Weaponizing Anthropology. David H. Price
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training, reveals that the anthropologist with the highest name recognition in all of history was not Margaret Mead, but was instead Joseph Mengele. That most anthropologists have no idea that Mengele was formally trained in anthropology is a small but significant monument to the ways that the discipline has divorced itself from its historical interactions with power.
American anthropologists at times also worked on disturbing war projects. One OSS study sought to identify specific biological differences among the Japanese that could be exploited with biological weapons. Another OSS project was designed to destroy food sources for the Japanese homeland, hoping to use ethnographic knowledge to refine techniques of terror. Some anthropological projects used newly developed applied anthropological methods to manipulate studied populations (at home and abroad) in ways that troubled some of these anthropologists at the time and at times subverted democratic movements. These applications of wartime anthropology with few limits led anthropologist Laura Thompson to publicly write of these concerns in 1944, asking what would become of such an anthropology without limits, and wanting to know “are practical social scientists to become technicians for hire to the highest bidder?” (1944:12).
It was the Nuremberg Trials after the war that provided anthropology and all the human and social sciences the basis of their modern ethic codes. The Nuremburg Code insisted that scientists studying human beings (in war and peace) must obtain voluntary informed consent, must avoid causing mental and physical suffering, must protect research subjects, must use qualified personnel, and must give research subjects the power to end the studies when risks appear. While it was Nazi atrocities, many of which were conducted not simply as acts of cruelty, but to gain valuable information to assist their war effort (e.g. their lethal hypothermia studies) that led to the development of this first modern ethical code, it would transform post-war research in public and private settings.
As a direct result of its members’ experiences in World War II, in 1948 the Society for Applied Anthropology articulated the first formalized American anthropological code of ethics. This code stressed that the “anthropologist must take responsibility for the effects of his recommendations, never maintaining that he is merely a technician unconcerned with the ends toward which his applied scientific skills are directed” (Mead et al. 1949:20). It stated that, “the applied anthropologist should recognize a special responsibility to use his skill in such a way as to prevent any occurrence which will set in motion a train of events which involves irreversible losses of health or the loss of life to individuals or groups or irreversible damage to the natural productivity of the physical environment” (Mead et al. 1949:21).
It was no accident that it was the applied anthropologists’ professional society, and not the larger, highly academic AAA, that first developed an ethics code. The experiences and traumas of the Second World War forced these anthropologists to take a hard look at what had been and what could be done with their work. The war also left many anthropologists concluding that the military frequently did not listen to their analysis because it went against the institutional assumptions of the agencies which sought their advice. During the war, the academic journal of the AAA continued to publish articles about obscure kinship systems and carry on lofty theoretical debates, but Applied Anthropology carried articles detailing the logistics of imprisoning Japanese Americans, wartime labor issues, and forms of social engineering in service of the war, and once the guns of war fell silent those who had been drawn into contributing anthropology so directly to this fight started thinking hard about what it all meant, and what limits should exist.
World War II taught anthropologists to work on directed research projects not of their own design, and the Cold War’s showers of previously unimaginable public and private funds for anthropological research shifted anthropological imaginations in ways aligned with geopolitics. The early Cold War brought new lucrative federal funding programs for foreign language study, and Area Study Centers (adopting and spreading the interdisciplinary approach to regional studies developed at the OSS during the war) mixed a new wealth of public and private funds for anthropologists to study the Underdeveloped World at the center of Cold War politics. During the Cold War, the CIA and other intelligence agencies used funding fronts, through either agency controlled dummy foundations or by channeling research monies to “useful” research projects through bona fide research foundations without the recipient’s knowledge. These foundations are known as “pass-throughs” or funding fronts. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. Congress’ Church Committee determined that during the mid-1960s such maneuvers allowed the CIA to manipulate about half the grants made for international research in the USA. For the most part these were unwitting interactions (Church Committee 1976:182).
Uncounted Cold War anthropologists quietly passed through the revolving door between the academy and intelligence agencies with little notice or concern by their colleagues. Anthropologists covered the Third World, and while most anthropologists were doing the exact academic research they claimed they were, some anthropologists had other agendas. In the early Cold War Frank Hibbin used fieldwork as a cover to secretly plant devices to monitor Chinese atomic bomb tests. During this same period, the AAA Executive Board covertly provided the CIA with a master roster of their membership, including language abilities, foreign contacts, and geographical specialties (Price 2003). Sometimes anthropologists were sponsored by funding fronts and didn’t even know that their sponsors were actually the CIA, such as when anthropologists writing about stress in different cultures were funded by the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA front working on the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual (Price 2007). Through such means anthropologists and other social scientists became unwitting CIA laboratory mules examining questions of mutual interest while earning money and advancing their academic careers. Many anthropologists were oblivious to the political context in which they worked, which Laura Nader characterized the period as “sleepwalking” through the history of anthropology (Nader 1997).
In 1964, the U.S. Army’s Project Camelot sought to use anthropologists and sociologists to study patterns of Third World social upheaval and revolution. Project Camelot planned to use anthropologists’ and sociologists’ research to develop counterinsurgency tactics to quell uprisings (democratic or otherwise) in Latin America. When the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung was contacted in a futile effort to recruit him for Camelot’s Chilean counterinsurgency program, he publicly exposed the project. A sizable public uproar followed and soon the AAA began scrutinizing programs designed to use social science to inform counterinsurgency.
With anthropologists’ outrage, growing suspicions in the international community, public scrutiny and academic criticism, Project Camelot never got off the ground. As Marshall Sahlins wrote at the time, “as a tactic of fomenting Latin American unrest and anti-North American sentiment, Camelot would be the envy of any Communist conspiracy. We have heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy; here was the self-fulfilling research proposal” (Sahlins 1967:73). The American Anthropological Association reacted to Camelot by establishing a committee led by Ralph Beals that wrote a 1967 report on “Background Information on Problems of Anthropological Research and Ethics.” The report identified many of the fundamental ethical principles to be articulated in the AAA’s first ethics code four years later.
Project Camelot was a flashpoint for academic anger in the mid-1960s, but it was but one of many counterinsurgency programs drawing on anthropologists. Anthropologists worked on Strategic Hamlet Program in Vietnam, and were beginning to work on a number of so-called “Modernization Programs” managed by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other agencies which had rationales similar to those articulated by Thomas Jefferson in his secret congressional briefing. Anthropologists working for RAND in Vietnam supported a number of rural agricultural counterinsurgency programs. In the 1960s, military strategists and intelligence analysts suddenly rediscovered the value of anthropology, and began dreaming that culture might hold answers to their military problems. The Special Operations research Office (SORO) and its cousin-organization CINFAC (Counterinsurgency Information Analysis) published a whole series of crazy sounding (and reading) papers on counterinsurgency related topics like the 1964 classic, “Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic and Other Psychological Phenomena and Their Implications on Military and Paramilitary Operations in the Congo,” or CINFAC’s Staff “An Ethnographic Summary of the Ethiopian Provinces of Harar and Sidamo,” and a series of counterinsurgency related documents. The military and CIA were in over their head with a mix of overt and