On the Locations of Korean War and Cold War Anthropology

Abstract

The most famous instance of direct American anthropological involvement in the Korean War is barely recognized as anthropology at all.In December 1950, after the Inch'ŏn landing had driven back the initial North Korean advance and before the second capture of Seoul, three university-employed social scientists and a PhD-holding CIA and Air Force-affiliated psychological warfare specialist were hastily assembled and dispatched to the peninsula to study the North Korean occupation of the South and, by proxy, the Northern system itself.1 A month later they just as quickly withdrew, but over the months that followed produced a series of classified and unclassified reports on "Sovietization" and the "impact of Communism" for their governmental sponsors, as well as scholarly articles and a popular book on the occupation of Seoul, The Reds Take a City, that would be distributed worldwide by the State Department as a staple anti-communist text.Of the members of the team, the most prominent then and since has been Wilbur Schramm, founder and head of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois.In both celebratory and critical scholarship, Schramm has been regarded as a central figure in the post-1945 development of communications as an academic discipline, and as a result the Korean War study has often been portrayed as a foundational moment in the birth of a field specially geared to the understanding of media-saturated mass society, to the extension of Cold War power and knowledge through technologies of consent, or both (Chaffee and Rogers 1997; Simpson 1994; Robin 2001).Yet the team of 1950-51 was multidisciplinary in both personnel and methodology: its other academic members were John Riley, at the time chair of the Rutgers department of sociology and himself subsequently a participant in the growth of communications, and the Harvard anthropologist John C. Pelzel, whose contribution, a study of two villages south of the 38th parallel that had undergone North Korean occupation, would set a model for similar wartime research by other United Nations and U.S. researchers.

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