Review of Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War in Critique of Anthropology

After a year-and-a-half, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War has finally gotten reviewed in an academic journal. Dr. Heonik Kwon, author of several books and articles about the wars in Vietnam and Korean, as well as the forthcoming Columbia University Press book The Decomposition of the Cold War, writes in Critique of Anthropology:

Wax and other contributors to the volume should be congratulated not only for telling their colleagues about anthropology’s hidden past during the early Cold War, but also for opening a new way to investigate the shape of the Cold War political-intellectual complex.

It’s a positive review overall (yay!) although Kwon does highlight an unfortunate omissions, the role of the Korean War. I had actually wanted to include something about the Korean War, but hadn’t found the person to write it. One question that really interests me is how the essentially 12-year-long military extraction of men from the US population affected the gender balance of the US academy (and particularly the social sciences) — whether it opened the way for more women (as the late Mike Salovesh once suggested to me) or whether it was balanced by the increased percentage of men entering the academy through the GI Bill.

The review is at:

Heonik KwonBook Review: Dustin M. Wax ed., Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Critique of Anthropology 2010 30: 232-233.

If you have access to SagePub (directly or through an academic database like EBSCO), you can get the PDF at Critique of Anthropology.

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