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ANTHROPOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War. By David H. Price. Durham (NC) and London: Duke University Press, 2008. xix, 370 pp. US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4237-3.
The US military's recruitment of anthropologists and other "cultural analysts" to serve in human terrain teams, first sent into Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006, ignited some rethinking of the appropriate uses of anthropological knowledge and method. This has included a revision (2009) of the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) Code of Ediics. David Price's revealing history of anthropological collaboration with government and military authorities during World War II, an earlier and better appreciated conflict, provides important background understanding about what happens when anthropologists go to war. The book complements Price's earlier account of postwar FBI surveillance of activist anthropologists and forthcoming work on anthropological participation in the Cold War.
Price begins his survey with a summary of anthropological contributions in World War I, including Franz Boas's castigation of those who spied under cover of anthropology and archaeology and the AAA's subsequent notorious rebuke of Boas's position. He also includes a chapter on WWII anthropological collaboration in Germany, Japan, the UK and elsewhere. The rest of the book traces anthropological employment...