The ongoing battle for hearts and minds in Iraq and Afghanistan is a
military strategy inspired originally by efforts at domestic social
control and counterinsurgency in the United States. Weaponizing
Anthropology documents how anthropological knowledge and ethnographic
methods are harnessed by military and intelligence agencies in post-9/11
America to placate hostile foreign populations. David H. Price outlines
the ethical implications of appropriating this traditional academic
discourse for use by embedded, militarized research teams.
Price's inquiry into past relationships between anthropologists and the
CIA, FBI, and Pentagon provides the historical base for this expose of
the current abuses of anthropology by military and intelligence
agencies. Weaponizing Anthropology explores the ways that recent
shifts in funding sources for university students threaten academic
freedom, as new secretive CIA-linked fellowship programs rapidly
infiltrate American university campuses. Price examines the specific
uses of anthropological knowledge in military doctrine that have
appeared in a new generation of counterinsurgency manuals and
paramilitary social science units like the Human Terrain Teams.
David H. Price is the author of Threatening Anthropology:
McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists and
Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American
Anthropology in the Second World War. He is a member of the Network of
Concerned Anthropologists and teaches at St. Martin's College in Lacey,
Washington.
