2. The Carnegie Mission and Vision of Science: Institutional Contexts of Maya Archaeology and Espionage

In the United States, the major alternative [to Rockefeller funding of anthropology] came from the Carnegie Institution, which was heavily oriented to physical anthropology and archaeology; such general ethnographic work as it sustained was an outgrowth of its interests in Mayan archaeology.

George W. Stocking Jr., Philanthropoids and Vanishing Cultures

The war work of the Carnegie Institution covered many fields of activity, from the manufacture of optical glass to military intelligence work, and to it all Dr. Woodward offered the most effective support. He himself was a member of the Naval Consulting Board.

Fred E. Wright, Memorial of Robert Simpson Woodward

When the history of the proceedings of the institution comes to be written there will be a fine chapter of patriotic service to the Government in reference to this matter.

CIW President Robert S. Woodward, Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Trustees

This essay, while not a "fine chapter of patriotic service," does contribute toward an anthropological history of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW; also known officially as Carnegie Institution or CI). The CIW (also referred to here as "the Carnegie") was founded, with a deed of $10 million in steel stock in 1902, as a research institute during the formative period of U.S. science.¹ The CIW participated in the general emergence of a public sphere that was driven by the great philanthropic foundations and initiatives of the first decades of the 20th century. It was part of the emergence of a new governmentality that was to transform citizen and society along the rational lines of scientific knowledge. As a part of its scientific mission, it supported research in many, but not all, areas of science, including archaeology and, eventually, social anthropology. The legacy of the Carnegie also includes, to a great extent, the shaping of both the U.S. military–industrial complex and the shaping of the contemporary structure of scientific research in the United States. As is well known, CIW president Vannevar Bush orchestrated the collaboration of science, industry, and military during World War II and then forged the development of the National Research Foundation (Bush 1990; Zachary 1999). Less known, however, is that the second CIW president, Robert S. Woodward, had already established institutional precedent for how science and scientists would contribute to the U.S. government during war time.

The wide ranging and profound importance of the CIW in many areas of science and society has motivated many studies that focus on specific aspects and problems in the history of the institution and of some specific sciences. While the results of the CIW support of archaeology is not quite as monumental as the million-dollar observatories and laboratories that the Carnegie built and operates, the Carnegie sponsorship of "pan-scientific" research in Mesoamerica and the Maya world is a fundamental watershed for Americanist anthropology. Despite this indisputable importance, a sustained study of this history of the field in the manner of a "sociology of knowledge" is curiously absent. In part this may have to do precisely with the role of the Carnegie in initiating espionage by scientists, specifically by archaeologists. However, if such a silence might stop some from "digging up the dirt" on archaeology, it also effectively "buries" the intellectual specificity and unique contribution of the Carnegie-sponsored Maya research. For example, Stocking is able, as in the epigraph at the beginning of this essay, to reduce and dismiss the complexity, diversity, and specificity of 44 years of Carnegie Mesoamerican archaeological research (see also Stocking 1992:156–57; Castañeda 2003, n.d.).

The CIW sponsorship of wide-ranging "pan-scientific" research and interdisciplinary "cooperation" is something of a unique and significant, if also relatively short-lived and narrowly focused, experiment in anthropology. Not a school nor a tradition nor a paradigm, the Carnegie anthropological research program was a distinct way of doing anthropology that has since been absorbed into the university-based science and its associated historiography. To recuperate this "minor literature," it is necessary to "excavate" it from the intellectual histories that marginalize and...