Seeing on Behalf of a State

The quasi-Anarchist anthropologist James C. Scott died on Friday. Something which has been missing from lots of people's tributes over the last couple of days is this information, from Todd Holmes' oral history interviews with Scott published a few years ago:

So I had also, not knowing what to do, I applied to join the CIA. I had applied to Harvard Law School and had been accepted, and on a kind of flash of daring, I applied for a Rotary Fellowship to Burma, and I got the Rotary Fellowship to Burma. I thought to myself, I can postpone Harvard Law School, I can always go to law school, but when am I going to get a chance to go to Burma? And so, I decided to go to Burma and spent a year there, and in the meantime—this is not in a lot of my stuff—the CIA people asked me to write reports on Burmese student politics and so on, which I did. Then they arranged through the National Student Association to have me go to Paris for a year and be an overseas representative for the National Student Association. I went to the Congo; I went to Ghana; I went to, oh, Scotland. I spoke at the French National Student Union meeting. I went to the Polish—first American to go to the Polish National Student meeting, et cetera. It was quite an experience.

A few pages later we get this:

I went to Jakarta and Bandung, so I had a little Indonesian experience, and then I went to what was then East Pakistan, Dhaka, and I went to Singapore. In Singapore, I got to know the Socialist student union people, the sort of so-called Dunham Road Hostel, many of whom became very important politicians later on, and personal friends in some cases. So at the end of my Burma year, I saw, if you like, student politics in three or four different places, and including—we're talking '60, and so I met the sort of Communist leaders of the CGMI, which was the Communist student union in Indonesia, most of whom were killed after '65, and so on.

It just seems like the kind of thing that needs to be in the little potted biographies, in order to give a fuller picture. 

It's not particularly a surprise that anthropologists and archaeologists get recruited as assets by intelligence services, although it tends not to be remarked upon much from inside the profession other than by David Price, and as he's remarked, doing so "is not thought to be a good 'career builder'."