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

Approaching any study of anthropology's entanglement with military and intelligence operations during the Cold War is something of a Rorschach test: It is as much about what you bring to the encounter as it is about what others can make of your reaction. You may shrug and think, "What did you expect?" You may be shocked, shocked that such things are happening right here in academia. Or, if you are over a certain age, you may give the book a hasty Washington read, searching the index for the names of your colleagues or granting agencies. If you start from the beginning, you will undoubtedly reach the final chapter wondering what lessons the author will draw from it all as a retrospective measure of his very credibility.

After reading Price's most recent study of anthropologists, the Cold War, and military involvement, I came away with several conclusions: (1) that Price is serious and methodical, though he has a tendency to draw inferences without proof and makes occasional errors that speak more to his overall orientation than probing appraisal; (2) that anthropologists played a very slight and, by the author's own admission, almost entirely harmless role in events of the Cold War period; and (3) that what lessons one draws are largely a function of what one brings to the enterprise rather than what one is required to take away from it.

Price relies for his central assessment on the idea of dual use—that even when scholarly works are not directly commissioned for Central Intelligence Agency or Pentagon purposes, they could be (mis)used by such agencies. That some scholars during the Cold War were naive in this respect or believed they could help their subjects by cooperating with government entities is unsurprising. But to hold one responsible for the uses to which others may apply a publicly available work of scholarship, as Price suggests, constitutes more an expression of one's politics than a well-reasoned moral argument.

Price appreciates that at the outset of the Cold War many anthropologists had been molded by their experience in the Second World War, when whatever studies the discipline contributed were in furtherance of defeating mortal enemies. But claiming that government funding for subsequent research led scholars to align their studies with Cold War topics is too crabbed a view of the intellectual history of the times. Although Cold War efforts are the topic of the book, Price's failure to consider how much anthropology was influenced in this period by the civil rights movement, the newfound independence of former colonial countries, and the burgeoning theories of cultural evolution, structuralism, science studies, and symbolic analysis leaves the impression that militarism, nefarious grants, and employment opportunism or career apprehension alone led those he describes to pursue their specific interests. Scholarship may follow the flag, but that does not mean academics read the same meaning or attachments into that act as do the reigning powers. In fact, many of the individuals Price mentions were not even doing anthropology. He rarely tells us how much of the subject they had studied, and some of his most detailed examples—such as Donald Wilbur, who helped plan the overthrow of Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh and whose doctorate was in architectural history—were not anthropologists at all. Price acknowledges that anthropologists in fact contributed little to Cold War efforts, that even government-commissioned studies were constantly ignored, and that in almost no instance did anthropologists do any real harm. Moreover, even when the author acknowledges that "few anthropologists have historically used their professional credentials and fieldwork as covers for espionage" (p. 245), he is able to offer only a single example.

Throughout a book that is based on unprecedented use of little-known sources, Price constantly implies connections while offering almost no solid proof. He gives a fact or two and then adds that...