4. Anthropology, the Cold War, and Intellectual History

Abstract

4. Anthropology, the Cold War, and Intellectual History Herbert S. Lewis (bio) The growth of interest in the history of anthropology, of which this new annual is one manifestation, has at least two discernible motivations and "traditions." One of these, called "disciplinary history" (by some of its opponents, in fact), arose from within the intellectual concerns of the field itself and owes a great deal to the writing and students of A. I. Hallowell.1 George W. Stocking's article "On the Limits of 'Presentism' and 'Historicism' in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences" (1965) stands as a manifesto for that approach, the attempt to study the past "in its own terms" in order to understand the origins of ideas, the contexts in which they grew, and the significant intellectual and personal histories of the subjects of their research. The second stream of writing about the history of the discipline had more of an exogenous origin, connected to the serious political, moral, and intellectual concerns that arose in America and much of the rest of the world in the 1960s, particularly as a result of the devastating events surrounding America's war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement(s) in the United States, assassinations, and the struggles for independence of peoples in colonial areas. This approach to the study of the history of anthropology has been labeled "critical" for a number of reasons. For one, the earliest form of it came from a Marxian perspective, and the terms "critical" and "critique" are central to that tradition. (See the explicitly Marxist journals Critical Anthropology and Critique of Anthropology.) Kathleen Gough (1968) fired the opening salvo of this intellectual war and was followed by more than two dozen pieces in the often-cited collections edited by Dell Hymes (1969) and Talal Asad (1973). (See Desai 2001 for an original discussion of some of the key pieces in the debate.) The stream of "critique" of anthropology was widened by the revival of interest in the writers of the "Frankfurt school" and their "critical theory," as well by the general influence of Michel Foucault and Orientalism (1978) by his acolyte, Edward Said. The growth of "the literary turn," [End Page 99] "literary theory," postmodernist, and postcolonial discourses produced a mighty river of critique of anthropology. The "critical" literature is heavily freighted with moral, ethical, and political commitments. According to Michael Payne, "critical theory" is dedicated to "the attempt to bring truth and political engagement into alignment" (Geuss 1981:1–2). "Critical theories have special standing as guides for human action in that: (a) they are aimed at producing enlightenment in the agents who hold them. (b) they are inherently emancipatory, i.e they free agents from a kind of coercion which is at least partly self-imposed" (Payne 1996:118). Anthropologists, with their unique direct involvement with the peoples of the world, especially the poorer and less powerful peoples, have been the object of suspicion of choice for many writers both within and outside the field.2 Until recently the gaze of those in the "critique" tradition has been firmly fixed on anthropology's putative connection to colonialism—resulting in what is one of the larger bibliographies in the canon and discourse of the past three decades—but there are signs that the critiques may soon turn to more recent events. The Cold War, itself the context in which these critiques first arose, is the most obvious of these. The Cold War serves as the basis for a chapter in Thomas C. Patterson's recent book A Social History of Anthropology in the United States and for an invited session at the 2003 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association. This essay had its origin in both the book and the AAA session, at which there were eight papers and two discussants. It is inevitable that works written from the "critical" and "critique" perspective will find that anthropology and anthropologists were complicit in the Cold War on the side of the United States and "the West." My essay is intended as a contribution to the historiography of anthropology from the "disciplinary" perspective; it can also be seen as a preemptive strike, delivered in the...