Threatening Anthropology : McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists

An archival history of governmental investigations of anthropologists in the 1950s, based on over 20,000 pages of documents obtained by the author under the Freedom of Information Act 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.