Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State

Dr. David Price (professor of anthropology and sociology at Saint Martin's University) traces some of anthropology's historical roots, including links to colonial, military, and intelligence projects. He also focuses on a range of post-9/11 developments from Human Terrain to CIA campus centers and CIA-linked funding opportunities, and he provides some comments about future changes. Price has developed an ambitious and innovative project examining the uneasy relationship between professional anthropologists and various agencies of the United States government since World War II and the Cold War/McCarthy era. According to Price, even as some prominent anthropologists and the American Anthropological Association were complicit with the government's threats to academic freedom, government agencies largely neglected anthropological insights and selectively gleaned ethnographic knowledge as part of various military and intelligence efforts. This lecture is the 8th annual anthropology lecture at Linfield College. The annual anthropology lecture showcases diverse perspectives from all four subfields of anthropology.