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

For twenty years, Price has been honorably and doggedly trawling for evidence of the “weaponization” of anthropology in World War II and the Cold War, making especially good use of the Freedom of Information Act but also performing the traditional functions of the good historian in archives, memoirs, oral histories, and the technical literature. Cold War Anthropology, his third book on the subject, is his magnum opus. It is not, and could not be, complete. The CIA still keeps too many secrets in various archives, and too much of its covert skulduggery has left little trace, having been performed off the books by private contract or with a wink and a nod. Nevertheless, Price’s range is encyclopedic and his reach very deep.

The book contains some familiar, perhaps over-familiar, stories: for instance, the CIA’s ties to Harvard’s Russian Research Center and to MIT’s Center for International Studies from their foundings in 1948 and 1952, respectively; Project Camelot, the Army’s attempt to infiltrate a counterinsurgency agenda into Latin American social science in 1964/5, the exposure of which led to an acute moral crisis about covert government funding of academia; and the Army’s sponsorship of counter-insurgency research in Thailand beginning in 1967, the revelation of which in 1970 ripped apart the American Anthropological Association (AAA). But it also contains many other, less familiar, and sometimes still elusive, stories: state-funded research in Sarawak, Guatemala, Egypt, Mongolia, Indonesia, and Afghanistan; front organizations like the Asia Foundation and the Human Ecology Fund; and a long sequence of counter-insurgency manuals informed wittingly and unwittingly by academic research. The only obvious omission is the regional work of anthropologists for various technicalassistance programs in the 1950s, which Price acknowledges only briefly and from the center rather than the periphery, where the work (and possibly the damage) was done.

Over the years, Price’s stance toward the implication of anthropology in state-sponsored activities has softened, acquiring nuance and greater penetration. In this book, he adopts a typology much like Gilman’s, recently enunciated in a review essay in Modern Intellectual History, which distinguishes between direct “first-order” contributions to the Cold War struggle, “second-order” fellow-traveling, and “third-order” exploitation of opportunities.¹ Price is particularly interested in the “dual use” of anthropological research, which both serves pure academic interests and has the potential to inform national-security priorities. There is no doubt that funding opportunities in “area studies” pushed anthropologists into sensitive parts of the world that held interest for the U.S. government, though given the global scope of the Cold War, it is hard to imagine any “area” that might not have fallen under this rubric.

In 2016, however, the idea that “American anthropology has been slow to acknowledge” its links, overt or covert, witting or unwitting, to the national-security state is no longer viable (xvii). Apart from Price’s own twenty-year campaign to reveal these links, and the enormous literature that has amassed since the 1980s across the social sciences about the discipline’s Cold War misadventures, his research in this book reminds us how aware many anthropologists were of the moral and political challenges that they faced at the time, in the thick of the Cold War. The “‘critiques of area studies centers’ political alignments are almost as old as the programs themselves” (106), he points out, even if they were stonewalled by the professional establishment.

“Applied anthropology” acquired an ethics code in 1949; Price discusses it in one of his earlier books but not this one. New-Left agitation about Camelot and the Thai affair led to an AAA ethics code in 1971. As Price acknowledges in reference to these codes, and the constant battles over them, “War forced the discipline to grapple with these issues of identity and meaning” (362). Price’s...