Is Anthropology Alive? Social Responsibility In Social Anthropologi by Gerald D. Berreman .. The old formula fOT successful counterinsurgency used to be J 0 troops for evtry guerrilla, one American specialist [in Thailand] remarked. Now the formula is ten anthropologists for each guerrilla (Braeslrud I THE NOTION THAT contemporary world events arc ir­ relevant to the professional concerns of anthropologists GERALD D. BERREMAN was born in Portland, Oregon in 1930. He received his B.A. in anthropology from the University of Oregon in 1952 and his :;o.1.A. in 1953. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1959 and began teaching anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley in the same year. He is now Professor of Anthropology at Berkeley. Berreman has done fieldwork in the Aleutians, investigating sociocultural change by means of a restudy of an isolated com­ munity 10 years after his original visit. On a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training Fellowshi! he spent 15 months in 1957-58 in a Pahari-speaking community in the Himalayas northeast of Delhi. Among the results of this experience were a monograph, Hindus of IJu Himalayas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963); a pa!,er on the problems ethnographers face in doing fieldwork, and particularly the problem of estab­ lishing a relationship with the people whose life they wish 10 study, Behind Many Masks (Sociery for Applied Anthropology Monograph no. 4); and a number of articles on caste and social stratification, among them Caste in India and the United States (American ]OUTrlQ/ o/Sociology 66: 120-27). He is now in India, on a Fulbright­ Hays Fellowship for Advanced Research Abroad, studying intercaste and interethnic interaction in a medium-sized city. The three papers here presented were submitted to CURRF'...NT ANTHROPOLOGY on the following dates: Berreman, 31 VII 67; Gjessing, 20 I 67; Gough, 25 VII 67. Of 51 scholars to whom the papers werc scnt the following responded with written comments: Olga Akhmanova, Ralph Beals, P. M. Butler, Daniel Cazes, Erik Cohen, Robert Cresswell, Andre Gunder Frank, John Gulick, T. Kawabata, Leo S. Klejn, David Levine, I. M. Lewis, Thomas McCorkle, Bruce B. MacLachlan, F. C. Madigan, Thomas l\tlaloney, Otto von Mering, R. Mukherjee, Ethel Nurge, Sollie H. Posinsky, Cara E. Richards, Wolfgang Rudolph, Henning Siverts, and Peter Skalnik. The comments are printed in full after the three papers and are followed by replies from each of the was laid neatly to rest when, at the meeting of Fellows of the American Anthropological Association in Pittsburg in November, 1966, Michael Harner rose to challenge the ruling of the president-elect that a resolution introduced by David and Kathleen Gough Aberle condemning the United States' role in the war in Vietnam was out of order because it did not advance the science of anthropology or further the professional interests of anthropologists. Harner suggested that genocide is not in the professional interests of anthropologists. With that, the chair was voted down and the resolution was presented, amended, and passed (ef. Fellow Newsletter 1966, Nelson 1966, Raymont 1966). The dogma that public issues are beyond the interests or competence of those who study and teach about man is myopic and sterile professionalism and a fear of commit­ ment which is both irresponsible and irrelevant. Its result is to dehumanize the most humanist of the sciences) as Eric \>Vo1£has called our discipline; to betray utterly the oppor­ tunity and obligation which he has claimed for anthro­ pology, namely: the creation of an image of man that will be adequate to the experience of our time (\'Vo1£ 1964:94). It forsakes the insights of generations of social scientists) social philosophers, and other mcn of knowledge who, since the Enlightenment, have been cast in the role of social critics (cf. Becker 1967). That neurrality in science is illusory is a point which has been made often and well. Telling statements by social scientists in recent times have followcd Robert Lynd's Knowledge for What!, published in 1939. That work is by now a classic) as are the writings of C. Wright Mills on the issue, most notably his articles, liThe Social Role of the Intellectual (1964a) and On Knowlcdge and Power (1964b) and his book, The Sociological Imagination (1961). A series of recent essays on the topic appear in a volume l Proceedings of the Cultural Congress of Houana. 1968. Appeal of Havana. Reprinted in Gramno, weekly edition ofJanuary 21. [AGF tf] author3, Vol. 9· No.5· December 1968