were treated by others as sub-humans without proper culture. Mooney’s detailed work on the Ghost Dance, Peyote Sacraments, and the Sun Dance earned him administrative and Congressional enemies — as well as congressional investigations and sanctions; and though Mooney suffered these hardships he did not betray his work or those he studied (Moses 1984).
Mooney had no professional ethical statements to guide him beyond his own religious and personal understanding of what individuals owed to others; yet while employed by a government actively working to undermine American Indian culture, he chose not to create forms of counterinsurgency or psychological operations directed against those he studied. Though never articulated as a litanized code of ethics, Mooney’s work reveals his ethical commitment to those he lived with and studied — and while the idiosyncratic nature of this understanding was largely personal, it was also professional — even if it would remain uncodified and professionally un-recognized for decades.
I do not fully understand how Mooney came to such an enlightened understanding of his ethical duties to the Indians who allowed him to live amongst them, but I would like to think it was at least in part a result of the simple and profound act this very act of sharing his life through fieldwork’s