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 "war on terror" 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.

An archival history of governmental investigations of anthropologists in the 1950s, based on over 20,000 pages of documents obtained by the author under the Freedom of Information Act

About the Author

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.

Reviews
"An enthralling expedition into the heart of academic darkness. David H. Price brilliantly confirms that there are no depths to which policemen and professors will not sink."-Alexander Cockburn, coeditor of CounterPunch and columnist for The Nation
"David H. Price's painstaking account of political repression in anthropology after the Second World War is a unique contribution to the history of the field. More than that, it may foreshadow what some today may entertain. Let us hope not, but let us not be naive."-Dell Hymes, editor of Reinventing Anthropology
"Threatening Anthropology is a bold piece of scholarship, one that breaks the silence on many issues in the American trajectory that have changed only a bit since the Cold War and-given recent indications-might still come to the foreground in such a way as to make the McCarthy era look like play."-Laura Nader, University of California, Berkeley
"That Price had the drive, the stamina, and the imagination to pursue this arduous task for more than a decade is an effort for which all anthropologists, and all of those interested in the history of the McCarthy years, must be profoundly grateful. . . . Price's book . . . is an illuminating contribution to 'anthropology's understanding of itself'-one that should be on the shelf of every serious student of the history of U.S. anthropology." -- George W. Stocking Jr. * American Anthropologist *
"This book is a spellbinder, a creative contribution to the history of anthropology, to understanding post-9/11 reactions, and to recalling threads of repression in American society that are continuous. It is a provocative, seminal contribution to scholarly history." -- Laura Nader * The Historian *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822333388
Author David H. Price
Format Paperback
Page Count 448
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 630g