[URBANTH-L] Savage Minds: A web log to bring anthropology to a wider audience

[Angela Jancius]

http://savageminds.org/


Savage Minds

About Savage Minds:

Savage Minds is a collective web log devoted to both bringing anthropology 
to a wider audience as well as providing an online forum for discussing the 
latest developments in the field. We are a group of Ph.D. students and 
professors teaching and studying anthropology and are excited to share it 
with you. You can find out more about the contributors by clicking on the 
'about' pages on the right for each of us.


Anthropologists as Counter-Insurgents

Posted by oneman under Academia , Culture Notes

...It is generally assumed that anthropologists are CIA agents or otherwise 
connected with Western military apparatus. It certainly helps 
anthropologists in dealing with these accusations if they can honestly say 
that they are not. This is why most anthropologists look down on covert 
research, why Franz Boas exposed the activities of anthropologists who had 
worked as spies during WWI -in the words of the current referendum to 
uncensure Boas:

Boas insisted on the distinction between researchers - scientists whose 
lives are dedicated to "the service of truth" - and spies under the 
employment of the US Government..

It is crucial that anthropologists be taken at their word in the field-not 
being able to dispel these perceptions can be harmful not only to our 
research, but to our lives. ...