CFP: Fieldwork Technologies: Transitional Histories of Ethnographic Mediation (Panel)

AAA/CASCA 2023 Call for Papers

Organizers: Jennifer Hsieh (University of Michigan), Matthew C. Watson (Mount Holyoke College)

Mythologies of ethnographic research – past and present – often construct fieldwork as a series of unmediated intersubjective encounters. But particular tools routinely enable, shape, and frame ethnographers’ field experiences. This panel rethinks the mediation of anthropologists’ embodied sensory, technical, and epistemic labors through fine-grained attention to historically-specific fieldwork technologies. We expect the panel to draw together work on past and present fieldwork technologies in order to reframe constructions of the field’s history and rethink the contemporary techno-politics of extended ethnographic embodiment. How might attention to technologies aid us to recompose fieldwork’s history and to reimagine the technical, ethical, and epistemic contours of ethnography today? How have anthropologists, and the tools that they use, uniquely constructed ethnographic fieldwork at a specific time and place? 

While a longstanding literature – bridging anthropological subfields – examines the social production of technologies, comparatively little attention has been directed to ethnography’s own tools of mobility, recording and documentation, and inscription. Work on the practical, aesthetic, and epistemic shapes of film and photography comprises a clear exception to this technical aversion. But the ethnographic imagination also forms through technologies of travel and mobility, audio recording tools, and varied inscription devices – ranging from pen and paper to typewriters to contemporary tablets and computers. Such tool-enabled recording and textualization are not just objects for use by the researcher; they produce ethnographic insights and modes of theorization—in cases when the tools are deployed as intended, and in cases when they aren’t. These technologies further invite consideration of the limits and potentials of ethnographic embodiment and access in terms that might engage disability studies critiques.

We invite presenters to track the role of technologies in affecting the sensorial, political, and ethical shapes of ethnographic labor across fieldwork, interpretation, and exposition. While panelists should situate ethnographic fieldwork and writing in specific sociotechnical contexts, this work of contextualization may take up diverse theoretical inspirations, including research in the anthropologies of technology and the body, science & technology studies, disability studies, digital ethnography, feminist assemblage theory, and affect theory.

Orienting questions for historical and critical work on this topic may include:

• How is the sensory and bodily experience of fieldwork constrained or extended through technological mediation?
• How have technological transitions and transformations shifted the very construction (including the imaginable site) of the ethnographic “field?”
• How have shifts in technologies of mobility shaped the imagination, planning, and practice of fieldwork?
• How have transitions in inscription technologies – e.g., typewriters and computers – reshaped the evidentiary, analytical, and expository work of ethnography?
• How have transitions in computer technology shaped the interpretation of ethnographic data and, hence, the field’s prevailing narratives of theoretical development and change?
• How do computer programs, software, or apps yield distinct kinds of ethnographic reasoning and analysis?
• How has the development of cellphones into discrete and ubiquitous audiovisual devices affected the terms and practices of recording and analysis in the field?
• How have technologies of record keeping – e.g., bibliographies, filing cabinets, computer hard-drives, the “cloud” – affected modes of ethnographic reasoning and reportage?
• How have anthropologists adapted technologies, using them in unintended ways?

For consideration, please send a draft abstract to jchsieh@umich.edu and mcwatson@mtholyoke.edu by Friday, March 17, 2023.

The HAR editors would like to draw your attention to a recent interview with linguist Andrew Garrett on Alfred Kroeber. The interview, which relates to previous posts on this site, is in the podcast series created by the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences group, where you will regularly find content on the history of linguistic anthropology.

This episode of the podcast series is described by HPLS as follows:

In this episode we talk to Andrew Garrett about the life, work and legacy of American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Kroeber achieved a number of firsts in American anthropology: he was Boas’ first Columbia PhD and the first professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. But Kroeber is not only of historical interest. The recent “denaming” of Kroeber Hall at UC Berkeley illustrates the clash of the past with our present-day social and political concerns.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in Portuguese, on French ethnographer Michel Giacometti and his revolutionary trajectory in Portugal.

Oliveira, Luísa Tiago de, 2023. “Um etnógrafo corso em Portugal: uma biografia de Michel Giacometti”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

French ethnographer Michel Giacometti (1929–1990) became an essential figure in the history of Portuguese anthropology. With a focus on his life trajectory, and considering various works and exhibits dedicated to him in Portugal as well as archival material, this article highlights the intellectual, political and even existential motives behind Giacometti’s strenuous safeguarding of folk culture – particularly folk music – in Portugal. He was part of and contributed to weaving a network of anti-fascist resistance that lasted beyond the “Carnation Revolution” of 1974. In this perspective, Giacometti’s ethnomusicology is inseparable from the fact that he both shared and built a culture of resistance and public intervention. The Portuguese Communist Party (a clandestine organization during Salazar’s dictatorship) was a point of reference in this process. Giacometti founded the Arquivos Sonoros Portugueses (Portuguese Sound Archives) soon after his arrival in Portugal in the late 1950s, and from then on, his anthropological praxis was subtly but steadily oriented towards a cultural and civic militancy that was revolutionary. The article reveals how Giacometti’s activities during the democratic transition process in the 1970s culminated in the creation of the Museu do Trabalho (Labour Museum), an institution that today bears his name and plays a leading role in the enhancement of his legacy, along with other institutions that preserve his vast collection of materials. The present article is thus a biography of Giacometti’s work, which can be situated between ethnographic praxis and political intervention.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in French, on ethnomusicology in post-WWII communist Bulgaria.

Le Gonidec, Marie-Barbara, 2023. “Entre passé et présent: l’ethnologie bulgare au service du façonnage d’une tradition à des fins idéologiques”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

From the early 1950s, Bulgarian folkloristi – a category comprising ethnologists and ethnomusicologists as well – were engaged in the safeguarding of peasant traditions, not just from a salvage ethnography perspective but with the aim of reactivating and projecting them into the future of the country. Bulgarian music played a key role in this post-WWII project – both a nation-building and a communist project – as the folk tunes of the agro-pastoral world would enable composers to forge a new musical tradition of the Bulgarian People’s Republic. This vibrant article explains how the narodna muzika (official folk music) was established with the help of the folkloristi and in accordance with the new ideals adopted by the communist authorities of this Balkan country, following the abolition of the (pro-Nazi) monarchy in September 1944, the liberation from German occupation, and the fall into the Soviet sphere of influence.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in English, on theories of caste in late nineteenth-century colonial ethnography.

Fuller, Chris, 2023. “Colonial Ethnography and Theories of Caste in Late-Nineteenth-Century India”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

None of the colonial anthropologists of the British Raj were widely read by metropolitan anthropologists, but their rival theories of caste crucially influenced early sociologists writing on the topic – notably Célestin Bouglé and Max Weber. Even though both men criticized it, the occupational theory put forward in late-nineteenth-century India has indirectly but significantly influenced modern scholars of South Asian society. This article explores the ethnographic and theoretical writings on caste of three prominent colonial anthropologists in late-nineteenth-century India: Sir Denzil Ibbetson (1847–1908) and Sir Athelstane Baines (1847–1925), who were both members of the Indian Civil Service, and John Nesfield (1836–1919), who belonged to the educational service. In 1883, Ibbetson completed a land revenue settlement report pertaining to the rural district of Karnal in the Punjab, which included copious ethnographic material, as well as a proto-functionalist description of the local village community. He also finished his superintendent’s report on the 1881 census of the Punjab, whose chapter on ‘races, castes and tribes’ was particularly outstanding. Baines was the superintendent for the 1881 census of Bombay province and later the commissioner in overall charge of the 1891 census of India. Using 1881 census data, Nesfield wrote a book on caste in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (modern Uttar Pradesh). In these works, Ibbetson, Baines and Nesfield presented slightly different versions of an occupational theory of caste, in which they classified castes mainly by hereditary occupation or politico-economic function. They also explained the ‘closed’ caste system (in contrast to the ‘open’ class system in Europe) as the distinctively Indian outcome of the evolution of the division of labour. The occupational theory of caste was particularly criticised by Herbert Risley (1851–1911), who argued that the system’s origins lay in racial inequality and that its defining feature was ‘social precedence’ or hierarchical ranking, rather than occupational differentiation. By examining this largely forgotten literature, this article adds historical depth to a fundamental debate in the history of anthropology and sociology.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in English, on the Afro-Brazilian anthropologist Manuel Querino.

Gledhill, Sabrina, 2023. “A Pioneering Afro-Brazilian Ethnologist: The Life and Work of Manuel Querino”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Afro-Brazilian polymath Manuel Raymundo Querino (1851–1923) was the first Black scholar to study the history, culture and origins of the enslaved Africans and their descendants in Brazil. At a time when pseudoscientific racism was widespread in Brazilian scientific circles, Querino put forward alternative, positive views based on his personal experience and respectful interviews with elderly Africans who had survived the transatlantic crossing and enslavement. Orphaned at the age of four by a cholera epidemic, he was entrusted to a white guardian who taught him to read and write and had him apprenticed to become a painter-decorator. After being drafted into the armed forces to fight in the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), Querino was appointed as a clerk to the battalion and was later demobilized. Following his return to Salvador in 1871, he became an abolitionist, journalist, labour leader, politician, folklorist, ethnologist, food scholar and art historian – among other activities. During his lifetime and until the 1930s, he was considered one of the pioneers of ethnology in Brazil. However, in the following decades, numerous attempts were made to disparage his scholarship and disqualify his scholarship as amateur. The fact that he was of African descent and often described as “self-taught” led to the assumption that he was illiterate, despite being the author of several books. But Querino’s visionary anthropology has also been the subject of numerous reappraisals in Brazil and internationally. Now, he is once again being recognized for his ground-breaking work as a Black vindicationist, anthropologist, art historian and food scholar. This article is part of a decades-long effort to restore Querino to his rightful place in the pantheon of Brazilian anthropologists.

The HAR editors are pleased to draw your attention to an upcoming event: this year’s Gatty Lecture, delivered by Juan Fernandez (Ph.D. candidate, Cornell University), on “Sex and Gender in the Ethnographic Encounter in the Highlands of the American Colonial Philippines.” The lecture will take place on Thursday, February 2, 2023 at 12:30pm EST.

This talk examines three foundational ideas in the history and anthropology of sex and gender in Southeast Asia in the context of the colonial Philippines: the “high” status of women; the image of the man of prowess; and the concept and practice of gender pluralism. Drawing from episodes of the ethnographic encounter between the earliest generation of American anthropological field-workers during the first decade of the twentieth century and their Indigenous interlocutors, the talk aims to rethink the assumptions behind the axioms of the study of gender and sexuality in the region, as well as tracing their roots in the history of anthropology.

Juan Fernandez is a historian of modern Southeast Asia. He received his M.A. from the University of Chicago, and his B.A. from the University of the Philippines at Baguio. He has two forthcoming publications: one is a contribution to an edited volume on Indigenous Studies in the Philippines, and the other is an article in the journal Philippine Studies, entitled “‘From Savages to Soldiers’: The Igorot Body, Militarized Masculinity, and the Logic of Transformation in Dean C. Worcester’s Philippine Photographs.” He will be joining the faculty of the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in Fall 2023 first as an Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellow, and subsequently as assistant professor of history in Fall 2024.

This Gatty Lecture will take place in-person at the Kahin Center at Cornell University, but guests are also welcome to join on Zoom. Online attendees must register in advance at this registration link.

More information can be found on the event page. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in English, on the trajectory and legacy of French ethnologist Éric de Dampierre.

Buckner, Margaret, 2023. “Éric de Dampierre: Social Scientist and Discreet Builder of French Ethnology”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Ethnologist and sociologist Éric de Dampierre (1928–1998) was one of the main driving forces behind French ethnology from the 1960s to the 1990s. After studying literature, law and political science, he spent two decisive years (1950–1952) at the University of Chicago as a member of the Committee on Social Thought. A former student of Dampierre, Margaret Buckner traces his scholarly activities and contributions by drawing on both published and unpublished material, as well as personal conversations. She vividly outlines the exceptional trajectory of Dampierre from early scholarship to a position of leadership in the Parisian academia at the University of Nanterre, while highlighting his meticulous, long-term fieldwork experience in Africa. After discovering the Nzakara-Zande country in 1954, Dampierre set up a “sociological mission” in the Haut-Oubangui territory of French Equatorial Africa (now the Central African Republic) and he returned there almost every year until 1987. Having mastered the language and its poetry, he had an unequaled understanding of the Zande-Nzakara peoples and their neighbors. In this article, Buckner intertwines the main themes of Dampierre’s researches and his strategic contributions to the affirmation of ethnology and the social sciences in France. Despite his mentorship of generations of students and junior colleagues, his many publishing projects, and his shrewd maneuvering in institutional circles, Dampierre’s role in the history of the discipline is often overlooked. Less known internationally than a Claude Lévi-Strauss or a Georges Balandier, this “discreet” key figure is now brought to the fore. Buckner’s in-depth study is also a personal portrait and a tribute to her former teacher.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in English, on German ethnographer and collector Wilhelm Joest.

Deußen, Carl, 2022. “An Obscure Forschungsreisender ? Wilhelm Joest and the Shaping of Ethnology in Late 19^th Century Germany”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Born in Cologne as the eldest son of a family of wealthy Protestant sugar merchants, German ethnographer and collector Wilhelm Joest (1852–1896) started his career with an extensive collecting journey through Asia (1879–1881). A disciple of Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), who supervised his doctoral thesis on the Gorontalo or Hulontalo language spoken in Indonesia by the Gorontalo people, Joest published his first scientific articles in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie in 1892. These publications and his travelogues, together with his strategic donating of artefacts to various German ethnographic museums, quickly earned Joest a reputation. He went on two more expeditions, to Southern Africa (1883–1884) and to the Guianas (1890), published his main work Tätowiren, Narbenzeichnen und Körperbemalen (Tattooing, Ornamental Scars and Bodypainting) in 1887 and, finally, received his titular professorship in 1890. After his death, his collection fell to his sister Adele Rautenstrauch (1850–1903), an influential patron and benefactor who lobbied for the creation of an ethnographic museum in their hometown of Cologne. The Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum opened in 1906. This path-breaking article on a forgotten figure in disciplinary history traces Joest’s introduction into Völkerkunde as an avid collector of ethnographic artefacts on a global scale, as well as his career as a scholar and travel writer. It highlights Joest’s ideal of the Forschungsreisender, or traveller-scientist, and how this methodology influenced his understanding of racialised Others within an imperial context. Joest excelled in travelogues geared towards larger audiences, which became his most influential writing. Carl Deußen argues that although Joest did not have a marked theoretical influence on the development of German ethnology, his contribution was still crucial to the emergence of the discipline in the late 19^th century.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in French, on the contributions of Haitian writer René Depestre to Cuban anthropology.

Argyriadis, Kali, 2022. “Réné Depestre à Cuba: un ‘faire savoir’ anthropologique”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Haitian poet and novelist René Depestre (1926– ) is also known for his Marxist reflections on color, his critique of the concept of Négritude (Blackness) being considered a major contribution to Caribbean anthropological debates. In 1945, he was one of the founders of the newspaper La Ruche, which opposed the ruling elite associated with President Élie Lescot and eventually contributed to triggering the 1946 revolution in Haiti. Depestre lived in France, where he met numerous influential literary and political figures from diverse European, Latin American, Caribbean and African backgrounds but was eventually expelled from the country. He then began a journey that took him from Czechoslovakia to Chile, then to Brazil and back to France, before returning to Haiti in 1957. An opponent of the new regime of François Duvalier and a critic of his “noiriste” theories, Depestre moved to Cuba in March 1959 and lived there for almost twenty years. In addition to his literary production, he published numerous anthropological essays in Havana. Based on an interview with Depestre in 2015, this article analyses his writings and those of his contemporaries in the first two decades of the Revolución Cubana, while looking in detail at his contributions to the renewal of Cuban anthropology. By following Depestre’s views on topics such as decolonization and pan-Africanism, Argyriadis unveils both the political debates of the time and the turbulent transformations of anthropology in Cuba, a discipline that first highlighted the African element of Cuban national identity but later gave way to a Soviet-style rural ethnography. Depestre returned to France and worked at UNESCO. A key figure within a vast international network of visionary intellectuals and artists, he promoted dialogue between worlds separated by language, history or geopolitical affiliations. According to Argyriadis, this unique figure in the history of anthropology was “expelled from both sides of the Iron Curtain.”

HAR is pleased to announce a new release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: a special issue including thirteen short papers originally delivered at a virtual round table held on July 7, 2022, at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), London, to celebrate the centennial of Bronisław Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922–2022) and the appearance of the edited volume Ethnographers Before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork 1870-1922 (Rosa and Vermeulen, Berghahn Books, EASA Series, 2022).

Vermeulen, Han F. & Frederico Delgado Rosa (eds.). 2022. “Before and After Malinowski: Alternative Views on the History of Anthropology [A Virtual Round Table at the RAI]”, BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Chaired by David Shankland and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, with Andrew Lyons as discussant, the two-part round table at the RAI in London highlighted the history of ethnography before Malinowski’s Argonauts, the genesis of British social anthropology in 1922, and its aftermath in Britain and beyond. The resulting papers discuss the three theses that opened the round table: (1) In the fifty years before the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, a growing number of ethnographers produced hundreds of ethnographic monographs worldwide, but much of their work was sidetracked or neglected by Malinowski and his followers; (2) Malinowski is still celebrated as the inventor of intensive fieldwork in a single society, despite the fact that he had many predecessors in other societies and continents pursuing the same goal; and (3) the success of British social anthropology has been partly due to its marginalizing the relative importance of other approaches such as non-functionalist ethnographies, comparative studies and ethnohistory. Participants in the round table/contributors to this special issue are (in alphabetical order): Sophie Chevalier, Barbara Chambers Dawson, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Michael Kraus, Adam Kuper, Herbert S. Lewis, Andrew Lyons, David Mills, Frederico Delgado Rosa, David Shankland, James Urry, Han F. Vermeulen, and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in Spanish) on Italian missionary and ethnographer Massimino Giannecchini.

Combès, Isabelle & Pilar Garcia Jordán, 2022. “Fray Doroteo Giannecchini: lingüista, etnógrafo y explorador del Chaco boliviano”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Born in Tuscany, Massimino Candido Regolo Giannecchini (1837-1900) was a Franciscan missionary, ordained in 1854 under the name Doroteo. In January 1860 he went to Tarija, in the south of Bolivia. For more than three decades, he was a missionary among Indigenous communities of the Chaco, such as the Chiriguanos and the Tobas. He could not manage to publish his abundant linguistic and ethnographic materials during his lifetime, but his manuscripts were exploited and used throughout the twentieth century by numerous authors who did not always acknowledge their debt to him. The publication in 1996 of his Historia natural, etnografía, geografía, lingüística del Chaco boliviano (Natural history, ethnography, geography and linguistics of the Bolivian Chaco) unveiled his important contributions and made him an inescapable reference for Chaco history, ethnography and linguistics. In this in-depth presentation of this Italian scholarly missionary, Combès and García contextualize his ethnographic endeavors and conclude that despite the inevitable biases linked to his evangelizing action “his sharp observations and reflections on social life, the status of women and political organization, among other topics, place Giannecchini in the pantheon of great missionary ethnographers”.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: a short essay on the historiography of anthropology by Regna Darnell, which was originally the keynote address of the 4^th Meeting of the EASA’s History of Anthropology Network (HOAN), virtually held on November 18, 2022.

Darnell, Regna, 2022. “A Critical Paradigm for the Histories of Anthropology.
The Generalization of Transportable Knowledge,” in BEROSE International
Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

HOAN addresses anthropology’s multiple histories. The plurality of its mandate constitutes a rallying point for diverse interests across conventional silos of knowledge accumulation and practice, with the potential to reach other audiences and publics in the academy and beyond. Regna Darnell has addressed specific audiences from her vantage point as an interdisciplinary historian of anthropology and linguistics. By and large, the audience for these discourses remains a closed circle of known colleagues with familiar ways of speaking to one another. She argues that the variables emerging in these discourses recur across them, and that we urgently need a new paradigm retaining the value of the particular while seeking generalization through cycles of change and geographic location. What she calls “transportable knowledge” toggles between them in a paradigm shift from the history of anthropology that emerged in the 1960s to address causes and rationales of what happened in the past. The new model foregrounds the complexity of decision-making in a rapidly changing world using available information. Read in context, in hindsight non-optimal choices avoid what she calls “assassination by anachronism.”

CFP: Eighth Annual Conference on the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS)

Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University

June 9-10, 2023

This two-day conference of the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS), at Uppsala University in Sweden, will bring together researchers working on the history of post-World War II social science. It will provide a forum for the latest research on the cross-disciplinary history of the post-war social sciences, including but not limited to anthropology, economics, psychology, political science, and sociology as well as related fields like area studies, communication studies, history, international relations, law, and linguistics. The conference aims to build upon the recent emergence of work and conversation on cross-disciplinary themes in the postwar history of the social sciences.

Submissions are welcome in such areas including, but not restricted to:

• The interchange of social science concepts and figures among the academy and wider intellectual and popular spheres
• Comparative institutional histories of departments and programs
• Border disputes and boundary work between disciplines as well as academic cultures
• Themes and concepts developed in the history and sociology of natural and physical science, reconceptualized for the social science context
• Professional and applied training programs and schools, and the quasi-disciplinary fields (like business administration) that typically housed them
• The role of social science in post-colonial state-building governance
• Social science adaptations to the changing media landscape
• The role and prominence of disciplinary memory in a comparative context
• Engagements with matters of gender, sexuality, race, religion, nationality, disability and other markers of identity and difference

The two-day conference will be organized as a series of one-hour, single-paper sessions attended by all participants. Ample time will be set aside for intellectual exchange between presenters and attendees, as all participants are expected to read pre-circulated papers in advance.

Proposals should contain no more than 1000 words, indicating the originality of the paper. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is February 3, 2023. Final notification will be given in early March 2023 after proposals have been reviewed. Completed papers will be expected by May 5, 2023.

Please note that published or forthcoming papers are not eligible, owing to the workshop format.

The organizing committee consists of Jenny Andersson (Uppsala University), Jamie Cohen-Cole (George Washington University), Philippe Fontaine (École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay), Jeff Pooley (Muhlenberg College), and Per Wisselgren (Uppsala University).

All proposals and requests for information should be sent to submissions@hisress.org

If you enjoyed Christopher Heaney’s insightful Field Note from 2017, “Fair Necropolis,” the HAR editors suggest reading his most recent work on physical anthropology and the collecting of Indigenous human remains. Dr. Heaney‘s newest article, “Skull Walls: The Peruvian Dead and the Remains of Entanglement,” has just been published in the American Historical Review and is currently free to read online.

From 1820 through 1920, American anthropologists acquired more human remains of Andean origin than those of any other individual population worldwide. Samuel George Morton, the Smithsonian, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the American Museum of Natural History all made “ancient Peruvians” core to their collections, racializing the Americas’ past and present by using “ancient Peruvians” as a historic set against which living Native Americans might be compared. This process fueled the collection of Indigenous remains in general and confirms Americanist historians’ need to attend to entanglement: US scholars were adapting a Peruvian tradition of knowledge and grave robbing in which the Andes possessed the Americas’ oldest, wealthiest, most “civilized,” and most plentiful human remains. It also reminds us that recent and useful conceptualizations of early American history as vast had disturbing early republican counterparts—in this case, a violent science that entangled precolonial, colonial, and republican North and South American temporalities and embodied them in the “historic” Indigenous dead. Reckoning with history’s role in colonization includes recognizing the literal, even spirited, remains of entanglement as historical forces in their own right, with temporalities beyond those of the United States. Read more in the American Historical Review.

Congratulations, Dr. Heaney!

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in English, on the career of Kamba Simango, Mozambican anthropologist and student of Boas.

Macagno, Lorenzo, 2022. “From Mozambique to New York: The Cosmopolitan Pathways of Kamba Simango, African Disciple of Franz Boas,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Born in 1890, in the Machanga District on the coast of present-day Mozambique, Kamba Simango was an ethnographer, missionary, musician, performer and activist. In 1914, under the auspices of the missionaries of the American Board of Missions, he was sent to the United States to study at the Hampton Institute, a college where African-Americans and young people from Africa learned sciences, literature, and manual skills. In 1919, after completing his studies at the Hampton Institute, Kamba Simango was sent to the Teachers College at Columbia University, where he would remain until 1923. Immediately after his arrival in Columbia, Kamba Simango was presented to Franz Boas. The two immediately struck up a rapport. The father of North American anthropology wanted Simango to become not only a mere “informant” but a native ethnographer, furnished with anthropological tools. They became collaborators and friends. Boas hoped that upon returning to Mozambique, Simango would write about his people (the Vandau), independently of his commitments to the missionaries of the American Board.

Based on the exchange of letters that the pair kept up for many years, this extraordinary article unveils the itineraries of the ethnographic dialogue between the famous anthropologist and his forgotten disciple. Simango’s years in New York coincided with the start of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, a time when the incipient voices of Pan-Africanism co-existed with a whole host of Black writers, poets, painters, sculptors and musicians. During this period, he would also become friends with Pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois. As a Vandau intellectual, he collaborated also with many anthropologists and Africanists, such as Melville Herskovits, Henri-Philippe Junod and Dora Earthy. Kamba Simango died in Ghana, in 1966.

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in English, on the early work of ethnographer Daisy Bates in Australia.

McDonald, Edward M. & Bryn Coldrick, 2022. “‘Out Amongst the Natives’: Fieldwork and the Legacy of Daisy Bates, a Controversial Ethnographer in Australia,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Born in Ireland, Daisy May Bates (1863–1951) was a self-made anthropologist and welfare worker among Aboriginal people in Australia, where she first migrated in 1883–1884. Bates used participant observation techniques prior to and during her appointment by the Western Australian government to undertake research on Aboriginal language and culture, a position she held from 1904 to 1911. Her trajectory intersected with that of the newly arrived A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, whose status as a professional anthropologist eventually overshadowed the vast contributions of his female counterpart. Having worked as a journalist in England, Bates’s ethnographic skills were intertwined with a compassionate interest in the present conditions and the future of Aboriginal people, but some of her controversial views and eccentric ways have transformed her legacy into an enduring challenge. She has long been denied the status of a ‘real’ anthropologist, at best considered an “enthusiastic amateur,” and her work is typically discredited because of moralistic views about her personal life. Examining her correspondence and published and unpublished papers, Eddie McDonald and Bryn Coldrick argue that much of her work is both anthropological and insightful and her ethnographic fieldwork compares favorably with Malinowski’s developments a decade later. They suggest that Bates was ahead of her time, avoiding many of the shortcomings of ‘modern’ anthropology. However, in other ways she remained a pre-modern anthropologist with a focus on ethnology, endeavouring to create an encyclopedic compendium of ‘facts’ about all aspects of Aboriginal culture. But then, so did many of her contemporaries.

In this illuminating article, McDonald and Coldrick argue that much of the criticism of Bates and her work is moralistic and ‘presentist’ and fails to acknowledge the complex history of the development of anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork. They contend that Bates is an “excluded ancestor” who needs to be ‘reclaimed.’ Her corpus of ethnographic material also needs to be examined in such a way as to provide a more critical understanding of the development of the discipline of ethnographic fieldwork in Australia.

Alice Kehoe’s recent book, Girl Archaeologist: Sisterhood in a Sexist Profession (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), has been selected as a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles, both print and digital, reviewed by Choice during the previous year and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community. Girl Archaeologist recounts Kehoe’s life, begun in an era very different from the twenty-first century in which she retired as an honored elder archaeologist. She persisted against entrenched patriarchy in her childhood, at Harvard University, and as she did fieldwork with her husband in the northern U.S. plains. The book recounts her experiences with the entrenched sexism and misogyny of academic archaeology, from being paid less than her male counterparts and sexual violence at the hands of male colleagues, to having her dissertation ambitions in archaeology thwarted by male Harvard faculty. Yet Kehoe persisted, and throughout her career found and fostered a sisterhood of feminist women archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians who have been essential to the field.

Alice Beck Kehoe is a professor of anthropology emeritus at Marquette University. She is the author or editor of twenty books, including North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology, and North America Before the European Invasions. Congratulations, Dr. Kehoe!

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in English, exploring the connections between American anthropology and colonialism by Herbert S. Lewis.

Lewis, Herbert S., 2022. “American Anthropology and Colonialism: A Factual Account,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Anthropology developed as an academic discipline at the height of European colonialism at the turn of the 20th century. It was the same as for many scientific disciplines, but anthropologists – ethnographers – engaged intellectually and practically with many peoples of the world who were under colonial domination. Since the intellectual upheavals of the 1960s, this relationship has been viewed as shameful, and the phrase “anthropology and colonialism” has, Lewis argues, become an ill-informed cliché that undermines historical understanding. In this article Lewis addresses this quandary with respect to anthropology as it has developed in the United States. Until World War II, very few American anthropologists did research outside the United States, and even fewer investigated areas under European colonial rule. The vast majority of ethnographic research conducted in the United States has been with Native American peoples, whose complex historical situation, Lewis contends, is barely captured by the use of the term “settler colonialism.” Applied to anthropology and ethnography, this article charges that recent narratives are an oversimplification that distorts the reality of both process and results. The second part of the article explores the legacy of anthropological research among North American Indian peoples, particularly for the descendants of these communities, as well as the discipline’s contribution to understanding the human condition, and the diversity of human behavior, thought, and creativity.

Its editors are pleased to announce the launch of a new journal, History of Social Science, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS).

History of Social Science offers an international forum for the examination of the transformations of the social sciences since the early twentieth century. The journal covers a variety of disciplines, from the core social sciences of economics, political science, and sociology, to disciplines with links to natural science, such as anthropology, geography, and psychology, and disciplines closer to the humanities, such as history and philosophy. Related fields, including area studies, business, communication studies, criminology, law, and linguistics, are also included under the journal’s editorial scope. An important editorial commitment of the journal is to solicit and cultivate scholarship on the history of the social sciences throughout the world, as well as work that traces the transnational circulation and mutual shaping of ideas, practices, and personnel.

The journal is now accepting submissions. More information can be found on the journal’s website, including Author Guidelines and the Editorial Board. The first issue is slated to appear in Spring 2024.

The journal’s sponsor is the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS), which also hosts a small annual conference on the worldwide history of the social sciences in the twentieth century. Next year’s symposium will be held in Uppsala, Sweden, in June; see the call for papers for more details.

Please contact the journal editors with submission inquiries or any other questions.

Jamie Cohen Cole, Philippe Fontaine, and Jeff PooleyCo-editors, History of Social Science

HOAN (History of Anthropology Network) will host its next meeting online via Meet on November 18, 2022, 5 PM (CET) at the following link (no password required). All are welcome to attend.

At this meeting, HOAN has the honor to host Regna Darnell as keynote speaker, delivering the speech “A Critical Paradigm for the Histories of Anthropology: The Generalization of Transportable Knowledge.” An abstract for this talk can be found here.

Afterwards, HOAN’s Correspondents in the Netherlands (Peter G.A. Versteeg) and in Lithuania (Vida Savoniakaite) will present on the historiography of anthropological sciences in their respective countries, thus enriching our knowledge and perspectives. Last but not least, Frederico Delgado Rosa and Han Vermeulen will present their latest book Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922 (Berghahn, 2022). 

Coordinated by the HOAN convenors, HOAN Meetings (HOAN-M) are meant to be friendly spaces to meet and mingle and share ideas and news. HOAN-M offers an open stage to HOAN members and members of sister organizations to highlight new research, books, articles, and activities, as well as to discuss current or sensitive issues in our sub-disciplinary field.

For a further description of this event and past meetings, please visit the HOAN website.

The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association will be held online and in-person in Seattle from November 9-13, 2022.

The HAR News editors are please to share a selection of panels that may be of interest to our readers. Please note that all times are listed in Pacific Time (U.S.). Other panels and additional details, including registration information and room location, may be found in the full meeting program.

This year, the History of Science Society will host its annual meeting in person, in Chicago, from November 17-20, 2022. The meeting schedule includes talks, roundtables, social events, prize ceremonies, plenary lectures, and listening sessions.

The HAR News editors would like to highlight several events on the program related to the history of anthropology, including presentations by HAR editors. Please note that the event times given are in Central Time (U.S.). Registration for the meeting is required; a discounted rate is available for graduate students. Please note that events are subject to change and it is best to check the program regularly for the events you are interested in. Abstracts for each panel can also be found in the full meeting program.

Thursday, November 17, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m.

Arctic Materialities: Objects, Collections, and Knowledge in and of the Far North

Brooke Penaloza-Patzak, University of Pennsylvania / University of Vienna: The Natural Science of Human Culture: Naturalized Data in Ancient Migration Research on the Strait, 1865-1907

Sarah Pickman, Yale University: “Exploration Was Already a Joke When I Came to Canada”: Archiving and Objects in the Making of a Scientific Legacy

Allegra Rosenberg, NYU: “Disappointed at finding nothing”: Failures of Inscription in the Polar Expeditions of Franklin and Cook

Eva Molina, Princeton University: “The Saddest of Membra Disjecta”: 19th Century Arctic Exploration and the Body as Object

Between Natural and Human Histories

Emma Kitchen, University of Chicago: Smoothing through Time: Liminal Fossils and their Narratives of the Past

David Sepkoski, University of Illinois: Biology and Critique: Jacques Monod and the Fate of Hegel in France Isabel Gabel, University of Chicago Geo-Eschatology and the Anthropocene

Sophia Roosth, NYU/Max Planck Institute for History of Science: The Fluent Sculpture of Time

Friday, November 17, 5:00 – 5:45 p.m.

HSS Listening Session

Members of HSS’s leadership will host a listening session to respond to concerns from HSS membership. All are welcome to attend.

Friday, November 18, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m.

Forum for the History of Human Science Meeting and Distinguished Lecture

FHHS welcomes historians of the human sciences, broadly defined, to attend a distinguished lecture, Body Arithmetic: Facts, Quantification, and the Human in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic by Pablo F. Gómez (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and celebrate emerging work in this field. Two awards will be presented: the FHHS/JHBS John C. Burnham Early Career Award and the the FHHS Dissertation Prize. Elections will be held for FHHS officers.

Friday, November 18, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Roundtable: Digitizing and Decolonizing Collections: Challenges and Experiences

Chairs: Catarina Madruga, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, and Adrianna Link, American Philosophical Society

Participants: Anita Guerrini, Oregon State University and University of California Santa Barbara; Nuala Caomhánach, New York University/American Museum of Natural History; Elaine Ayers, New York University; Adrianna Link, American Philosophical Society; Catarina Madruga, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

Human Descent and Evolution Across Scientific and Popular Literatures in the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American World

Elizabeth Yale, University of Iowa: Illustrating Human Evolution: Wonder, Extinction, and Love in Victorian Children’s Literature

Tina Gianquitto, Colorado School of Mines: Roots of Consciousness: Darwin’s plant studies and human descent

Edwin Rose, Darwin College, University of Cambridge: Dynasties and the Adaption of Science: George Howard Darwin and the ‘Public’ Perception of the Solar System

James T. Costa, Highlands Biological Station, Western Carolina University: Wallace and Darwin on Human Evolution: Competing Visions of Race and Gender and Their Influence on Science and Society

Friday, November 18, 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.

Animal Knowledge Farther Afield: Menageries, Breeding Colonies, and Cities in the History of Animal Science

Alexander Clayton, University of Michigan: The (Living) Specimen: Knowledge and its Limits in the Atlantic Menagerie, 1760-1890

Oliver Lazarus, Harvard University: The Construction of the Industrial City and the Reconstruction of Nonhuman Life, New York City c. 1850-1900

Brigid Prial, University of Pennsylvania: Breeding Uncertainty: Caretaking and Reproduction in Robert Yerkes’ Chimpanzee Station, 1929 – 1955

Friday, November 18, 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.

Medicalizing Colonial Subjects: Peoples, Poisons, and Pupils

Zeynep Kuleli Karasahan, Johns Hopkins University: Melancholic Turks: Medical Theory, Race, and Climate in Early Orientalist Thought

Thomas C. Anderson, Yale University: Noxious Empiricism: Poison, Pharmacy, and Localized Science Between Early Modern France and the Colonial Caribbean

Miguel Angel Chavez, Vanderbilt University: “Colonial” Science: John Brian Christopherson and Sudanese Knowledge in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1904-1919)

Aparna Nair, University of Oklahoma-Norman: “Protecting” the Sight or “Passing” as Sighted?: Sunglasses and Eye Preservers in British India, 1850-1950

Saturday, November 19, 4:00 – 5:30 p.m

From Skulls to Complete Humans: Reconfigurations of Biological Anthropology in the Post-War Decades

Matthis Krischel, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf: Hans Nachtsheim, the UNESCO Declarations on Race and the Reintegration of West German science after 1945

Iris Clever, University of Chicago: Geoffrey Morant and the Unexpected Connections Between Racial Science and Human Growth Studies in the 1940s and 1950s

Fabio De Sio, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf: Adaptation: Biological, Social, Academic. Defining the science of Human Biology in postWWII Great Britain (ca. 1950s-1960s)

Explorations, Expeditions, and Extractions

Anne Ricculli, Morris Museum: Coral Fisheries, Neglected: Peter Lund Simmonds, H.M.S. Challenger, and the Economics of Depth-Dependent Research, 1873

Tatyana Bakhmetyeva and Stewart A. Weaver, University of Rochester: Extreme Science in the Age of Extremes: the Finsterwalders, Mountaineering, and the Emergence of Glacial Science, 1889 – 1934

Carlos Alberto Haag, York University: The Royal Society Expedition to Brazil (1969-1971)

Tainã Moura Alcântara: Notes on History of Archaeology in Brazil: “Only Foreigners Research Brazilian Prehistory”

Gender and Eugenics in Applied Social Sciences

Alex Worrall, University of Pennsylvania: Medicalizing Suffrage: The Use of Health and Disease Rhetoric in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States Woman Suffrage Movement

David Munns, John Jay College-CUNY: “A bad inheritance can be overcome by a good environment”: The Legacy of Euthenics in the History of American Eugenics

Gwen Kay, SUNY Oswego: How to De-Gender a Field in One Easy Step? The transformation of Consumer and Family Science

Abigail Grace Cramer, Kent State University: “Should Men Always Marry For Money”: A History of Psychology and IQ, Eugenics, and Manhood

Sunday, November 20, 11:00 a. m. – 12:30 p.m.

Paradigms of Scientific Knowledge in Colonial Contexts

Patrícia Martins Marcos, UCSD: Absented Presences: Rethinking Chronologies of Scientific (Early) Modernity

Edward J Gillin, UCL: The magnetism of empire: dipping needles and the experimental encounters of nineteenth-century expeditionary science

Sarah Qidwai, University of Regensburg: Situated Scientific Knowledge

HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article, in English, on the anthropological career of Józef Obrębski.

Engelking, Anna, 2022. “From Archaic to Colonial Peasantries: An Intellectual Biography of Józef Obrębski, the (Forgotten) Polish Disciple of Malinowski,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Polish social anthropologist Józef Obrębski (1905–1967) was a disciple of Malinowski at the London School of Economics, and the first anthropologist who applied Malinowski’s method and theory to a European village. In the 1930s, he conducted his fieldwork in Macedonia and the Belarusian-Ukrainian borderland. In those studies, Obrębski applied Malinowski’s fundamental methodological directive: long-term participant observation. The belief in the comparability of cultures underlaid Obrębski’s anthropology, which was sensitive to “the native’s point of view,” while identifying Slavic peasant communities in various stages of modernization before World War II. From 1948 onwards he lived in the US and was an expert at the United Nations. In the late 1940s, his ethnographic research covered post-slavery communities in Jamaica. He responded to the call for human equality with an emancipatory, anti-nationalist and anti-colonial attitude. While one can speak of Obrębski’s focus on the mechanisms of domination and discrimination, his anthropology was also an attempt to deconstruct them. He formulated innovative theoretical propositions concerning ethnicity and nation-building, but his works remained mostly unpublished and have only recently been rediscovered. In this pathbreaking article, Engelking presents the trajectory of a man who is ignored in the anthropological mainstream but can be seen as a precursor of ethnic, gender and
postcolonial studies.

The next meeting of the History of Anthropology Working Group hosted by the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine will be held on Wednesday, November 2, 2022 at 12:00pm ET via Zoom.

Matthew C. Watson joins us from Mount Holyoke College to workshop a chapter from his new book project, tentatively titled The Whiteness of Method: Racial Infrastructures of Harvard Ethnography and Mexican Sovereignty.
 
“The Ethnographic Drive: Interviews and the Racial Erotics of a Harvard Land-Rover in Chiapas”

In 1951, Mexico’s Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) established a coordinating center for a pilot development project in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. INI administrators sought to draw Tzotzil- and Tzeltal-speaking indigenous communities that radiated around San Cristóbal into identification with the Mexican state and its political mythology of racial-cultural mixture, or mestizaje. To do so, the INI built roads. This essay stories the conjuncture of this state investment in the transportation infrastructure of indigenous Chiapas and the attendant geographical mobility of scores of U.S. anthropologists and students who used these roads to access “closed corporate communities” such as Zinacantán during the late-1950s and 1960s. I focus particularly on Harvard Chiapas Project founder Evon Vogt’s early project interviews conducted on these roads in a Land-Rover. Reading the Land-Rover as a space-making technology of ethnographic rapport, I ask how such vehicles have structured ethnographic forms of homosocial intimacy and attachment within a racial erotics of empiricism that renders the interview space a site of capitalist capture. Finally, through a cross-reading of mirror scenes reflecting encounters with Land-Rovers across the Harvard Chiapas Project and the Harvard Kalahari Project, I refract this critique of the interview form’s capitalist coloniality through a weak-theoretical evocation of the Land-Rover’s social, technological, and symbolic indeterminacy.
 
Discussants: Hilary Morgan Leathem (Maynooth University); Karin Rosemblatt (University of Maryland)

Additional details about the group, access to the readings, and information on how to attend may be found on the Consortium website.