Author: Brian McKenna
Anthropology in Action, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2009 pp. 39-50(12)
ABSTRACT: The article describes my efforts as a public anthropologist/journalist in addressing
the official culture of silence in Michigan’s colleges, universities and towns
regarding Dow Chemical’s extensive environmental health pollution and corruption.
These sites include Midland, Michigan, home of Dow’s international headquarters,
and my own residence of East Lansing, site of Michigan State University, the state’s
largest higher education institution. Both are beneficiaries of Dow largess or philanthropy.
This relative silence – which extends to nearly all state media and universities
– is remarkable considering the fact that, unlike turn of the century company towns,
Dow Chemical operates in a civic culture where thousands of highly educated professionals
work in education, government and communications. Democracy is degraded
by processes of accumulation, ideology, fear, suppression, conformity, specialization
and, importantly, the self-censorship of professionals and academics. With Eriksen
(2006) and Hale (2008) I argue for an engaged anthropology where anthropologists
step out of their academic cocoons to embrace the local public. This is ‘not just a matter
of … reaching broader publics with a message from social science … it is a way of
doing social science’ (Hale 2008: xvii). This case study illustrates how an anthropologist
engaged contradictions in order to show how Michigan universities are becoming
veritable knowledge factories in service to Eisenhower’s feared military–industrial–
academic complex.