Minerva and the militarization of Anthropology

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

RADICAL TEACHER ? NUMBER 86



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).

NUMBER 86 ? RADICAL TEACHER 5



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

6 RADICAL TEACHER ? NUMBER 86



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




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).




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.




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




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




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.




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




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.




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




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.




Documents

Minerva and the militarization of Anthropology