Anthropology and counterinsurgency: the strange story of their curious relationship

Military Review, March-April, 2005 by Montgomery McFate

In 1943, Benedict, Mead's long-time friend and collaborator, became the head (and initially the sole member) of the Basic Analysis Section of the Bureau of Overseas Intelligence of the Office of War Information (OWI), a position Benedict sought to use "to get policy makers to take into account different habits and customs of other parts of the world." While at OWI, Benedict coauthored The Races of Mankind, a government pamphlet which refuted the Nazi pseudo-theories of Aryan racial superiority. Conservative congressmen attacked the pamphlet as communist propaganda, and the publicity surrounding it led to the sale of 750,000 copies, its translation into seven languages, and the production of a musical version in New York City. (37)

Benedict also undertook research on Japanese personality and culture, the effect of which cannot be overstated. Near the end of the war, senior military leaders and U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt were convinced the Japanese were "culturally incapable of surrender" and would fight to the last man. Benedict and other OWI anthropologists were asked to study the view of the emperor in Japanese society. The ensuing OWI position papers convinced Roosevelt to leave the emperor out of the conditions of surrender (rather than demanding unconditional surrender as he did of dictators Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini). Much of Benedict's research for OWI was published in 1946 as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, considered by many as a classic ethnography of Japanese military culture, despite Benedict never having visited the country. (38)

Since fieldwork in the traditional sense was impossible during wartime, culture had to be studied remotely. The theoretical contribution of World War II anthropologists to the discipline is commonly known as "culture at a distance." Following the war, from 1947 to 1952, Mead, Benedict, and others established a research program at Columbia University. Working under contract to the U.S. Office of Naval Research, anthropologists developed techniques for evaluating cultural artifacts, such as immigrant and refugee testimonies, art, and travelers' accounts, to build up a picture of a particular culture. (39)

Most of the culture-at-a-distance studies were rooted in the premises of developmental psychology, such as that the so-called national character of any group of people could be traced to commonalities in psychological-development processes. While some of their conclusions now seem ridiculous (for example, Gorer's "swaddling hypothesis" to explain the bipolar swings in Russian culture from emotional repression to aggressive drinking), other research results were not only accurate but useful in a military context. (40)

Small Wars

In January 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy met with national security adviser Walt Whitman Rostow to discuss various national-security threats. Kennedy and Rostow turned their attention to the subject of Vietnam, and Kennedy said: "This is the worst one we've got. You know, Eisenhower never mentioned it. He talked at length about Laos, but never uttered the word Vietnam." (41)