Anthropology Newsletter, January 1997
Q: WHY IS THE WORD "AMAZON" IN THE TITLE? WHY NOT "HEMISPHERE" OR "AMERICAS"?
There are several reasons as we will explain below, but the ultimate reason is that our research began in the Amazon looking into the causes behind the genocide of Indians, and that we concluded that the conquest of the Amazon can and should be viewed as a metaphor for the conquest by corporate-controlled market forces of the entire Third World, not just this hemisphere.
What we uncovered, in investigating the forces behind the genocide of up to 100,000 Indians in the Amazon during the 1950s and 1960s, was a certain historical continuum, a "tried and true" method of development that had been successful in conquering the American West in the 19th century. We discovered, to our fascination, a conscious comparison of the Amazon to the West by American developers. George Hanson, an explorer of the Amazon and an advisor to Nelson Rockefeller when the latter was Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during World War II, perhaps expressed this attitude most succinctly when he wrote that "The average man can hardly realize how widespread is the idea, even in the U.S., that the settling of South America's interior would give another breathing spell to our civilized world...I find myself confronted at every turn by the romantic argument that the conquest of South America's wilderness would do for the Western Hemisphere that the conquest of the West did for the United States at a critical time." Hanson's emphasis on the "romance" of conquest reveals a blind-sightedness about the horrifying impact of conquest on indigenous peoples: ethnocide and genocide.
Among those sharing in this blindness, or denial, are American fundamentalist Christian missionaries. When we began our investigation 20 years ago, we wanted to understand why the United States's largest missionary organization, the Wycliffe Bible Translators ( which functions abroad under its more scientific sounding alias, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) ) remained silent while working among some of the very tribes in the Brazilian Amazon that were being destroyed by the military dictatorship's genocidal development policies. Over the next four years, we learned about SIL's symbiotic relationship with Amazon basin governments colonizing the Amazon rainforest in lieu of effective agrarian reform, and about the role of the State Department and the Agency for International Development in backing SIL's efforts to pacify tribes resisting encroachment on their lands and to integrate them into the increasingly globalized and corporate-controlled national cash economies.
We also observed SIL's assistance to American corporate interests moving into the Amazon, whether born-again industrialists like Robert Le Tourneau (the earth-moving machinery magnate) or more politically sophisticated oil companies linked to eastern finance like Texaco and Gulf.
Initially, however, it appeared there were few links between SIL's large corporate donors (most of whom were new wealth interests from the South and Southwest) and the mining and oil companies which were benefitting from SIL's work and moving into the Amazon. After a few years, we shifted our investigation from SIL's money trail to political research, eventually focusing on two powerful Americans, one in the State Department and the other in the CIA, who had operated in Brazil and the Amazon in both business and government intelligence capacities and worked together to contour American policies to meet corporate needs and interests during and after World War II. These men were John C. King, former Johnson & Johnson vice president in Brazil and later the CIA's Chief of Clandestine Services in the Western Hemisphere, and Adolf Berle, former chairmen of the American Molasses Company and Roosevelt's Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America and Ambassador to Brazil, and later chairman of President Kennedy's Task Force on Latin America. Berle's papers, in turn, led us to his ally in Latin American affairs, Nelson Rockefeller.
But it was not until we discovered the role of Rockefeller in shaping U.S. development policies that the whole picture became clear. By learning of the role missionaries played in advising Nelson's grandfather, Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller Sr., about Indian revolts and land speculation in the very areas he had targeted for investment, we came to understand how critical their role was in development, often acting, albeit unconsciously, as an "advance guard" of corporate development forces, pacifying Indians to prepare them for the corporate interpretation of "progress."
THY WILL BE DONE follows Townsend's missionaries throughout South America, particularly the Amazon Basin countries, and then on to Southeast Asia. What we found, in each case, was a confluence of missionary activity and counterinsurgency programs -- some of them assisted by anthropologists -- laying the groundwork for corporate penetration of "new frontiers." By the end of THY WILL BE DONE, the reader comes away with a vital understanding of the multi-disciplinary nature of corporate- controlled development, which can be applied to not only the Amazon, but most remote areas of the world.
Q: WHAT ARE THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ROLES OF ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN THIS PROCESS?
We would not have been able to accomplish our investigation into the ethnocide and genocide of Indians without the assistance of some courageous and dedicated anthropologists. Initially, among our most valuable sources were those who either participated in or were influenced by the ground-breaking Barbados conference of 1971 sponsored by the World Council of Churches's Program to Combat Racism. They saw no contradiction between their dedication to scientifically advancing humanity's knowledge of itself as a culturally adaptive species struggling to survive, and an ethical responsibility to bear witness to the needless suffering of indigenous people.
Many of these anthropologists risked their careers to document and protest the brutality inflicted on indigenous peoples in the name of progress. Others remained silent. Some collaborated with government and corporate forces involved, including Nelson Rockefeller's own development schemes.
In an effort to understand the contradictions that we had witnessed in the field, we researched the origins of anthropology as a discipline and found the early role of applied anthropology in counterinsurgency, spelled out clearly by Clyde Kluckhohn: "If we know a culture, we know what various classes of individuals within it expect from each other -- and from outsiders." The U.S. government, he pointed out, hired anthropologists to serve in "military intelligence, the Department of State, OSS, Board of Economic Warfare, the Strategic Bombing Survey, the Military Government, Selective Service Organization, Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of War Information, the FBI...the medical branch of the Army Air Forces and the Chemical Warfare Division." The U.S. government continued to enlist anthropologists into its services, whether to analyze indigenous labor as a potential labor supply for rubber gathering during WWII, or as chroniclers of peasant and indigenous unrest for studies like the ill-fated Project Camelot, or as intelligence sources on tribal customs in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Not surprisingly, prestige and influence would often go to anthropologists whose loyalties to corporate and government prerogatives would not be in question. Thus, the rise of United Fruit heiress Doris Stone at Tulane, a recipient of her father's company's largess, was as much a result of her attitudes and behavior as it was her social background. This behavior included her collaboration with SIL's Townsend in the U.S. delegation's effort to silence dissent at the 1959 Inter- American Indian Conference.
In some cases, however, anthropologists were concerned enough about government misuse of the information they or their colleagues had gathered from trusting indigenous informants that they pressed for investigations by the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association and for resolutions barring collaboration with the CIA. Others tried, and continue to try, to influence the policies of development agencies such as the World Bank. At the last annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, we witnessed Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader talk on the use of anthropologists in the Cold War and her urging her colleagues to consider "studying up" the ladder of power, not just down. We think this could be a healthy and realistic development in anthropology. There is no legitimate or ethical reason why the people who inspire and control policies affecting indigenous people should not be studied any more closely than the indigenous people who are the objects of such policies.
Q: WHAT ABOUT DAVID STOLL'S CHARGE IN HIS AA REVIEW (98:3, SEPTEMBER 1996:636-638) THAT YOUR BOOK IS "ACCURATE BUT ESSENTIALLY PARANOID" ABOUT SIL'S AND ROCKEFELLER'S ROLE IN LATIN AMERICA?
While David Stoll cannot argue with our facts, he is uncomfortable with what they prove: SIL, because it saw nothing wrong with collaborating in the Cold War, worked with military regimes and the US government in counterinsurgency operations and "prophylactic" development programs allegedly designed to stop the spread of communism, but later revealed to be genocidal. SIL, therefore, must evade 3 central issues: the fact of genocide, SIL's silence before genocide, and SIL's witting and enthusiastic collaboration with those regimes that permitted genocide to take place. Stoll, who has studied SIL for as long as we have, does not challenge SIL's silence before genocide. He does not use the word "genocide" once in his review, though that is the central concern of our conclusions in the last chapter and should be a central concern of anyone concerned about morality and ethics. He even observes that the "docile attitude" of "hapless" SIL missionaries was "not necessarily a bad thing. By keeping their mouths shut, they could sometimes give hard-pressed native people medicine and schools." In the face of genocide, of course, these amenities cannot excuse SIL's silence. So Stoll also evades the question of genocide, and the Rockefeller influence over Townsend and the political world in which Townsend's ambition led SIL. Perhaps this explains Stoll's almost schizophrenic characterization of our book as "accurate but paranoid." Paranoia is a fear of things that do not exist. The evidence shows that genocide existed, that Rockefeller's unique influence over a corporate and "New Military" development process that was genocidal existed, and that the use of SIL to help to carry out that process -- regardless of SIL's own misguided motives -- existed. History, if it is accurate, is not paranoia. And, incidentally, Rockefeller links to SIL are not ancient history, either. In 1994, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund gave SIL $10,000. Stoll knew this. We gave him a xerox of the relevant page from the RBF annual report at last year's AAA meeting.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)