Marvin Harris Lecture looks at not-so-obvious effect of Cold War

March 16, 2015

One usually doesn’t associate the Cold War with anthropology. David Price does. A professor of anthropology at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash., he will discuss "Contextualizing Cold War Anthropology: How Political Economy Impacts Anthropological Research,” Friday, March 20, from 4:15 to 6:00 p.m. in Turlington Hall, L005. The Marvin Harris Lecture series is sponsored by the UF department of anthropology.

This presentation examines how the Cold War shaped the funding, production and consumption of anthropological knowledge. It forcefully illustrates how the production of anthropological knowledge is linked to the larger economic and political forces dominating the society in which the work is produced. Price draws on two decades of archival research and a collection of over 60,000 pages of CIA, FBI, and Defense Department documents released in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

This evidence highlights the witting and unwitting interactions between anthropologists and military and intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Focusing on the “dual use” nature of Cold War anthropology, documents released under FOIA and from several Cold War anthropological research projects show how anthropologists at times pursued projects of their own choosing without adequately considering the political economy in which this work was embedded or the larger political arena in which this knowledge was at times consumed. 

Price has conducted cultural anthropological and archaeological fieldwork and research in the United States and Palestine, Egypt and Yemen. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Florida, in 1993 under the supervision of Professor Marvin Harris. He is the author of several books and articles, and has served on American Anthropological Association committees investigating anthropologists’ interactions with military and intelligence agencies, and a task force writing the Association’s new code of ethics.