Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, The Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology by David H. Price (review)

The publication of Cold War Anthropology extends a remarkable series of works by David H. Price on academic anthropology’s relationship with the US security state. In three prior books, Price has traced US anthropologists’ role in intelligence during World War II (2008), their harassment and repression under anti-Communism (2004), and their more recent role as military advisors in the Global War on Terror (2011). In Cold War Anthropology, Price fills in the missing story by examining anthropologists’ role in supporting and extending US power during the Cold War period, which he implicitly defines as lasting from the end of World War II through the early 1970s. These works are the product of unparalleled research, including a tireless application of the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) process. Price’s reputation as the leading authority on Cold War anthropology is entirely deserved.

Cold War Anthropology presents a massive amount of information on a vast ensemble of researchers, funding agencies, and acronym-laden projects that were either openly or covertly associated with US military or intelligence agencies. Having myself spent several years filing FOIA applications and researching CIA front organizations—albeit mostly concerning scientific fields other than anthropology—I have no doubt of Price’s command of historical fact. The more pressing question is what readers are to do with this information. While Price consistently damns those scholars who knowingly and wittingly consorted with the CIA, his discussion of other sorts of funding arrangements is inconsistent, sometimes maddeningly so. At points, Price seems to offer grudging admiration to researchers who openly acknowledged their ties to such military agencies as the US Army; elsewhere, he castigates those who contributed to USAID’s development projects as accomplices in US counterinsurgency efforts.

What is consistent is Price’s charge that US anthropologists did not fully consider the ethical and political costs that greased the wheels of scientific funding during the Cold War. Price especially draws readers’ attention to the problems inherent in “dual use research,” by which he means investigations designed to answer disciplinary problems that might equally well contribute to national security. As Price puts it, “scientists’ claims of neutrality often meant they had unexamined alignments with the predominating political forces, which went unnoted because they occurred without friction” (xx). These ties only drew attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the extent of the profession’s ties to the security state gradually became clear. Now that this generation of anthropologists is retiring, Price worries that anthropologists have lost their sense of moral outrage. The concern that contemporary anthropologists lack an understanding of “why these relationships endanger prospects of free inquiry” (363) perhaps explains the exhaustive range and scope of Cold War Anthropology, which must be considered a work of historical accounting as much as a work of historical analysis. If the end result is sometimes encyclopedic, that is intentional. The book is, as Price puts it, “an anthropological consideration of anthropology” (xi).

The two parts of Cold War Anthropology approach this work of documentation from different angles. Part I, “Cold War Political–Economic Disciplinary Formations,” addresses the financial and institutional arrangements governing relationships between universities, the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the CIA, military agencies, and USAID. Part II, “Anthropologists’ Articulations with the National Security State,” explores the relationships—whether witting or not—between particular individuals or projects and US agencies. Because the book aims to be the definitive account of such relationships, Price is at pains to recount only incidents where he can provide some sort of concrete evidence linking his historical subjects to military or intelligence agencies. Such care is especially welcome because, as Price notes, “documented CIA atrocities [have become] indistinguishable in the public memory from absurd claims” (29). When Price can prove something, he does. When he can’t, but has overwhelming circumstantial evidence to make a case, he tells readers where the paper trail stops. And...