An In t erv i e w w it h Hu g h G u s t e rso n
2 013 R e cipi e n t o f t he AAA’s P r esident ’s Awar d B y A i sh a Sh a h id Gh a n i - Dis s ertation Writer the question of nuclear weapons development, its ethics, and linkages with notions of security and insecurity have culminated in the production of two books and numerous edited volumes, including Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1998), People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), and most recently, The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It (University of California Press, 2009).
Professor Hugh Gusterson is no stranger to the Department of Anthropology at Stanford. Born in the UK, Hugh Gusterson received a BA in history at Cambridge University in 1980, a master's degree in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1982, and a PhD in anthropology at Stanford University in 1992. He is currently Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University. When Gusterson was first admitted to the anthropology department, he intended to study Africa. Prior to his entry into the program, Professor Gusterson had worked as an activist for the nuclear freeze in San Francisco. In an interview with The New York Times in 2002, Gusterson recounts, “What I thought about, whenever my mind was at rest, was the arms race -- why it existed, how to stop it.” It comes as no surprise, then, that Gusterson’s interests in the question of nuclear proliferation returned during the course of his graduate studies at Stanford. In the same NY Times interview he describes when and how he began thinking seriously about swapping his intended project in Africa for fieldwork at a nuclear weapons lab in Livermore, California: One day, while I was still with the nuclear freeze, I was sent to a high school to debate a weapons designer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Tom Ramos. I was shocked to discover that I really liked him, as a person. Till that moment, people on the other side of the debate were very abstract to me. I'd never met any of them. Yet, my whole life was devoted to undoing their work. I began to wonder more about what kind of people they were. This formative encounter began what has become a life’s work—understanding nuclear weapons proliferation and the social and ethical worlds of the scientists who carry out their production. Professor Gusterson’s interest in
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ANTHROPOLOGY
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2013 / 2014 NEWSLETTER
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VOLUME 7
This year, Professor Gusterson received the American Anthropological Association’s President’s Award in recognition of his contribution to anthropology. In an interview conducted over email, I asked him, “why anthropology?”, “why security?” and “why and how might anthropologist’s intervene in contemporary political debates?” This is what Professor Gusterson had to say: Q. What brought you to anthropology? A. My BA was in history, especially African history. I won a fellowship from the UK to the US to pursue a master's degree in anthropology so I could then go back to Oxford in the UK and write a PhD thesis in African social history that would have an anthropological edge to it. Then I decided I preferred anthropology. I preferred fieldwork to archival research, I appreciated the freedom to read comparatively about different cultures in anthropology, and I was drawn to the remarkable freedom anthropologists have to invent research projects that really speak to them (and hopefully to wider audiences too). I fell in love with this amazingly diverse and disorganized discipline that encompassed everything from ecology in New Guinea to fraternity hazing rituals in New Jersey. Q. In much of your work, there is a clear interest in the question of "security" and the ways in which people create material and social worlds around this concept. Your interest is not only in security, but also in understanding the underlying feelings of insecurity that transform the attainment of "security" into a ethical imperative. What do you think it is about the concept of "security" that captivates people's imaginations and makes it an interesting and important concept for anthropology and anthropologists to understand? A: When I arrived at Stanford I had been active in the antinuclear movement and had been reading the essays on militarism and the nuclear arms race that the great British historian E.P. Thompson wrote at the end of his career. (He tried to adapt Marxist ideas to theorize something he called "exterminism," which caused enormous controversy in New Left circles at the time). This was a time in the