Abstract
Though American anthropologists have long engaged in radical political activities, there remains a poorly documented history of American Marxist anthropologists’ engagements with national and global socialist and communist political parties. This article draws on an interview with American anthropologist John Moore, as well as material from Moore’s FBI file, recently released under the Freedom of Information Act, with records from a 1960s Military Intelligence investigation of Moore to document and explore Moore’s involvement in communist and socialist organizations from the 1960s to the 1990s. Moore’s reflections on his political activities highlight a continuity.
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Notes
Moore added: “There is no harm about me telling you about this now because the Texas Farm Workers Union is now all dispersed, but the party was very prominent among the leadership of the union” (JM DP interview 1996).
ARPA’s [Anthropologists for Radical Political Action] name was a play on Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a Pentagon funded research group, predecessor to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
What Moore is referring to here is that Leacock wrote an anthropologically informed introduction to an edition of Engels’ Origin that was published by the Communist Party run International Publishers (See Leacock 1972).
At the 2008 AAA annual meetings, I organized a session on “Collaboration Against Military Engagements: Reconsidering Anthropologists for Radical Political Action 35 Years After the Fact,” with papers from Karen Brodkin, Jim Faris, Gerry Sider, Richard Lee, Marshall Sahlins, and me. Rereading this interview with John Moore 21 years after the fact, I realized the core argument of my paper for this session came from Moore’s comments, long forgotten, that AAA leadership conspired to disempower the radical caucus. An abbreviated version of this paper’s analysis appears in Price 2016:342–348.
To read the sort of critique Moore made during this period, see Moore 1971.
According to Wolf, the choice to avoid at least one prestigious private university was his own: “I was recruited by the University of Chicago, which was then considered the summit of American anthropology. I found the department to be a gerontocracy, with long meetings devoted to trivia and an overload of ritual and obeisance to the ancestors. In 1960 I fled by taking up a new field project” (Wolf 2001:8).
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Aaron Goings, Alice Kehoe, Alice Littlefield, and Thomas Patterson, for their comments and critiques on earlier drafts of this piece.
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Price, D.H. Radical memories: an interview with John H. Moore and documents from a communist anthropologist’s past. Dialect Anthropol 43, 233–247 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9516-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9516-7