Panel II
Remarks by Laura Nader, University of California, Berkeley
Delivered at MIT, Cambridge, MA, March 29, 1999.
Well, we're certainly covering the waterfront today. I guess it started for me when I was at Harvard and was a guinea pig in a research project which was never published and never sent to any of us, the data for which had been burned by the time I thought it would have been important to gather it. So, my understanding of the question of secrecy has come about slowly.
Anthropologists have been caught in the cross-fire between openness and secrecy in science. The story is an elusive one, difficult to capture in the few lines that have been allotted to me. For today's purposes, anthropology can be seen as tripartite: archeology, physical/biological, and socio-cultural (including linguistics). In my published research on the impact of the Cold War on anthropology (Nader 1997, 1998), I concluded that each of the three parts of our field had been differently impacted. Archaeology, it could be said, benefited from Cold War technologies--dating, imaging techniques and the like--and found themselves hobnobbing with physical scientists in national laboratories where they could identify themselves as scientific and objective or apolitical, at least until feminist archeology came along. Physical anthropologists in response to the possibility of nuclear extinction pursued evolutionary projections by searching out the primitive and non-human primate behavioral basis for arguing that humans were not equipped to deal with the present technologies. Theirs was a kind of humanist hard science. Other physical anthropologists worked for the army or navy in various capacities. But socio-cultural anthropologists were faced with Vietnam and the activities of U.S. counter-insurgency among the people we studied, many of whom were being targeted for bombing napalming, or genocide. We were involved with our informants about whose lives we were writing and whose lives were at stake. So the cultural anthropologists were the ones most affected by questions of secrecy and openness during the period. The American Anthropological Association was torn apart.
The Cold War had a profound impact on anthropological thinking. We were often caught between our informants, about whom we were writing, the expectations of funding agencies, and the uses made of our work by U.S. counter-insurgents, for example. A few anthropologists became directly associated with counter-insurgency work, some were spies, but the great majority were trying to maintain a loyalty to the people studied while at the same time trying to regulate our colleagues who were thought to be involved in unethical "science." For the first time the Association developed a code of ethics. But neither the Association nor individual anthropologists had the power to control the uses made of our work. Once we revealed the secret lives of our informants, which for them often meant survival or its opposite, as was made clear in the Vietnam war and in Cambodia, we could do nothing to maintain control.
This Cold War experience and the red-baiting which of course had an even longer history, had an impact which outlasted the Cold War period. There was a loss of trust--of informants in anthropologists (who were often unable to work because of accusations of spying and indeed who were sometimes killed), of anthropologists in the hidden agenda of funding agencies, and anthropological distrust of each other. The misuses of anthropological knowledge revealed the dangers of an anthropology that was open in its recording of native life. As my distinguished Africanist colleague , Elizabeth Colson, wrote at the time, "The anthropologist until then concentrated upon the formal aspects of political and social structure and produced codes, that is the abstract statements of the rules people say ought to be observed." We provided "the tools that allow the foreigner to become an expert on local usages and so assumes the right to arbitrate in local affairs…If the anthropologist attempts instead to describe the dynamic processes by which the community adjusts to changing circumstances he concentrates upon particular political battles. This entails exposing the stratagems employed by particular persons…" Colson goes on to conclude, "It is perhaps not surprising that so many of our contemporaries have retreated from trying to deal either with events or with rules of procedures and have turned instead to concentrate upon symbolic systems assumed to be impersonal, above the battle, and to operate by their own logic" (Colson 1974).
There was at this time an almost complete break with the older generation of anthropologists since the 1960s, and there was a sophisticated move by a highly intelligent group of younger anthropologists to not do anthropology/ethnography in the traditional manner. It was to be an "experimental moment," an anything-goes ethnography that did no pretend to be scientific. In fact, some asked where did scientific anthropology get our informants but exploitation and colonizations of various sorts that sometimes ended in genocide. Many of the younger anthropologists spoke a different language, wrote in code, depended greatly upon European philosophers like Foucault and Lacan, never concluded anything, rather, as one colleague told me recently--they began to complexify. What often passes for ethnography by such a group would not be very helpful to counter-insurgency movements, or to McCarthy type un-American activities hearings. Some ethnographers just stopped publishing, and some of us delayed our publications for decades. As Colson said, "It is not surprising." Native secrets remain secrets and a generation of anthropologists are self-censored.
My own response to closing down was different one. In a widely read and sometimes understood essay "Up the Anthropologist--Perspectives Gained from Studying Up" (Nader 1969), I proposed to resolve the ethical questions by studying up, down, and sideways. Thus the ethnography of the colonizers would also be revealed to the colonized. And people did start studying up although as if they were isolated, unconnected groups. Studies of elites replicated in some sense the isolated community and what I was speaking to was the need to connect. I published another piece to underscore that point--"The Vertical Slice--Hierarchies and Children" (Nader 1980), articulating how connections could be discovered. But by now there was too much generational isolation and self-censorship, the most efficient form of control.
This younger generaion of anthropologists who were paving the way to a different anthropology are now in their 50s. They talk mainly to each other or to their student generation. They emphasize disjunctures. They actively avoid intergenerational anthropological debates. One leading figure noted, "I don't like confrontation." His comment is part of the larger result of the Reagan cultural revolution, resulting in coercive harmony. The rights generation of the 1960s, the contentiousness, was to be replaced by a generation that had to deal with the culture of harmony wherein self-imposed censorship becomes the norm. Contentious debates even in science are mooted. The U.S. government opened an office on Consensus Science Conferencing.
The Cold War also resulted in an enormous increase in the sheer number of anthropologists, many of whom work in industry or at the World Bank for example. Those that work in industry are often only B.A. anthropology students hired, for example, by marketing firms to ferret out the secret fears and desires of young children for marketing purposes--highly unethical from my vantage, and that example is just an opener. At the World Bank a more complex picture emerges, whereby according to one colleague social scientists and their colleagues in economics are at the forefront of disclosure, and with the help of the U.S. Congress, environmentalists and conservative right-wing groups and international pressures--especially on environmental disclosures regarding indigenous peoples. The Bank has taken up corruption; censorship here requires the use of code language to mask the reality. Also according to my colleague, the level of people who work in the Bank may certainly be characterized as self-censoring. They construct an image of what is acceptable, then follow it. As a result there is a lack of critical faculty and slogans become substitutes. He describes a mixed picture, but reminded me that he carries a letter of resignation in one pocket and when asked to change or hide results would not hesitate to pull it out.
The same mood of self-censorship prevails especially in large U.S. universities today. If the defense department contracts were omnipresent in the Cold War era, industrial interests present themselves in a most commercial manifestation ubiquitously in the post Cold War era. At Berkeley, the Novartis contract with the University has sent a chill especially over younger untenured faculty. Word gets around early, as with the Dr. Nancy Olivieri case at the University of Toronto in Canada, over the proper relationship between researchers and industry in a university setting. A seige mentality sets in, reminiscent of the McCarthy period and the so-called red scare, except then it was government which could be called to account and was, and now this is as yet unaccountable large companies.
What anthropologist is going to "write all" in an ambiance of exploitation, one in which they would be viewed as hired guns? My own field notes, work supported by a Mexican government grant, are replete with information on indigenous knowledge that is exploitable. I never published this material, and have destroyed data that might give leads to exploitation by multinational pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, if I want data on the location of toxic dumps in the United States and on disease clusters based on information gathered through tax moneys, I expect to get it. It is a sliding scale of openness. Weaker parties must have the upper hand as in the transnational genetic diversity studies amongst indigenous peoples. The people that anthropologists have traditionally studies may want us to help defend their intellectual and genetic properties. When we do not, whole areas close down to anthropological research. Try and work in the Venezuelan Amazon, for example, or among the Inuit--in northern Canada. Because anthropology is the study of the human condition, when areas are closed our science work is damaged. During the Cold War, the USSR, the Middle East, China and other parts of the world were off-limits. After the Cold War traditional rural areas like Oaxaca or Chiapas or in the north the Inuit are threatened either by the consequences of trade agreement, or devastation by PCBs. Either way anthropologists are increasingly unwelcome and scientific work suffers.
Historians tell of the struggle in American universities since the post Civil War, to maintain a relationship of arm's length from government and industry. In this present post Cold War era, the entanglement of government with corporate interests and university administration will both have changed the landscape. Secrecy is on a sliding scale. No practicing science statesperson publicly advocates secrecy in science, only science administrators do. No anthropologist publicly advocates jeopardizing those we stud.y. Hired guns are another story.
The situation I glean, while varied, is not encouraging of an open scientific anthropology. My own special research now is centered on the controlling processes and constructs of hegemonic culture. But the uses made of such work are double-edged. Given the present asymmetrical distribution of power in both democratic countries and non-democratic ones, my publications on the subject, my manuscripts on the subject, my findings, sit in limbo. I could not agree more that science should be open, but the advantages of secrecy, sometimes viewed as privacy, are part and parcel of the anthropological code of ethics if those we study are at risk to harm by powerful entities. Those whom anthropologists traditionally study are more at risk of military destruction, bribery, extortion and blackmail than ever before. The pressures are for the most part driven by commercial and military interests. On the other hand, studying the powerful has as its companion, as I mentioned earlier, self-imposed censorship. So I would conclude that both secrecy and censorship are responses to imagined or real perceptions of power. A re-examination of the role of secrecy in science might outline damaging and beneficial aspects of research along the sliding scale implied in my remarks. The bottom line, however, is that anthropology is presently vastly hampered by both secrecy and self-censorship and in danger of becoming insular to the point of irrelevance except for literary and cultural studies concerns. The loss would be great and include a loss of knowledge important to related sciences.
References
Colson, E.
1974. Tradition and Contract: The Problems of Order. Chicago: Aldine Press.
Nader, L.
1969. "Up the Anthropologist-Perspectives Gained from Studying Up." In Reinventing Anthropology. Dell Hymes, Ed. Pantheon Press, pp. 285-311.
1997. "The Phantom Factor--Impact of the Cold War on Anthropology." In The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years. New York: The New Press, pp. 107-148.
1998. "Response to A.Gunder Frank." In Social Epistemology, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 335-344.
Program |Speaker Bios | Presentations | Selected Readings | Home