The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

As President of the American Anthropological Association during the period when some of the events described by Eric R. Wolf and Joseph G. Jorgensen [NYR, November 19] took place, I must in the interests of the good name of the Association and its officers comment on several points. Professors Wolf and Jorgensen appear to be attempting two things: 1) To justify their actions in identifying themselves as Chairman and member of the Association’s Committee on Ethics in making pronouncements about certain documents bearing upon United States involvement in Thailand; this identification led to a formal rebuke by the Association’s Executive Board, since it disregarded the Committee’s formal charge, and it was followed by their resignation from the Committee. 2) To make it appear by discussing the documents, presented to them by the Student Mobilization Committee, that American anthropologists are deeply involved in counterinsurgency research in Thailand, and that this is but the latest episode in a long series of similar events “in violation of the conscience of anthropology,” projects “calculated to interfere in the affairs of others….” The article presents a one-sided and unfair picture of the reasons underlying the Executive Board action, and it is grossly distorted in attributing to American anthropology a long history of unethical behavior.

To understand why the Executive Board of the Association felt it necessary to rebuke Professors Wolf and Jorgensen, one must know the constitutional limitations of the Association, and the events that preceded the action. The Association is governed by an eight-member elected Executive Board, which includes the President and President-Elect. This Board has “authority to exercise on behalf of the Association all powers and functions of the Association,” as defined in the Constitution and By-Laws, which in the case of committees and other agents includes delegation of authority and supervision of activities including receiving and acting upon budgets, requests, and plans submitted by them. Since legal liability as well as administrative powers and functions are vested in the Board, it is clear that it must exercise close control over all Association committees and other agents.

Except for an ad hoc Elections Committee appointed to count ballots, the Association has no constitutional committees. Committees, whether elected or appointed, derive their authority directly from the Board, and are empowered to act only in those ways charged them by the Board, which constitutionally must accept all responsibility for committee actions.

Because of its increasing concern about professional ethics, the Executive Board in the fall of 1968 appointed an ad hoc (or “Interim”) Ethics Committee, co-chaired by two Board members, and including among its membership Professors Wolf and Jorgensen. The Committee was instructed “to develop standards of conduct at the individual, corporate and Association levels.” Following a two-day meeting in January, 1969, the Committee submitted its report for consideration by the Executive Board at its February meeting. The motion to accept and implement Committee recommendations, which included complete Committee autonomy, was defeated.

Constitutionally the Board could not have granted Committee autonomy. However, important parts of the report were acted upon, including authorization of full publication of the report in the April, 1969, Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, which is distributed to all members, The Executive Board also approved the recommendation that the ad hoc committee be continued as an elected nine-member standing committee and, to provide continuity until this goal could be reached, three of the original appointed members, including Professors Wolf and Jorgensen, were carried over for one year. At its September, 1969, meeting the Board reaffirmed the establishment of the Standing Committee on Ethics, charging it to “consider the earlier report of the Interim Ethics Committee, the body of AAA resolutions concerning ethical matters, i.e., the Statement on Problems of Anthropological Research and Ethics by the Fellows of the American Anthropological Association (adopted in 1967) and to recommend to the Executive Board what its functions should be” (emphasis added).

In reporting this action in the November, 1969, Newsletter the two Board members serving as Committee co-chairmen wrote:

It is thus clear that although the Board remains concerned about the problem of ethics, it is as yet unclear on just how that problem should be handled. Nevertheless the Board affirms that a standing committee should be in office and should be selected by the membership itself, thus achieving the widest possible and most direct possible representation, and that the Standing Committee on Ethics should take its authority directly from the Board—that is, that it should undertake no action without first obtaining the approval of the Board. In the same way, although the Standing Committee is asked to define what its proper functions should be, it may not take that definition of its proper functions as a mandate without first obtaining the Board’s approval [both emphases added].

Further, in a memorandum to Executive Board members dated October 29, 1969, the (by now single) liaison Board member of the Committee on Ethics wrote, “At present the sole mission of the Ethics Committee is to establish its mission to the satisfaction of the Board.”

And finally, the explanation accompanying the ballot for the 1969 Association election of officers, which included candidates for six places on the Committee on Ethics, read in part: “Note that you are voting for members of a standing committee; that that committee is charged with defining its role and function but that it may not crystalize that role and function until it is authorized by the Executive Board to do so. Hence its activities will be under the direct review and control of the Executive Board, unless and until the Board agrees to relinquish that control.” (Emphasis added.) The Board felt compelled to spell out this matter because of widespread apprehension among many Association members, partially expressed in an unprecedented outpouring of letters to the Newsletter editor, about the intentions and powers of the Committee.

At its January, 1970, meeting the Executive Board was informed by its liaison member that Professor Wolf would request case materials bearing on ethical problems in an early Newsletter. This request appeared in the March, 1970, issue, and read in part:

We ask the Fellows and Members of the Association to acquaint us with the details of cases in which they have been involved, or which they have collected on their own. From such case material we hope to extract or to document general principles for the formulation of an ethical code for anthropologists. Any communication you may wish to make to the ethics committee will remain completely confidential; we are interested in general information in cases, but not in the names of persons or specific localities [emphasis added].

Please keep in mind that the committee is not a judicial body, and cannot take sides in any dispute, nor adjudicate a particular set of issues. We are interested in the circumstances of any particular case only to the extent that they can help us draw up general guidelines for conduct by anthropologists.

The propriety of the actions of Professors Wolf and Jorgensen with respect to the documents provided them by the Student Mobilization Committee, their unanimous rebuke by the members of the Executive Board, and their subsequent resignation, must be judged against this background. The charge to the Committee had been spelled out time after time, in a variety of ways and places, and it was specific and limited: suggest to the Executive Board what you believe to be an appropriate role for the Committee. Nevertheless, writing in “Warpath,” Professors Wolf and Jorgensen say, “We rejected what seemed to us a bureaucratic interpretation of the role of the committee….”

Under the circumstances, and in view of a calculated and deliberate disregard of its instructions, the remarkable thing is not that the Board rebuked Professors Wolf and Jorgensen, but that it did not ask for their resignations.

The rebuke was not for expressing their concern about the Thailand case, but for formally identifying themselves as Chairman and Member of the Committee on Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, thereby seeming to make official their action. That this was their intention is made clear in a letter dated April 26, 1970, which they wrote to one of the anthropologists named in the SMC documents: “In their communications and letters, Jorgensen and Wolf have acted as members of the AAA Ethics Committee. They do not, however, speak for the committee as a whole.”

Had Professors Wolf and Jorgensen not identified themselves as Committee members, the Board would have had no cause to rebuke them. A third Committee member who spoke in San Francisco in even more forceful terms at the Association of Asian Studies meetings was not included in the rebuke, because he did not identify himself as a Committee member. The Board’s unanimous rebuke was worded with great care and thought, formulated one day, set aside for the night, and reconsidered and slightly revised on the following day. It was not framed in the heat of anger.

Now let us consider the documents that the SMC placed in the hands of Professors Wolf and Jorgensen, since the authors of “Warpath” left much unsaid:

The documents we had received were not classified in the legal sense, but they were copied from the personal files of an anthropologist at a university in California. That is to say, we were presented with Xerox copies of the originals. We regret this action [what action?], and would certainly not have taken it ourselves, nor would we have encouraged anyone else to do so. But the documents seemed to us of such significance that, while taking care to protect the names of those mentioned, we nonetheless felt compelled to pursue the questions raised by them because of our concern for the integrity of our profession.

The SMC documents were removed from the files of a California professor prominently mentioned in the documents, by his research assistant, and Xeroxed and returned to their place without his knowledge or consent. The assistant then delivered them to the Student Mobilization Committee. These, and only these, purloined documents were the basis for Professors Wolf and Jorgensen’s public statements.

The incident is analogous to a hypothetical case in which on the basis of an illegal wire tap the government were to ask a grand jury to indict a suspect, without submitting any substantiating evidence. Yet Professors Wolf and Jorgensen seem hardly concerned about the propriety of obtaining evidence in this fashion, for they say, in effect, “We wouldn’t think of stealing ourselves, nor would we encourage others to steal, but if we are presented with stolen goods of overwhelming interest to us, we can hardly be blamed for succumbing to the temptation to accept and use them.”

Copies of the stolen materials, a two-inch thick packet of Xerox sheets, were made available to Executive Board members by Professor Wolf on May 5, 1970. In his covering memorandum he writes: “I herewith transmit to you xeroxed copies of the documents transmitted to the Ethics Committee by Student Mobilization, on March 30, 1970.” On the same date, namely March 30, Professors Wolf and Jorgensen wrote a memorandum, addressed to no one but apparently intended for the SMC, in which they report, “The undersigned members of the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association have had occasion to see xeroxed copies of the following documents:…” There follow the same six listed in “Warpath.” The memorandum concludes with the paragraph beginning “Since these documents contradict…,” also reproduced in “Warpath.” This paragraph is reproduced verbatim in the SMC news release of April 2, attributed to the authors, and it is mentioned in an April 2 Washington Star story covering the SMC public news conference, which says SMC leaders had “produced a statement from Professor Eric R. Wolf of the University of Michigan, chairman of the ethics committee of the American Anthropological Association, a principal professional society for social scientists. Wolf said the documents ‘raise the most serious issue for the scientific integrity of our profession.’ ”