Anthropology in Action

This is the third edition of the year 2005. We have moved from neoliberalism and the audit culture in the university, to embodiment in the teaching and learning of anthropology, and finally to the involvement of anthropologists in the Second World War and the following Cold War. In this volume, we are still experimenting and finding our feet. Here, after articles by David Price on the OSS and Japan, Gretchen Schafft with archival biographical research on a Nazi medical doctor, and Eric Ross on university involvement in the Cold War, we give Janice Harper some extra space to make her points about nuclear tourism. Rather than split Harper’s article, we have decided to let it run on. It is an article about the curious construction of cultural heritage. And it can be read from a post-9/11, post-7/7 vantage point where the catastrophe as well as catastrophic places can become Zeitgeist (tourist) sites (see also Feldman 2002). The piece links in with the other contributions to show the longue durée of wars with and on terror, and the changing nature and commemoration of our involvement with them.

It has long been acknowledged that the Second World War significantly transformed anthropology and gave rise to applied anthropology as a professional subdiscipline; but, there has been surprisingly little scholarly inquiry into the particulars of this process, during the war or as it gave way to the Cold War. The relative silence, among anthropologists, regarding the contributions of their colleagues to the interests of government during this crucial period, is itself worthy of study. Though it might simply be regarded as a subject whose time has not yet come, whose subject matter has little immediate relevance to the intellectual priorities of our own time, even a tentative excursion into the subject suggests that there are uncomfortable issues just below the surface, issues that reflect ethical and political contradictions that anthropologists must inevitably confront.

Anthropologists who were also medical doctors often had a particularly active role in the Nazi regime, including the SS. One of these, Herbert Grohmann, studied under Eugen Fischer at Kaiser Wilhelm Institut of Anthropologie (KWIA) in Berlin from 1937 to 1938 and became his assistant. Grohmann, an SS officer, was sent to Poland as the head of public health in Lodz while maintaining his association with the KWIA. This article describes the interconnections of anthropology and public health in occupied Poland including the elimination (killing) of mentally ill patients, the implementation of the Deutsche Volksliste and the culling of 'racially fit' children for abduction to Germany. All of these activities are seen through the career of Herbert Grohmann.

More than two dozen U.S. anthropologists worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War. Some anthropologists at the OSS's Research and Analysis Branch analysed information on Japanese culture and tracked shifts in Japanese morale to estimate the best ways of employing psychological warfare. Among the papers produced by these anthropologists was a 1943 'Preliminary Report on Japanese Anthropology' which included the contemplation of biological warfare programmes using anthrax and other weapons of mass destruction on Japanese civilian and military populations. This article summarizes and critiques the roles of American anthropology in designing and opposing various programmes directed against Japanese soldiers and civilians under consideration at the OSS.

This article examines how anthropology's emphasis on the traditional values of peasants reflected the general precepts of 'modernization theory', the dominant development discourse of the Cold War era. It explores how such ideas lent credibility to the U.S. strategy of 'community development' as a central part of its response to radical rural change. Special attention is paid to the Cornell-Peru Project at Vicos in the Peruvian highlands, which attained legendary status as a case of applied anthropology, but is here examined in relationship to the strategies of the U.S. power elite and Cold War government policies.

Nuclear tourism is rapidly becoming a popular industry that attracts a diverse international audience with interests in history, militarism, and anti-war activism. In some sites, nuclear tourism emphasizes the devastation of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while, at others, it draws on the past to present a future of environmental stewardship, technological achievement and scientific mastery of the earth's energy. In so doing, nuclear tourism becomes a well crafted strategy to stimulate sentiments of nationalism and civic pride, while authenticating a particular perspective of history, science and identity. This article discusses efforts to use cultural heritage of the Manhattan Project both as a marketing strategy to bring tourist dollars to the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and as a way to celebrate the community's past as a 'Secret City' and its central role in the development of the atomic bomb. This construction of cultural heritage, however, may disregard cultural rights in respect to environmental justice, health and human rights, and serve to authenticate the history of the atomic bomb as having a single moral imperative, divorced from the international arena in which nuclear science is currently being developed and debated.