Damned If You Don't, Damned If You Do: Anthropology in the Cultic Milieu

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Anthropology in the Cultic Milieu, or: Damned if You Don't, Damned if You Do
Ryan J. Cook | Loyola University Chicago
Anthropologies of the Damned: Disciplinary Practices and Peripheral Suffering
AAA 2010 - New Orleans LA, Nov. 19
draft copy - do not cite without permission of author
keywords: demarcation; stigmatization; cultic milieu; epistemic politics
Prelude
This paper grows out of an intensely personal experience, though one I have seen repeated in the cases
of other colleagues in academic anthropology. Each time I make the annual solicitation of support on my
quest for long-term employment in higher education, I receive variations on the same piece of advice:
"You're never going to get published, hired, or taken seriously with 'UFOs' so prominent on your CV." This
is eminently pragmatic and well-meaning counsel, flowing from my senior colleagues' own hard-earned
wisdom. And yet, having made the serious (and agnostic) ethnographic study of the religious and
scientific ramifications of this phenomenon a central aspect of my constitution as an anthropologist, such
counsel is quite disheartening, not only for how it bodes ill for my personal prospects, but for what it says
about the discipline.
Lest this be written off as the sour-grapes complaint of a malcontent member of the tribe, I want
to suggest some broad and disquieting questions raised by my experience and that of not a few others:
Why should some subjects or approaches remain off-limits to academic anthropologists, in spite of--or,
more perversely, because of--their importance to those whom we attempt to understand? Why is taking
our research subjects' truth claims at a comparable level of validity and importance to our own so strongly
resisted? What is at stake for anthropologists if we do so? What do we and our discipline stand to lose if
we do not?
The case of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) highlights the precarious context for our discipline,
and for academia. By centering this examination on how anthropologists have dealt (or failed to deal) with
UFOs, it becomes clear exactly how anthropologists are subject to the very processes of demarcation,
stigmatizing, and epistemic alignments that are often arrayed against the subjects of our research,
whether they be indigenous peoples, marginal members of our own societies, or our "pseudoscientific"

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competitors. By contrasting examples of UFOs studied anthropologically with efforts to fundamentally
reorient the discipline, I will suggest there are some ways in which we may not be able to overcome these
processes--which we apply to ourselves, to our research subjects, and to our interlocutors.
A Brief History of UFOs and Anthropology
In what follows I present the outlines of anthropological engagement with the vibrant, treacherous, and
polymathically perverse field of UFOs. This will not require delving into the deep history of aerial
prodigies, which can be gleaned from other sources (Vallée 1993; Thompson 1993), but rather will begin
with the post-WWII boom in saucer lore, sci-fi and Cold War popular culture, and the academic social
sciences. With an eye toward ease of access and considerations of space, this outline focuses primarily
on Anglophone ufological and anthropological literature. Finally, I will hint at but not develop the
significant archaeological engagement with the ufological subtheme of ancient aliens, which would
require a separate study.
As with their peers in many disciplines, anthropologists paid little overt scholarly notice to the waves of
"flying saucer" reports in the 1950 and early 1960s. What attention there was took the form of social
psychology or folklore, and mostly followed the debunking approach led by Donald Menzel (Menzel and
Boyd 1963) and other government-connected physical scientists--treating UFOs as manifestations of
collective tensions and wish-fulfillment brought on by the threat of nuclear annihilation and abetted by the
entertainment industry (Peebles 1994).
With the rise in the late 1960s of mass-market books and televised documentaries about culture-
bearing "ancient astronauts" 1973), archaeologists begin a decades-long
debunking campaign, sometimes as a strategy to engage the nonexpert public or to teach proper
archaeology (Stiebing 1984). At the same time, anthropological linguist Roger Wescott considered an
extraterrestrial-assisted origin for Homo sapiens in The Divine Animal (1969). The book was rebuked by
Edmund Leach (1970) in his inimitably stinging fashion, and now only receives mention in "fringe"
publications.

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Anthropologists, like their peers in many other disciplines and the general public, spent the 1970s
in fitful engagement with the so-called paranormal. For anthropologists, these debates were catalyzed as
much by the public visibility of Carlos Castaneda as by the disciplinary self-reimagining provoked by
political decolonization and the reflexive theoretical turn (Marcus and Fischer 1986). Out of these debates
emerged both the founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (Schwartz 2000) and an
increasingly vociferous and vehement positivist contingent in academia as well as within anthropology
(Harris 1980). Esteemed disciplinary ancestor Margaret Mead (1974) considered UFOs and their
attendant pop culture a legitimate social-scientific research problem, and said so publicly from the bully
pulpit of her column in Redbook magazine. Her call went unheeded by any but a few, and discreetly on
their parts. Grunloh (1977), for instance, argued that ufological readings of both indigenous myths and
"UFO" encounters take them out of their respective historical and cultural contexts, yet he treated them all
as indicative of a general human capacity to experience visions.
By the 1980s a few UFO-themed studies began to appear in anthropological venues, usually
folkloric in approach. For instance, Valerii Sanarov (1981) drew parallels between modern memorates of
encounters with saucerian extraterrestrials and tales of heavenly journeys in a number of folk traditions.
This set the stage for studies like William Dewan's (2006) multidisciplinary approach to contemporary
UFO lore.
The 1990s presented a paradox: serious anthropological interest was being directed at UFO
experiences, at the same time that ufological study of these experiences (principally alien abductions)
had split US ufology apart and alienated this abductionist wing from more sociological European ufology
(Barclay and Barclay 1997). Robert Bartholomew, alone (1991) and with George S. Howard (1998),
analyzed a deeper timeline of aerial anomaly reports with social-psychological tools. Benson Saler,
Charles Ziegler, and Charles Moore (1997) examined the Roswell narrative of saucer crash and
government cover-up that had been gaining prominence since its resurrection in the early 1980s (Berlitz
and William L. Moore 1988; Randle and Schmidt 1991), showing how it had the structure and function of
myth.
By the 2000s anthropologists, particularly those in the early stages of their professional careers,
began publishing field studies of UFO-themed material. Stephanie Platz (1996) led off with her

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examination of ufology's role in shaping ethno-national identity in Armenia as the country emerged from
the Soviet system. Ryan Cook (2004) treated the interaction of ufologists, indigenous shamans,
academic scientists, journalists, and government functionaries in a Mexican volcanic risk zone. Fleshing
out the prior interest in abduction experiences, Susan Lepselter (2005) reviewed US abductees'
experiences through the lens of trauma studies and a national history of captivity narratives. Eirik Saethre
(2007a; 2007b) traced the circulation of the figure of the UFO in narratives of Australian Aboriginal
communities.
Interlude: Light and Shadow
These recent studies, with their fine-grained attention to local meanings and practices and openness to
regional and global influences, suggest a more inclusive and eminently conventional cross-cultural project
that could be productively pursued by anthropologists. UFOs can serve as a fresh entry point for
understanding the translocal connections, the circuits of capital and symbols, the mass-mediated
narratives that increasingly connect humans. But what these studies (including my own) do not attempt to
do with UFOs is even more illuminating. For instance, James McClenon's (2002) effort to foreground the
scattered, often embarrassed mentions of ethnographers' anomalous experiences in the field, including
those involving UFOs, marshals those memorates in the service of a cognitive-experiential theory of
religion. Even such serious treatment of the so-called paranormal declines to speculate about how
admission of the presence and intervention of nonhuman intelligences (whether spiritual or
extraterrestrial) might necessitate modifications to the methodology and theory of anthropology, or of the
sciences generally. Thus far Edith Turner's call (1993) to open a conversation about the relation between
the truth claims of ethnographers and those of their research subjects--in her case, by arguing for the
empirically verifiable reality of spirit phenomena--goes unheeded in mainstream anthropology. (Giesler
[1984] and Hunter [2009] had to publish their Turnerian treatments of paranormal topics in
parapsychological journals.)
What this brief historical review illuminates, at the least, is the interest of many scholars with a
conventional program of research in paranormal topics, and the largely unexploited insights for
anthropology held by those paranormal topics. Yet what it leaves in the shadows is perhaps even more

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provocative. Woven into this history in a way that structures it are efforts by anthropologists to define their
field and demarcate it both from other academic disciplines and from marginalized "pseudosciences" like
ufology. Christopher Roth (2005) brings to light the numerous intersections between (usually outmoded)
anthropological theory and the ideas of UFO aficionados and experiencers. Yet this diffusion of ideas
never flows in the other direction: from ufology into anthropology. By contrast, a cursory glance at the
contents of a journal like Anthropology of Consciousness suggests that parapsychology, with its
laboratories, peer-reviewed journals, and endowed chairs, is reputable enough for affiliation where
ufology, with no mainstream institutional location and only some of the trappings of a discipline
(conferences, journals), is not (cf. Luke 2010).
Anthropology has in fact been involved with UFOs for a long time, whether or not it is widely
acknowledged, and we could stand to learn a great deal from attention to this relationship. Prominent
ufologists John Keel (1988) and Jacques Vallée (1992) in their own ways argue that the study of human
witnesses in their historical and cultural contexts must be placed at the center of ufology, with Vallée
himself seeking explicitly to enroll anthropology. On another note, an examination of the split within
ufology over the status of and approach to "abductees"--either as an antiscientific side-show along the
lines of 1950s contactees (Hynek 1997) or as the single most important avenue to understanding the
aliens (Jacobs 1998)--could make for a potentially intriguing comparison to the split between
positivist/explanatory and humanist/interpretive approaches to the Other in anthropology.
Another example that throws into relief the dual pressures of credibility-seeking and boundary-
work that anthropologists negotiate (and thereby bringing to light factors inhibiting examination of the
effects of that negotiation) is the wing of ufologists who ground their own expertise in anthropological
training or certification. This is as solid a foundation for authority and credibility as anything else where no
certification other than experience or prominence is available (Denzler 2001). An early example, self-
proclaimed contactee and sometime religious cultist George Hunt Williamson, flaunted a nonexistent
anthropology degree as one of many bona fides of his broad and esoteric knowledge (Roth 2005, 54-55).
A number of people including R. Cedric Leonard and Thomas J. Carey (Carey n.d.) have served as
resident anthropologists for UFO investigative organizations that otherwise tend to attract those with

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physical science or journalistic backgrounds. Some paranormalists like Michael Hesemann (UFO
Evidence n.d.) and Richard Boylan (Boylan n.d.) cite their anthropological training, gained by
conventional academic means or not, as but one of their qualifications to address the UFO phenomenon.
The asymmetry of this situation--where marginalized heteroscientists (Cook 2004) seek what
prestige may come from linking symbolically to even an anomalous discipline within academia while at
the same time accredited members of that discipline, with precious few exceptions (Philip Haseley
[Sapong 2010], C. Scott Littleton [2010]), avoid affiliation with those heteroscientists--should not be lost
on us. It illustrates the predicament in which anthropologists find ourselves when we attempt a serious
study of stigmatized topics and people.
The Dynamics of Academic Contempt Within the Ideological Arena
Recent anthropological interest in UFOs occurs in the context of a more general rethinking of the
anthropological project, in particular the relations between the knowledge practices and claims of
anthropologists and those of their research subjects. We could think of this as a set of decenterings. One
decentering move displaces humankind from a privileged position in the Western scientific study of the
world, either by considering the ramifications of the fusion of human and machine à la "cyborg
anthropology"(Haraway 1991) or by grappling with the kind and degree of agency exercised by
nonhuman technology and organisms (Latour 1997; Pickering 1999). Another decentering consists of the
project to decolonize anthropology and Western sciences generally: to show the cultural and historical
specificity of universalizing Science (Adas 1990); to put Euro-American mainstream anthropology into
context as one of many "world anthropologies" (Lins Ribeiro and Escobar 2006); or to show the ongoing
complicity of Western knowledge practices in maintaining an exploitative neocolonial system (Harrison
1997; Mignolo 2000). A third decentering, thus far a largely unexplored possibility, removes any epistemic
privilege from anthropology and every other (Western) science, treating them as sets of knowledge claims
and practices interacting with a variety of other such epistemic traditions (Hess 1993).
Such adventurous, necessary, yet still tentative rethinking takes place at a time of politicization,
financial retrenchment, and ascendant scientism within especially academia of the global North, making
any change in the status quo even riskier for anthropology, and its humanistic forms in particular. To

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emphasize this I have drawn the section's title and its analytic approach from two sources. One is a
fruitful aside in Steve Fuller and James H. Collier's survey of science studies that it is possible to "map the
structure of academic contempt" (2004, 47), though amended to suggest ongoing transformations in that
structure. The other is David Hess's (1993) anthropological work on the competition and collaboration of
experts and laypeople within an unequal "ideological arena".
Based on my continuing study of the religious and scientific modalities for UFOs in a number of
cultural contexts, an actor-network "political" treatment of the sciences, which emphasizes alliances and
contests over resources, makes a great deal of sense to me. We should seriously consider
anthropologists, our research subjects, and our academic and extra-academic interlocutors as operating
within an ideological arena--a mediated space created by the interaction of knowledge experts and
nonexperts (Hess 1993). The truth claims of these actors are circulated, contested, and co-opted, as the
actors more or less consciously and systematically try to distance themselves from each other (via
stigmatization [Cooter 1980] and boundary-work [Gieryn 1999]) or link to each other (via enrollment
[Callon 1982] or epistemic alignments [Rouse 1987]), though they do not do so from equally
advantageous positions.
This arena includes a "cultic milieu" (Campbell 1972) to which some actors, groups, and ideas
are disadvantageously relegated by the institutional structure of the arena and by the agentive operations
of other actors. Occupying the peripheries and interstices of the ideological arena, the cultic milieu is
where alternative and oppositional knowledges persist, and from which they sometimes emerge (Kaplan
and Lööw 2002). Claimants, approaches, and ideas have been marginalized into this milieu repeatedly
since the early modern period as new claimants emerge and supplant them--e.g., alchemy, phrenology,
scientific racism--but far from disappearing, many arise again in different guise from this cultic milieu.
Attempts to avoid relegation to this cultic milieu often mimic the exclusionary practices of the
institutional academic establishment: witness the foundings of the Society for Scientific Exploration and
the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness, or the efforts of parapsychologists to affiliate with the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (with Margaret Mead's help [Schwartz 2000]). I
would argue the fear of exile to the cultic milieu constitutes a sizeable part of the driving force behind
anthropologists' boundary-work and epistemic alignments to delineate our discipline's turf in academe--

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here warding off the humanities while importing interpretive strategies from them, there affiliating with the
exact sciences yet invoking our Geisteswissenschaftliche distinctiveness. Why else adopt in toto a
package of prejudices against anything UFO-themed as a topic of research, requiring caveats and
contortions to get a hearing, except as a means to stave off stigmatization of the discipline as a whole?
Consider the mediated fracas resulting when professor of anthropology (and Mutual UFO Network
member) Philip Haseley suggested that post-secondary students could learn things about the mainstream
sciences and the real world by studying UFOs and other paranormal subject matter (Sapong 2010).
Postlude: On Peripheral Locations and Perduring Suffering
Our panel's theme places the entwined issues of structural location, structural violence, and subjective
suffering on our agenda. We may well ask: who suffers if UFOs and other phenomena remain peripheral
and too hot to handle after 60 years? To begin with, the people we study who have been marginalized
and stigmatized for their connection to the UFO field will enjoy no change in their status. Any
anthropologist who touches the subject openly, even without deviating from the limited range of
approaches thus far used, will continue to have trouble getting published, etc. I would also point to the
poisoning effects on the relationship anthropologists have with, one the one hand, their informants in the
UFO field and, on the other hand, the audiences for their ethnographic and theoretical work.
Yet I do not see any way out of the double bind articulated by Faye Harrison (1997, 7) regarding
decolonizing anthropology. Ethically I think we are obligated to complete the project of decolonizing and
parochializing anthropology by treating it as but one knowledge system within a wider ideological arena--
good and valuable for what it does, but as limited and unprivileged as any other. This dose of epistemic
humility is already being administered by the movement to take our indigenous research subjects'
lifeways and knowledge systems seriously, to go from treating them as objects of knowledge to partners
in creating knowledge (e.g., Dove 2006; Mercer et al. 2010).
Such humility, however, leaves anthropologists open to being themselves peripheralized by
better-placed arena occupants. Among the damning and potentially effective shoves toward the cultic
milieu is, first, to paint four-field anthropology as a bastardized science, the worst-of-all-possible
disciplines, or a heart-warming myth (Borofsky 2002). A second is to delegitimize specific subfields of

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anthropology as insufficiently scientific, as some positivistic biological anthropologists have been wont to
do to cultural anthropologists (Lyman and O'Brien 2004). A third, evident in the cases of both Westcott
and Haseley, is to taint individual anthropologists and thereby the discipline through the research
partnerships or interests some of us maintain with stigmatized actors and ideas like UFOs.
To take this analysis of the ideological arena to heart, I have to ask whether even the most high-
minded and ethical among us wants an anthropology that liberates all of the people we study, if that
includes heteroscientists like UFO investigators whose presence signals the continuing threat of
stigmatization. If this liberation is accompanied by or accomplished through renouncing what little our
discipline has of authority, credibility, and support, I doubt many would make that trade-off--not even if the
heteroscientists in question (as with my informants) live in the global South along with most of our more
conventional research subjects.
It is painful if salutary to discuss how anthropology's credibility, viability, and coherence are significantly
affected when any anthropologist risks being repositioned nearer the cultic milieu by the better-aligned
forces of scientism or the neoliberal market or the imperial state. But this leaves to one side the matter of
what is to be done. I have offered this outline to help in tracing out the contours of the problem. I regret
that I have yet no answers other than to turn the tools of the discipline on the discipline itself and its
present context. Maybe, if added to calls by more eminent ancestors like Mead and Turner, and to the
small but growing reservoir of work by our colleagues, it will reach critical mass. In the meantime, I am
just trying to figure out whether including this talk on my CV will help get me a job.

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