Review
"A bold piece of scholarship that breaks the silence on many issues that have changed only a bit since the Cold War and might still come to the foreground in such a way as to make the McCarthy era look like a play." Laura Nader, University of California, Berkeley "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 "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 "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 "a story that is historically needed and industriously researched..." The Seattle Times, Bruce Ramsey "...is an opinionated, audacious, and welcome piece of scholarship." Barbara McMichael of The Olympian "David Price has produced an extremely important book. 'Threatening Anthropology' illuminates both the history of Anthropology and the political history of the USA from the late 1930's to the present."--CAMBRIDGE ANTHROPOLOGY, 25:1, 2005
Product Description
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.
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