Is there anything new to say in the never-ending discussion of anthropology and espionage? Most anthropologists think it is unethical to gather intelligence on behalf of the government when they do their fieldwork — but not all of them. Some spies pose as anthropologists. Sometimes people start out as anthropologists and move into espionage as a form of applied work. Indigenous people and others have criticized anthropology as itself inherently a form of unethical surveillance which aids colonialism. It turns out there IS something new to say about these issues. In a recent number of History and Anthropology, Insa Nolte, Keith Shear, and Kevin Yelvington discuss the case of anthropologist and clandestine operative Jack Harris, comparing his fieldwork in West Africa with his intelligence work in South Africa during WWII.

Harris lived an extraordinary life, and there is a small literature about him. Born Jacob Herscovitz, he was a first generation American who grew up in the 1910s and 1920s as the son of Romanian Jews. During the depression he became a merchant seaman and travelled the world. Interested in other cultures, he then moved to Northwestern to study with another Herscovitz: Melville Herskovits, who was studying race and acculturation at Northwestern University in Evanston, just north of Chicago. Most of Herskovits’s students I’ve talked to or read about did not become close with him, but Harris did. He moved on to do a Ph.D., where he studied the acculturation of White Knife Shoshone people in Nevada and also did a postdoc. During this period he also conducted research in Nigeria, becoming one of the first American anthropologists to work in Africa. After that he got a job at Ohio State University and would have stayed there, perhaps, if it wasn’t for WWII.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Harris volunteered to return to Nigeria to gather intelligence. His cover would be that he was doing more fieldwork in Nigeria. He grew to be a successful agent, but came down with malaria and left the country. He was then deployed to South Africa, where he posed as a diplomat. The focus of Nolte et al.’s article is Harris’s interview with Hans Van Rensburg, the leader of a pro-Nazi Afrikaner political movement in South Africa called the OB. Van Rensburg’s group was aiding Hitler by supplying intelligence and sabotaging South African industrial production but the Prime Minister, Jan Smuts, refused to clamp down on the movement. It was Harris’s damning report on Van Rensburg that convinced Smuts to rein the group in.

Nolte et al.’s article compares Harris’s ethnographic work with his career as a spy in order to see the similarities and differences between each line of work. As an anthropologist working in Nevada and Nigeria, Harris had to develop close relationships with communities who resented the colonial rule they found themselves under. Sympathetic to their position, he attempted to keep his distance from the government even as he recognized that he had to play by their rules. In these cases, of course, he was above-board with everyone about who he was and what he was doing.

As Nolte et al. point out, some think that the difference between spying and anthropology is that spies must answer research questions set by other people, and have very little influence on the people up the chain of command. But during his time gathering intelligence in Nigeria, Harris was given very little indication what he was supposed to do, and made up the job for himself as he went along. In doing so, he shaped the OSS’s sense of what an agent could and should do for it. Could it be, then, that anthropologists who participate in programs of surveillance really can reform the system from within? The authors suggest that the Harris example suggests that that has been possible in at least one case. Personally, I am skeptical that in this day and age others would have the same success as Harris.

In the end, the authors ask: What was Harris’s ethnographic practice? Was it salvage ethnography? An colonial anthropology of surveillance and power? They conclude that:

Harris’s engagement with [Van Rensberg’s group] the OB was less distorted by epistemological differences than colonial anthropological encounters. But the racist ideology of the OB… legitimated Harris’s unsympathetic portrayal of the group and its leaders. Taking Van Rensburg seriously as a political force, Harris perceived his ethnography confronting a powerful political adversary by provoking Smuts’s government to action. His report, and indeed his repertoire of ethnographic practice, show anthropology’s core methodology of personal engagement directly interrogating and challenging wider relations of power. At the same time, Harris’s case suggests how anthropologists in their various guises have often, despite their discipline’s self-representations, had to mediate systems of authority in situations of crisis.

As an agent in Nigeria and South Africa, Harris used these skills to observe these regimes themselves. If I understand them right, Nolte et al. argue that being an ethnographer made Harris a great agent, but that espioage and anthropology are two different things. Harris admitted who he was to his research respondents for his academic work. Both are politically positioned, and both involve accommodation to existing power structures.

One last note: Harris’s story has a tragic ending. After 1945 he got a high-profile job at the UN, where he worked aggressively to push for decolonization. Unfortunately, he fell victim to the anti-communism hysteria of the 1950s. He refused to snitch on other anthropologists and was fired from the UN. After successfully suing for wrongful termination, he moved to Costa Rica and started a taxi company, and eventually had a hand in creating the country’s first cement factory. Harris died a successful businessman, and never succeeded in breaking back into academic anthropology.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book “Leviathans at the Gold Mine” won the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology book award. He is interested in political anthropology, the anthropology of virtual worlds, the history of anthropology, and public anthropology and open access scholarship. alex.golub.name/