American Anthropological Association - Public Issues Involvement

Public Issues Involvement

From its earliest years, the AAA has given serious attention to public issues involving anthropology. For example, the AAA supported the passage of the Antiquities Act of 1906, protested the discontinuance of anthropological research in the Philippines (1915), urged the teaching of anthropology in high schools (1927), spoke out for the preservation of archaeological materials when dams were built by the Tennessee Valley Authority (1935), passed a pre-WWII resolution against racism (1938), and expressed the need to “guard against the dangers, and utilize the promise, inherent in the use of atomic energy” (1945).

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the association examined the issues of government-sponsored classified research, use of anthropologists by the military in Vietnam, secret research in Thailand, and the general problem of a code of ethics for anthropological research, particularly for the protection of the rights of those studied. Other issues addressed from the 1970s through the 1980s include illegal antiquities trade, the insertion of religious beliefs into social science texts, the preservation of endangered nonhuman primates, and the religious significance of peyote to Native Americans. In the 1990s, in response to continued public confusion about the meaning of “race,” particularly public misconceptions about race and intelligence, the AAA Executive Board commissioned a position paper on race as a constructed social mechanism.

In 2004, in response to President George W. Bush’s call for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, the AAA issued a statement on marriage and the family. It states:

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

The AAA also has adopted resolutions against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, against the use of anthropological knowledge as an element for physical or psychological torture, and against any covert or overt U.S. military action against Iran.