The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in the Anthropology of Douglas Miles

Abstract

During the Vietnam War, the US government funded anthropological research in South Vietnam that was charged by critics as supporting counterinsurgency measures. My 1973 BA Hons thesis addressed theoretical debates about the nature of political power in post-colonial peasant societies using ethnographic reports of the research group at Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group. In recent years, anthropology has returned to ethical debates in the discipline brought on in the context of US actions as one of the Superpowers during the Cold War and has examined these debates in terms of different contemporary research values in the discipline, as well as changed global politics. From the distance of almost half a century, I wish to re-examine these ethnographic texts in a critical reading of the nature of power in the villages studied.

Keywords:

• Thailand controversy
• Ethics and fieldwork
• Tribal Research Centre
• Vietnam

Notes

1. The Free University had been established on the fringes of the University of Sydney campus by students, academics and other intellectuals as a space for free intellectual enquiry.

2. The group included Linda Connor, Chris Eipper, Gill Cowlishaw and Gillian Leahy, all of whom became academics.

3. This paper by Miles was never published, allegedly due to efforts by Geddes to prevent it and who circulated a critique of it (Geddes n.d.).

4. In the early 1980s, Doug and I were in a popular culture discussion group with John Docker and others, and our meetings and discussions of inter alia new work emerging from the Birmingham School was at the forefront of the growing interest in Cultural Studies in Australia (see Docker 1994, p. xv).