David Price's painstakingly researched and carefully told story of Cold War anthropology is also particularly well timed. When anti-Russian orthodoxy in the United States has grown so strident that a new kind of “red-baiting” chills legitimate disagreement, and when the alarm at Moscow's alleged global propaganda onslaught grows so shrill and myopic that it omits any mention of our own misbehavior, it is salutary to be reminded of the latter. Skeptics of the new “Washington Consensus” on Russia know that, from techniques to undermine undesirable foreign regimes to the tools of modern cyber war, the US has never lagged in “hybrid” weapons nor the will to use them. For the young, in particular, it is instructive to revisit a very recent time when two-thirds of CIA covert operations were either “media and propaganda projects” or efforts to “influence the outcomes of foreign elections” (25–26).
The reader learns about such operations in passing, with Price's main focus being how social science was enlisted in the US government's often-problematic postwar and postcolonial policies in a supporting role. In Price's words, he examines “the ways that military and intelligence agencies quietly shaped the development of anthropology in the United States during the first three decades of the Cold War. Whether hidden or open secrets, these interactions transformed anthropology's development in ways that continue to influence the discipline today” (xi). The government's interest lay in securing social scientists’ help in pacifying and managing postwar, postcolonial populations, and in understanding these peoples’ beliefs, customs, and authority patterns in order to shape those cultures in ways desirable to the new US global mission: toward acceptance of American values and institutions, and away from undesirable nationalist or socialist orientations. Patriotism was sometimes the motivation, but far more often it was money—the manipulation of funding support and research opportunities to an eagerly expanding profession. In a characterization that he repeats often, Price emphasizes: “the dual use nature of this history: showing that anthropologists often pursued questions of their own design, for their own reasons, while operating in specific historical contexts where the overarching military-industrial university complex had its own interests in the knowledge generated by such inquiries” (xiii-xiv).
Many leading figures in wartime and postwar anthropology had no qualms about either the government's Cold-War policies or about compromising academic integrity and independence. The leading professional organization—the American Anthropological Association—later took a more principled stance, but in the 1950s it reflexively complied with such initiatives as the CIA's creation of an extensive database on AAA members (compiled through deception, via a detailed membership survey that was secretly passed on to the CIA), subsequently used for recruiting, surveillance, and other purposes. Price is careful to emphasize the very different context of the early Cold War—a carryover of the wartime sense of patriotism and mission, followed by the fervor of McCarthyism—that made it natural for many anthropologists to approach occupied Japanese, Philippine, Micronesian, and other peoples “as variables to be understood so that they could be altered to suit the needs of American interests” (35). More problematic, yet echoed in fields from physics to rocketry, was the embrace of Nazi-tinged colleagues:
“This decision by the AAA to ignore political differences between using anthropology for campaigns of genocidal fascist tyranny and, arguably, for liberation from such forms of oppression had later consequences for American anthropology. These would include the association's proclivity to sidestep political concerns in favor of ethical considerations in ways that focused on professional “best practices” for fieldwork yet ignored political outcomes of projects using anthropology and anthropologists (64).
Price details numerous fascinating, previously unknown examples of the “dual use” dilemma of anthropology made possible by his tireless research: hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filings, an exhaustive review of association records and professional correspondence, memoirs and interviews, and a most thorough review of the products of that “dual use” anthropology—from academic journal articles to military field manuals and guidebooks for foreign occupiers. Cold War Anthropology is the third in Price's trilogy on the profession (after Anthropological Intelligence and Threatening Anthropology), though written in such a way that it captivates the general reader without requiring much specialized knowledge of anthropology or familiarity with his earlier volumes. From military-administered funding programs to CIA infiltration of private foundations’ grant-issuing boards, the Cold War history of American anthropology resonates with that of other fields of interest to Slavic Review readers: “The most significant difference [was] a shift from anthropologists working mainly on projects following their own interests to anthropologists, if not following the questions of others, then following geographic or topical funding streams” (81).
Others have written about the Cold War's distorting effects on Russian and Soviet studies, such as Stephen Cohen, whose Rethinking the Soviet Experience offers a sharply critical overview.Footnote 1 Price's Cold War Anthropology supplements these and other earlier works with fascinating new details, such as the actions of anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn—founding director of Harvard University's Russian Research Center—who had earlier worked as an intelligence analyst with the Office of War Information. At Harvard, Kluckhohn repaid clandestine CIA funding by guiding his associates toward research projects of special interest to the CIA—in fact, sometimes virtually assigning them at the Agency's request. Kluckhohn applied techniques learned from an earlier CIA-sponsored project that involved interrogating defectors from behind the Iron Curtain to the larger Harvard Refugee Interview Project of the early 1950s. Price has no particular complaint about the methodology of those interviews—save that they were designed to elicit information of use to US intelligence, presumably ignoring other important questions—and focuses his criticism instead on the deception involved. Price faults Kluckhohn, along with his Harvard colleague, sociologist Talcott Parsons, for boasting of having avoided the temptations of McCarthyism when in fact they and their august institution were quite thoroughly compromised; in Kluckhohn's case, he lied to his students, his colleagues, and his interview subjects about the sponsors, the purpose, and the ultimate uses of their research (84–87).
Harvard, MIT, and Michigan, Rockefeller and Ford, CENIS and HRAF, Price's chronicle of the universities compromised, the foundations infiltrated, and the projects aimed at facilitating America's Cold-War policies (increasingly focused on counterinsurgency in Asia and Latin America, as well as shaping public opinion worldwide) is long, detailed, and often chilling. Some examples are fairly well known, from the US Army's secret funding of Project Camelot's research on revolution, to clandestine CIA financing of publishers such as Praeger Press and journals such as Encounter. What will be new to most readers is the sheer scope and magnitude of those efforts to sway public opinion—few dared call it US propaganda—and the hundreds of journalists, editors, publishers, and academics thereby compromised.
And compromised they were, when many such programs were exposed in the 1960s and 1970s. And here one strongly negative legacy of anthropology's “dual use” dilemma is felt to this day, namely the assumption by foreign governments, academies, and publics that American researchers are often—if not usually—agents of intelligence. In fact, “few anthropologists have historically used their professional credentials and fieldwork as covers for espionage. Yet archaeologists and cultural anthropologists have been accused of engaging in spying and rumors of field-based espionage have long circulated” (245), thanks to the quite accurate impression that many were at least indirectly engaged in research for the CIA or the US military. As your reviewer can testify—and I am not alone by any means—this Cold-War legacy impacted broader Russian and East European studies well into the 1980s, and beyond.
Even as he completes his magisterial trilogy, Price worries that a growing number of scholars now reply with a shrug:
Intellectual historians now analyze Harvard's Russian Research Center, acknowledging CIA funding without meaningfully probing its influence . . . or argue that the CIA's covert funding of political and academic movements supported rather than altered intellectual and political trajectories. . . . or interpret Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Geoffrey Gorer's postwar culture and personality work as if they might have freely chosen this exact research path without the enticement of previously unimaginable levels of military funding . . . or find minimal impacts of institutional framing in government-funded ethnographic research (257).
Clearly, beyond the real (or, more often, imagined) compromise of individual academic independence brought by decades of Cold-War deceit is the potential compromise of institutional academic integrity. At a time in US history when dissenters’ loyalty is questioned and lists are once again being drawn up, Price's insistence that conflicts of interest cannot just be brushed away by the subject's promise of probity deserves close attention. His summary may strike many as overheated, but perhaps in time will be seen instead as prescient:
The solutions to these problems are not simple, but acknowledging their existence is a vital step. Anthropology needs metanarratives of power relations that expose recurrent episodes of the weaponization of the field. Part of this metanarrative includes explicit understanding that funds . . . have historically been granted with expectations that gained expertise and knowledge will later be available for national militarized projects, often directed against the people anthropologists study, and those they are generally ethically committed not to harm. Anthropologists must come to grips with the limits of individual agency, acknowledging the unlikelihood that individuals working within agencies devoted to warfare and conquest can meaningfully alter the core functions of these organizations (365).
