Washington — In the latest round of conflict over anthropologists’ cooperation with the U.S. military, members of the American Anthropological Association voted on Friday to ban certain kinds of secrecy in ethnographic work. In a motion passed by a voice vote during the organization’s annual business meeting here, members decreed that “no reports should be provided to sponsors [of research] that are not also available to the general public and, where practicable, to the population studied.”
The strongly worded motion is not binding, however. Because the motion was not presented to the membership at least 30 days in advance of Friday’s meeting, it will be referred to the association’s executive board. The board, in turn, is likely to put the question to the association’s membership via a mail ballot next year.
The motion would restore four anti-secrecy clauses that were added to the association’s ethics code in 1971, but removed in 1998. A report issued this week by a special committee of the association urged that the secrecy rules be tightened.
In 1971 the association was convulsed by reports that several American anthropologists had clandestinely aided a counterinsurgency campaign in Thailand. This year anthropologists are debating a number of types of scholarly cooperation with the military, including the Human Terrain System, in which social scientists are embedded within military units in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Leaders of the Human Terrain System have said that the ethnographic data collected by the program’s social scientists should generally be kept open and unclassified. In an interview with The Chronicle two weeks ago, however, the program’s deputy director, James K. Greer, said, “When a brigade plans and executes its operations, that planning and execution is, from an operational-security standpoint, classified. And so your ability to talk about it, or write an article about it, is restricted in certain ways.”
In general, however, Mr. Greer said that the program would not discourage its employees from publishing their findings in scholarly journals. “There are certainly some restrictions from the security side,” he said, “but those don’t preclude a social scientist from writing up what they did and how they did it and how it may apply to the body of knowledge for their particular profession.”
Mr. Greer and his colleagues have not responded to a request for examples of how the social scientists’ findings are incorporated into the human-terrain program’s databases.
The new anti-secrecy motion would affect not only military anthropologists. It would also cast a shadow over the burgeoning field of private-sector anthropologists who conduct ethnographic research about consumer behavior for corporate clients. Such researchers are often contractually required to keep their findings confidential. During the business meeting, the motion’s primary author, Terence Turner, a professor emeritus at Cornell University, explicitly said that the motion applies to proprietary corporate research.
At a panel on private-sector anthropology late Friday afternoon, Ken T. Anderson, a senior researcher and anthropologist at the Intel Corporation, said: “I had a bad lunch. And I’m not talking about food. I’m talking about what went on at the business meeting.” Mr. Anderson and his peers offered several reasons why they believe their work can contribute to the public fund of scholarly knowledge, even if many of their specific findings must be kept secret.
In other action at Friday’s business meeting:
The association resolved that it “opposes any covert or overt U.S. military action against Iran, condemns any public-relations campaigns designed to convince the U.S. public to support military action against Iran, and urges President George W. Bush and members of the U.S. Congress to refrain from using any covert or overt military action, including air strikes, against the country or government of Iran.” (This resolution, unlike all others passed on Friday, was presented to the membership 30 days before the meeting, and therefore is binding. The others will be referred to the executive board.)
The association voted to urge the U.S. Census Bureau to include a question asking about proficiency in languages other than English, and to stop using the term “linguistically isolated” to describe households where English is rarely spoken. According to the resolution, that classification “promotes an ideology of linguistic superiority that foments intolerance and conflict.”
The association voted to establish a committee to study the rapidly rising prices of corn, wheat, and other food staples worldwide.
The members urged that the association’s bylaws be changed so that referenda can be conducted by e-mail rather than by expensive and time-consuming paper mail ballots. (That change would itself require a vote by paper mail.) Several speakers also urged reforms that would give the annual business meeting more weight, so that fewer resolutions would be referred to the executive board. “We need to make a face-to-face deliberative body the place where democracy happens,” said Karen Brodkin, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.—David Glenn