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ОглавлениеChapter One: War is a Force that Gives Anthropology Ethics
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Anthropology has always fed between the lines of war. Whether these wars rage hot in the immediate foreground of fieldwork settings or influence the background of funding opportunities, wars and the political concerns of “National Security” have long influenced the development of anthropological theory and practice. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have become increasingly conscious of the ways that knowledge honed from fieldwork was historically used by colonial and military powers against the populations anthropologists share lives with and study. American anthropology’s efforts to grapple with the political and ethical problems associated with warfare have been episodic, occasionally heroic, sometimes timid, and often embarrassingly linked to the whims of market forces as funding sources have recurrently situated individual anthropologists between the needs-of and duties-to those they study.
Although anthropologists have historically lent their skills to a range of military and colonial campaigns, the last hundred years has not been without moments of progress, minor enlightenments, and tangible contributions to social justice movements. During the past half-century, even while the need for anthropologically informed military maneuvers has increased, the fundamental ethical, moral and political issues raised by these activities have periodically forced the discipline to not only critically confront ethical and political questions about what anthropology is and what it is good for, but historically for American anthropology, it has been the abuses of anthropological knowledge in times of war that forced the discipline, in episodic spasms, to develop professional ethics codes.
In a world of political power struggles and military might, knowledge of other cultures has long been recognized as possessing a strategic value. Long before there was even a formal academic discipline of anthropology, politicians and militaries had uses for understanding the language and culture of their enemies. Because of the structural needs of occupations after conquests, basic forms of counterinsurgency have been around far longer than David Galula, Edward Lansdale, Sir Richard Thompson and contemporary counterinsurgency gurus. Sun Tzu understood the dangers of occupations and acknowledged that insurgencies at times lead wise leaders to abandon some occupations. Alexander the Great encouraged his mercenary armies to intermarry with locals, providing them with financial incentives to put down local roots in ways that stabilized the empire, and plenty of other conquerors have understood the basic principles of population centric dominance. The Greek occupation of Ptolemaic Egypt became a sort of historical high water mark in the cynicism of military occupations, as the Greek occupiers calculatingly merged their religious views with local Egyptian beliefs in ways that eased the political scene, allowing the export of goods and profits back to the empire’s core.
But counterinsurgency isn’t just concerned with occupations through forms of indirect rule. At times, counterinsurgency campaigns undermine traditional power structures and traditional economic systems, asserting external economic forces on indigenous political economies. There is nothing modern in recognizing that if one can get enemy populations to give up their traditional means of economic independence and make them dependent upon occupiers for the health or economic wellbeing, one can undermine traditional systems of governance and dominate these populations. These are standard counterinsurgency tactics, and the elements of these tactics can be seen in the Vietnam War’s failed Strategic Hamlets Program as well as contemporary economic reformation projects in Afghanistan undermining poppy production and other elements of the traditional local economy.
To provide but a single pre-anthropology example of historical forms of intercultural counterinsurgency, consider American President Thomas Jefferson’s secret briefing to Congress of January 18, 1803 in which, while secretly asking for $2,500 to fund the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Jefferson described plans to undertake what would later become a staple tactic of Twentieth Century counterinsurgency: undermining the traditional economic systems of enemies and then entrapping them in aggressive market-based economies in which they will have difficulty competing on an equal basis. President Jefferson advised congress that:
The Indian tribes residing within the limits of the U.S. have for a considerable time been growing more & more uneasy at the constant diminution of the territory they occupy, altho’ effected by their own voluntary sales; and the policy has long been gaining strength with them of refusing absolutely all further sale on any conditions, insomuch that, at this time, it hazards their friendship, and excites dangerous jealousies [and] perturbations in their minds to make any overture for the purchase of the smallest portions of their land. A very few tribes only are not yet obstinately in these dispositions. In order peaceably to counteract this policy of theirs, and to provide an extension of territory which the rapid increase of our numbers will call for, two measures are deemed expedient. First, to encourage them to abandon hunting, to apply to the raising stock, to agriculture and domestic manufacture, and thereby prove to themselves that less land & labor will maintain them in this, better than in their former mode of living. The extensive forests necessary in the hunting life will then become useless, & they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means of improving their farms, & of increasing their domestic comforts. Secondly to multiply trading houses among them & place within their reach those things which will contribute more to their domestic comfort then the profession of extensive, but uncultivated wilds, experience & reflection will develop to them the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare & we want, for what we can spare and they want. (Jefferson to Congress 1/18/1803)
Jefferson’s counterinsurgency operation recognized that the US government could provide economic incentives for Indians to become more dependent on raising stock, and therefore “abandoning hunting,” which would open more lands for the US government to claim. This planned destruction of the Indian’s reliance on their traditional economy would necessarily erode cultural cohesion. With time, and a certain amount of armed counterinsurgency, as the forests became “useless” to these displaced peoples, they became increasingly dependent as marginal players trapped as latecomers cornered at the edge of a market economy. The lure of increased “domestic comforts,” in modern times promised by an assortment of economic hitmen, remains a central carrot from Jefferson’s time to the present, and those pitching these schemes are seldom held accountable for their failures. Jefferson’s approach contained seeds of the standard tactics of population dislocation and population control.
We are left to wonder how much smoother Jefferson’s counterinsurgency campaign might have been had President Jefferson dispatched a squadron of applied anthropologists to soften the blow of conquest, offering microloans, helping to relocate settlements, and getting to know the names, lineages and traditional songs of those succumbing to the needs of the Republic. On one level Lewis and Clark’s role as agents in this American expansion westward made them like members of a first generation of development anthropologists selling the promises of modernization to those who would be displaced and damaged by the “progress” to come.
The early formalization of anthropology as a discipline occurred in the mid- to late-nineteenth century in a political economy where a mixture of colonialist gentlemen explorers, missionaries, functionaries at colonial outposts, dilettantes and occasional savants slowly came to understand the ways of the “others” that lived within and at the edges of Empire’s borders. Early anthropologists filled that complex hole of empire’s knowledge base with a useful understanding of culture that was both enlightened and mercenary. Anthropology’s roots grew in the soils of established military might in lands conquered by European powers, often some years after military forces laid conquest. The arrival of anthropologists often followed a progression of arrivals that flowed from infantries, to plantation or mining engineers, missionaries, then finally: anthropologists — these at times being self styled ethnographers working as colonial administrators in the hinterlands of empire. As the British, Dutch, French, and German, etc. empires spread around the globe, national traditions of ethnology and anthropology emerged. The needs of colonialism often required some knowledge of the occupied populations they sought to manage, and anthropology was born. As Talal Asad observed almost forty years ago, “anthropologists can claim to have contributed to the cultural heritage of the societies they study by a sympathetic recording of indigenous forms of life that would otherwise be lost to posterity. But they have also contributed, sometimes indirectly, towards maintaining the structure of power represented by the colonial system” (Asad 1973:17).
The early American history of ethnological studies of Native Americans cannot be told as separate from a shameful history of conquest and genocide; and while many early American ethnographers did not conceptualize their work as being part of a larger history of conquest, the federal agencies which most often employed them (e.g., the Bureau of American Ethnology, Bureau of Ethnology) were organized under the Department of Interior which at times had direct commerce with the U.S. Army; agencies relocating, undermining and controlling Indian populations. Disciplinary ancestors like Major John Wesley Powell often mixed the tasks of cataloging the geography and exploitable natural resources on empire’s frontier in ways that added the ethnographic details of the peoples inhabiting these environments as curiosities rather than integrated natural features.
While anthropologists trace their intellectual roots back in a great variety of directions, I remain struck by the importance of the American tradition quietly launched by James Mooney in the late 19th century. Mooney began his work for the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology even as the Department of Interior and U.S. Army were engaged in actions and policies designed to enact physical and cultural genocide against the native Indian people that Mooney was assigned to study. James Mooney first arrived on the Sioux reservation in 1891 just days after the Seventh Calvary had slaughtered Sioux men, women and children at Wounded Knee. An arrival that forced Mooney to confront the political forces framing and funding his research and to become aware that ethnography is not a neutral act. Recording and reporting cultural information under such circumstances risked making these populations vulnerable. Mooney understood early on that there was no political neutrality for ethnography.
There were mixed motivations guiding Mooney’s bosses at the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ethnology as they sought to make native peoples legible during a period of conquest, but the details of Mooney’s work went against these colonial administrative demands as he produced rich ethnographic reports that instead of providing military and administrative enemies with cultural tools for conquest through counterinsurgency, provided narratives establishing the full humanity, equality, and cultural richness of these peoples who were treated by others as sub-humans without proper culture. Mooney’s detailed work on the Ghost Dance, Peyote Sacraments, and the Sun Dance earned him administrative and Congressional enemies — as well as congressional investigations and sanctions; and though Mooney suffered these hardships he did not betray his work or those he studied (Moses 1984).
Mooney had no professional ethical statements to guide him beyond his own religious and personal understanding of what individuals owed to others; yet while employed by a government actively working to undermine American Indian culture, he chose not to create forms of counterinsurgency or psychological operations directed against those he studied. Though never articulated as a litanized code of ethics, Mooney’s work reveals his ethical commitment to those he lived with and studied — and while the idiosyncratic nature of this understanding was largely personal, it was also professional — even if it would remain uncodified and professionally un-recognized for decades.
I do not fully understand how Mooney came to such an enlightened understanding of his ethical duties to the Indians who allowed him to live amongst them, but I would like to think it was at least in part a result of the simple and profound act this very act of sharing his life through fieldwork’s core performance of participant observation. Shared knowledge, shared meals, shared lives should (yet, always doesn’t) imply if not shared loyalties and trust, then at a minimum: shared internalized understandings.
The American anthropological tradition is not unique in having its disciplinary roots firmly planted in a history of studying populations of others whom governments and other sponsors wished to conquer or shape in ways that would be today loosely recognized as counterinsurgency. The history of early anthropology establishes how British, French, Dutch, and German anthropological traditions were linked with colonial desires in Africa, Asia, Indonesia and elsewhere. While global colonial campaigns set a stage that made the sort of prolonged travel, or work at colonial outposts that birthed Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century anthropology, the social relations of European military dominance influenced the forms of often racialized cultural evolutionary theory that emerged in this colonial context. European and American expansions brought occupations, and ethnology became first a curiosity and then a tool of managers ever concerned with the prospect of native insurgency movements.
In the early Twentieth Century, anthropology programs grew and spread to a number of American universities. At Columbia University, Franz Boas cast a great shadow, teaching a core group of students (including folks like Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Ashley Montagu, etc.) an American form of cultural relativism that championed racial equality, rejected notions of cultural evolution and valued all cultures equally. His insistence of intense linguistic study of the complexity and beauty of Indian languages inevitably taught lessons of respect for these others. By contemporary standards Boas had serious ethical shortcomings. His scandalous involvement in grave robbing, and lying to an Inuit child about the death and burial of his father, testify to this, but Boas’ recognition of the equality of cultures and his insistence that anthropologists should undertake fieldwork, sharing their lives with those they studied, shaped the lives and sensibilities of American anthropologists in ways that warfare would inevitably twist and test.
As the United States waged foreign wars throughout the Twentieth Century, some anthropologists were forced to consider the inherent obligations they had to those they studied. The end of the First World War brought American anthropology a seminal moment raising core questions about anthropologists’ ethical discomfort in using their discipline to further warfare. In 1919 Franz Boas published a letter under the title “Scientists as Spies” in The Nation denouncing four anthropologists for having “prostituted science” during the war when they pretended to conduct archaeological research in order to undertake espionage in Central America for the Office of Naval Intelligence. Boas wrote that these spy-anthropologists “have not only shaken the belief in the truthfulness of science, but they have also done the greatest possible disservice to scientific inquiry. In consequence of their acts every nation will look with distrust upon the visiting foreign investigator who wants to do honest work, suspecting sinister designs. Such action has raised a new barrier against the development of international friendly cooperation” (Boas 1919). Two weeks after his letter was published, Boas was censured by the American Anthropological Association (AAA). The irony of the AAA’s 1919 vote to censure Boas was that the Association accused him of abusing his position for political ends. This was not a moment when the discipline was interested in questioning its relationship to the larger economic and political world in which it was enmeshed, much less to develop ethical codes or principles championing disclosure of sponsorship, or obtaining voluntary informed consent. Boas’ censure sent clear messages to any anthropologists interested in questioning who or what anthropology should serve.
Before the Second World War, there was a surprising lack of formal or informal concern with basic political or ethical questions relating to anthropology. Even basic practices such as using pseudonyms to protect research participants was so foreign that when Margaret Mead and her then husband Reo Fortune both studied the same Omaha Indian community, Mead’s book used a “pseudonym of the Antler Tribe, to shield the feelings of the individuals and to give no affront to the tribal pride” (Mead 1932:16), while her husband’s book fully identified the same town as Macy, Nebraska, its real name. Issues of power differentials between researchers and “research subjects” were seldom discussed in ethnographies, even by anthropologists who held otherwise progressive political views. Many anthropologists adopted a research stance that valued the discovery of scientific truths over concerns for the well-being of those they studied.
Without even a loose set of ethical standards, it was easy for anthropologists to be swayed to set aside even basic standards of decency in the quest of gaining new knowledge. A list of abusive anthropological practices during these early years would be a long one. The looting of sacred objects for museums and private collections was widespread, voluntary informed consent was rare, Boas and others secretly looted native grave sites, Leslie White bribed members of an Acoma Pueblo village to disclose sacred secrets, John Peabody Harrington once sent an emergency telegram demanding that a dying Indian elder (who had served as a linguistic informant) be dosed with opium to keep him alive until Harrington could travel to his side in order to complete a word list he had begun compiling, and so on.
While anthropologists’ interactions with warfare would eventually cause them to establish (and later revise) American anthropology’s formal ethics codes, it was the more mundane interactions with research participants and communities that showed most anthropologists the need for ethical standards. Because Pre-World War II anthropology was a minor discipline with a few scattered university departments and museum anthropologists mostly collecting artifacts and cultural data, not as part of large coordinated projects, but as individual efforts to collect cultural information for its own sake, it is easy to understand how these codes did not develop or become formalized in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Anthropologists were free agents, collecting information that interested them, often using their own funds to finance their fieldwork. Before the war, there was not much systemic appreciation of the uses to which anthropology could be put, or of the impacts anthropologists left simply by conducting fieldwork. But like many other elements of American life, the war changed all that.
Like other Americans, American anthropologists enlisted and served in a wide variety of capacities during the Second World War. Anthropologist Murray Wax recalled that at Berkeley, “after Pearl Harbor, Alfred Kroeber came to the departmental common room and encouraged the students and junior faculty by declaring, ‘We will show them what anthropology can do!’ Indeed, anthropologists recruited themselves” (Wax 2002:2). Suddenly anthropologists weren’t just useless campus nerds; the military soon realized that they needed pieces of anthropology’s skill set: things like language skills, customs, geographical knowledge of the others who were now enemies. In this war social scientists were harnessed at new levels as intelligence analysts, propagandists, guerilla insurgents, language instructors, jungle survival specialists, saboteurs, foot soldiers, officers, and spies.
Given anthropology’s geographical, cultural and linguistic expertise, anthropologists had vital sources of information for commanders and American troops fighting their way northward from New Guinea, through Micronesia towards the Japanese homeland — and throughout Africa, southern and eastern Asia and Europe. Anthropologists scouted for the needed natural resources like petroleum, magnesium, tin, and rubber in Central and South America — sometimes lying about their intentions while posing as fieldworkers; at least one of the spies that Boas had criticized during World War One, reprised his role of archaeologist spy in Peru (Price 2000). Some anthropologists formed secret and quasi-secret agencies like the Ethnogeographic Board (meeting in the Smithsonian’s castle) and the “M-Project” (secretly meeting in the Library of Congress to generate fantastical scenarios for relocating refugees at the war’s end), while others worked in the War Relocation Authority camps detaining Japanese American citizens (Price 2008).
American anthropologists weren’t the only anthropologists contributing to the global war. British, German, French, Japanese, and anthropologists from other nations contributed their cultural, geographical and linguistic knowledge to their nations during the war. In From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich, Gretchen Schafft broke a deep silence surrounding the details of Nazi anthropologists, documenting how anthropometric research, measuring Germans and others, was adapted and used to justify Nazi policies (Schafft 2007). Schafft raised serious questions not only about the political contexts determining the uses and abuses of anthropology, but she documents anthropology’s own blind-spots. Schafft’s research into Joseph Mengele’s formal anthropological training, reveals that the anthropologist with the highest name recognition in all of history was not Margaret Mead, but was instead Joseph Mengele. That most anthropologists have no idea that Mengele was formally trained in anthropology is a small but significant monument to the ways that the discipline has divorced itself from its historical interactions with power.
American anthropologists at times also worked on disturbing war projects. One OSS study sought to identify specific biological differences among the Japanese that could be exploited with biological weapons. Another OSS project was designed to destroy food sources for the Japanese homeland, hoping to use ethnographic knowledge to refine techniques of terror. Some anthropological projects used newly developed applied anthropological methods to manipulate studied populations (at home and abroad) in ways that troubled some of these anthropologists at the time and at times subverted democratic movements. These applications of wartime anthropology with few limits led anthropologist Laura Thompson to publicly write of these concerns in 1944, asking what would become of such an anthropology without limits, and wanting to know “are practical social scientists to become technicians for hire to the highest bidder?” (1944:12).
It was the Nuremberg Trials after the war that provided anthropology and all the human and social sciences the basis of their modern ethic codes. The Nuremburg Code insisted that scientists studying human beings (in war and peace) must obtain voluntary informed consent, must avoid causing mental and physical suffering, must protect research subjects, must use qualified personnel, and must give research subjects the power to end the studies when risks appear. While it was Nazi atrocities, many of which were conducted not simply as acts of cruelty, but to gain valuable information to assist their war effort (e.g. their lethal hypothermia studies) that led to the development of this first modern ethical code, it would transform post-war research in public and private settings.
As a direct result of its members’ experiences in World War II, in 1948 the Society for Applied Anthropology articulated the first formalized American anthropological code of ethics. This code stressed that the “anthropologist must take responsibility for the effects of his recommendations, never maintaining that he is merely a technician unconcerned with the ends toward which his applied scientific skills are directed” (Mead et al. 1949:20). It stated that, “the applied anthropologist should recognize a special responsibility to use his skill in such a way as to prevent any occurrence which will set in motion a train of events which involves irreversible losses of health or the loss of life to individuals or groups or irreversible damage to the natural productivity of the physical environment” (Mead et al. 1949:21).
It was no accident that it was the applied anthropologists’ professional society, and not the larger, highly academic AAA, that first developed an ethics code. The experiences and traumas of the Second World War forced these anthropologists to take a hard look at what had been and what could be done with their work. The war also left many anthropologists concluding that the military frequently did not listen to their analysis because it went against the institutional assumptions of the agencies which sought their advice. During the war, the academic journal of the AAA continued to publish articles about obscure kinship systems and carry on lofty theoretical debates, but Applied Anthropology carried articles detailing the logistics of imprisoning Japanese Americans, wartime labor issues, and forms of social engineering in service of the war, and once the guns of war fell silent those who had been drawn into contributing anthropology so directly to this fight started thinking hard about what it all meant, and what limits should exist.
World War II taught anthropologists to work on directed research projects not of their own design, and the Cold War’s showers of previously unimaginable public and private funds for anthropological research shifted anthropological imaginations in ways aligned with geopolitics. The early Cold War brought new lucrative federal funding programs for foreign language study, and Area Study Centers (adopting and spreading the interdisciplinary approach to regional studies developed at the OSS during the war) mixed a new wealth of public and private funds for anthropologists to study the Underdeveloped World at the center of Cold War politics. During the Cold War, the CIA and other intelligence agencies used funding fronts, through either agency controlled dummy foundations or by channeling research monies to “useful” research projects through bona fide research foundations without the recipient’s knowledge. These foundations are known as “pass-throughs” or funding fronts. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. Congress’ Church Committee determined that during the mid-1960s such maneuvers allowed the CIA to manipulate about half the grants made for international research in the USA. For the most part these were unwitting interactions (Church Committee 1976:182).
Uncounted Cold War anthropologists quietly passed through the revolving door between the academy and intelligence agencies with little notice or concern by their colleagues. Anthropologists covered the Third World, and while most anthropologists were doing the exact academic research they claimed they were, some anthropologists had other agendas. In the early Cold War Frank Hibbin used fieldwork as a cover to secretly plant devices to monitor Chinese atomic bomb tests. During this same period, the AAA Executive Board covertly provided the CIA with a master roster of their membership, including language abilities, foreign contacts, and geographical specialties (Price 2003). Sometimes anthropologists were sponsored by funding fronts and didn’t even know that their sponsors were actually the CIA, such as when anthropologists writing about stress in different cultures were funded by the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA front working on the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual (Price 2007). Through such means anthropologists and other social scientists became unwitting CIA laboratory mules examining questions of mutual interest while earning money and advancing their academic careers. Many anthropologists were oblivious to the political context in which they worked, which Laura Nader characterized the period as “sleepwalking” through the history of anthropology (Nader 1997).
In 1964, the U.S. Army’s Project Camelot sought to use anthropologists and sociologists to study patterns of Third World social upheaval and revolution. Project Camelot planned to use anthropologists’ and sociologists’ research to develop counterinsurgency tactics to quell uprisings (democratic or otherwise) in Latin America. When the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung was contacted in a futile effort to recruit him for Camelot’s Chilean counterinsurgency program, he publicly exposed the project. A sizable public uproar followed and soon the AAA began scrutinizing programs designed to use social science to inform counterinsurgency.
With anthropologists’ outrage, growing suspicions in the international community, public scrutiny and academic criticism, Project Camelot never got off the ground. As Marshall Sahlins wrote at the time, “as a tactic of fomenting Latin American unrest and anti-North American sentiment, Camelot would be the envy of any Communist conspiracy. We have heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy; here was the self-fulfilling research proposal” (Sahlins 1967:73). The American Anthropological Association reacted to Camelot by establishing a committee led by Ralph Beals that wrote a 1967 report on “Background Information on Problems of Anthropological Research and Ethics.” The report identified many of the fundamental ethical principles to be articulated in the AAA’s first ethics code four years later.
Project Camelot was a flashpoint for academic anger in the mid-1960s, but it was but one of many counterinsurgency programs drawing on anthropologists. Anthropologists worked on Strategic Hamlet Program in Vietnam, and were beginning to work on a number of so-called “Modernization Programs” managed by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other agencies which had rationales similar to those articulated by Thomas Jefferson in his secret congressional briefing. Anthropologists working for RAND in Vietnam supported a number of rural agricultural counterinsurgency programs. In the 1960s, military strategists and intelligence analysts suddenly rediscovered the value of anthropology, and began dreaming that culture might hold answers to their military problems. The Special Operations research Office (SORO) and its cousin-organization CINFAC (Counterinsurgency Information Analysis) published a whole series of crazy sounding (and reading) papers on counterinsurgency related topics like the 1964 classic, “Witchcraft, Sorcery, Magic and Other Psychological Phenomena and Their Implications on Military and Paramilitary Operations in the Congo,” or CINFAC’s Staff “An Ethnographic Summary of the Ethiopian Provinces of Harar and Sidamo,” and a series of counterinsurgency related documents. The military and CIA were in over their head with a mix of overt and covert operations around the world, and they held out hopes that “culture” was the panacea for the forms of social control they envisioned.
For many American anthropologists of the mid-1960s, it was this prospect of using anthropology for counterinsurgency that raised the most fundamental ethical and political questions about applying anthropology to the needs of warfare. Using anthropology to alter and undermine indigenous cultural movements cut against the grain of widely shared anthropological assumptions about the rights of cultures and people to determine their own destiny. In 1968 a full-page ad for a Vietnam War PYSOP Counterinsurgency position appearing in the back of the American Anthropologist journal led over eight hundred anthropologists to sign a statement protesting the running of this ad in the American Anthropologist. Eric Wolf, Robert Murphy, Marvin Harris, Mort Fried, Dell Hymes, and Harold Conklin later wrote a policy forbidding the Association from accepting advertisements for employment that produced secretive reports. These border incursions by military and intelligence agencies pushed the AAA to undertake steps that led them closer to drafting its first ethics code. And while the Association leadership strove to frame members concerns in terms of ethics, the political issues raised by using anthropology for counterinsurgency drove much of the debate.
In 1967 a self-identified “Radical Caucus” of anthropologists was organized, and using grassroots techniques it seized political power at the AAA’s annual meetings, drawing massive crowds to the sessions they organized, flooding the annual business meetings with caucus members who used the meetings to push through political resolutions against anthropological contributions to the war, and supporting a broad platform of progressive issues ranging from anti-discrimination policies and calling for the establishment of an ethics code, to calling on the association to provide childcare at the annual meetings. This movement successfully pressed the AAA’s Board to draft an ethics code (known as the Principles of Professional Responsibility) that mandated members “do no harm,” disclose funding sources and uses of research, and forbid covert research and the production of secret reports.
In 1970 a graduate student at UCLA stole documents from the files of anthropologist Michael Moerman. These documents established that Moerman and other anthropologists involvement in counterinsurgency operations in Thailand. Copies of these stolen documents were sent to Eric Wolf, the chair of the AAA’s Ethics Committee, and to a radical newspaper, The Student Mobilizer. After Eric Wolf publicly questioned the propriety of this counterinsurgency work, the AAA Executive Board harshly criticized Wolf, and Eric Wolf resigned as Chair of the Ethics Committee. There were highly charged debates between anthropologists across the country, and the AAA Board appointed an independent committee chaired by Margaret Mead to investigate these matters (Wakin 1993).
But the Mead Committee’s report was a disaster. When the committee submitted its report in late 1971, their findings were seen as a cover-up by many of the AAA membership because the report focused most of its criticism not on the anthropologists engaged in counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia, but on Ethics Committee chairman Wolf for making judgments without affording the accused anthropologists due process and for taking actions beyond those procedurally identified in the AAA bylaws and the Ethics Committee’s charge. The Radical Caucus packed the 1971 AAA Council meeting and used their numbers to seize control of the agenda, and though the AAA leadership had not wanted the report to be approved or rejected, a motion was made, seconded and adopted which rejected the Mead Report. But more significant than the rejection of the Mead Report was that all the commotion and anger over the weaponization of anthropology in the aborted Camelot Project and Southeast Asia solidified the AAA membership’s vote to adopt the Principles of Professional Responsibility, the AAA’s first Code of Ethics, in a vote that pushed by the political concerns of warfare.
The AAA’s 1971 Principles of Professional Responsibility unambiguously declared that anthropologists should not conduct covert research, should not issue secret reports (to governmental agencies or anyone else) and must work to use pseudonyms to protect the identities and well-being of those they studied. This 1971 code clarified that anthropologists’ primary loyalties were to those they studied. In the immediate sense, the establishment of the 1971 AAA Code of Ethics was a disciplinary reaction to CIA and Pentagon counterinsurgency efforts in the Vietnam War; but in the larger sense, it was also the product of a growing awareness of the problems and concerns raised when anthropology is used not only for warfare, but in any interactions between anthropology and research participants.
While war brought anthropology ethics, in some sense, military and intelligence agencies’ temporary neglect of the discipline contributed to a weakening these ethical proclamations. During the 1980s, as the pressing concerns of abuses in wartime were replaced by market-driven concerns over responsibilities to sponsors; concerns that included loosening prohibitions over secretive reports or reports containing what industry termed “proprietary data.” Shifts in anthropology’s political economy brought growing desires to produce proprietary reports for industry in the 1980s, which spawned successful efforts to loosen the AAA’s Code of Ethics to allow for more secrecy.
This shift troubled many university-based anthropologists because it inverted appropriate relationships between professional ethics and desires to produce or control knowledge. The 1990 relaxation of the AAA’s Code of Ethics allowing the production of proprietary, secretive, reports, occurred for reasons of commerce as increasing number of anthropologists worked outside of universities in corporate or governmental settings, but it would be the re-militarized America following the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 that demonstrated how these changes expressed anthropology’s commitments and responsibilities during times of war.
President Bush’s wars at home, Afghanistan and Iraq brought new uses for anthropology and anthropologists, many of these engagements occurred without ethical complications, while others, especially those involving counterinsurgency went far beyond what the previous generation of anthropologists would considered ethical uses of anthropology. Increasing numbers of anthropologists responded to militarized calls in ways that viewed anthropological ethics as a luxury not to be afforded by those needing anthropology’s ethnographic knowledge for warfare. The clearest expression of these views came from anthropologist Montgomery McFate, who openly sought to militarize anthropology with the development of embedded Counterinsurgency teams known as Human Terrain Teams. Doctor McFate led the charge to recruit anthropologists, bluntly admitting that “despite the fact that military applications of cultural knowledge might be distasteful to ethically inclined anthropologists, their assistance is necessary” (McFate 2005:37). Rather than confronting the complexity of ethical relationships, McFate’s Human Terrain Teams simply ignored them.
Post 9/11 efforts to militarize anthropology lean on false historical narratives that construct unrealistic interpretations of the possibility of individuals changing entrenched military structures, and an abandonment of normative understandings of professional ethics. The Pentagon, White House, and military contractors painted pictures of Human Terrain Teams as “armed social workers.” But using anthropology for counterinsurgency perverts the discipline’s potential; and the Human Terrain Program took the research of other ethnographers and applied it for occupations in ways that took the science or art of ethnography and resold it as a sort of social science pornography.
But Ethics can be a Force that Allows Anthropology to Avoid Politics
Somewhere between 1971 and today, American anthropologists lost their collective strong sense of outrage over the discipline being so nakedly used for counterinsurgency. Part of this loss of outrage comes with the degeneration of historical memory as fewer Americans know the history of the CIA’s legacy of assassinations, coups and death squads and a history of undermining democratic movements harmful to the interests of American elites. The increasing corporatization of university campuses over the past decades has reduced expectations of academic independence, and has left under-funded departments willing to consider anything that promises to provide funding. Post-9/11 America has become so fervently militarized that many anthropologists privately questioning these developments remain publicly silent because they fear a mob response should Fox News target them as unpatriotic intellectual snobs. Today, news of anthropologists’ involvement in counterinsurgency programs still mobilizes a core group of scholars, but the discipline as a whole refrains from stating outright opposition to anthropologically informed counterinsurgency. The growing militarism of American social science since 2001 slowly raised concerns among a large number of anthropologists.
In 2006, these developments pressed the AAA to form a commission, of which I was a member, charged with investigating the issues raised by anthropologists’ engagements with military, intelligence and national security agencies; and this commission chose to delineate the ethical issues raised by these engagements (AAA 2007 & 2009). While this examination of professional ethics provided some guidance to the discipline, the Association’s inability to critique the political issues leaves the primary concerns of many anthropologists unaddressed.
One way that these political issues were addressed was with the formation of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists by a group of colleagues and myself in 2007 helped focus political and ethical opposition to counterinsurgency and the militarization of anthropology. Anthropologist Terry Turner drew upon widespread concerns over the increasing weaponization of anthropology to press the AAA to restore language in the Code of Ethics prohibiting secretive research. Some anthropologists have argued that it is “unfortunate” that revisions of the AAA’s Code of Ethics is occurring during a time marked by active warfare — the implication being that political or emotional factors stand to override objective rationality. Such arguments act as if political vacuums existed in nature, laboratories or anywhere. Anthropology’s consideration of ethics has always been pushed by warfare — and after 9/11, the mercenary nature of counterinsurgency necessarily drives anthropological discussions of ethics.
In 2008, the AAA membership voted to restore general prohibitions against secrecy by adding a section to the Association’s ethics code stating that: “anthropologists should not withhold research results from research participants when those results are shared with others” (AAA Code of Ethics VI, 2). Human Terrain Systems, other militarized forms of anthropology, as well as pressures and changes in applied and non-applied forms of anthropology led the AAA Executive Board in late 2008 to appoint an ad hoc committee charged with revising the Association’s Code of Ethics (at the time of this writing, I am a member of this committee). Obama’s wars and increasing militarization of society casts shadows over this undertaking — but just how these shadows will influence these revisions to the ethics code remains unclear. While the issues addressed by anthropological ethics codes must address routine anthropological activities, war remains the force that pushes the importance of these issues to the fore.
While professional associations like the AAA have historically taken political stances on some issues (most generally dealing with matters of social equality, including statements on race and marriage), and adopted policies linking the discipline to supporting the Second World War, there remains a great resistance to confronting the ways that disciplinary ethics are linked to the political context in which anthropology is practiced. Although the rank and file membership of the AAA have adopted resolutions condemning particular unpopular wars or military actions (the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, etc.), the Association remains skittish in adopting stances on the uses of anthropology in non-defensive wars of aggression, or wars of imperialism. Instead, professional associations like the AAA are pressured to keep the institutional focus on delineating ethical, not political, practices.
On the surface, these distinctions between ethical and political concerns make a certain amount of sense if you follow the logic that professional ethics have legitimate concerns with establishing “best practices.” But this reasoning stops short of addressing fundamental issues ranging from the inconsistency of associations supporting some political causes (e.g., racial equality, the Second World War) and not others, and it fails to address just how problematic notions of “best practices” are if they don’t include basic political stances like opposing imperialism, neo-colonialism, and supporting the rights of nations to self determination. While professional associations like the AAA, often embrace doctrines of universal human rights (the AAA does), such positions can insolate organizations from adopting positions on specific issues.
These distinctions between ethics and politics limit the critiques that develop within professional associations. Such distinctions mean the difference in organizations, like the AAA, opposing the Human Terrain program’s use of anthropologists for ethical reasons (because it does not obtain voluntary informed consent, endangers studied populations etc.), or opposing it for political reasons (because it assists the American military in an unjust project of empire, occupation, and exploitation). As long as professional associations limit these discussions to the realm of ethics, and avoid addressing these political issues embedded in conducting anthropological research in a nation engaging in global military expansion, the critiques of these associations must be limited to critiques of manners and techniques, not of the underlying political program employing anthropology for conquest.
Professional associations focusing on ethics while setting aside politics, ignore the larger political issues of how anthropological engagements with military, intelligence, national security sectors relate to US foreign policy, neo-colonial military campaigns, the Global War on Terror and a growing military reliance on anthropologically informed counterinsurgency. But addressed or not, these political issues remain at the forefront of many anthropologists’ concerns over these issues, even while their professional associations generally limit their focus on ethics.
Professional associations like the AAA hope to position themselves as politically neutral, but there is no political neutrality. There is only silence or engagement on these issues — and silence most usually means acquiescence to national policies, which is itself a dangerous political position. The AAA avoids addressing the political meaning of using anthropology in military contexts that include the occupation and conquest of the peoples anthropologists work with and study. It is as if some anthropologists believe that addressing these issues would undermine the scientific (or humanistic) nature of our work — yet the measures of anthropologists’ work are generally measured by criteria such as reliability, validity, rigor of method etc., criteria that need not be undermined by directly addressing the political project that seeks anthropologists, our data and methods.
Given the Obama Administration’s increased reliance on counterinsurgency’s soft power in Afghanistan, the political and ethical issues raised by anthropologists manipulating other cultures in ways aligned with US foreign policy will grow in importance. Anthropologists need to resist limiting their critiques to issues of ethics and bring the political issues of domination to the fore of their critiques.
