Emilie Bickerton

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION Emilie Bickerton on Cultural Anthropology's FBI Files THREATENING ANTHROPOLOGY: MCCARTHYISIVl AND THE FBI'S SURVEILLANCE OF ACTIVIST ANTHROPOLOGISTS BY DAVID H. PRICE DURHAM, NC: DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 448 PAGES. $24.

LESLIE A. WHITE: EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION IN ANTHROPOLOGY BY WILLIAM J. PEACE LINCOLN: NEBRASKA UNIVERSITY PRESS. 320 PAGES. $55.

The French anthropologist Marcel Griaule described his role as ethnographer as "sniffing out social facts ... often comparable to that of a detective or examining magistrate. The fact is the crime, the interlocutor the guilty party; all the society's members are accomplices." Dispensing with "facts" this is an appropriate allegory of the FBI's approach to anthropologists during the McCarthy era. Under Griaule, "ethnographic provocation" openly acknowledged the colonial stratification of society that allowed anthropologists authority to investigate. etait une fois: Fieldwork was never so straightforward. Today, anthropology's past as historical accomplice to colonialism is well documented, if not somewhat excessively for present students of the discipline, forced to carry the weight of reflexivity and embarrassed consciences. Other allegiances also provoke rosy cheeks: associations with espionage, collaboration with national governments during the world wars. Margaret Mead applied her anthropological training at the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits (1941-54); Ruth Benedict's study of the Japanese, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), received government funding to provide insight into the otherwise impenetrable society of the enemy; and both women worked at the RAND Corporation on sponsored studies of Soviet personality types.

Mead and Benedict were part of the second generation of American cultural anthropologists. In contrast to the Durkheimian sociological functionalism underpinning much European anthropology, the roots of the discipline's American tradition lie in the historical particularism of German Romanticism. The German immigrant Franz Boas applied Herder's concept of Volksgeist to the study of cultures (rather than Culture), which, he argued, emerged and developed by a process of diffusion, not evolution. The ethnographer must stay close to the ground, collect data from a specific community, and dispense with overarching classificatory or comparative projects. Transferring the explanation of difference from race to culture, Boas argued that every culture is equal, but different, and must be understood on its own terms. These were the foundations of cultural anthropology, and at the beginning of the twentieth century they presented a case for racial equality, albeit one justified by cultural relativism-unhappy bedfellows that perdure in the discipline.

Students of Boas continued in a similar vein in the 19405 and '505, but the radical and liberal views would be confounded in the cold-war climate of suspicion and surveillance. This period continues to elicit a stream of murky revelations about state practices and high-profile HUAC informants, but the era's impact on the work of anthropologists makes up only a slim chapter in the history of the discipline-one now buffeted (perhaps to breaking point) by David H. Price's Threatening Anthropology. Drawing extensively from FBI documents obtained (often with difficulty) under the Freedom of Information Act, Price recounts the scope of the bureau's interest in anthropologists during the period as well as the public trials many underwent. The discipline, he suggests, was particularly susceptible to FBI attention given its dominant concerns at the time. By shifting from biological to cultural understandings of difference, anthropologists presented a direct challenge to the subordinate position of the African-American and minority populations in the US.

The Boasian perspective that frames Threatening Anthropology lays it open to a critique made by the subject of William J. Peace's biography: Leslie A. White. Based at the University of Michigan, White worked tirelessly against the particularist Boasian approach to fieldwork. It made a "fetish of induction" and suffered from a "paucity of theory ... alongside a plethora of data." Instead, White sought to revive the out-of-favor evolutionary theory originally advocated by Lewis Henry Morgan (whose biography White left unfinished on his death in 1975) in Ancient Society (1877). White's theory of cultural change-which in The Science of Culture (1949) he summarized as the greater amount of energy harnessed per capita equals the greater degree of cultural development-also drew on Marx's materialist notion of history and commodity exchange. In his forward to Marshall Sahlins's Evolution of Culture (1959), White referred to Engels's Origin of Family, Private Property., and the State (1884) to understand revolution, social change, and primitive society through evolutionary theory.

In 1954, White was placed on the FBI's security Index, though he was never brought to trial and experienced comparatively little scrutiny. Considering his theoretical tenets and pronouncements, White's late addition may appear surprising, though it is clear he was conscious of the risks of his associations, eventually burning the majority of his socialist-leaning writings. Despite this self-censorship, White's work frequently provoked hostility, especially from the church. he was also the subject of the media frenzy that followed his now-famous paper at the 1957 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. In a speech charting the evolution of religion, White alluded to the launch that year of Sputnik: "A monarchical cultural system is not likely to have a bear or a feathered serpent for a god. And a cultural system that can launch earth satellites can dispense with gods entirely." It is likely, given White's animosity toward religion, that he was voicing his approval of Soviet society and its technological and cultural sophistication. While unaware of White's writings for the socialist publication Weekly People (thirty-one articles, letters, and miscellaneous notes between 1931 and 1946, under the pseudonym John Steel), the FBI did know of his 192.9 trip to the Soviet Union and received information on his "Communistic tendencies" in 1953 from a still-unnamed source. That anthropologists with comparatively less explicit "red" connections were subjected to intense, if not careerchanging, surveillance, such as Ruth Landes, Richard Morgan (fired from the Ohio State Museum), Gene Weltfish, and Bernhard Stern (both of whom were brought to trial before Senator McCarthy), does indicate that the real threat for the US state was perceived to be as much from radicals as from reds.

Ironically, the FBI's lack of interest in White was more likely a product of the vulgar Marxism his evolutionary theory articulated; with revolution inscribed in nature, the motivation for actual mobilization was entirely diminished. Disengagement rather than radicalism is the result. The merit of White's attack on cultural relativism, demanding more theory and a broader understanding of cultures to allow for the comparative method, is weakened by the strictly evolutionary understanding of human action, cultural change, and social revolution: "It is not, of course, that knowledge will change the essential nature of civilization or alter the course of its development.... But with knowledge and understanding of social forces and laws, mankind could go forward intelligently with eyes open, instead of stumbling along the road of social evolution in blindness." Knowledge conceived of in such terms renders activism-when change is not man-made but inscribed in the logic of evolution-futile.

For White, the greatest obstacle was the intellectual opposition of his peers, whereas others suffered from the broader threats to academic freedom. Price makes this clear by revealing the nature of FBI investigations and assessing the role played by the American Anthropological Association. Transcripts from the trial of Columbia's Weltfish, for example, show McCarthy's specific concern over the implications made (pertaining to the social construction of race) in The Races of Mankind (1943), which Weltfish coauthored with Benedict. In addition, an exchange between the prosecution and Bernhard Stern reflects a lack of rigor in their investigative methods-skimming indexes for "Marx" or "USSR"-and an ignorance of the format of scholarly edited volumes. The "threatening" potential of anthropology as a discipline was thus jeopardized by these conservative strategies to maintain the status quo. Through the FBI's focus on social activists ("building red family trees" by tracking those with a family background in activism such as Landes) rather than radical theorists, the discipline suffered a "culling" of interested minds and a curtailment of critical research and thinking. Price, joining other American anthropologists, including Laura Nader, argues that the legacy of the cold war remains in the discipline today, having encouraged a reflexive turn inward; there is now a reinvention of "armchair anthropology," with increasing analysis "of the tropes of agency with language of self-referential alienation."

A particularly poor player during the period was the American Anthropological Association, which failed to investigate adequately, let alone defend, the charges made against its scholars (though in the '505 new president Ralph Beals injected "courageous aggressiveness" into the defense of anthropologists). In part, its postwar reorganization into six different scientific societies-an attempt to reflect American anthropology's subfield structure and secure new government funds offered for research-hindered its ability to act with unified conviction. The AAA claimed it was a professional body not equipped to engage in political affairs, but this stance was in itself political. The association fell silent when Morris Swadesh, Melville Jacobs, and Richard Morgan were persecuted. Forged ties with the War Department, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency expose, compellingly, its allegiance with the US government rather than with the free-thinking academy. An allegiance confirmed in 1949, when AAA committee member George P. Murdock wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, offering to act as an FBI informant from within the association.

Secrecy and lies-enemies of truth and knowledge. White is notorious for using the "secretive method," which involved scheming, trickery, and "scenting out" willing informants from an ethnographer living outside the community under study. When contrasted with Griaule's ethnographie verite, the two techniques reveal how field work by European and US ethnographers was shaped by the sociopolitical circumstances each worked in. As Griaule proudly pitched his tent at the center, White hid. Open hostility from native groups was a reaction to the US government's 19208 acculturation schemes, which were failing to integrate the minority populations, provoking instead further isolation and a retreat to traditional life. Any approaching white face was thus treated with vehement suspicion.

With the release of the first substantial biography of Leslie A. White and an account of the impact of McCarthyism on American anthropology, ethical and theoretical entanglements past and present remain at the forefront of anthropological debate. However, a defense, as that presented by Price, of anthropology on the grounds of its cultural relativism and dedication to equality is an impossible bind, and one that is especially threatening to academic freedom. Currently it is cultural relativism precisely that provides the justification for the "protection" of culture in debates over indigenous rights and intellectual property. Defending academic freedom requires the expunging of relativism latent in the calls for safeguarding knowledge systems deemed irredeemably different, presented as fragile, requiring protection from outside dissemination or exploitation. It is this which flirts with a present "apartheid of the mind."

[Author Affiliation]

Emilie Bickerton is a London-based writer.