Cold War Anthropology

Once again, David H. Price proves he is anthropology's conscience. In a time that the human sciences are being compromised by revelations of their complicity with some of the worst practices of a national security state and a phony 'war on terror,' Price's work stands as a moral and political compass. It stands as a caution and a guide to research because of Price's remarkable accomplishment in making a persuasive case for ethical action the logical conclusion of serious scholarship. -- Marshall Sahlins, author of Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware Cold War Anthropology is a major accomplishment that reveals a largely hidden and strategically forgotten aspect of American anthropology: the complex and contested interactions between anthropologists, the Pentagon, and the CIA during the early Cold War. David H. Price contextualizes longstanding anxieties in the discipline about the nature of its knowledge production, the militarization of ethnographic work, and the status of anthropology as an independent social science. The intellectual stakes of this meticulously researched work could not be higher. -- Joseph Masco, author of The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror Others have written on the entanglement of the social sciences with the military-intelligence complex, but none as energetically, from as many angles, or with as sensitive an eye for connections and overarching themes. ... ? Just as [Price] insists that HTS matters less than the underlying trends it represents, he cares less about the dramas of individual anthropologists in Cold War Anthropology and more about the subtle, systemic changes throughout the field-changes that threatened to make the discipline itself a security-state collaborator, sucking in individual researchers without their full knowledge. -- Peter C. Baker The Nation In the course of twelve years Price has written three books which have helped redefine anthropology's understanding of itself. And now, with Cold War Anthropology, Price brings his massive, precedent-make (and -busting) history of anthropology and American power to a close. It's a defining moment in the history of anthropology, and deserves wide attention... We have much to learn from our discipline's recent past, and thanks to David Price we have the opportunity to see our field as it really was, warts and all. The stories in this book, and the issues that it raises, need to be discussed by the discipline as a whole. -- Alex Golub Somatosphere