Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War
Posted on: Thursday, 10 July 2008, 06:00 CDT
By Gonzalez, Roberto J
David H. Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 352 pp. Approximately half of all anthropologists in the United States contributed their expertise to the World War II effort. This timely book explores the wide range of roles they played through dozens of accounts profiling their work. The book's methodology is innovative and eclectic. It relies upon an array of sources including declassified documents requested through the Freedom of Information Act, anthropologists' letters and obituaries, government reports, and interviews, among others.
Price begins by providing a historical framework, specifically an analysis of anthropologists' roles in the "war to end all wars," WWI. During this time, Franz Boas developed a " radical ethical critique" in response to American archaeologists who worked as spies in Central America (p.12). According to Price, "Boas's belief in the existence of pure science independent of the corrupting influence of a militarized and politicized nation-state fueled this attack more than his disapproval of American participation in the war" (p. 12). It also set the stage for ethical struggles that would erupt throughout the course of the century.
Subsequent chapters thoroughly cover a wide range of topics. For example, Price examines the role of professional associations (notably the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology), and finds that " few anthropologists had second thoughts about the ethics of applying anthropology to warfare" (p. 49), as the needs of the war effort were assigned high priority by most members of the organizations. Laura Thompson was among the few concerned that some anthropologists had become " social engineers" and " technicians for hire to the highest bidder" (pp. 34, 35).
The book includes a fascinating chapter that analyzes "Allied and Axis Anthropologies," and reveals that Japanese and German anthropologists' "silence was remarkably similar to that which emerged in the writings of the postwar Allied anthropologist victors" (p.71). Another chapter documents the ways in which WWII transformed college campuses, most notably through the creation of foreign language and area studies programs, and, after the war, the creation of the GI Bill. Yet another explores the work of institutions that together functioned as a kind of "brain trust." These included the Human Relations Area Files, the Smithsonian Institution and its Ethnogeographic Board (created to generate information about potential theaters of war), and the Institute of Social Anthropology, among others. Academics were not always able to see the risks that such projects might entail: "The war's needs shone so brightly that they seemed to blind anthropologists to the possiblity that America's interests and those of the cultures they were studying might diverge" (p. 89).
Among the most shocking sections is a description of "social engineers" such as Henry Field (p. 127). Field and several other anthropologists were deeply involved in the "M Project" initiated by President Roosevelt in 1942. The goal was to search the globe for regions where millions of wartime refugees could be resettled. (Ales Hrdlicka, a physical anthropologist, who was an informal advisor to Roosevelt, also gave suggestions on relocating refugees.) Declassified documents reveal that "library bound bureaucrats [were] designing contingency plans to move tens of millions of people thousands of miles away from their native lands. Field and his staff appear[ed] comfortable planning to move inventoried people about the globe like fungible commodities" (p. 126). Even more disconcerting is that fact that "in almost every case, the peoples identified for relocation were victims of the aggression of others (e.g., the Roma, Jews, etc.), as if the reward of being victimized was being moved so that the aggressor could live in peace" (p. 127).
Price's account of some anthropologists' involvement in the War Relocation Authority-the agency charged with the internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans-will be well-known to many anthropologists. Even so, Price's careful synthesis and analysis leads to an extraordinarily powerful and well-informed critique of wartime anthropology for the military, even in a "good war" against fascism. Such anthropology is too easily compromised by " the captive thinking of a government bureaucracy" under military control during WWII (p. 168). This may explain why so many of those who provided their anthropological expertise to the war effort were often silent about their experiences in the post-war period, an observation that Price makes early in the book.
Others were engaged in more secretive endeavors. The Office of War Information employed nearly a dozen anthropologists, who among other things designed propaganda custom made for Japanese audiences for the purpose of convincing them to surrender. Some (including Clyde Kluckhohn and Ruth Benedict) recommended that a post-war US military occupation force retain the Japanese emperor, following the method of imperial rule established by British and other colonial administrators. Several anthropologists were recruited into the FBI's Special Intelligence Service, an office dedicated to coordinating US intelligence operations in Latin America. Still others were recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (established in 1942), a spy agency that was the precursor to the CIA. For example, Gregory Bateson carried out clandestine missions in South Asia; Carleton Coon used his anthropological knowledge to train assassins and kidnappers in North Africa; Rhoda Metraux studied the war's impact on the morale of German civilians; and David Mandelbaum directed a unit that planned strategies for the OSS's famous Detachment 101, tasked with funding and coordinating Kachin resistance groups in Burma. In the conclusion, Price acknowledges the "ambiguities" of the post-war period. At the same time that anthropologists' efforts might have helped defeat the forces of fascism, they unleashed other forces that could potentially be used for harm.
Price has done a masterful job of weaving a complex tapestry of American wartime anthropology. It is much more than a collection of case studies- the whole is certainly greater than the sum of its parts, and several themes emerge throughout the text. Price's work reveals that even in a "good war" like WWII, anthropologists often stood on ethically shaky ground when working for military and intelligence agencies, and some of them came to regret the long- term consequences of their participation. In addition, the book reveals that the during the war, military officials had a tendency of "selectively ignoring and selectively commandeering social scientists' recommendations" (p. 198). All too often, anthropologists had little impact on policy making and functioned as cogs in large bureaucracies with clearly established goals. In worst- case scenarios, he notes that anthropologists may "often find themselves doing 'piecework' on large projects that have grand designs beyond their control or comprehension'" (p. 142). Price's accounts also dramatically illustrate how secretive research can be pernicious and long-lasting-especially in a time of war: "those who committed anthropology to warfare in this context were unaware that their actions were releasing a genie from a bottle, unleashing forces they could not control in new, unimagined Cold War contexts" (p. 280). Anthropological expertise deployed in WWII set the stage for more troubling chapters in the history of the discipline, including Project Camelot and the "Thai affair."
Anthropological Intelligence could not have come at a more critical time as the Pentagon, the CIA, and countless private contract firms (such as BAE Systems and NEK Advanced Securities) aggressively seek to recruit social scientists for positions ranging from " Intelligence Analyst" to "Field Anthropologist" on experimental counterinsurgency teams. Price's work gives us fair warning of the pitfalls that are likely to accompany such collaborations.
Roberto J. Gonzalez
San Jose State University
Copyright Institute for Ethnographic Research Spring 2008
(c) 2008 Anthropological Quarterly. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Anthropological Quarterly
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