Content area
Full Text
Abstract: This article is a historical examination of several watershed episodes in the militarization of US social science. It offers an assessment of the actual "science" underpinning such initiatives as Project Camelot, and traces how American anthropology in its reaction to Project Camelot and Cold War studies moved from certain kinds of scientific/knowledge production toward others. By critiquing the intellectual foundations of Project Camelot alongside other examples of actionoriented social science, this article examines the connections between functionalism and the conceptual bias toward social order. What linked development, militarism, and imperialism was a more often than not oversimplified view of human behavior. In order to comprehend how models of development and modernization continue to shape American hegemony, this article scrutinizes a particular history of "military modernity."
Keywords: anthropology and US imperialism, Cold War science, intellectual history, Project Camelot, social sciences and the military
"The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show."
-T. S. Eliot
Much has been written about the controversies surrounding Project Camelot (Horowitz 1967; Jacobs 1967; Madian and Oppenheim 1969; McFate 2005; Price 2002; Solovey 2001; Stocking 1991), a "covert" operation initiated by the Department of Defense in the mid-1960s to conduct counterinsurgency research in Latin America, but not much has been analyzed with respect to its scientific failures, epistemological shortcomings, and what consequences this has meant (if any) for a substantial understanding of US imperialism.1 Project Camelot enjoys a folk status, marking a watershed moment in the intellectual history of American anthropology, because of the way it revealed an uncomfortable comingling of defense, development, and US imperialism. Serious inquiries into the ethical uses and production of anthropological knowl edge, disparities in power relations (both political and epistemological), the formation of the 1966 Beals Report, anti-Vietnam movements, the Thai Village Study Affair, and the formation of the 1971 American Anthropological Association (AAA) code of ethics preceded Project Camelot, but were also the result of a zeitgeist increasingly fed up with growing alienation, the limits of rational instrumentality, and bureaucracy in the global system (Beals and the Executive Board 1967; Wakin 1992). Although what follows is a...