Threatening Anthropology

McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists

Autor: Price, David H.
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333265
eISBN Pdf: 9780822385684
Lugar de publicación: Durham , Estados Unidos
Año de publicación digital: 2004
Mes: Abril
Páginas: 448
DDC: 301/.0973/09045
Idioma: Ingles

Descripción

A vital reminder of the importance of academic freedom, Threatening Anthropology offers a meticulously detailed account of how U.S. Cold War surveillance damaged the field of anthropology. David H. Price reveals how dozens of activist anthropologists were publicly and privately persecuted during the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s. He shows that it was not Communist Party membership or Marxist beliefs that attracted the most intense scrutiny from the fbi and congressional committees but rather social activism, particularly for racial justice. Demonstrating that the fbi’s focus on anthropologists lessened as activist work and Marxist analysis in the field tapered off, Price argues that the impact of McCarthyism on anthropology extended far beyond the lives of those who lost their jobs. Its messages of fear and censorship had a pervasive chilling effect on anthropological investigation. As critiques that might attract government attention were abandoned, scholarship was curtailed.

Price draws on extensive archival research including correspondence, oral histories, published sources, court hearings, and more than 30,000 pages of fbi and government memorandums released to him under the Freedom of Information Act. He describes government monitoring of activism and leftist thought on college campuses, the surveillance of specific anthropologists, and the disturbing failure of the academic community—including the American Anthropological Association—to challenge the witch hunts. Today the “war on terror” is invoked to license the government’s renewed monitoring of academic work, and it is increasingly difficult for researchers to access government documents, as Price reveals in the appendix describing his wrangling with Freedom of Information Act requests. A disquieting chronicle of censorship and its consequences in the past, Threatening Anthropology is an impassioned cautionary tale for the present.

CONTENTS
Preface
A Note on References
1 A Running Start at the Cold War:Time, Place, and Outcomes
2: Melville Jacobs, Albert Canwell, and the University of Washington Regents:A Message Sent
3 Syncopated Incompetence: The American Anthropological Association’s Reluctanceto Protect Academic Freedom
4 Hoover’s Informer
5 Lessons Learned: Jacobs’s Fallout and Swadesh’s Troubles
6 Public Show Trials: Gene Weltfish and a Conspiracy of Silence
7 Bernhard Stern: ‘‘A Sense of Atrophyamong Those Who Fear’’
8 Persecuting Equality: The Travails of Jack Harris and Mary Shepardson
9 Examining the FBI’s Means and Methods
10 Known Shades of Red: Marxist Anthropologists Who Escaped Public Show Trials
11 Red Diaper Babies, Suspect Agnates,Cognates, and Affines
12 Culture, Equality, Poverty, and Paranoia:The FBI, Oscar Lewis, and Margaret Mead
13 Crusading Liberals Advocating for Racial Justice: Philleo Nash and Ashley Montagu
14 The Suspicions of Internationalists
15 A Glimpse of Post-McCarthyism: FBI Surveillance and Consequences for Activism
16 Through a Fog Darkly: The Cold War’s Impact on Free Inquiry
Appendix: On Using the Freedom of Information Act
Notes
Bibliography
Index