“Cybernetics “At A Distance”: Cold War Anthropology, the RCC Project, and the Interpretation of Culture”

Ian Hartman (Northwestern University)

This paper highlights the role of cybernetics in Columbia University's Research in Contemporary Cultures project (RCC, 1947-1953). RCC was a military-funded effort to develop characterological profiles of Cold War national cultures and ethnic groups for the purposes of diplomacy and psychological warfare. Notable for its studies of culture “at a distance,” RCC was particularly invested in analyzing foreign film and literature as representative of cultures’ durable, psychological characteristics.

I argue that cybernetics oriented these analyses by pushing RCC’s interdisciplinary anthropology into alignment with Cold War ideologies of stasis and containment. First, I trace how the involvement of Margaret Mead (RCC director) and Gregory Bateson (a significant RCC interlocuteur) in the Macy Conferences on cybernetics influenced their understandings of cultural cohesion and the role of anthropology in the academy. Next, I demonstrate how RCC meshed systems thinking with neo-Freudianism, developmental psychology, and Cold War nationalism to conceive “national cultures” as self-reinforcing circuits amenable to containment or disruption. Finally, I consider how Bateson’s formulations of “schismogenesis,” “end-linkage,” and cybernetics prompted RCC’s participants to view film and literature as homeostatic systems of interlocking thematic components indexical of broader cultural patterns.

This history illuminates how systems thinking consolidated the transfer of Cold War state politics into one of the first major interdisciplinary programs for the study of art and popular culture. At the same time, it moves away from diffusionist histories of cybernetics by situating it within a wider set of contemporary anthropological discourses on systems, cohesion, and control.

“The Insurgent Generation: Critical Anthropologists in the US and Mexico, 1969-1976”

John Gee (Harvard University)

This paper is part of a dissertation project that traces ideas about cultural change and expertise among anthropologists in the US and Mexico from the 1930s to the mid-1970s. It argues that controversies inaugurated by a younger generation of anthropologists in the late 60s and early 70s dramatically shifted anthropology’s attitudes toward the state, but did not fully succeed in altering its institutional positions in those countries. This history illuminates a broader intellectual shift toward suspicion of state power, and the limited capacity of intradisciplinary conflict to reshape durable institutional structures.

In both cases, cohorts of Marxist and Marxist-influenced anthropologists, such as Eric Wolf and Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, accused the disciplinary mainstream of theoretical inadequacy and political negligence. On this account, anthropologists had failed in their responsibility to produce useful generalizations that could explain and confront the oppression of indigenous peoples by colonial states and the capitalist world economy. Several of these critical anthropologists rose to the top of the disciplinary prestige ladder and became intellectual agenda-setters.

Critical anthropologists also attempted to reshape their disciplines’ institutional structures. In Mexico, they worked to promote new policy approaches in indigenous affairs administration, while building research centers to achieve intellectual independence. These efforts were partially successful, but the discipline ultimately retained its mixed institutional base and its substantive focus on research related to Mexican indigenous affairs. Their US counterparts, meanwhile, succeeded in generating substantial academic criticism of US government influence on the world and on anthropology, but were unable to dismantle the structures of the larger market for anthropological expertise.

“Human Ecology as Cultural Diplomacy: Navigating International Politics in the Smithsonian Quadrangle, 1983-1987”

Adrianna Link (American Philosophical Society)

Completed in 1987, the Smithsonian Quadrangle is known as home to the National Museum of African Art, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Enid Haupt Garden, and the S. Dillon Ripley Center (named after the the Institution’s eighth Secretary). Yet throughout its planning, the Quadrangle represented more than just additional gallery space; it promised a venue for cultural exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and international diplomacy.

Key to this project was the establishment of an International Center for African, Near Eastern, and Asian Cultures. Organized around the theme of “conservation” and funded by the nations represented in its programming, the Center drew upon the expertise of Smithsonian anthropologists and folklorists to promote intercultural understanding of the world’s diverse peoples. Among the project’s largest supporters were Saudi Arabian officials, who contributed five million dollars towards the construction of an Islamic Studies Center within the Institution. Following heavy criticism from members of Congress and the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, these funds were ultimately returned and precipitated Ripley’s retirement from the Smithsonian in 1984.

In recounting this episode, this paper has two aims. First, it situates the Quadrangle project within larger narratives about the role of museums as diplomatic agents in international affairs. Second, it uses the International Center’s intellectual basis in anthropology and “conservation” to argue for a human-ecological approach to cultural diplomacy emphasizing the future of human survival. By framing it in these terms, this paper highlights tensions between social scientists and the state in negotiating international politics during the later Cold War.