At the Edge of Silence: Unrealized Space In the Fieldwork and Archive of Joseph Michel Carrier Jr., Ph.D.  

K. Anthony Jones, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, MDes History and Philosophy of Design and Media

During the Cold War, when the nuclear threat still loomed large, organizations such as The RAND Corporation and the National Academy of Sciences provided crucial foreign intelligence to the United States government. These institutions blurred the distinction between government and academia. This thesis focuses on the research of an ex-counterinsurgent agent and trained anthropologist, Joseph Michel Carrier Jr., who conducted his research in the 1970s at the University of California at Irvine. Carrier continued his affiliation with The RAND Corporation and the National Academy of Sciences while carrying out his doctoral research, a cross-cultural analysis of male homosexual encounters in Guadalajara, Mexico.

This study will examine the analytical effects of the anthropologist’s encounters with midcentury think tanks and Cold War politics. I argue that Carrier’s research methods were shaped by his affiliation with The RAND Corporation and the National Academy of Sciences. Central to this thesis are Carrier’s dissertation and archival findings, housed at the University of Southern California’s ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. Ultimately these writings reveal both a realized and an unrealized space. In his dissertation, Carrier described the importance of finding a specific Guadalajaran apartment to conduct his ethnographic research on Mexican male homosexuals. He elaborates on the importance of this apartment from page seven to page ninety-two in the dissertation, yet thereafter, the apartment ceases to exist in his writings. Further, Carrier fails to clarify how he gets his informants to the apartment, and there is no visual ethnography accompanying this research, though visual ethnography was central to his previous research in Vietnam. One can hypothesize that his dissertation committee at the University of California at Irvine’s Department of Social Science advised the anthropologist to omit certain research findings concerning the apartment. Supporting this conjecture is the fact that during his admissions interview, he was instructed by his prospective advisor, Dr. Duane G. Metzger, not to disclose to the committee that his research pertained to male homosexuality, for fear that he would be denied admission to the program.

Though the apartment itself thus becomes, in part, an unrealized space, I will argue that the anthropologist was spatializing the world through diverse methodological means encompassing economic geography, psychology, mathematics, cartography, and quantitative methods that were all part of the toolkit of social scientists directly or indirectly serving and being funded by the United States government in its pursuit of its foreign relations goals. Using this variety of methods, Carrier manages to distinguish a specific Mexican male homosexual population from the male population at large, even though this subgroup had not been previously identified as a social category. Carrier’s research affords us a revealing view of the intertwined nexus of academia and government during the Cold War period, as well as the location of unrealized spaces and dispossessed people in the field research of social scientists. As Carrier is constructing the social categories of homosexual males in Mexico, he finds that they are difficult to locate in the field. And when they finally appear in the archive, they appear as statistics and questionnaires and interviews, but not as a fully realized category. He asks them about homosexual encounters rather than about their identities as gay men. In general, the dispossessed are difficult to locate in the archives of the West. Ultimately, Carrier’s research represents a historic transition between disciplines, as it is the first time that homosexuality is studied in the field of social science rather than in psychology and psychiatry, its original domain. What we know today of the field of homosexual anthropology was birthed out of Carrier’s research, which was informed by research methods such as economic geography and statistics. These methods are those of the Cold War academic-military-industrial-complex.