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Things Not Revealed: A Redacted Ethnography of the CIA

Chapter of: Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State(pp. 237–243)

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Metadata
TitleThings Not Revealed
SubtitleA Redacted Ethnography of the CIA
ContributorCarole McGranahan(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0466.1.17
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/redacted-writing-in-the-negative-space-of-the-state/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightCarole McGranahan
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2024-10-27
Long abstractThere are things we don’t know. There are things we choose not to learn. And there are things we hide. Redaction, however, is not necessarily performed by an individual subject (or agent as this particular case may be). In the case of the CIA, redaction is institutional. It is in the name of the state and is in service to the state. What is redacted is not always what matters to the stories we need to tell. It might matter to other stories and to other times. It might matter elsewhere or otherwise. It might not matter at all. In this chapter, I consider the cultural and political status of things not revealed in relation to Tibet and the CIA, specifically the CIA’s training of several hundred Tibetan soldiers at a secret camp in Colorado. Based on 25 years of ethnographic research with Tibetan resistance veterans and their families, and with retired CIA officers and their families, I consider what is deemed important or relevant and by who. While redacted documents play a role in the story I have to tell, I am also interested in other forms of redaction as a politics of knowing and world-making. Ethnographically, the story moves between the USA and Tibet, between the Rocky Mountains and the Himalaya, traversing the way people are known by others through names, through relationships, through both shared and secret pains in search of what it means to not know something.
Page rangepp. 237–243
Print length7 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • Tibet
  • CIA
  • training camps
  • epistemology
  • secrecy
  • history
  • ethnography
Contributors

Carole McGranahan

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5187-4769

Carole McGranahan is an anthropologist and historian who teaches at the University of Colorado. Her research involves ethnographic and historical research on the CIA, Tibet, and the Cold War, as well as questions of citizenship and political asylum in the Tibetan diaspora. Her publications include Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (2010), Imperial Formations (2007, with Ann Stoler and Peter Perdue), Ethnographies of US Empire (2018, with John Collins), and Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (2020).