Remembering Gerald Berreman: One Who Raged Against the Machine
February 19, 2014
Remembering Gerald Berreman
One Who Raged Against the Machine
by DAVID H. PRICE
A few mornings ago I saw an announcement that anthropologist Gerald Berreman died this last December. Berreman was a professor of anthropology at Berkeley for decades who became an important voice of dissent in the 1960s and 70s, speaking out against anthropologists’ interactions with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and championing openness in science. Berreman’s early ethnographic work studied caste stratification dynamics in India, and cultural ecology in India and Nepal.
I did not know Professor Berreman well. We occasionally corresponded and both contributed to an American Anthropological Association (AAA) panel on militarism a few years ago, but his writings, his work on the AAA code of ethics, and his political activism have had a significant impact on my work and on generations of anthropologists who followed him. I write this brief salute to Gerry Berreman’s ideas with the simple hope that some new generation of anthropologists and other academics might be drawn to his work (his essays like “The Social responsibility of the Anthropologists,” “Ethics Versus ‘Realism’ in Anthropology,” or his book The Politics of Truth) in this disjointed era where notions of knowledge for the public good have been outsourced to cynical opportunists of capital or state.
Berreman was the real deal, a strong early voice speaking out against anthropologists’ collusion with military and intelligence agencies, playing crucial roles in giving legitimacy to the AAA’s efforts to develop an ethics code during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was an era when a strong belief in unmitigated science led many to view other cultures as datasets to be explored as needed, but to Berreman, the world was no longer anthropologists’ “laboratory,” but “a community in which we are coparticipants with our informants.”
In the late 1960s he worked on the University of California’s Himalayan Border Countries Research Project. He resigned this project in early 1968 after its funding became dominated by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, the institutional predecessor of DARPA). Berreman understood how Pentagon funds altered the focus of the project and after resigning from the program he publicly critiqued the damaging impacts of these military funds.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/19/one-who-raged-against-the-machine/
