“Controlled Change” as Counterinsurgency in 1950s Peru
In the late 1940s, Cornell anthropologists, led by young Yale-trained anthropologist Allan Holmberg, began an unprecedented experiment in applied anthropology. As part of a comparative global study on technology and cultural change in “underdeveloped regions,” initiated in 1947 with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, they would take effective control of a Peruvian highland hacienda named Vicos. In time, the Cornell-Peru (Vicos) Project became one of anthropology’s fabled stories of how to induce change in the Third World.
But, the real story was far less simple. The Cornell cross-cultural study originated in a Western community development paradigm in post-war India where, according to George Rosen of MIT’s Center for International Studies (CENIS), home of modernization theory, it offered a model “for meeting the revolutionary threats from left-wing and communist peasant movements demanding basic social reforms in agriculture.”
The Cornell team easily won the backing of Carnegie, a major supporter of post-war initiatives such as the Institute for Defense Analysis, Harvard’s Russian Studies Center, CENIS, and the RAND Corporation, the U.S.’s premier Cold War think-tank. In all these, its goals regularly converged with those of U.S. defense, security and intelligence agencies.
Invited in 1948 by Lauriston Sharp to join the Cornell Department, to add a Latin American component to their study, Holmberg proposed to conduct research in the Callejon de Huaylas, because of “its natural resources, its large unskilled labor supply, its proximity to the coast, and its potential industrial and agricultural significance for the future of Peru.” At a time when Latin America was increasingly regarded as susceptible to communist influence, the U.S. was eager to promote Western-style development (“modernization”) in such crucial areas.
Having begun during the corrupt dictatorship of General Manuel Odria, with whose government Holmberg would claim to be in “close cooperation,” by 1962 the Project was the subject of a fulsome CBS documentary, So That Men Are Free, which proclaimed that, “At Vicos history has begun, prodded into life by ideas springing directly from the American Revolution.” It was Cold War propaganda, facilitated by the fact that the president of CBS, Frank Stanton, was Chair of RAND.
More pointedly, a year earlier, John Gillin had announced to the Society for Applied Anthropology, that “The experience of Vicos contains numerous suggestions for the ‘cold war.’ Through our foreign-aid programs, I presume that we are trying to bring the peoples of the modern world to our side. The numerous defects in our national programs can be corrected on the basis of the experience of Vicos.”
Gillin conveniently omitted the hidden story of which Vicos was a part: since Project Troy in the early fifties, government counter-insurgency efforts had been steadily recruiting social scientists. The Pentagon would soon embark on Project Camelot, to identify, predict and circumvent the causes of “internal war” and revolution, particularly in Latin America. When the Army Research Office asked the National Academy of Sciences to create a committee to advise on Camelot, it appointed Gillin chair.
Cornell anthropologists themselves rarely mentioned the Cold War, communism or, as the World Bank’s Wolf Ladejinsky, colorfully wrote, the need to take “the wind out of the Communist sails in a peasant ocean.” But, in April, 1951, Sharp wrote to John Gardner, former Office of Strategic Services (OSS) –precursor of the CIA– and Vice President of Carnegie: “the hope of the Andean countries as a whole lies in the mountain regions…[where] present conditions of unrest and dissatisfaction are apt to lead to more and bloodier revolutions within the next few years….We would like, therefore, to attempt to change these conditions in as controlled a manner as possible.”
Research at Vicos could help because, according to Holmberg, it would “improve the existing body of knowledge relating to the methods of modernization and democratization under various conditions of ‘control from the top.’”
This side of the Vicos Project –with its deference to Western modernization thinking and implicit distrust of peasant motives– came increasingly to the fore after Holmberg’s year at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in 1954, where he began collaboration with Harold Lasswell, arch-guru of modernization and communication studies.
Lasswell, who wrote that people were “often poor judges of their own interests,” who had been involved with Project Troy and had close ties to both RAND and CENIS, became an intimate member of the Vicos team, eventually co-editing its most important product, Peasants, Power and Applied Social Change: Vicos as a Model. In 1955, they proposed to Carnegie to transform Vicos from a seemingly benign site of “participant intervention,” into “a full-fledged laboratory by reason of Holmberg’s position as patron,” which meant that, uniquely, “an entire community” was “under the political control of a behavioral scientist.”
To enlarge the project beyond Vicos, beyond the Callejon, even beyond Peru, they proposed to create a Center with a Board of Directors that “would be continuously and directly in charge of all research and development.” Holmberg wrote for advice on its composition to Leonard Cottrell, a social psychologist at Russell Sage who was chair of the Defense Department’s advisory group on psychological and unconventional warfare and would join the Smithsonian Institution’s Research Group in Psychology and the Social Sciences, which also worked for Defense. Among Cottrell’s suggestions: Frank Stanton, President of CBS, who would become Chair of RAND; Charles Dollard, former head of Carnegie and founding member of RAND’s Board of Trustees; John Gardner, former OSS and President of Carnegie; Max Millikan, member of Project Troy, senior economist at the CIA, and first director of CENIS; Hans Speier, head of Social Sciences at RAND and a student of Harold Lasswell; Philip Mosely, head of Columbia’s Russian Institute, CIA consultant and the Council on Foreign Relations’ director of studies; and Clyde Kluckhohn, former OSS, member of Project Troy, director of the Harvard Russian Studies Center and, in 1947, president of the American Anthropological Association.
A cross-section of the civilian intelligence community, it highlighted the covert Cold War significance of the Vicos model of “modernization” as counter-insurgency.
Eric B. Ross taught for 16 years at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, where he ran the MA in Development Studies. He is currently Professorial Lecturer at The George Washington University. His best-known book is The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development.
This side of the Vicos Project –with its deference to Western modernization thinking and implicit distrust of peasant motives– came increasingly to the fore after Holmberg’s year at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in 1954, where he began collaboration with Harold Lasswell, arch-guru of modernization and communication studies.
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Paul Doughty”s comments on my essay hardly surprise me, since he is, if anyone, the “keeper of the flame” of the myth of Vicos and the legend of Allan Holmberg. As such, what he inevitably doesn’t do is refute any of my specific arguments, preferring instead to suggest that any critics of the Cornell-Peru Project must be “conspiracy theorists.” Trivializing the efforts of those who dissent from the standard Vicos script doesn’t really do anthropology any good, however. And I would remind Doughty that, long before I ever wrote on the subject, Dwight Heath, an outstanding Latin Americanist, had already commented in 1980 that the Cornell work at Vicos was a “tangled skein of theory and practice, individuals and institutions, progress and problems.” The problems began from the moment that Holmberg entered the Callejon de Huaylas and described Vicos as “an Indian farm where the natives can be studied under aboriginal conditions.” As Barbara Lynch pointed out in her 1982 report for USAID, Holmberg and his colleagues persistently regarded Vicos “as a medieval society, isolated from history, rather than a product of it.” Deeper inquiry into the nature of the Project, its assumptions and aims, was long overdue when I first wrote about Vicos in 2005.
Doughty unfortunately evinces little respect for the spirit of such inquiry when he rather superciliously implies that my critical perspective on Vicos is just a product of my imagination. So, he doesn’t even attempt to refute a single argument that I have made, here or elsewhere. But, in any event, what he has finally chosen to “respond” to is merely a short opinion piece. He has never sought to reply to my longer, more substantive papers –one of which appeared in the very Greaves, Bolton and Zapata volume (2011) that he cites, the other of which was published earlier in Dustin Wax’s excellent Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War (2008).
But, efforts to fathom precisely what the Vicos Project entailed –beyond what Doughty and other loyalists think or say it meant– hardly begin or end with me. I would therefore highly recommend that readers look at Lynch’s 1982 report which concluded that, by working within the dominant framework of Peruvian institutions, the Project had actually “acted as a brake on social change.” She describes, among other things, how the introduction of new potato varieties had chiefly benefitted better-off Vicosinos. Of special significance, according to Florence Babb (1985), is the fact that the Cornell-directed modernization process at Vicos reflected a “male bias” that intensified the dependent position of women. For further contributions toward a critical perspective on the Vicos Project, interested readers should also look at the chapters by Jason Probilsky and William Mitchell in the Greaves, Bolton and Zapata volume. Doughty might also consider looking at them.
About Allan Holmberg, much more remains to be said than what I have written so far. The story begins, in part, with his famous study of the Siriono, a tropical Bolivian lowland group that, thanks to work by Isaac and Stearman, is now known not to have been the pristine aboriginal culture that he characterized it as. After completing his dissertation at Yale in 1945, Holmberg, as Doughty notes, secured a position as ethnographer on the Viru Valley project, run by the Institute of Social Anthropology (ISA) at the Smithsonian. But, then, for years, he continuously avoided his obligation to submit any work for publication to the Smithsonian. At one point, in January, 1950, he wrote to Gordon Willey that, despite a heavy teaching schedule at Cornell, he hoped to complete it by the Fall. He described it as an impressive work: “The manuscript will run between 800 and 1000 pages, double-spaced typing…The title of the work will be: Fiesta and Siesta in a Peruvian Town: A Cultural Study of Viru Valley.” In late September, he wrote to George Foster, then head of the ISA, “Although the Viru manuscript is not finished, I have been working every spare minute I can on it.” Yet, a year later, Foster had to write to Holmberg: “ I would appreciate a note about the status of the Viru report, and whether or when you expect to let me have it.” In early January, 1952, Holmberg replied that he was “up to my neck in work on our Callejon project and I just haven’t had time to finish up the Viru paper.” The monumental work described two years earlier had been down-sized to “a paper,” but even that would never be finished. Holmberg’s whole Viru manuscript seems to have been pure fantasy. In the end, he offered Foster a modest manuscript that became Nomads of the Long Bow instead.
That was the only book that Holmberg ever wrote. Years later, he was meant to be collaborating on a major work on Vicos with Harold Lasswell, when he died, suddenly, in 1966. In response to a delicate letter of inquiry by Lasswell about the state of the manuscript, Allan’s widow, Laura, wrote: “I have gone through all of the files in Allan’s office at Cornell and, unfortunately, I find no manuscript in progress…Hank [Henry Dobyn] and I are mystified by the lack of any kind of in-progress material. I found nothing at home in his desk or files, nothing in the department office and so far, Hank has found nothing in the Research Office. I apologize to you on Allan’s behalf…There is really very little on hand and I am afraid that it was all in Allan’s head.”
And Doughty talks about my imagination!
Speaking of Myths: a Response to Ross
by
Paul L. Doughty
Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, University of Florida. He worked in community development projects in Mexico and El Salvador in the 1950s, development and applied research and evaluation work in Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. His fieldwork in Peru stretched from 1960 to 2004. He authored and co-authored three books on Peru. His most recent book is co-edited with Alice Kehoe, Expanding American Anthropology, 1945-1980: A Generation Reflects (Alabama, 2012).
Eric Ross’ article “Modernization and the Myth of Vicos about the Cornell Vicos project spins off into the mire of supposed “conspiracy,” imagining that American imperial designs were focused on a hacienda population of 1800 indigenous serfs entrapped in peonage since 1595. Ross’ imagination runs overtime to show that A worked with B, who knew C & D, and they had met E and F at a meeting, where G gave a paper they might have heard, and H was also there and he was a friend of C and they were on a committee together. Aha! This connection expands to I, J and K who once worked for L who was a distant cousin of B. And there you have it. All of this construction takes place in the absence of on-the-ground facts that nevertheless, are widely available. Ross apparently doesn’t trust those who were involved in the work or what they have researched, done and written about the Vicos project. After all there were A and B’s connections to M to consider. Clear enough?
But then all of this took place in that prehistoric time in the early 1950s. That was when the old colonial world was breaking up, new nations emerging, the newly formed United Nations beginning to act, ideas about planned change taking shape and development strategies featured “bottom up” approaches that often rested on anthropological-like visions of community and culture, This process took place in the context of the quickly developing cold war and the US emergence as the great democratic world power. Social, cultural and political changes were rapidly transforming the colonized world.
The Americans involved in these events in the early 1950s were veterans of WWII. Among them, was Allan Holmberg who had spent the war years in the Amazon seeking rubber for military use along with others who were familiar with that environment. Upon finishing his Yale dissertation after the war (having studied under Alfred Metraux, Bornislaw Malinowski, G.P. Murdock and other notables of his time) Holmberg went to Peru in the late 1940s as a visiting professor at San Marcos University in Lima where he helped to establish the Anthropology department with Jorge Muelle and others. He also undertook a community study of the town of Virú as part of the historic Virú Valley archeology project (John Gillin studied Moche at the same time, also as part of the larger project). In this process, Holmberg involved San Marcos students in the department’s first student field research.
He also first visited Vicos while directing a similar student research project and survey in the Callejón de Huaylas. Among his students on the trip was Jose Maria Arguedas. The archetypical Andean hacienda of Vicos fascinated him. Another San Marcos student, Mario C. Vázquez, subsequently undertook his dissertation research there and from that, Vázquez launched the idea about a land reform and development program designed to free Vicosinos from peonage and to help them become an independent agrarian community. Vázquez’ keen interest stemmed from the fact that he was from the area and concerned about the oppression of indigenous peoples. Subsequently, Holmberg worked with Vazquez and the director of the Instituto Indigenista Peruana, Dr. Carlos Monge Medrano, and they forged a plan that Holmberg presented to the Carnegie Corporation for funding.
The project would be a cooperative one with the Ministry of Labor and Indigenous Affairs where the IIP was located. Thus the first such program in Peru was launched at the start of 1952 as a collaborative effort between Cornell and the Ministry. A decade later, in June 1962, the Vicos community was able to purchase the hacienda with its own money from potato sales, an act from which Vicosinos still take great pride. The key person “on the ground” much of the time for the project was Mario Vazquez. It had been an innovative program that incorporated Peruvian ministries and programs in a coordinated fashion that brought efforts to bear holistically upon the community and inhabitant wants and felt needs: freedom from serfdom, food, education, organization and sources of income.
The community changed from its over 480-year-long “culture of peonage” to become a independent, busy community with an educated populace electing its leaders, debating its issues and participating in regional affairs. My own association with Vicos was from 1960 to 1962. After 1962, Cornell’s active role in Vicos ended. Later, from 1963-4, I was Field director for the Cornell Peru Project, directing our evaluation of the Peace Corps and I frequently visited the community. During this time and in subsequent years up to my last visit in 2004, Vicosinos had become elected local officials and provincial leaders, active entrepreneurs, teachers and many other things. That was the intent of the Cornell Peru Vicos Project that had successfully outlasted landlord and right wing political attacks in Peru and conservative critics from the US, and, the constant opposition of their left wing counterparts there and elsewhere that assumed there were hidden American imperialist, “colonial” interests involved. It is a myth that Ross tirelessly embraces and propagates. Those interested in learning about the Vicos project should read the book, Vicos and Beyond Edited by Tom Greaves, Ralph Bolton, and Florencia Zapata (2011 Altimira), that provides extensive details by anthropological participants and critiques by others who were not, covering 50 years.
Professor Ross wrote on this topic in a chapter contained in the book on Vicos edited by Tom Greaves, Ralph Bolton and Florencia Zapata, VICOS AND BEYOND: A Half CENTURY OF APPLYING ANTHROPOLOGY IN PERU (2010, Altamira). A version of that book appeared in Spanish, 50 ANOS DE ANTROPOLOGIA APLICADA EN EL PERU: VICOS Y OTRAS EXPERIENCIAS (2010, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos). For a fuller appreciation of the Vicos Project, I suggest the reader consult the accounts contained in either of those volumes.
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