espionage – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

The Goat Caught in Bushkazi: Personal Effects of One’s Role in the Great Game

The beginning of this story, for me, was in the spring of 1969. I had applied for funding to do a cutting edge project combining methods and techniques of visual anthropology that I had learned from John Collier, Jr, my own version of cognitive anthropology arising out of the works of Edward Sapir and the […]

John Gledhill: “Anthropology and Espionage” and some comments on anthropology as ethics

John Postill has posted the transcript of John Gledhill‘s very thoughtful essay, “Anthropology and Espionage,” first produced for BBC3’s radio series, “The Lives of Others,” and I am thankful to John Posthill for first introducing me to this series which has featured a series of prominent anthropologists already. Gledhill, known to many of us as […]

David Price: Anthropologists as Spies

The following is a selection of passages that I have marked out for special attention from David Price’s 2000 article in The Nation: On December 20, 1919, under the heading “Scientists as Spies,” The Nation published a letter by Franz Boas, the father of academic anthropology in America. Boas charged that four American anthropologists, whom […]