2017 (page 4 of 4)

Fair Necropolis: The Peruvian Dead, the First American Ph.D. in Anthropology, and the World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago, 1893

Given just how many people participated in the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, it is understandable that historians have used the well-documented presence of a manageable few individuals to illuminate the experiences of the crowd. But sometimes the exemplary are so bright that they wash out the wider experience. In terms of the history of anthropology, for example, Franz Boas has become central to our accounts of the field at the World’s Fair, despite his own protests that he thought that his collection of biological and cultural materials from the Pacific Northwest were poorly represented (Cole, 1995 [1985]).[1] There is, therefore, much gained by expanding our frame, to consider less lasting lights at the anthropological Fair, whose contributions illuminate anthropology’s multiple pasts in a way that helps us move beyond genealogies of its future.[2]

Fig. 1 The “Necropolis” of Ancón, reproduced at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 by F. W. Putnam based on the excavations of George Dorsey. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair (Chicago, San Francisco: The Bancroft Company, 1893), 633.

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CFP: Panel on Victor and Edith Turner for 2017 AAA Meeting, 29 Nov. – 3 Dec., Washington, D.C.

We are organizing a panel exploring the many contributions of Victor and Edith Turner to anthropology for the 2017 Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, to be held November 29 through December 3 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. Papers are sought on any of the major areas to which they have contributed, including the history of anthropology, pilgrimage, the study of the paranormal, liminality, humanistic anthropology, dramaturgy and anthropology or any of the other areas of their work. Their influence has been great and has continued into the present. Please, contact either Frank A. Salamone (fsalamone@iona.edu) or Marjorie Snipes (msnipes@westga.edu) for further information or with an abstract for the panel. Cambridge Scholars Press is interested in publishing the papers from the session.

CFP: “New Nationalisms: Sources, Agendas, Languages,” 25-27 September 2017, Wrocław, Poland

Our conference seeks to confront the discourse of affective mobilization propagating anti-EU and anti-immigration policies in many European countries, with its opponent, the discourse of civic ethos and cosmopolitanism. How did it happen that xenophobia and anti-European sentiment have become a vocal presence in public discourse? We hope that the conference will shed some light on how a refurbished nationalism has become central to the new visions of what has become a functioning oxymoron in Central Europe: the non-liberal democracy.

We would like to invite contributions from the fields of history, political science, social and cultural anthropology, literary studies, sociology and linguistics.

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