A vital reminder of the importance of academic freedom, Threatening
Anthropology offers a meticulously detailed account of how U.S.
Cold War surveillance damaged the field of anthropology. David H.
Price reveals how dozens of activist anthropologists were publicly
and privately persecuted during the Red Scares of the 1940s and
1950s. He shows that it was not Communist Party membership or
Marxist beliefs that attracted the most intense scrutiny from the
fbi and congressional committees but rather social activism,
particularly for racial justice. Demonstrating that the fbi's focus
on anthropologists lessened as activist work and Marxist analysis
in the field tapered off, Price argues that the impact of
McCarthyism on anthropology extended far beyond the lives of those
who lost their jobs. Its messages of fear and censorship had a
pervasive chilling effect on anthropological investigation. As
critiques that might attract government attention were abandoned,
scholarship was curtailed.Price draws on extensive archival
research including correspondence, oral histories, published
sources, court hearings, and more than 30,000 pages of fbi and
government memorandums released to him under the Freedom of
Information Act. He describes government monitoring of activism and
leftist thought on college campuses, the surveillance of specific
anthropologists, and the disturbing failure of the academic
community-including the American Anthropological Association-to
challenge the witch hunts. Today the "war on terror" is invoked to
license the government's renewed monitoring of academic work, and
it is increasingly difficult for researchers to access government
documents, as Price reveals in the appendix describing his
wrangling with Freedom of Information Act requests. A disquieting
chronicle of censorship and its consequences in the past,
Threatening Anthropology is an impassioned cautionary tale for the
present.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
