The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in the Anthropology of Douglas Miles

Abstract

During the Vietnam War, the US government funded anthropological research in South Vietnam that was charged by critics as supporting counterinsurgency measures. My 1973 BA Hons thesis addressed theoretical debates about the nature of political power in post-colonial peasant societies using ethnographic reports of the research group at Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group. In recent years, anthropology has returned to ethical debates in the discipline brought on in the context of US actions as one of the Superpowers during the Cold War and has examined these debates in terms of different contemporary research values in the discipline, as well as changed global politics. From the distance of almost half a century, I wish to re-examine these ethnographic texts in a critical reading of the nature of power in the villages studied.