Weaponizing Anthropology. David H. Price
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shared meals, shared lives should (yet, always doesn’t) imply if not shared loyalties and trust, then at a minimum: shared internalized understandings.
The American anthropological tradition is not unique in having its disciplinary roots firmly planted in a history of studying populations of others whom governments and other sponsors wished to conquer or shape in ways that would be today loosely recognized as counterinsurgency. The history of early anthropology establishes how British, French, Dutch, and German anthropological traditions were linked with colonial desires in Africa, Asia, Indonesia and elsewhere. While global colonial campaigns set a stage that made the sort of prolonged travel, or work at colonial outposts that birthed Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century anthropology, the social relations of European military dominance influenced the forms of often racialized cultural evolutionary theory that emerged in this colonial context. European and American expansions brought occupations, and ethnology became first a curiosity and then a tool of managers ever concerned with the prospect of native insurgency movements.
In the early Twentieth Century, anthropology programs grew and spread to a number of American universities. At Columbia University, Franz Boas cast a great shadow, teaching a core group of students (including folks like Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Ashley Montagu, etc.) an American form of cultural relativism that championed racial equality, rejected notions of cultural evolution and valued all cultures equally. His insistence of intense linguistic study of the complexity and beauty of Indian languages inevitably taught lessons of respect for these others. By contemporary standards Boas had serious ethical shortcomings. His scandalous involvement in grave robbing, and lying to an Inuit child about the death and burial of his father, testify to this, but Boas’ recognition of the equality of cultures and his insistence that anthropologists should undertake fieldwork, sharing their lives with those they studied, shaped the lives and sensibilities of American anthropologists in ways that warfare would inevitably twist and test.
As the United States waged foreign wars throughout the Twentieth Century, some anthropologists were forced to consider the inherent obligations they had to those they studied. The end of the First World War brought American anthropology a seminal moment raising core questions about anthropologists’ ethical discomfort in using their discipline to further warfare. In 1919 Franz Boas published a letter under the title “Scientists as Spies” in The Nation denouncing four anthropologists for having “prostituted science” during the war when they pretended to conduct archaeological research in order to undertake espionage in Central America for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Boas wrote that these spy-anthropologists “have not only shaken the belief in the truthfulness of science, but they have also done the greatest possible disservice to scientific inquiry. In consequence of their acts every nation will look with distrust upon the visiting foreign investigator who wants to do honest work, suspecting sinister designs. Such action has raised a new barrier against the development of international friendly cooperation” (Boas 1919). Two weeks after his letter was published, Boas was censured by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). The irony of the AAA’s 1919 vote to censure Boas was that the Association accused him of abusing his position for political ends. This was not a moment when the discipline was interested in questioning its relationship to the larger economic and political world in which it was enmeshed, much less to develop ethical codes or principles championing disclosure of sponsorship, or obtaining voluntary informed consent. Boas’ censure sent clear messages to any anthropologists interested in questioning who or what anthropology should serve.
Before the Second World War, there was a surprising lack of formal or informal concern with basic political or ethical questions relating to anthropology. Even basic practices such as using pseudonyms to protect research participants was so foreign that when Margaret Mead and her then husband Reo Fortune both studied the same Omaha Indian community, Mead’s book used a “pseudonym of the Antler Tribe, to shield the feelings of the individuals and to give no affront to the tribal pride” (Mead 1932:16), while her husband’s book fully identified the same town as Macy, Nebraska, its real name. Issues of power differentials between researchers and “research subjects” were seldom discussed in ethnographies, even by anthropologists who held otherwise progressive political views. Many anthropologists adopted a research stance that valued the discovery of scientific truths over concerns for the well-being of those they studied.
Without even a loose set of ethical standards, it was easy for anthropologists to be swayed to set aside even basic standards of decency in the quest of gaining new knowledge. A list of abusive anthropological practices during these early years would be a long one. The looting of sacred objects for museums and private collections was widespread, voluntary informed consent was rare, Boas and others secretly looted native grave sites, Leslie White bribed members of an Acoma Pueblo village to disclose sacred secrets, John Peabody Harrington once sent an emergency telegram demanding that a dying Indian elder (who had served as a linguistic informant) be dosed with opium to keep him alive until Harrington could travel to his side in order to complete a word list he had begun compiling, and so on.
While anthropologists’ interactions with warfare would eventually cause them to establish (and later revise) American anthropology’s formal ethics codes, it was the more mundane interactions with research participants and communities that showed most anthropologists the need for ethical standards. Because Pre-World War II anthropology was a minor discipline with a few scattered university departments and museum anthropologists mostly collecting artifacts and cultural data, not as part of large coordinated projects, but as individual efforts to collect cultural information for its own sake, it is easy to understand how these codes did not develop or become formalized in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Anthropologists were free agents, collecting information that interested them, often using their own funds to finance their fieldwork. Before the war, there was not much systemic appreciation of the uses to which anthropology could be put, or of the impacts anthropologists left simply by conducting fieldwork. But like many other elements of American life, the war changed all that.
Like other Americans, American anthropologists enlisted and served in a wide variety of capacities during the Second World War. Anthropologist Murray Wax recalled that at Berkeley, “after Pearl Harbor, Alfred Kroeber came to the departmental common room and encouraged the students and junior faculty by declaring, ‘We will show them what anthropology can do!’ Indeed, anthropologists recruited themselves” (Wax 2002:2). Suddenly anthropologists weren’t just useless campus nerds; the military soon realized that they needed pieces of anthropology’s skill set: things like language skills, customs, geographical knowledge of the others who were now enemies. In this war social scientists were harnessed at new levels as intelligence analysts, propagandists, guerilla insurgents, language instructors, jungle survival specialists, saboteurs, foot soldiers, officers, and spies.
Given anthropology’s geographical, cultural and linguistic expertise, anthropologists had vital sources of information for commanders and American troops fighting their way northward from New Guinea, through Micronesia towards the Japanese homeland — and throughout Africa, southern and eastern Asia and Europe. Anthropologists scouted for the needed natural resources like petroleum, magnesium, tin, and rubber in Central and South America — sometimes lying about their intentions while posing as fieldworkers; at least one of the spies that Boas had criticized during World War One, reprised his role of archaeologist spy in Peru (Price 2000). Some anthropologists formed secret and quasi-secret agencies like the Ethnogeographic Board (meeting in the Smithsonian’s castle) and the “M-Project” (secretly meeting in the Library of Congress to generate fantastical scenarios for relocating refugees at the war’s end), while others worked in the War Relocation Authority camps detaining Japanese American citizens (Price 2008).
American anthropologists weren’t the only anthropologists contributing to the global war. British, German, French, Japanese, and anthropologists from other nations contributed their cultural, geographical and linguistic knowledge to their nations during the war. In From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich, Gretchen Schafft broke a deep silence surrounding the details of Nazi anthropologists, documenting how anthropometric research, measuring Germans and others, was adapted and used to justify Nazi policies (Schafft 2007). Schafft raised serious questions not only about the political contexts determining the uses and abuses of anthropology, but she documents anthropology’s own