Weaponizing Anthropology. David H. Price
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“culture” was the panacea for the forms of social control they envisioned.
For many American anthropologists of the mid-1960s, it was this prospect of using anthropology for counterinsurgency that raised the most fundamental ethical and political questions about applying anthropology to the needs of warfare. Using anthropology to alter and undermine indigenous cultural movements cut against the grain of widely shared anthropological assumptions about the rights of cultures and people to determine their own destiny. In 1968 a full-page ad for a Vietnam War PYSOP Counterinsurgency position appearing in the back of the American Anthropologist journal led over eight hundred anthropologists to sign a statement protesting the running of this ad in the American Anthropologist. Eric Wolf, Robert Murphy, Marvin Harris, Mort Fried, Dell Hymes, and Harold Conklin later wrote a policy forbidding the Association from accepting advertisements for employment that produced secretive reports. These border incursions by military and intelligence agencies pushed the AAA to undertake steps that led them closer to drafting its first ethics code. And while the Association leadership strove to frame members concerns in terms of ethics, the political issues raised by using anthropology for counterinsurgency drove much of the debate.
In 1967 a self-identified “Radical Caucus” of anthropologists was organized, and using grassroots techniques it seized political power at the AAA’s annual meetings, drawing massive crowds to the sessions they organized, flooding the annual business meetings with caucus members who used the meetings to push through political resolutions against anthropological contributions to the war, and supporting a broad platform of progressive issues ranging from anti-discrimination policies and calling for the establishment of an ethics code, to calling on the association to provide childcare at the annual meetings. This movement successfully pressed the AAA’s Board to draft an ethics code (known as the Principles of Professional Responsibility) that mandated members “do no harm,” disclose funding sources and uses of research, and forbid covert research and the production of secret reports.
In 1970 a graduate student at UCLA stole documents from the files of anthropologist Michael Moerman. These documents established that Moerman and other anthropologists involvement in counterinsurgency operations in Thailand. Copies of these stolen documents were sent to Eric Wolf, the chair of the AAA’s Ethics Committee, and to a radical newspaper, The Student Mobilizer. After Eric Wolf publicly questioned the propriety of this counterinsurgency work, the AAA Executive Board harshly criticized Wolf, and Eric Wolf resigned as Chair of the Ethics Committee. There were highly charged debates between anthropologists across the country, and the AAA Board appointed an independent committee chaired by Margaret Mead to investigate these matters (Wakin 1993).
But the Mead Committee’s report was a disaster. When the committee submitted its report in late 1971, their findings were seen as a cover-up by many of the AAA membership because the report focused most of its criticism not on the anthropologists engaged in counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia, but on Ethics Committee chairman Wolf for making judgments without affording the accused anthropologists due process and for taking actions beyond those procedurally identified in the AAA bylaws and the Ethics Committee’s charge. The Radical Caucus packed the 1971 AAA Council meeting and used their numbers to seize control of the agenda, and though the AAA leadership had not wanted the report to be approved or rejected, a motion was made, seconded and adopted which rejected the Mead Report. But more significant than the rejection of the Mead Report was that all the commotion and anger over the weaponization of anthropology in the aborted Camelot Project and Southeast Asia solidified the AAA membership’s vote to adopt the Principles of Professional Responsibility, the AAA’s first Code of Ethics, in a vote that pushed by the political concerns of warfare.
The AAA’s 1971 Principles of Professional Responsibility unambiguously declared that anthropologists should not conduct covert research, should not issue secret reports (to governmental agencies or anyone else) and must work to use pseudonyms to protect the identities and well-being of those they studied. This 1971 code clarified that anthropologists’ primary loyalties were to those they studied. In the immediate sense, the establishment of the 1971 AAA Code of Ethics was a disciplinary reaction to CIA and Pentagon counterinsurgency efforts in the Vietnam War; but in the larger sense, it was also the product of a growing awareness of the problems and concerns raised when anthropology is used not only for warfare, but in any interactions between anthropology and research participants.
While war brought anthropology ethics, in some sense, military and intelligence agencies’ temporary neglect of the discipline contributed to a weakening these ethical proclamations. During the 1980s, as the pressing concerns of abuses in wartime were replaced by market-driven concerns over responsibilities to sponsors; concerns that included loosening prohibitions over secretive reports or reports containing what industry termed “proprietary data.” Shifts in anthropology’s political economy brought growing desires to produce proprietary reports for industry in the 1980s, which spawned successful efforts to loosen the AAA’s Code of Ethics to allow for more secrecy.
This shift troubled many university-based anthropologists because it inverted appropriate relationships between professional ethics and desires to produce or control knowledge. The 1990 relaxation of the AAA’s Code of Ethics allowing the production of proprietary, secretive, reports, occurred for reasons of commerce as increasing number of anthropologists worked outside of universities in corporate or governmental settings, but it would be the re-militarized America following the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 that demonstrated how these changes expressed anthropology’s commitments and responsibilities during times of war.
President Bush’s wars at home, Afghanistan and Iraq brought new uses for anthropology and anthropologists, many of these engagements occurred without ethical complications, while others, especially those involving counterinsurgency went far beyond what the previous generation of anthropologists would considered ethical uses of anthropology. Increasing numbers of anthropologists responded to militarized calls in ways that viewed anthropological ethics as a luxury not to be afforded by those needing anthropology’s ethnographic knowledge for warfare. The clearest expression of these views came from anthropologist Montgomery McFate, who openly sought to militarize anthropology with the development of embedded Counterinsurgency teams known as Human Terrain Teams. Doctor McFate led the charge to recruit anthropologists, bluntly admitting that “despite the fact that military applications of cultural knowledge might be distasteful to ethically inclined anthropologists, their assistance is necessary” (McFate 2005:37). Rather than confronting the complexity of ethical relationships, McFate’s Human Terrain Teams simply ignored them.
Post 9/11 efforts to militarize anthropology lean on false historical narratives that construct unrealistic interpretations of the possibility of individuals changing entrenched military structures, and an abandonment of normative understandings of professional ethics. The Pentagon, White House, and military contractors painted pictures of Human Terrain Teams as “armed social workers.” But using anthropology for counterinsurgency perverts the discipline’s potential; and the Human Terrain Program took the research of other ethnographers and applied it for occupations in ways that took the science or art of ethnography and resold it as a sort of social science pornography.
But Ethics can be a Force that Allows Anthropology to Avoid Politics
Somewhere between 1971 and today, American anthropologists lost their collective strong sense of outrage over the discipline being so nakedly used for counterinsurgency. Part of this loss of outrage comes with the degeneration of historical memory as fewer Americans know the history of the CIA’s legacy of assassinations, coups and death squads and a history of undermining democratic movements harmful to the interests of American elites. The increasing corporatization of university campuses over the past decades has reduced expectations of academic independence, and has left under-funded departments willing to consider anything that promises to provide funding. Post-9/11 America has become so fervently militarized that many anthropologists privately questioning these developments remain publicly silent because they fear a mob response should Fox News target them as unpatriotic intellectual snobs. Today, news of anthropologists’ involvement in counterinsurgency programs still mobilizes a core group of scholars, but the discipline as a whole refrains from stating outright opposition to anthropologically informed counterinsurgency. The growing militarism of American social science since 2001 slowly raised concerns