Threatening Anthropology

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.

“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)

• Preface xvii1 A Running Start at the Cold War: Time, Place, and Outcomes 12 Melville Jacobs, Albert Canwell, and the University of Washington Regents: A Message Sent 343 Syncopated Incompetence: The American Anthropological Association’s Reluctance to Protect Academic Freedom 504 Hoover’s Informer 705 Lessons Learned: Jacobs’s Fallout and Swadesh’s Troubles 906 Public Show Trials: Gene Weltfish and a Conspiracy of Silence 1097 Bernhard Stern: “A Sense of Atrophy among Those Who Fear: 1368 Persecuting Equality: The Travails of Jack Harris and Mary Shepardson 1549 Estimating the FBI’s Means and Methods 16910 Known Shades of Red: Marxist Anthropologists Who Escaped Public Show Trials 19511 Red Diaper Babies, Suspect Agnates, Cognates, and Affines 22512 Culture, Equality, Poverty, and Paranoia: The FBI, Oscar Lewis, and Margaret Mead 23713 Crusading Liberals Advocating for Racial Justice: Philleo Nash and Ashley Montagu 26314 The Suspicions of Internationalists 28415 A Glimpse of Post-McCarthyism: FBI Surveillance and Consequences for Activism 30616 Through a Fog Darkly: The Cold War’s Impact on Free Inquiry 341Appendix: On Using the Freedom of Information Act 355Notes 363Bibliography 383Index 405