The discipline of anthropology has perhaps always been especially close to the exercise of state power, but, in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, the nature of both anthropology and state power changed dramatically. This was a period when many anthropologists distanced themselves from earlier evolutionist accounts that traced a generalized human development from “primitive” to “civilized.” This evolutionist anthropology, as many scholars have shown, reflected and justified a range of imperialist practices by presenting European conquest as bringing progress to societies existing in a noncontemporary present.Footnote ¹ Two of the most important variants of post-evolutionist anthropology are the cultural relativism associated with Franz Boas (1858–1942) and the sociological universalism associated with Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). The state power that evolutionist anthropology had once supported also changed radically over the same period. The forms of domination exercised by the global North over the global South gradually shifted from direct colonial rule to the combination of military intervention and economic control that characterizes the postcolonial period. Anthropology, Talal Asad has written, is “rooted in an unequal power encounter between the West and Third World . . . an encounter in which colonialism is merely one historical moment.”Footnote ² Internally, the social welfare state continued its remarkable growth but also, in the 1960s and 1970s, faced challenges from those who rejected the patriarchy and heteronormativity that it often presupposed and reinforced. The two books under review reveal how new types of anthropology in the United States and France came to serve these new forms of state power in the twentieth century. In both cases anthropology adapted to these new political conditions by incorporating psychoanalysis to posit an especially strong bond between individual and culture that produced what one contemporary called an “oversocialized conception of man.”Footnote ³

Each of these texts points toward ways of understanding anthropology and state power beyond the moment of formal colonial rule. They focus not only on major intellectuals but also on what Camille Robcis calls “bridge figures” between these intellectuals and political power, as well as on the proliferating state and nonstate institutions in which these individuals operated. In Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War, Peter Mandler traces the rise and fall of the “national character” studies that anthropologist Margaret Mead and her colleagues offered to the United States government during the Second World War and the early Cold War. These anthropologists synthesized a characteristically US-American ego psychology with a pluralist concept of culture to understand how individuals were bound—one could almost say determined—by their culture and also to offer a handy method of “culture cracking” that might help the US state deal with allies and enemies at home and abroad. Robcis, in The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France, studies the rise and partial demise of a “structuralist social contract” derived from the closely related work on kinship and sexuality of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. In the immediate postwar period this structuralist social contract reinforced long-standing patriarchal family policy in France. Yet, while Lévi-Strauss's anthropology may have had some affinity with the “oversocialized” anthropology of Mead and others in her circle, Lacan's psychoanalysis differed radically from—indeed it was developed in part against—the kind of psychoanalysis Mead employed. Thus, in the 1960s and 1970s, French scholars and activists could graft emancipatory critiques and movements onto some of the intellectual roots of this “structuralist social contract.” French familialists could also redeploy this psychoanalytic and anthropological structuralist social contract as part of their own counterattack in the 1980s and 1990s.

Both Mandler and Robcis show how anthropology functioned as a science of social control. Robcis offers a compelling account of how the social emerged as a field of control in an era when mass democracy threatened to upend hierarchies of power and authority. France, as the capital of the democratic revolution, perhaps necessarily played a leading role in this political and scientific innovation, beginning with the Thermidorian Reaction during the French Revolution. Against socialists, Jacobins, and other radical democrats, as well as against counterrevolutionaries, French authorities devised a republicanism that rested on the twin pillars of family and private property. This French republicanism placed the family at the center of the social order. In Robcis's words, “the family operated as the enactor of the social contract, as the purest expression of the general will, as a structure essential for both the social and the individual” (19). The 1804 Civil Code institutionalized this family-centered republicanism. French pro-natalism and familialism developed and grew over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bolstered also by the social Catholicism of Pope Leo XIII. The 1939 Family Code further strengthened this kind of conservative social policy and also formed a cornerstone of the Vichy regime. Other European states discovered their own version of the social question, but only France, according to Robcis, made the family the center of this social question before the fascist states followed the French example in the twentieth century.

No figure is more important for this social-control anthropology in both France and the United States than Emile Durkheim. Kinship was a foundational concern of anthropology, as it was of psychoanalysis, and it is thus perhaps to be expected that the French variant of the social question that placed such emphasis on the family would also produce an anthropology so congenial to the social question. Durkheim's sociological anthropology would be important not only for Lévi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology but also for the functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons, who was a central figure in Mead's intellectual and political milieu.Footnote ⁴ Lévi-Strauss, in fact, as Robcis shows, turned to Durkheim primarily after his encounter, during the Second World War, with this American scene.

Durkheim was only one of the many European influences on American social science. Leading US social scientists had long studied in Europe, and especially Germany, and many Europeans came to the US academy, especially after the rise of fascism. The most directly important of these scholars for Margaret Mead was her PhD adviser, the German Franz Boas. Boas emigrated to the United States in 1886 and three years later took up his first teaching position at Clark University, the institution that, two decades later, would first bring Sigmund Freud to the United States. Moving to Columbia University in 1896 he soon founded the first program to offer a PhD in anthropology in the United States. Along with his student Ruth Benedict, Boas was, Mandler shows, the most important early, and longest-lasting, influence on Mead's anthropology.

Franz Boas led Mead, Benedict, and his other students away from evolutionist anthropology toward a cultural relativism. This cultural relativism, so much more attractive to present-day liberal sympathies than the evolutionist or even frankly racist anthropology that it displaced, is often applauded rather than analyzed. Thus Mandler characterizes Mead's debt to Boas as her “aspiration to teach tolerance by illustrating the richness and variety of human diversity” (11). In fact, this cultural turn was part of a broader reorientation of imperial power in the twentieth century. In the US and elsewhere, social scientists developed cultural conceptions of human difference and hierarchies that stood at odds with biological racism but nonetheless offered schemes of managing, under the guise of “improving,” populations of color nationally and globally. Boas himself made plain that he believed in hierarchical differences in levels of “civilization” between whites and blacks in the United States and between whites and practically all peoples of color globally. He just did not believe that these hierarchies were immutable or grounded in biology.Footnote ⁵ As historian Eric Love has argued, conventional racists often stood at odds with advocates of imperial expansion: racists of the Progressive Era often wanted as little as possible to do with people of color, while advocates of imperialism proposed, by definition, to increase US involvement with, and improve the cultures of, people of color, both at home and abroad.Footnote ⁶ As many scholars have suggested, tolerance has a relation to imperialism and other forms of hegemony perhaps more complex than Mandler allows.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, Mandler's own account offers an outstanding portrait of the complex entanglement of tolerance and hegemony in Mead's world.

Psychoanalysis worked so well with Mead's anthropology in part because of her understanding of cultures, especially those she identified as primitive, as distinct, coherent, and self-consistent wholes. She derived this concept of culture in part from Boas and Benedict, although it was also consistent with the contemporary functionalist sociology of Talcott Parsons, who similarly employed concepts drawn from psychoanalysis. Mead's attention to the intersection of childrearing practices, sexuality, and culture in her first fieldwork in US-governed Samoa also brought her work close to the concerns of psychoanalysis. This research resulted in her best-selling 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa.

Mead began explicitly incorporating psychoanalysis into her anthropology when she was introduced to the neo-Freudian social psychology brought to America by Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, and others. Mead learned about neo-Freudianism at a 1934 conference organized by the General Education Board (GEB). The GEB had been founded in 1902 to promote Tuskegee-style industrial education for African Americans in the South, and it had since expanded this kind of politics into what Mandler, following Brett Gary, aptly characterizes as “nervous liberalism.”Footnote ⁸ Perhaps a counterpart to the French republican familialists described by Robcis, nervous liberals were nervous about “immigration, race-mixing, Bolshevism, sexual deviancy, and free-thinking of all kinds,” and hoped that social science would help manage these perceived threats to the social order (Mandler, 2–3). Both Erikson and Fromm had fled Germany after the Nazi seizure of power, and it may be for this reason that they were as anxious as nervous liberals like their GEB hosts to apply psychoanalytic concepts to understanding and managing society. Their views also fit well with Mead's interest in understanding cultures as coherent wholes fundamentally shaped by kinship, sexuality, and childhood. Mead and Benedict elaborated this neo-Freudian approach to culture in a Columbia University seminar that they ran with Fromm and Karen Horney, another émigré German psychoanalyst.

During the Second World War, Mead and her collaborators brought this variant of psychoanalytic anthropology to the US national security state. As many as half of all US anthropologists, Mandler estimates, devoted themselves full-time to war-related work in a variety of agencies of which the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) is only the best known. In 1940–41 Mead and her spouse Gregory Bateson worked together with GEB president Lawrence Frank in the Committee for National Morale, one of a number of organizations founded to combat isolationism in the US. Mead soon found herself heading the unlikely sounding Committee on Food Habits of the National Research Council, where she coordinated the work of anthropologists at a variety of agencies in Washington, DC. During the war Mead developed the concept of “national character,” one central to much of her subsequent work. The idea of “national character” simplified Mead's concept of distinct, coherent, and self-consistent cultures into a kind of anthropomorphized national individuality analogous to the Freudian ego (Mandler, 56–7).

During the war Mead and her long-term collaborator Geoffrey Gorer, along with Bateson, Erikson, and others, developed methods for what they called “culture cracking,” or “the study of culture at a distance.” The idea was to produce rapid sketches of “national characters” relevant to the war effort, whether of friends or of enemies, by interviews with immigrants from the relevant nations and analyses of film, propaganda, and other information available in the United States. True to their particular psychoanalytic approach to anthropology, Mead and Gorer concentrated on child rearing, kinship, and sexuality as keys to “national character.” Gorer also interested himself in toilet training. The cultures thus cracked included those of such allied states as Greece, Burma, and Britain, as well as enemy states Japan and Germany. Perhaps the most famous—and for some most ridiculous—culture-cracking job was Geoffrey Gorer's Cold War explanation of Soviet politics with reference to the apparent contradiction between the permissive toilet training and generous breast feeding of Russian infants and the restrictive swaddling to which they were subjected. This theory received support from Mead and others at the RAND think tank.

Strategic debates around culture cracking continued during and after the Second World War. Mead worried that “culture cracking” of enemies might interfere with her broader political goal of a world order based on tolerance for cultural diversity. She continued to support such culture cracking, however, in hopes that it would help establish a global power that might bring about this world order (Mandler, 123–4). Talcott Parsons criticized the concept of national character entirely because it made Germany seem unsusceptible to fundamental social transformation and rehabilitation. Meanwhile, those who doubted whether Germany should be rehabilitated at all had little use for descriptions of its national character. Such debates over the strategic value of national character studies continued into the Cold War, as erstwhile allies became enemies and enemies became allies.

During his wartime exile at the New School for Social Research in New York City, Claude Lévi-Strauss came to admire, if not precisely follow, the psychoanalytic anthropology developed by Mead, Benedict, Boas, and others at Columbia University. When he returned to Paris, Lévi-Strauss set about institutionalizing anthropology on the scale he had observed in New York. When he turned to Durkheim to provide a more comprehensive theory of society than he had found in the New York culture crackers, he distanced himself from American anthropology but, perhaps without knowing it, also brought himself closer to the Parsonian sociology that formed another important part of “nervous liberal” social science. This may also help explain why, by the time he returned to Paris, Lévi-Strauss had also abandoned his erstwhile interest in left-wing politics (Robcis, 63–6).

With welcome clarity, Robcis explains the “structuralist social contract” developed by Lévi-Strauss and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in postwar Paris. This structuralist model of kinship built on, and provided a new foundation for, the by-then venerable tradition of French republican familialism. Much of the foundation for this work was a book that Lévi-Strauss had researched in New York, his 1949 Elementary Structures of Kinship. In his general explanation of society Lévi-Strauss rejected historical narratives of a transition from nature to culture. Instead he grounded culture on a prohibition, namely a prohibition against incest, a position close to that put forward by Freud in his 1913 Totem and Taboo. This prohibition, for Lévi-Strauss, was not, however, a historical decision taken by humans, whether for eugenic, ethical, or other reasons, but rather the foundation of culture that made historical decisions, and history itself, possible in the first place. This is due less to what incest prohibits than to what this prohibition requires: if, as Lévi-Strauss has it, men cannot marry their mothers, sisters, or daughters, then they must “exchange” these women for the mothers, sisters, and daughters of other men. In his analysis of the exchange of women, Lévi-Strauss incorporated the work of Durkheim's student Marcel Mauss on the exchange of gifts. Mauss had argued that exchange does not simply transfer goods and services between individuals but also establishes the relationships and hierarchies that constitute society at both a material and a symbolic level. As a semiotic system, society, for Lévi-Strauss, could thus be studied with the methods of structural linguistics. Lévi-Strauss relied especially on the work of Czech linguist Roman Jakobson, who had been his colleague at the New School for Social Research in New York during the war. Culture was not just founded on, but constituted by, the circulation of signs necessitated by the incest taboo and its attendant system of heterosexual exogamy.

Lacan employed the structuralist anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, itself partly indebted to the work of Freud, to further develop his own structuralist variant of psychoanalysis. Lacan conceived of his theoretical work as a “return to Freud”; that is, a return, primarily, from what Lacan saw as the orthopedic, ego-focused psychoanalysis then prevalent in the United States. This was the type of psychoanalysis that lay behind Mead and her cohort's concept of “national character.” Lacan, borrowing a well-known example from Lévi-Strauss's Brazilian ethnographic work, decentered the ego in psychoanalysis by characterizing it as a socially exchanged symbol rather than as the ground of identity. “The ego, the imaginary function,” Lacan wrote, “intervenes in psychic life only as symbol. One makes use of the ego in the same way as the Bororo does the parrot. The Bororo says I am a parrot, we say I am me.”Footnote ⁹ But if the self is an aspect of the symbolic order, on what does the symbolic order found itself? If the subject is an element in language then the subject cannot also be the origin, the “inventor,” of language. Here Lacan also turns to Lévi-Strauss's notion of the incest taboo as the foundation of the symbolic exchanges that constitute culture or the social, combining it (or recombining it) with Freud's analysis of the Oedipus complex. The ground of the symbolic, and thus of language and culture, for Lacan, is the homophonic (in French) name-and-no of the father (nom/non du père). Much as in Totem and Taboo, the no of the father inaugurates the incest taboo and the Oedipus complex and the name of the father acts as the symbolic foundation of the law, authority, and the social order. The heterosexual patriarchal family, for Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, is more than a common element in many social orders: it is the very foundation of social order as such. As Robcis insightfully notes, this view rendered the familialism of the then 150-year-old republican social contract in a new language of structuralism, creating what she terms the “structuralist social contract.”

Robcis leaves open whether Lévi-Strauss and Lacan intended to normalize, even naturalize, heterosexist patriarchy, whether they provided a language to challenge heterosexist patriarchy, or whether their work simply reflected a heterosexist patriarchy still prevailing in the 1950s. For Robcis, the question is how these texts “ask certain questions of their contexts and vice versa” (9–10). In fact, critical responses to these thinkers have produced a variety of compelling positions. The anthropologist Gayle Rubin, in a now classic article, pointed out that the prohibition on incest that Lévi-Strauss locates at the foundation of cultural tacitly assumes, and thus accepts, a prohibition on homosexuality.Footnote ¹⁰ Judith Butler has made similar points, calling for an understanding of gender as performance.Footnote ¹¹ Yet other theorists, including Joan Copjec, and recently Joan W. Scott, have also used Lacan's conception of sexual difference to offer what they consider a more thoroughgoing critique of sex and gender than that made possible by Butler's notion of performativity (Robcis, 8–9).Footnote ¹²

A group Robcis analyzes as “bridge figures,” most importantly Georges Mauco, André Berge, and Françoise Dolto, helped institutionalize this structural social contract as a normative support for heterosexual patriarchy in postwar France. In the French High Commission on Population and Family, Mauco, in Robcis's words, “literalized Lacan's theories and filled the abstract signifiers of the structuralist social contract with real sexed figures” (113). At a “psycho-pedagogical center” and an école des parents, which also had significant political visibility in postwar France, Mauco, Berge, and Dolto further institutionalized a certain normative Lacanianism. This normative Lacanianism was also disseminated through the mass media, above all in parenting advice on radio and television by Dolto, so popular that some in France spoke of “Doltomania” (131). Regardless of where Lévi-Strauss and Lacan themselves stood, thinkers like Mauco, Berge, and Dolto deployed this variant of psychoanalytic anthropology in defense of familialism against democratic challenges common to much of the world in the 1960s and 1970s.

The United States government could call on its own psychoanalytically informed anthropologists as it moved from the left-democratic antifascist politics of the Second World War to the right anticommunist global interventionism of the Cold War. During the Cold War, anthropologists and other social scientists worked in academia, think tanks, and governments, including in the Office of Naval Research and the RAND corporation connected with the Air Force, in support of US global power. The more aggressive global stance of the United States during the Cold War sometimes fit uneasily with aspects of the Boasian cultural relativism championed by Mead, Benedict, and others. Yet Mead and her cohort also remained committed to a universalism of an orchestrated diversity of global cultures, consistent with the “one-world” doctrine of the Roosevelt and early Truman administrations.

Mead became especially concerned with helping economists and engineers overcome local resistance to the technocratic policies of Truman's Point Four Program. Mandler does not explore the politics of this self-described neutral assistance, but Return from the Natives nonetheless makes clear that overcoming local resistance with “culture cracking” was no less political, no more disinterested, during the Cold War and after than it had been during the Second World War. Even as more universalistic modernization theory came to displace one-worldism as the ideology of US Cold War foreign policy, cultural expertise remained, and remains, central to American global hegemony.

During the 1960s and 1970s, intellectuals and activists around the world challenged the way states exercised power both domestically and overseas. In both France and the United States, these radical challenges included attacks on conservative applications of psychoanalytic anthropology to these forms of state power. Thus anthropologists participating in the rebellion against US imperialism in the Cold War, particularly in Southeast Asia and Latin America, criticized Mead and others for their work in support of the national security state and especially US counterinsurgency and war making. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) rejected anthropology in support of US foreign policy on ethical and scholarly grounds, and continues to do so to this day.

In France, meanwhile, intellectuals and activists turned on the structuralist social contract to challenge the state heterosexist patriarchal familialism that psychoanalytic anthropology had helped sustain. Post-structuralism, Robcis makes clear, played an important political role in articulating democratic sexual and kinship demands in France. It emerged alongside a set of legal challenges to familialism in postwar France, which, among other things, expanded a narrow definition of paternity, challenging the name (and implicitly the no) of the father that Lacanian familialists saw not simply as a good thing in itself but also as the foundation of the republican social order. That family law could change at all suggested, moreover, that the family was hardly the immutable structural constant that many French familialists held it to be.

The language of Lévi-Strauss and especially of Lacan served many who rejected French familialism, much as it had also served those who supported it. Thus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, radicalized Lacan's critique of US ego psychology for its conformist normalizing of the “mommy–daddy–me” triad. Luce Irigaray similarly employed Lacanian concepts and arguments in her critique of phallogocentrism, also in psychoanalysis, and in her call for a language and politics that overcome, and do not simply reverse, the hierarchical man–woman binary. Yet Lacan was no neutral player in this conflict over the structuralist social contract, and he helped remove Irigaray from her position at the University of Vincennes, at least in part in response to her Speculum of the Other Woman, which she had published that year. The critique of Freudianism offered by Foucault in History of Sexuality similarly builds on critiques by Lacan, even as this influence remains less explicit than in the cases of Deleuze and Guattari and Irigaray (see Robcis, 171 n. 7). These challenges to structuralist familialism, Robcis reveals, took place on an institutional as well as an intellectual level, including in the Mouvement de libération des femmes, the consciousness-raising group for women Psychanalyse et politique, and the Front homosexual d’action révolutionnaire.

As Robcis shows, the psychoanalytic anthropology of the structuralist social contract has formed an important component of conservative defenses against many changes in French family law, above all the 1999 legislation recognizing all couples, including same-sex couples, in the Pacte civil de solidarité (PACS). Many opposing this legislation, including the Lévi-Strauss student Françoise Héritier, invoked the idea associated with structuralist psychoanalytic anthropology that the patriarchal heterosexual family lay at the foundation of both the normal individual psyche and the social order. One opponent of the PACS law, the sociologist Irène Théry, called to testify before the French senate on the possible consequences of the law, called it “a sociological absurdity and an anthropological irresponsibility” because of its threat to the “symbolic order” (Robcis, 255).

Anthropology of the kind developed by Mead also remains important to the US reassertion of global hegemony after the Vietnam War. The Cold War social science analyzed by Mandler continued to help counterinsurgency overcome “cultural” obstacles around the world, despite the strenuous and ongoing objections of the AAA. This disciplinary consensus was recently challenged by the “Human Terrain System,” in which the US military employed anthropologists and other social scientists in support of the US “War on Terror,” which has also revived and even expanded many other aspects of the Cold War national security state. Still, in 2007 the AAA reaffirmed its commitment against such uses of the discipline. Mandler also contributes to this debate, offering that, while anthropologists should not place themselves entirely in the service of the state, especially for purposes of counterinsurgency, they should nonetheless offer “help in addressing relations between [presumably the United States and] the peoples of the world” (Mandler, 292).

Yet, in support of this conclusion, Mandler rejects scholarship that he classifies as coming from “both ends of the political spectrum” (290, see also 11). In this rhetoric of moderation Mandler dismisses, on apparently political grounds, scholarship on Mead that might have strengthened and developed Return from the Natives. The work on the “right” that Mandler rejects is that of Derek Freeman, an anthropologist of Samoa who argued that many of Mead's sources had deceived her and that she had been gullible because these deceptions accorded with her own political views. Most remember Freeman's rejection of Mead's views of sexual emancipation. More important, in my view, is Freeman's claim that Mead distorted her findings in Samoa to support a “cultural determinism” that had displaced biological racial determinism in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ¹³ The work that Mandler rejects as “left” further contextualizes this cultural determinism. This includes the work of Micaela di Leonardo, whom Mandler names explicitly, as well as others whom he does not cite, especially Jean Walton.Footnote ¹⁴ These authors argue that the cultural relativism in Mead's work functioned as part of a larger political reorientation of Cold War hegemony based on cultural rather than racial inequality. Whether to distinguish US forms of domestic and international white supremacism from Nazi racialism, to defend against Soviet accusations of racism, or because culture proved a handier concept than race for political control, the language of empire since the early twentieth century has mostly been a language of culture rather than race. Elsewhere Mandler characterizes this view of the Cold War entanglement of anthropology and state power as an “orthodoxy,” but Mandler seems to have circumvented rather than overturned it.Footnote ¹⁵ In any case, the work of these scholars does not contradict Mandler's major findings, and engaging it might have enriched Return from the Natives and better connected it to other scholarship.

Mandler and Robcis each offer a compelling portrait of how US and French psychoanalytic anthropology became important disciplines of social and political power in the twentieth century, both domestically and overseas. Robcis especially also reveals how anthropology and psychoanalysis could play counterhegemonic roles in the same period, in part precisely because the fields remained central to the exercise of social and political power. Perhaps a similar point could be made about the psychoanalytic scholarship of Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse in the United States, who served in many of the institutions that Mead and her cohort had but who later stood with those who opposed conservative US power at home and overseas. In 1966, in the waning days of their relatively unchallenged role in supporting state power, Michel Foucault suggested that anthropology and psychoanalysis constituted “counter-sciences” and pointed toward an emancipatory posthumanism when “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”Footnote ¹⁶Return from the Natives and The Law of Kinship suggest that Foucault might just as easily have characterized these two disciplines as preeminent sciences of what he would later term governmentality. Mandler and Robcis each show how psychoanalysis and anthropology not only were fields that participated in the great political conflicts between democracy and authority in the last century but, perhaps for this reason, were also themselves fields on which these conflicts took place.