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This article uses documents released from the Central Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act to examine Gregory Bateson's work for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. The primary document under consideration is a position paper written by Bateson for the OSS in November 1944. In that paper, Bateson outlined a number of methods and strategies that U.S. intelligence agencies might wish to consider using in the post-war period to continue to gather intelligence in India and to help maintain colonial order in India. This 1944 OSS position paper is discussed in order to shed light both on some of the largely undocumented work done by anthropologists during the war and to understand why Bateson returned to his overall negative assessment of applied anthropology in the post-war period.
Key words: applied anthropology, Gregory Bateson, OSS, WWII
Tn 1947, John Cooper estimated that, during World War II, as any one half of all professional anthropologists worked fulltime in some war-related governmental capacity, while another quarter worked on a part-time basis (Cooper 1947). These anthropologists used their skills to fill hundreds of positions in governmental agencies ranging from the Office of War Information to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and they engaged in activities ranging from bureaucratic drudgery (Bennett 1947) to the cloak and dagger adventures of secret agents (Coon 1980).'
As a part of a larger research project which investigates the impact of the Cold War on the development of American anthropology, I have used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to hundreds of governmental records pertaining to anthropologists and anthropological organizations from a variety of military and intelligence agencies (Price 1997a, 1997b, and 1998). What emerges from this pile of documents is a very complicated picture of vastly different individuals with divergent wartime experiences. I am finding a greater level of ambivalence than most historical considerations of this period present. I am also finding that this first-sizable-wave-of-selfidentified applied anthropologists faced many of the same frustrations that many contemporary applied anthropologists face. Primarily, these have to do with conflicts between the goals of anthropologists and sponsoring agencies. In this article, I discuss some of the experiences of Gregory Bateson at the Office of Strategic Services - as a...