Whistle-blower anthropologist to be reinstated

/ field studies / anthropological / in a broader sense /

The American Anthropological Association moved on Thursday to right an 85-year-old wrong done to a pioneer in the field and a founder of the association. At its annual meeting, the group voted to rescind its censure of Franz Boas...

The controversy dates from December 1919 when, amid a bitter dispute about patriotism, espionage, and scientific ethics, the group's governing council censured Boas, then a professor at Columbia University and probably the country's best-known scholarly anthropologist...

But in the aftermath of World War I, he angered many of his peers by making sharp-tongued criticisms of anthropologists who had covertly served as U.S. spies in Latin America...

A detailed account of anthropologists as spies can be found in the Nation (where Boas' original denounciation of his spying colleagues was published). Some further details on the Boas affair can be found here.