Threatening Anthropology

Price David H. Price

Description

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.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• History of the Americas
• Activism
• Anthropology
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822385684
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T H R E A T E N I N G

A N T H R O P O L O G Y

T H R E A T E N I N G

A N T H R O P O L O G Y

McCarthyism and

the FBI’s Surveillance

of Activist Anthropologists

D A V I D H . P R I C E

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Durham and London 

© 2 0 0 4 D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S All rights

reserved. Printed in the United States of America on

acid-free paper  Typeset in Carter & Cone Galliard by

Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Designed by Amy Ruth

Buchanan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Epigraph fromTimequakeby Kurt Vonnegut copyright

©  by Kurt Vonnegut. Used by permission of G. P.

Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Lyrics from ‘‘Your Next Bold Move’’ by Ani DiFranco

copyright ©  by Righteous Babe Music. All rights

reserved. Used by permission.

F O R M Y C H I L D R E N M I L O A N D N O R A

May they share the insight, courage, and conviction

of conscience of Bernhard, Earle, Richard, Jack, Mary,

Melville, Gene, Morris, Kathleen, Philleo, and the

many brave others whose stories are recounted here

The widespread revulsion inspired even now,

and perhaps forever, by the wordCommunism

is a sane response to the cruelties and stupidi-

ties of the dictators of the USSR, who called

themselves, hey presto,Communists, just as

Hitler called himself, hey presto, aChristian.

To the children of the Great Depression,

however, it still seems a mild shame to outlaw

from polite thought, because of the crimes of

tyrants, a word that in the beginning described

for us nothing more than a possibly reasonable

alternative to the Wall Street crapshoot.

Yes, and the wordSocialistwas the second

SinUSSR, so good-bye,Socialismalong with

Communism, good-bye to the soul of Eugene

Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana, where the

moonlight’s shining bright along the Wabash.

—K U R T V O N N E G U T

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C O N T E N T S

Preface xi

A Note on References xvii

A Running Start at the Cold War: Time, Place, and Outcomes 

Melville Jacobs, Albert Canwell, and the University of Washington Regents: A Message Sent 

Syncopated Incompetence: The American Anthropological Association’s Reluctance to Protect Academic Freedom 

Hoover’s Informer 

Lessons Learned: Jacobs’s Fallout and Swadesh’s Troubles 

Public Show Trials: Gene Weltfish and a Conspiracy of Silence 

Bernhard Stern: ‘‘A Sense of Atrophy among Those Who Fear’’ 

Persecuting Equality: The Travails of Jack Harris and Mary Shepardson 