2018 (page 2 of 3)

Event: Anthropology and Folklore in Conversation: Revisiting Frazer, Lang, and Tylor, Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 25 October 2018.

September 13, 2018 / Jennifer Fraser

On October 25th the the Folklore Society and the Royal Anthropology Institute will be holding a joint seminar entitled “Anthropology and Folklore in Conversation: Revisiting Frazer, Lang, and Tylor.” This seminar is devoted to examining the complementarities between anthropology and folklore, through exploring the lives and work of James George Frazer, Andrew Lang and Edward B. Tylor.

This event will take place at the Royal Anthropological Institute at 50 Fitzroy St, London and will run from 10:00am to 5:00pm.

For additional information about this event, please contact: admin@therai.org.uk

Event: The life and works of Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, 1902-1973, Royal Anthropological Institute, London, October 18-19 2018,

September 12, 2018 / Jennifer Fraser

Edward Evans-Pritchard was one of the most famous anthropologists of the twentieth century. Known for the great range and perspicacity of his writings and lectures, the books which he published were often seminal, creating discussion and setting anthropology off onto new paths. In order to explore his life, fieldwork, and legacy, on October 18-19, 2018 the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) is holding a seminar on “The life and works of Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973),” There will be no conference fee, and refreshments will be provided on the day. Program information can be found here.

To RSVP to this event please go to https://evans-pritchard.eventbrite.co.uk.

New Resource: Robert Launay’s “Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking About Others from Montaigne to Herder”

September 10, 2018 / Jennifer Fraser

The History of Anthropology Newsletter (HAN) is pleased to announce the upcoming publication of Dr. Robert Launay‘s new book Savages, Romans and Despots: Thinking About Others from Montaigne to Herder. Scheduled for release on October 1, 2018, Launay’s work traces how Europeans both admired and disdained unfamiliar societies in their attempts to work through the inner conflicts of their own social worlds.

A full description of the book can be found below:

Resource: New Content in HAN’s Bibliography

September 10, 2018 / Jennifer Fraser

The History of Anthropology Newsletter (HAN) is pleased to announce the addition of new items to our Bibliography section. This section features citations of recently published works (stretching back to 2013) in all formats that are relevant to the history of anthropology. A full list of the new titles added can be found below. More information on our latest bibliography entries can be found here.

HAN welcomes bibliography suggestions from our readers. If you come across a title of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.

Event: Human Diversity in Context, Trieste, Italy, 25-26 September 2018

September 9, 2018 / Jennifer Fraser

On September 25-26, 2018 the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste & Academia Europaea is hosting an international conference called Human Diversity in Context.

This event will offer a multifaceted critical examination of the ways, tools and strategies through which European societies have historically envisioned and now confront, construct and conceptualize their perception, representation and evaluation of the difference-in-unity of mankind. The scope of the conference will range from the recognition and/or reconstruction of religious identities and the legal status of minorities, together with the formation of territorially bounded human collectives, to the analysis of wounded identities or competing regimes of memory, from the dialectical examination of processes of ‘othering’ to cultural and physical anthropological narratives and classifications of mankind, exploring which cognitive skills humans share and do not share with animals.

The full conference program can be found here.

Questions about the event can be directed to conference organizer Dr Cinzia Ferrini at ferrini@units.it

Invitation to Contribute: Land Acknowledgement at HSS

September 9, 2018 / Jennifer Fraser

During the 2017 History of Science Society meeting in Toronto, a committee was formed to expand the Society’s ongoing initiatives for inclusion, diversity and equality. The committee’s primary focus for the 2018 meeting in Seattle is to invite one of the six Seattle-area Nations (Duwamish, Tulalip, Muckleshoot, Snohomish, Suquamish, and Snoqualmie) to open the conference with a land acknowledgment ceremony. They are also drafting guidelines to make land acknowledgment a regular practice at conferences and institutions for research and education.

Many institutions of research and education have been erected on stolen land. Academic conferences and events are also routinely held in these spaces. Often these lands were taken under unjust and violent circumstances. However, these truths, including the devastating effects that forced relocation continues to have on native communities, are left out of dominant historical narratives.

Indigenous Land Acknowledgements, which refers to the practice of recognizing an Indigenous community’s ancestral ties to the land on which a meeting or event is taking place, are one small but tangible way institutions of culture and education in the United States can begin repairing the harm caused by mainstream historical accounts, which have excluded Indigenous voices and obscured the centrality of violence to colonialism in the United States. Acknowledging the communities that have an inseparable connection to the land on which these institutions reside challenges the mainstream narrative and calls attention to the strength of Indigenous communities which have survived the devastating effects of displacement and colonization. Further, this history informs the present experience of Native American peoples, so it is essential to the contextualization of current events.

Anyone interested in joining the committee is very welcome. They can be reached at hss.land.acknowledgment@gmail.com.

Publishing Opportunity: Invitation to contribute to Anthropological Theory

September 6, 2018 / Jennifer Fraser

Anthropological Theory (AT) is looking for submissions regarding disciplinary history. According to the editors, Stephen
Reyna, Julia Eckert and Nina Glick Schiller, they are “[P]leased to review individual articles or entire issues dealing with particular themes. AT is a theory journal, so our preference is for articles that deal with theoretical or methodological matters that have been significant in the discipline’s history. We do not insist that AT authors hew to a particular intellectual standpoint. However, successful manuscripts will construct arguments, notable for their clarity, that advance questions of theory in historical contexts.”

Information about the journal including submission requirements can be found
at http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ant

‘Early Inuit Studies: Themes and Transitions, 1850s-1980s’ edited by Igor Krupnik

August 27, 2018 / Julien Pongerard

Igor Krupnik (Editor). Early Inuit Studies: Themes and Transitions, 1850s-1980s. xviii + 452pp., illus., maps, bibl., index. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2016.

Inuit studies today is an interdisciplinary and institutionalized field of research. The present book, edited by Arctic ethnologist Igor Krupnik, proceeds from a session organized at the 18th Inuit Studies Conference, and provides insightful elements on the history of the field. This collection of fourteen essays (plus a contextualizing introduction by Krupnik and a closing “Coda” by Béatrice Collignon) is a beautiful object, printed on glazed-paper, reproducing many maps, tables, and unique photographs from the collections of prominent social scientists of the Arctic. In the front endpapers readers encounter a nearly circumpolar map of the whole Inuit Arctic. This cartographic representation of the polar North fits well with the book’s pan-Inuit framework, dealing with research produced about all Inuit groups in Northern America, Russia, and Europe (Greenland). The book’s broad geographic scope is united with an ambitious historiographical agenda. Krupnik aims to fill a void in the “collective memory” of scholars of Inuit studies by portraying in broad strokes the early history of their research field. Most of the book’s chapters are devoted to portraying one important figure in Inuit studies, or studying a precise research project, or depicting a school of thought or a research tradition.

Archival Developments: The Cora Du Bois Archives

August 24, 2018 / Susan Seymour

This is the first entry in our “Archival Developments” series, in which we invite scholars to write and reflect on their experiences using specific archives. If you would like to suggest a contribution, please contact us at bibliographies@histroanth.org.

Cora Alice Du Bois (1903–1991) is known for her studies in culture-and-personality and change in complex societies. Her personal and professional papers are divided among several institutions including Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. Du Bois was educated at Barnard College (BA) and UC Berkeley (PhD) and spent much of her academic career at Harvard, where she would hold the Zemurray-Stone Professorship and become the school’s first tenured woman. She did fieldwork among Native Americans in the western US and in Orissa, India, and her work in Indonesia led to her landmark study, The People of Alor: A Social-Psychological Study of an East Asian Island.[i]

Susan Seymour, the Jean M. Pitzer Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Pitzer College and a student of Du Bois at Harvard, used Du Bois’s archival collections extensively when writing her 2015 biography of Du Bois, Cora Du Bois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent.[ii] We asked her to write briefly about how her use of the Cora Du Bois Collection housed in Tozzer Library at Harvard, informed her work. Continue reading

Visual Kinship

July 24, 2018 / Ara Wilson / 2 Comments

Even if we don’t see them very often in ethnographies these days, the charts connecting up circles and triangles into lines of descent and affiliation remain iconic artifacts of anthropological knowledge. They are also compelling visual representations in their own right. As part of a larger project on how sex or gender has been codified into visual symbols — such as ♀ and ♂ — I have been looking at the history of anthropological kinship diagrams.

“Laying the Cards on the Table”

July 10, 2018 / Luis Felipe Sobral

Michel Leiris. Phantom Africa. Translated by Brent Hayes Edwards. Africa List Series. 720 pp., 37 halftones, 3 fascimiles, 1 map. Calcutta, London, and New York: Seagull Books, 2017. $60 (cloth)

Editor’s Note: This essay—an extended commentary on the recently published translation of Phantom Africa—is HAN’s first joint production of Field Notes and Reviews. The Editors welcome and encourage future submissions that combine reviews of recently published works with reflections on the history of anthropology.

Cover of the first edition of L’Afrique Fantôme, published by Gallimard in its series ‘Les Documents Bleus’ in 1934.

Phantom Africa is the diary that French writer and ethnologist, Michel Leiris, kept for almost two years, from May 1931 to February 1933. During this period, he was the secretary-archivist of the Dakar-Djibouti mission, an important ethnographic expedition financed by the French government, supported by several private donors, and organized by the University of Paris and the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. The main goal of the mission was to collect a large number of ethnographic objects in order to renew the collection of the museum. The years between the world wars were a critical period for French anthropology because it was the moment of its emergence as an independent discipline. As a highly publicized event attached to the Trocadéro, the Dakar-Djibouti mission in particular played an important role in this process, paving the way for other ethnographic expeditions throughout the 1930s.^[1] The original French edition of the diary was published by Gallimard soon after the mission, in 1934, and now it has been published in English, translated by Brent Hayes Edwards. Continue reading