Price David H. Price

Threatening Anthropology (eBook, PDF)

McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

A vital reminder of the importance of academic freedom, Threatening Anthropology offers a meticulously detailed account of how U.S. Cold War surveillance damaged the field of anthropology. David H. Price reveals how dozens of activist anthropologists were publicly and privately persecuted during the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s. He shows that it was not Communist Party membership or Marxist beliefs that attracted the most intense scrutiny from the fbi and congressional committees but rather social activism, particularly for racial justice. Demonstrating that the fbi's focus on anthropologists lessened as activist work and Marxist analysis in the field tapered off, Price argues that the impact of McCarthyism on anthropology extended far beyond the lives of those who lost their jobs. Its messages of fear and censorship had a pervasive chilling effect on anthropological investigation. As critiques that might attract government attention were abandoned, scholarship was curtailed.Price draws on extensive archival research including correspondence, oral histories, published sources, court hearings, and more than 30,000 pages of fbi and government memorandums released to him under the Freedom of Information Act. He describes government monitoring of activism and leftist thought on college campuses, the surveillance of specific anthropologists, and the disturbing failure of the academic community-including the American Anthropological Association-to challenge the witch hunts. Today the "e;war on terror"e; is invoked to license the government's renewed monitoring of academic work, and it is increasingly difficult for researchers to access government documents, as Price reveals in the appendix describing his wrangling with Freedom of Information Act requests. A disquieting chronicle of censorship and its consequences in the past, Threatening Anthropology is an impassioned cautionary tale for the present.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 446
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. April 2004
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822385684
• Artikelnr.: 54911562

Autorenporträt

David H. Price is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Saint Martin’s College in Lacey, Washington. He is the author of the Atlas of World Cultures: A Geographical Guide to Ethnographic Literature.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface
> 1 A Running Start at the Cold War: Time, Place, and Outcomes 1
2 Melville Jacobs, Albert Canwell, and the University of Washington
Regents: A Message Sent 34
3 Syncopated Incompetence: The American Anthropological Association’s
Reluctance to Protect Academic Freedom 50
4 Hoover’s Informer 70
5 Lessons Learned: Jacobs’s Fallout and Swadesh’s Troubles 90
6 Public Show Trials: Gene Weltfish and a Conspiracy of Silence 109
7 Bernhard Stern: “A Sense of Atrophy among Those Who Fear: 136
8 Persecuting Equality: The Travails of Jack Harris and Mary Shepardson 154
9 Estimating the FBI’s Means and Methods 169
10 Known Shades of Red: Marxist Anthropologists Who Escaped Public Show
Trials 195
11 Red Diaper Babies, Suspect Agnates, Cognates, and Affines 225
12 Culture, Equality, Poverty, and Paranoia: The FBI, Oscar Lewis, and
Margaret Mead 237
13 Crusading Liberals Advocating for Racial Justice: Philleo Nash and
Ashley Montagu 263
14 The Suspicions of Internationalists 284
15 A Glimpse of Post-McCarthyism: FBI Surveillance and Consequences for
Activism 306
16 Through a Fog Darkly: The Cold War’s Impact on Free Inquiry 341
Appendix: On Using the Freedom of Information Act 355
Notes 363
Bibliography 383
Index 405