Project Minerva and the Militarization of AnthropologyAuthor(s): Hugh GustersonSource: The Radical Teacher, No. 86 (Winter 2009), pp. 4-16Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20710511 .
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Project Minerva and the
Militarization of Anthropology By Hugh Gusterson
fi
ROCKY MOUNTAIN ARSENAL, BOMBS IN CRATE, 1965 HISTORIC AMERICAN ENGINEERING RECORD
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When I had a 45-minute conversa
tion with a senior Department of
Defense official about the Pentagons new
Minerva initiative, I found that Project Camelot was on his mind as well as mine.
He had been reading about Camelot, he told me, trying to understand why it
blew up in the Pentagons face and how
to ensure the same fate did not befall
Minerva.
Project Camelot was a 1964 research
initiative, run by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) at American
University and funded with $6 million
from the US. Army as seed money for a larger initiative. This was, at the time, "the largest single grant ever provided for a social science project."1 Against the
backdrop of powerful insurgencies led
by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and, on
another continent, Ho Chi Minh, the
purpose of Project Camelot was to mobi
lize leading social scientists to under
stand the sources of revolutionary move
ments and insurgencies in Latin America
and to develop strategies of what the SORO called "insurgency prophylaxis." Six countries had been selected for study, the first being Chile. According to its
defenders, the research envisioned under
Project Camelot was not greatly differ
ent from open research already being done by various social scientists pursuing their own academic interests; the Army
was just planning to formalize scattered
research into a more coherent program, increase its volume, and bring in some
more prestigious social scientists to juice it up. Despite allegations at the time that
Camelot was mobilizing social scientists
to engage in covert espionage in Latin
America, Project Camelot was, in fact, not classified and its researchers were to
be free to publish in the open literature.2
A 1964 Project Camelot working paper
presented Camelot as an enlightened effort to achieve development and reduce
violence, saying "it is far more effec
tive and economical to avoid insurgency
through essentially constructive efforts
than to counter it after it has grown into a
full-scale movement requiring drastically greater effort."3
Project Camelot self-destructed when
the anthropologist Hugo Nutini, a
Chilean who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen, misrepresented Camelot to Chilean colleagues he was trying to
recruit, concealing the U.S. military's financial backing of the project. This
deception was publicly unmasked by the
Norwegian researcher Johann Galtung, who decried the "imperialist features" of
the project. Once the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Chile said they had been kept in the dark about Camelot, the project was widely denounced in Chile
and elsewhere in Latin America. Latin
American academics felt betrayed by their
American colleagues, wondering which of
them could be trusted, and politicians? especially those on the Left?were quick to join in the chorus of condemnation. In
the ensuing commotion about social sci
Versions of this article were presented at
UCLA, at Duke University, and at Rut
gers University. My thanks to all who
gave feedback at those venues, and to my colleagues in the Network of Concerned
Anthropologists (http://concerned. anthropologists .googlepages .com/) for their continuous intellectual and
political comradeship. A few passages in this article are indebted to chapter 2 of the Network of Concerned Anthropolo gists' Counter-Count er
insurgency Manual
(Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009).
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entists as spies, Project Camelot became
publicly framed as a covert research pro gram on insurgency and counterinsurgen cy in Latin America, often in ways that
were less than fully accurate. President
Frei of Chile protested the project to
Washington, and Congressional hearings were held during which Camelot was
denounced by Senator Fulbright among others. By 1965 Camelot was cancelled,
though other counterinsurgency projects that used social scientists would contin ue. These included Project Troy, Project
Simpatico, Project Revolt, and Project Michelson.4
Many American social scientists who
worked in Latin America found their
research damaged by political shrapnel from Camelots implosion. One doc toral student had two years of data on
social stratification in Chile seized by the Chilean government and, for years
afterwards, U.S. researchers reported that many Latin American collaborators
became distant, research visas or other
tokens of official cooperation became
problematic to obtain, and so on. As a
1967 article in Science put it: "With social scientists now making their annual sum
mer exodus to the foreign countries in
which they conduct fieldwork, many of
them are discovering that their 'labora
tories' abroad have been metaphorically
padlocked."5 This article quotes from a
letter sent by a group of Brazilians can
celing their collaboration with a team
from Cornell. "How can one maintain
and justify a relationship with an institu
tion?the university in the United States
?which permits itself to be transformed into the instrument of a security agency
which today is internationally known as
the instigator of international coups... We...know that [your] project did not
receive money from foundations linked to the security service of the American
government...Lamentably the just will
pay for the sinners."6
Meanwhile, within anthropology,
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban has argued that
"Project Camelot can now be recognized as the crisis that began ethical discourse in
anthropology.. .It provided the immediate
background for the adoption by the fellows
of the AAA [American Anthropological Association] of the first statement on
Problems of Anthropological Research
and Ethics in 1967...The greatest effect
of Camelot was that it raised the issue of
secret research on a wide scale within the
profession, across the social sciences as a
whole, and among the American literati
who observe and comment on anthro
pology's public quarrels. The principle enunciated was that clandestine research is wrong, that secret research is unethical,
and, finally, that both are unprofessional."7 Together with revelations three years later
that some anthropologists were involved in secret counterinsurgency research in
Southeast Asia,8 Project Camelot set the
stage for the AAAs 1967 Statement on
Problems of Anthropological Research
and Ethics and, after a bruising fight within the Anthropology Association, its
1971 Principles of Professional Practice.
The 1967 statement declared, "the inter
national reputation of anthropology has
been damaged by the activities of individ
uals...who have pretended to be engaged in anthropological research while pursu
ing other ends. There is good reason to
believe that some anthropologists have
used their professional standing and the names of academic institutions as cloaks
for the collection of intelligence informa
tion and for intelligence operations."9 From the ashes of Camelot, four decades
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later, we see the birth of Minerva. Minerva was first announced by Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates on April 14, 2008, in a speech to the American Association
of Universities, where the assembled uni
versity presidents reacted with enthusiasm to an initiative that offered $50 million to university researchers.10 Gates' speech
was soon followed by a Broad Agency Announcement soliciting proposals for
funding.11 Like Camelot, Minerva was given a
mythical name, the progression from
Arthurian England to imperial Rome as a source of mythical imagery per
haps betraying a deeper shift in America's
self-identification in the years between
John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush.
Minerva was ancient Rome's counterpart to Athena, the goddess of warriors and
wisdom. As Catherine Lutz has observed, the Pentagon's naming practices often
make use of "classics-washing" to suggest the "nobility, timelessness, and beauty" of their imperial projects. In Lutz's words, "the military academies have found the Roman Empire good to think with as they
contemplate what the US can accomplish in the world."12
Gates' speech and the Broad Agency Announcement laid out five broad areas
of heterogenous inquiry grouped loose
ly?some would say incoherently?to
gether under the Minerva umbrella: (1) Chinese Military and Technology Research
and Archive Programs: an initiative to
translate, gather and analyze unclassified but hard-to-find Chinese documents to be
aggregated in a physical or virtual archive.
According to the call for proposals, rel evant topics might include "the effects of a shift from a command to a market economic system on the defense establish ment and budget; changing identities in
the People's Liberation Army (PLA) that
accompany shifts from a closed to a more
open political system...and the evolution
of PLA strategic thinking." Here some of
the work analyzing open sources that is
typically done by intelligence analysts is
being outsourced to academia. This com
ponent of Minerva is clearly tied to con
cerns that a rising China, on track to be
the world s second largest economy within a few years, will soon become the United
States' leading geopolitical rival; (2) the
Iraqi Perspectives Project: an initiative to
translate, archive, and analyze documents
from Saddam Hussein's Iraq captured
during the U.S. invasion and occupa tion of that country; (3) Studies of the
Strategic Impact of Religious and Cultural
Changes within the Islamic World: here the
Minerva announcement foregrounds such
questions as the sources of the Taliban's
popularity, the role of Islamic madras
sahs as incubators of violence, and so
on. "Relevant disciplines include anthro
pology, economics, political science,
sociology, social and cognitive psychol ogy, and computational science," says the
call for proposals; (4) Studies of Terrorist
Organization and Ideologies: emphasising the importance of predictive computer
modelling, the call says "development of
models that can be used to explain and
explore human behaviour in this area?
organized violence?will be especially
helpful to the Department of Defense in
understanding where organized violence
is likely to erupt, what factors might
explain its contagion, and how to cir cumvent its spread. Research on belief
formation and emotional contagion will
provide cultural advisors with better tools to understand the impact of operations on
the local population;" (5) New Approaches to Understanding Dimensions of National
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Security, Conflict and Cooperation: this is basically a "none of the
above" category.
Researchers are
invited to sub mit proposals to develop new
ways of looking at the security
challenges fac
ing the United States in the twenty-first century. In his rollout speech, Gates said
he was hoping for the emergence of new
ideas that might play a role analogous to game theory or Kremlinology in the
Cold War. According to William Rees, a Minerva official in the Pentagon, the
majority of proposals received have been in this catch-all category.13 Under the initial call for proposals,
Minerva was capitalized at $50 million over five years. This raises the prospect that, overnight, the Pentagon will become one of the largest funders of anthropolog ical research in the country. Applying the
"big science" model to the humanities and
social sciences (and thereby showing their lack of understanding of the academics
they seek to recruit), Defense Department officials said that most awards would go to teams of researchers and be in the $1
million to $1.5 million range.14 Foreign, as well as American, academics are invit
ed to apply, and researchers are allowed to
publish work funded by Minerva in the
open literature. On May 28, 2008, Setha Low,
the President of the American
Anthropological Association wrote to the
head of the Office of Management and
Budget signalling broad approval for the
goals of Minerva, but expressing concern
about the wiring of the funding circuitry. (Full disclosure: I was
consulted on
the phrasing of this letter.) "The
Association
wholeheartedly believes that
social science
research can
contribute to reduction of armed con
flict," Low wrote, "but we believe that as Project Minerva moves toward imple mentation, its findings will be considered more authoritative if its funding is routed
through the well established peer-re viewed selection process of organizations like the National Science Foundation
(NSF), the National Institute of Health
(NIH), and the National Endowment
for the Humanities (NEH)...Rigorous, balanced and objective peer review is the bedrock of successful and productive pro grams that sponsor academic research...
Lacking the kind of infrastructure for
evaluating anthropological research that one finds at these other agencies, we
are concerned that the Department of
Defense would turn for assistance in
developing a selection process to those
who are not intimately familiar with the
rigorous standards of our discipline."15
Partly in response to such criticism, pre
sumably, the Department of Defense then
announced a three-year memorandum of
understanding with the National Science Foundations Social, Behavioral, and
Economic Sciences Directorate. This was
accompanied by an additional $8 million
for Minerva in 2009 to be administered
by NSF in a separate competition titled
"the Social and Behavioral Dimensions
GATES' AIDES SPOKE OF MINERVA AS AN INITIATIVE
THAT WOULD YIELD RESULTS IN A 10-30 YEAR TIME
FRAME, LIKENING IT TO BASIC RESEARCH FUNDED BY THE
PENTAGON DURING THE COLD WAR THAT EVENTUALLY LED
TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNET AND GLOBAL
POSITIONING SYSTEMS (GPS).
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of National
Security, Conflict, and
Cooperation" (NSCC). There
may or may not
be a further $8 million for this
NSF version of
Minerva in 2010
and 2011. To put this in perspec
tive, one foundation program officer told me
that Wenner-Gren spends about $5 mil
lion per year on anthropology research.
The memorandum of understanding with NSF might seem to alleviate the
concerns raised by Low about the peer review process through which grantees
will be selected, as well as further con
cerns that Minerva would not attract a
broad cross-section of academics unless
it were a civilian program not identified
with the Pentagon. However, as I have
argued elsewhere,16 the NSF program, which bears the Defense Department logo, is being used to give Minerva a
cosmetic makeover rather than to make
Minerva genuinely independent of the
military. The majority of Minerva fund
ing, disbursed outside the NSF process, will still be controlled directly by the
Pentagon. Meanwhile, in a highly unusu
al arrangement, the NSF is allowing the
Department of Defense to pick some
members of the NSF review panels, and
recipients of NSF Minerva funding are
expected to attend collective meetings with Defense Department officials seeking to develop a social sciences brain trust. In
other words, the Pentagon will be allowed to put its thumb on the scale of the puta
tively objective NSF selection process, and the NSF will lend its networks and
prestige to the
task of building a reserve army
of social science
expertise for the
U.S. military. Gates' pro
nouncements
have made it
clear that he sees
the "war on ter
ror" as a genera
tional commitment that, like the cold war, will last for decades, and he is looking to
Minerva for research whose fruits may take many years to mature. At a forum
sponsored by the Department of Defense
and the Smith Richardson Foundation, Gates' aides spoke of Minerva as an initia
tive that would yield results in a 10-30 year time frame, likening it to basic research
funded by the Pentagon during the cold war that eventually led to the development of the Internet and Global positioning sys tems (GPS).17 It is also clear from a num
ber of speeches Gates has given that he is
particularly interested in the contribution
anthropologists and other cultural special ists can make. If the cold war was the
physicists' war, Gates seems to see the "war on terror" as the anthropologists' war.
The Pentagon's new public interest in
anthropology broke with the precedent of the previous thirty years. After the
firestorm that erupted within the anthro
pological community in the 1960s in
reaction to some anthropologists' par
ticipation in counterinsurgency projects, and as anthropology turned to the left in
the 1970s and 1980s, the national secu
rity state treated anthropology as a largely demilitarized zone. Those few anthro
pologists who worked for the national
security apparatus tended to do so quiedy,
IT IS ALSO CLEAR... THAT [GATES] IS
PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN THE CONTRIBUTION
ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND OTHER CULTURAL SPECIALISTS CAN
MAKE. IF THE COLD WAR WAS THE PHYSICISTS' WAR,
GATES SEEMS TO SEE THE "WAR ON TERROR" AS THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS' WAR.
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in the shadows. This changed after 9/11.
Now the CIA tried to place a job ad in Anthropology News. (It was rejected). The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars
Program (PRISP)?a sort of ROTC for
spies?offered tuition funding for anthro
pology and other students who pledged to
work for the intelligence community on
graduation.18 And, in 2007, the Pentagon announced that it planned to send
anthropologists to Iraq and Afghanistan as embedded social scientists in "human
terrain teams." "One anthropologist can be much more effective than a B-2
bomber," said one Human Terrain Team
spokesperson.19 Although the Executive
Board of the American Anthropological Association issued a statement condemn
ing Human Terrain teams on the grounds that anthropologists on these teams would run a grave risk of endangering human
subjects,20 some anthropologists have
signed up for these teams.
Critiques of Minerva At least three critiques of Minerva have
emerged. The first has to do with the legal and ethical status of the Iraqi documents
offered for translation and analysis. The
second focuses on selection bias issues
in the way the competition has been
set up. And the third concerns ways in
which Minerva threatens to further mili
tarize the university and the production of
knowledge in American society. To start with the Iraqi document com
ponent: the Broad Agency Announcement
says of these documents, using a strikingly
agentless locution, that "In the course of
Operation Iraqi Freedom, a vast num
ber of documents and other media came
into the possession of the Department of
Defense." [Emphasis mine]. To be pre
eise, 5 million documents. They were
seized by the U.S. military, then given
by the Department of Defense to the
Iraq Memory Foundation, an organiza tion founded by an Iraqi exile, Kanan
Makiya, who had lobbied for the invasion
of Iraq. The Iraq Memory Foundation has
in turn signed an agreement to transfer
these documents to Stanford University's Hoover Institute.
According to an article in The New
York Times, "to some Iraqi officials and
American archivists...this has been...a
blatant case of plunder.. .with Saad
Eskander, the director of the Iraq National
Library and Archive in Baghdad, and
Akram al-Hakim, Iraq's acting minister
of culture who also holds the title state
minister for national dialogue, asserting that the documents were unlawfully seized
and calling for their immediate return. In an open letter to the Hoover Institution on June 21, Mr. Eskander wrote that its arrangement with the Iraq Memory Foundation was 'incontrovertibly illegal.,,, The Society of American Archivists and
the Association of Canadian Archivists
have supported that claim, calling the
removal of the documents from Iraq "an act of pillage, which is specifically forbid
den by the 1907 Hague Convention."21
The professional archivists' stated opin ion on this issue is arresting. According to them, any scholar who works with
these documents, rather than working for their repatriation, is complicit with a violation of the Hague Convention
and with an act of state looting. These documents should be returned to Iraq as
part of their national patrimony, rather
than being exploited as a resource by an
occupying army which, in turn, invites
scholars to profit from their expatriation. Once they have been returned to Iraq, the
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Iraqi government can decide who should
have access to these documents for what
purposes.
The second critique of Minerva concerns
possible selection biases that may prove inherent in its current structuring as a
research initiative run by the Pentagon. To begin with, the Pentagon has little in
the way of an established infrastructure?
program officers trained in anthropology and a rich network of trusted external
reviewers?for evaluating anthropological work. In such circumstances one wonders
how rigorous the process of peer review
and selection will be and what canons of
judgment will be applied in the selection
process. Will proposals be judged accord
ing to prevailing standards of excellence
in academic anthropology (granted that we know how problematic they can be)? Will they be judged according to yester
days standards of excellence in academic
anthropology, or by the standards of some
other academic discipline? Or will they be
judged not so much in terms of academic
standards at all, but in terms of promised pragmatic payoff for the military? In the
1960s some social scientists complained
bitterly that the Project Camelot program officers were mostly psychologists who did not understand anthropological research.
Will we hear similar complaints from vet erans of the Minerva selection process? But my main concern in regards to selec
tion bias is not so much about Minerva's
gatekeepers as it is about a biased pool of applicants. If, say, the Social Science
Research Council (SSRC) issued a call for
proposals on the roots of terrorism and on
the relation between Islam, violence and
peace, they would attract proposals from a
broad range of anthropologists and other
experts. We would expect an SSRC call
for proposals to elicit a strong response for
two reasons: first, because the S SRC has a well established set of networks, built over decades and nourished by program officers rooted in the academic commu
nity, to beat the bushes for proposals; and,
second, because the SSRC has a strong
reputation as an independent arbiter of
academic quality whose funding will not
run the risk of tainting those funded
in the way that, for example, oil indus
try money might taint an environmental
researcher, tobacco money might taint an
epidemiologist, or pharmaceutical money
might taint a medical researcher. If one
reflects for a moment on the reluctance of a strong, independently-minded envi
ronmental researcher to accept oil indus
try funding?as much because they fear
how it will appear to others as because
of any precise mechanism to suborn the
integrity of their research?it is easy to
understand why many experts on Islam
and the Middle East would be inclined not to seek funding through a Pentagon research initiative. Minerva is likely to be
given a wide berth by many scholars who do not like the Pentagon on political prin
ciple, scholars who have other funding options, and scholars who are afraid that
accepting Pentagon funding will damage their reputation with colleagues or make interlocutors in the field less likely to trust
them. The latter concern will be particu
larly acute for the scholars the Pentagon most needs: those who have spent years
developing relationships of trust with
interlocutors in the Middle East.22
If Minerva is boycotted by left-wing
anthropologists and by anthropologists worried that Minerva would leave them with lots of funding but no informants, then it will limp along as a biased, dis
torted, depleted research program. And
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indeed this is what seems to be
happening. One
anthropologist in the confidence
of the Minerva
bureaucracy reports that the first round
of applications was
smaller than the
Pentagon hoped for, contained
few applications from anthropolo
gists, but many applications from people who have sought defense funding before.
Instead of breaking the mould, Minerva
is becoming another chance at the trough for the usual suspects.23 This is a lose
lose outcome: the research community does not get a funding competition in
which all its members feel comfortable
participating. Meanwhile, policy makers who rely on Minerva to make intelligent decisions about future policies in the
Middle East will not have the benefit
of research informed by a full range of
political commitments, nor the benefit
of the best research American academia can provide. Minerva will then, to use a
phrase coined by Laura Nader in a dif
ferent context, be "unhelpful to reality
testing for government."24 If Minerva is not intended to be a clas
sified program of research, it would make
much more sense to make it a genuinely civilian research program. Given that
allowing such research to be funded by a
civilian agency through a truly indepen dent process would surely produce much
better research, we must ask why the
Pentagon refuses to do this. I believe the answer to this question lies in the NSF s
stated goal in its Minerva announce
ment "to develop [Defenses] social
and human science
intellectual capital in order to enhance
its ability to address
future challenges." In the context of an anticipated long
war in the Middle
East and of other
neocolonial proj ects in Africa and
elsewhere, the
Pentagons long term goal is to develop a cadre of social scientists, particularly in
anthropology, who are tied to the mili
tary and its projects. The Pentagon seeks to recuperate the implosion of Project Camelot and its estrangement from much of the social science community in the
Vietnam years by establishing a com
munity of social scientists who will be on
call for consultations, who will be drawn into the training of soldiers and intelli
gence officers, who will serve as adjudica tors of research proposals for others, and
who will train students and direct them to careers as military social scientists.
Project Minerva is an attempt to restore
the 1950s.
The third critique of Minerva is more
overtly political. It warns that military
funding will undercut the kind of critical
thinking many of us prize in anthropol ogy, changing the questions we ask and
the positions from which we ask them? to the detriment of both scholarly and democratic debate. In Cathy Lutz's words, "the Pentagon frames the questions to be
asked, and does so within the constraints
of what C. Wright Mills years ago called
the military definition of reality. This
entails seeing the world as a series of
IN THE CONTEXT OF AN ANTICIPATED LONG WAR
IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND OF OTHER NEOCOLONIAL
PROJECTS IN AFRICA AND ELSEWHERE, THE
PENTAGON'S LONG TERM GOAL IS TO DEVELOP A CADRE OF SOCIAL
SCIENTISTS, PARTICULARLY IN ANTHROPOLOGY, WHO
ARE TIED TO THE MILITARY AND ITS PROJECTS.
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threats to be dealt with, sorting people into enemies and allies, and focusing on
the use or threat of force.
"Look at the Pentagons research wish
list. It does not correspond to the lists most anthropologists would construct of
the most important problems, security or
otherwise, facing the people of the United
States or the world. Their alternative lists
would include global warming, inequality, disease, job loss....The lists might contain
some problems generated by the Pentagon itself, like the human toll of the current
wars or the huge deficit created by mili
tary spending."25 In a similar vein, John Tirman has
argued that Minerva creates a distorted
picture of the world in which the rise of
China and the upswell of Islamic radical
ism crowd out other emergent security threats that are, in Tirman's view, more
dangerous. Among these he names nuclear
proliferation, massive international flows
of human migrants, the rise of AIDS
and other diseases, climate change, and
food shortages created by the new neolib eral economic order. "Minerva is a missed
opportunity on a massive scale?investing
heavily in the irrelevant or minor, ignor
ing the monumental and urgent."26
Noting Minervas focus on and tight
coupling of Islam and terrorism, Tirman
also suggests that a more broadly based
program of inquiry into terrorism might ask how differently positioned peo
ple define "terrorism," whether (as the
anthropologist Talal Asad has argued27)
Christianity produces terrorist violence as well, whether suicide bombers in the
Middle East are driven by religion or (as much social science research suggests28) by nationalism and other ideologies. In
the way it defines the problem to be
addressed, then, Minerva replicates what
Irving Horowitz in a 1967 essay saw as
the principal failing of project Camelot:
"the Army, however respectful and pro tective of free expression at the formal
level, was 'hiring help and not openly
submitting military problems to the higher
professional and scientific authority of
social science...It became clear that the
social science servant was not so much
functioning as an applied social scientist as he was performing the role of supplying information to a powerful client."29
During the cold war, the patronage of
the national security state substantially transformed the American university in
ways that have been mapped by a num
ber of recent studies.30 Federal funding,
especially defense funding, underwrote a massive expansion of American high er education, increasing its capitaliza tion twentyfold from 1946-1991.31 Major research universities such as Stanford,
MIT and Johns Hopkins rose to power and prominence on the back of this fund
ing stream, and the new circuitry of
funding undergirded the emergence of
complex networks tying together uni
versity researchers, weapons laboratories, and funding agencies (often staffed by
people who had been trained with defense
funding by the very academics they then went on to fund). In response to the needs
of the national security state, lavishly funded centers appeared, sucking in fac
ulty and graduate students as they grew: MIT's Center for International Studies
(which grew out of Project Troy and was first directed by a former CIA offi
cial); Russian research centers at Harvard
and Columbia Universities; the Stanford
Research Institute; and the Draper Laboratory for research on missile guid ance at MIT, for example. Meanwhile, within disciplines, some fields grew and
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others shrank. In physics, nuclear physics and solid-state physics were of great inter est to the military, so funding for these
fields grew and those engaged in these areas of research were disproportionately
likely to become department chairs, labo
ratory directors, graduate advisors and so
on. Engineering saw the rise of cybernet ics. In communication, opinion polling found a new prominence. In psychology, research on mind control, obedience, and
opinion formation (important for psycho
logical warfare and propaganda opera tions) grew. In political science, ethics and
political thought went into decline even
as area studies, development studies and
security studies prospered.
Anthropology did not escape the shap
ing effects of the cold war, as recent
work by David Price and Laura Nader
in particular has made clear. In the high
McCarthyist years of the 1950s most
anthropologists learned to steer clear of radical ideas, while some who did not paid the price.32 Meanwhile the emergence of area studies, the creation of the Human
Relations Area Files (HRAF), and the
rise of linguistic anthropology and of
Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships were developments associ
ated with the rise of the national security state.33 However, anthropology was not
as deeply militarized during the cold war
as many other academic disciplines, and
many anthropology departments played an important role in the second half of
the cold war in developing critiques of
the Vietnam War, of U.S. intervention in
Central America, and of economic poli cies that led to underdevelopment in the
Third World.
Will anthropology now abandon or
attenuate this oppositional tradition in
response to initiatives from the Pentagon
and intelligence agencies? If anthropolo gists match the Pentagon's cultural turn
with their own military turn, it is clear
from the history of other disciplines in the
cold war what we can expect: an infusion
of resources at the cost, paradoxically, of a narrowing of research foci and points of view; separate conferences and jour nals for anthropologists who do security work; curricular changes in anthropology,
including the emergence of new mas
ters programs, tailored to the produc tion of defense workers; the discovery by some anthropologists, as their discipline is increasingly perceived as an instrument
of U.S. hegemony, that they can no longer do certain kinds of fieldwork; and the pro
gressive marginalization of those formerly at the discipline's center of gravity who refuse to undertake this kind of work.
In her article on the "phantom factor" in
anthropology?the phantom factor being the role of the national security state in our
discipline's history?Laura Nader remarks
that in anthropology "questions of social
responsibility raised in the 1960s remain
largely unresolved." Now anthropology has reached a point where it must decide
whether it wants to be the human rela tions branch of Empire. If we throw in our
lot with the military, then, in Marshall
Sahlins' words in an essay on project Camelot, our "quest for objective knowl
edge of other peoples [will be] replaced by a probe for their political weaknesses."34 It
is my most profound hope that anthropol
ogists will refuse to transform their disci
pline into one that uses a rhetorical patina of cross-cultural understanding and harm
reduction to mask a project that would
understand the other in order to subjugate and control it. This would be a betrayal of our human subjects and of our vocation as
interlocutors of the other.
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Notes 1 Irving Louis Horowitz, The Rise and
Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Rela
tionship Between Social Science and Practi cal Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), p. 4.
2 Document 4, reprinted in Horowitz, bears this claim out.
3 Horowitz, p.52.
4 Thomas Asher, "Making Sense of Minerva Controversy and the NSCC,"
http://essays.ssrc.org/minerva/wp-con
tent/uploads/2008/lO/asher.pdf; Milton
Jacobs, "LAffaire Camelot," American
Anthropologist 69 (3/4), 1967, pp. 364-6; John Walsh, "Cancellation of Camelot After Row in Chile Brings Research Under Scrutiny," Science 149, number 3689,
September 10, 1969, pp. 1211-3; Horow
itz, 1967. On Project Troy, a study run
through MIT of strategies of psychologi cal warfare against the USSR, see Allan
Needell, "Project Troy and the Cold War Annexation of the Social Sciences," in
Christopher Simpson (ed.) Universities and
Empire: Money and Politics injhe Social Sci ences During the Cold War (New York: New
Press, 1998), pp. 3-38.
5 Elinor Langer, "Foreign Research: CIA Plus Camelot Equals Troubles for U. S. Scholars," Science 156 (3782) June 23, 1967, pp. 1583-4, quote p. 1583.
6 Langer.
7 Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, "Ethics and
Anthropology 1890-2000," in Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (ed.) Ethics and the Profes sion of Anthropology (Walnut Creek, CA:
Altamira Press, 2003), pp.1-28, quotes pp.6-7, 10.
8 On anthropological participation in
counterinsurgency work in Southeast Asia,
see Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War:
Professional Ethics and Counter insurgency in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1992).
9 http : //www. aaanet. org/stmts/ethst mnt.htm.
10 http://www.defenselink.mil/ speeches/speech. aspx?speechid=1228.
11 http://www.arl.army.mil/www/ D o wnlo ade d Inter net Page s/Cur
rentPages/DoingBusinesswithARL/ research/08-R-0007.pdf.
12 Catherine Lutz, "The Perils of Penta
gon Funding for Anthropology and Other Social Sciences," http://essays.ssrc.org/ minerva/2008/ll/06/lutz/.
13 "Social Science and the Pentagon," Kojo Nnamdi Show, WAMU, August 6, 2008 http://wamu.org/programs/ kn/08/08/06.php#21269.
14 Asher, p. 3.
15 http://www.aaanet.org/issues/pol icy-advocacy/upload/Minerva-Letter.
pdf. There were complaints in the 1960s that Project Camelot was largely run by program officers trained as psychologists, and that these did not understand research norms in other disciplines more relevant to
counterinsurgency research. (See Jacobs, 1967).
16 Hugh Gusterson, "Project Minerva
Revisited," The Bulletin Online August 5, 2008, http://thebulletin.org/print/web edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/ project-minerva-revisited.
17 Personal communication, Thomas
Asher, September 11, 2008.
18 On PRISP, see Hugh Gusterson and
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David Price, "Spies in Our Midst," Anthro
pology News September 2005, http:// www.aaanet.org/press/an/infocus/prisp/ gusterson.htm.
19 Robert Haddick, "Can Counterinsur
gency Ever be Used Again?" Foreign Policy May 29, 2009, http://www.foreignpolicy. com/story/cms.php?story_id=4955.
20 http://www.aaanet.org/issues/ AAA-Opposes-Human-Terrain-Sys
tem-Project.cfm.
21 Hugh Eakin, "Iraqi Files in U.S.: Plunder or Rescue?" New York Times July 1, 2008.
22 http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/ columnists/hugh-gusterson/the-us
militarys-quest-to-weaponize-culture;
http : //www. foreignpolicy. com /story/ cms.php?story_id=4398.
23 Personal communication, February 12, 2009.
24 Laura Nader, "The Phantom Factor:
Impact of the Cold War on Anthropol ogy," in Noam Chomsky et al, The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intel lectual History of the Postwar Years (New
York: Free Press, 1997), pp. 107-146.
25 Catherine Lutz, "The Perils of Penta
gon Funding for Anthropology and Other Social Sciences," http://essays.ssrc.org/ minerva/2008/ll/06/lutz/.
26 John Tirman, "Pentagon Priorities and the Minerva Program," Online paper October 2008, http://www.ssrc.org/ essays/minerva/2008/10/09/tirman/.
27 Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
28 See Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The
Strategie Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
29 Horowitz, pp. 36-7.
30 See Noam Chomsky et al, The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intel lectual History of the Postwar Years (New
York: Free Press, 1997); Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Henry Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the
Milita ry -In dustrial-Academ ic C o mplex (Paradigm Publishers, 2007); David Kai ser, American Physics and the Cold War
Bubble, forthcoming; Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Mili
tary-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (Columbia University Press, 1994); Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold
War University (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Christopher Simpson, Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (New York: Free Press, 1998).
31 Richard Lewontin, "The Cold War and the Transformation of the Academy" in Noam Chomsky et al, The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual His
tory of the Postwar Years (New York: Free
Press, 1997), pp. 1-34.
32 David Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBTs Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Duke University Press, 2004).
33 Nader, "The Phantom Factor."
34 Marshall Sahlins, "The Established Order: Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate," in Irving Louis Horowitz, The Rise and Fall
of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967) pp. 71-79.
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