In the archives of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, I found an advertisement torn from a magazine in the late 1950s or early 1960s promoting a new electric slide projector. “Open your eyes wide,” it says, and “don’t make a single move. It’s ENTIRELY AUTOMATIC.” A well-coiffed, contented, schematically drawn face hovers over a pair of hands, their fingers snugly entwined. The thumbs twiddle idly; they have nothing to do.
HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article in two versions – English and Italian – on the visual ethnography of U.S. anthropologist Frank Cancian, who sadly just passed away on November 24, 2020.
Faeta, Francesco, 2020. “‘I never left Lacedonia’. The 1950s Italian Mezzogiorno in Frank Cancian’s Visual Ethnography,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Faeta, Francesco, 2020. “«I never left Lacedonia». Il Mezzogiorno italiano degli anni Cinquanta nell’etnografia visuale di Frank Cancian,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
When the iconic U.S. visual anthropologist Frank Cancian – who died on November 24, 2020 – was a 23-year old, he did path-breaking fieldwork in Southern Italy, the Mezzogiorno. In the late 1950s, this region was in the forefront of community studies, but social scientists were divided between a commitment for knowledge, reformist and ideological perspectives, or simply the aspiration to describe a supposedly archaic world that was finally embracing “modernity.” While some shed a gloomy light on the supposed lack of agency of the Mezzogiorno peasants, Frank Cancian conducted his systematic photographic survey in the village of Lacedonia with utmost respect for the inhabitants and attention to their daily community social life. Away from ideological prejudice, he showed a desire for visual experimentation within a frame of reciprocity. In this illustrated article, which was written in dialogue with Cancian and now pays tribute to his legacy, Francesco Faeta claims that no anthropologist who studied the South of Italy during those years has left us with a more vivid and complete photographic portrait of its communities. Cancian experienced the desire to understand the dark side of the observed society, manifest through emigration, unemployment, social disparity, mistrust, disenchantment, and an ambiguous relationship with looming modernity. Faeta gives the reader an in-depth historical, theoretical, and methodological account of the issues at stake in Cancian’s visual ethnography and Italian studies of the post-war period. Fifty years later, in 2017, Frank Cancian bequeathed 1,801 photographs and his field notebooks to the community of Lacedonia, so passing on an invaluable testimony which is displayed in a photographic exhibition curated by Francesco Faeta, held in Rome at the Museo delle Civiltà (Museum of Civilizations) until January 2021.
HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article in two versions – English and Portuguese – on Brazilian anthropologist Oracy Nogueira.
Cavalcanti, Maria Laura Viveiros de Castro, 2020. “Racial Prejudice and Stigma of Disease: The Pioneering Work of Oracy Nogueira,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Cavalcanti, Maria Laura Viveiros de Castro, 2020. “Preconceito racial e estigma da doença na obra pioneira de Oracy Nogueira,” in BEROSE – International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Oracy Nogueira (1917-1996), a Brazilian sociologist with broad anthropological training, took groundbreaking approaches to the study of racial prejudice and the stigma of disease. In this article published in two versions – Portuguese and English – Maria Laura Cavalcanti highlights the fact that Nogueira had himself experienced the stigma of disease as he had to isolate himself for tuberculosis treatment as a young man, between 1936 and 1938. His intellectual trajectory, prior to and following his Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, expresses the fecundity of Brazilian social sciences during the decisive period from the 1930s to the early 1960s. According to Cavalcanti, Nogueira’s anthropology, particularly his studies of the relations between black and white populations both in Brazil and the United States, allow us to place him in the pantheon of classic authors in Brazilian social sciences.
HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. It is a “Who’s Who in the Age of Boas,” written by Herbert S. Lewis.
Lewis, Herbert S., 2020. “Who’s Who in the Age of Boas: The Sponsors of Anthropological Papers Written in Honor of Franz Boas (1906)”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
In 1906, when Franz Boas was 48 years old, he was honored with Anthropological Papers Written in Honor of Franz Boas, “Presented to Him on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of His Doctorate.” This massive volume, containing 43 scholarly papers, gives powerful testimony to the impact of Franz Boas on the establishment of anthropology as an academic and scientific discipline in America even at that early date. In this ambitious article, Herbert S. Lewis describes a complex, intercontinental network of scholars and sponsors, including unexpected figures such as two whaling captains known to Boas from his Baffin Island fieldwork in 1883-84. Boas’s continuing direct and active connection to European scholarship is evident in the fact that about a third of the contributions are from that continent, particularly from Germany and Austria. Lewis highlights the fact that the contributions of a younger generation pointing in the direction of what would become modern American anthropology was counterbalanced by a majority of papers by “pre-Boasian” ethnologists and antiquarians. Something else that the volume indicates is the extent to which Franz Boas had reached beyond the scholarly community to the world of wealthy and powerful men who supported his anthropological projects. Approximately 50 individuals were listed as backers of this fundamental volume and their backgrounds are revealing of the patronage for this new science at the birth of its institutionalization and professionalization. By rediscovering the lives of these numerous and largely ignored personalities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lewis reveals how the Boas Anniversary Volume marks the transition to a new anthropology in the United States. 1906 was, in this sense, a key moment in the history of the discipline.
HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. This is an article by Kali Argyriadis and Maud Laëthier, presenting the research theme they co-direct for BEROSE about anthropologies and nation-building in Haiti and Cuba (1930-1990). The article is published in three languages: English, Spanish, and French.
Laëthier, Maud & Kali Argyriadis, 2020. “Anthropologies and Nation-building in Cuba and Haiti (1930-1990),” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
This article sketches the outlines of a comparative history of social and cultural anthropology in Cuba and Haiti. It examines the role played by the discipline in the construction of the national cultural identities of both countries, and the peculiar interweaving of anthropological thought and political discourse. With a focus on the period from the 1930s to the 1970s, Kali Argyriadis and Maud Laëthier shed light on a complex circulation of people and ideas both within and beyond the Caribbean through transnational networks and artistic movements that claimed to be anti-imperialist, socialist, or communist. They highlight the role played by iconic figures such as Fernando Ortiz, Jean-Price Mars or Jacques Roumain in reshaping the concept of race and exploring a new national imagination. The meaning of being Haitian or Cuban was not necessarily a matter of racial dignity so much as of cultural authenticity, and the debates in question had an international impact to the point of affecting the notion of ‘Otherness’ in the United States and Europe.
History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research that provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology, and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognize a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies, and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply.
Guidelines for the Award
Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are asked to submit an up-to-date two-page C.V. (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines.
Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope.
Eligibility
Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a Ph.D. or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years,” with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in the calculation.
Prize
The winning scholar will be awarded £250 and have their essay published in History of the Human Sciences (subject to the essay passing through the journal’s peer review process). The intention is to award the prize to a single entrant but the judging panel may choose to recognize more than one essay in the event of a particularly strong field.
Deadlines
Entries should be made by Friday, January 29th, 2021. The panel aims to make a decision by Friday, April 30th, 2021. The winning entry will be submitted for peer review automatically. The article, clearly identified as the winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, will then be published in the journal as soon as the production schedule allows. The winning scholar and article will also be promoted by History of the Human Sciences, including on its website, which hosts content separate to the journal.
Previous Winners
2019-20’s winner was Danielle Carr (Columbia University) for their essay, “Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism.” The committee also awarded a special commendation to Katie Joice (Birkbeck University) for their essay “Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67.” You can read more about these essays in interviews with Danielle and Katie on the journal’s website.
To Apply
Entrants should e-mail an anonymized copy of their essay, along with an up-to-date C.V., to hhs@histhum.com.
Further Enquiries
If you have any questions about the prize, or anything relating to the journal, please email hhs@histhum.com.
The School for Advanced Research (SAR) presents its next online salon: “Recognition in Unexpected Places: The Yaqui Indians and the 89th Wenner-Gren International Symposium,” with speaker Nicholas Barron. The salon will take place on Tuesday, December 8th at 2:00 pm U.S. Mountain Standard Time.
In November of 1981, an assortment of academics gathered in Tucson, Arizona for the 89th Wenner-Gren International Symposium. Organized in collaboration with the newly federally recognized Pascua Yaqui Tribe and local anthropologists, the symposium promised a public reenactment and interdisciplinary examination of Yaqui rituals and performances. A relatively forgotten event in a seemingly out-of-the-way place, the gathering served as an installment in a longstanding and mutually constructive history of Indigenous recognition and anthropological authority in the Southwest.
Nicholas Barron is the 2020 William Y. and Nettie K. Adams Summer Scholar at SAR. Barron is associate faculty of anthropology at Mission College and managing editor at the History of Anthropology Review. In his talk, he will llustrate how the International Symposium became a consequential participant in the ongoing efforts to re-present the Yaqui as a newly recognized American Indian tribe. Yaqui intellectuals and activists strategically embraced and challenged anthropological institutions and authority in order to affirm their newfound political status—even in unexpected places such as an academic conference.
Advance registration is required. To register for this event, please visit the SAR website here.
This page displays our most recent batch of citations; a comprehensive bibliography of citations we’ve collected since 2016 (going back as far as 2013) and a search tool are also available.
We welcome suggestions from readers. If you come across something 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.
Continue readingPaul Turnbull. Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia. Palgrave Studies in Pacific History. 428 pp., 6 b/w illus., bibl., index. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Indigenous bodies have long been a source of historical interest. Over the past decade many scholars have discussed how indigenous bodies and body parts have functioned as sites of persistent fascination, colonial oppression, and Indigenous agency. One persistent theme in this historiography is how the collection and use of Indigenous biospecimens came to be prospected and profited upon. Warwick Anderson’s The Collectors of Lost Souls showed us how Fore brain samples served as a valuable biomedical commodity. Kim TallBear and Jenny Reardon illustrated the role of “Indigenous DNA” in generating scientific knowledge, accruing capital, and attaining professional prestige. Emma Kowal similarly drew our attention to the “ethical biovalue” afforded to Indigenous specimens through discussing how many drug targets and diagnostic tools have emerged out of the collection and use of Indigenous blood, saliva, surgically-removed diseased tissues, and urine.[1] Paul Turnbull’s Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia follows in the footsteps of this well-known body of work. However, rather than focusing his attention on brains, blood, or bodily tissues, Turnbull is more interested in Indigenous skeletal remains and the ways that they have functioned as sites of scientific curiosity from the 1700s to the turn of the twentieth century.
Continue readingOne hundred and nine years ago, The New York Times ran a full-page overview of Franz Boas’s recently published book, The Mind of Primitive Man. [1] The headline read: “DOES THE WHITE RACE GIVE THE HIGHEST HUMAN TYPE?: As a Result of Recent Researches Prof. Boas Questions Current Beliefs in Racial Supremacy, Makes a Plea for the Negro and Tells Strange Facts in European Immigration.”[2] Above the handsome sketch of Boas were exaggerated profile portraits of “the Characteristic Round Jewish Head,” and “Characteristic Long Sicilian Head.” Coming on the heels of the media storm generated by Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (1911),[3] this article provided added grist for the so-called Americanization movement whose sole purpose (at least that I can discern) was the consolidation of whiteness by assimilating the not quite white. The Times highlighted Boas’s research on how immigrants quickly became an “American type,” and underscored his arguments that there are no pure or superior races, and all can participate as citizens. The paper also described vital forms of government, thrift, skill, and complex military organization in pre-colonial Africa. The Times quoted Boas explaining, “the traits of the American Negro are adequately explained on the basis of his history and social status. . . without falling back upon the theory of hereditary inferiority.” Although pictures of “the Jewish” and “Sicilian” head are cringe-worthy today, many Americans would have found most of his findings against racial hierarchy not only repugnant, but profane.[4]
Continue readingHAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. This release is a fascinating paper by Richard Kuba about Leo Frobenius’s activities during World War I, and is extensively illustrated.
Kuba, Richard, 2020. “An Ethnologist on the Warpath: Leo Frobenius and the First World War,” in BEROSE – International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), one of the most famous and controversial German ethnologists of the twentieth century, emphasized the historicity of African cultures and his work was inspirational to the representatives of the “Négritude” movement who aimed at re-establishing the cultural self-awareness of African peoples. Richard Kuba demonstrates, however, that any portrait of Frobenius is incomplete – if not distorted – if his activities and writings as an ethnologist engaged in World War I are not taken into account. Frobenius spent the war years not only as a researcher, but as the leader of a secret mission, propagandist, and director of a prisoner-of-war camp. As dazzling as his war experience may seem, it nevertheless reveals a great deal about the basic orientations of this rather unusual founding father of early twentieth-century anthropology and of the embedded-ness of the discipline in greater political regimes.
HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. This article, in Portuguese, presents Brazilian anthropologist and folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo. It is published as part of the research theme “Histories of Anthropology in Brazil,” which was edited by Stefania Capone and Fernanda Peixoto.
Gonçalves, José Reginaldo Santos, 2020. “O folclore no Brasil na visão de um etnógrafo nativo: um retrato intelectual de Luís da Câmara Cascudo”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Brazilian anthropologist and folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo (1898-1986), who specialized in the folk cultures of his own country, is an under-acknowledged figure in the history of the discipline. In this compelling article in Portuguese, J. R. Santos Gonçalves portrays Cascudo as a “native ethnographer,” whose work is capable of igniting our contemporary imagination. Cascudo focused his attention on the most humble, material, earthly aspects of daily life, be they a sleeping hammock, a raft, food and cachaça, or popular gestures and expressions. In many of Cascudo’s studies, the human body was present as a fundamental, unavoidable mediator. Santos Gonçalves also highlights the fact that this “excluded ancestor,” while spending all his life in his hometown of Natal, in the legendary Nordeste, was part of the Brazilian Modernist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Associated as Cascudo was with “folklore” studies, his importance remained unacknowledged by the academic community of anthropologists. He is the author of numerous books that vividly recreate the universe of folk cultures in Brazil and continue to be re-printed, while his works remain important sources for current researchers.
HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. This latest release is a paper, in French, about the French Protestant missionary and ethnologist Maurice Leenhardt.
Mary, André, 2020. “Maurice Leenhardt, un ethnologue en mission,” in BEROSE – International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
This ambitious biographical essay restores the complexity and depth of Maurice Leenhardt’s (1878-1954) missionary and ethnological endeavors in New Caledonia over more than twenty years. André Mary also evokes Leenhardt’s “second” career after he returned to France, where he was soon recognized as a first-class ethnologist, in dialogue with luminaries such as Paul Rivet, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Mauss. His academic career did not prevent Leenhardt from remaining deeply committed to the Protestant world at the heart of a working-class neighborhood in Paris. He also reflected on the paradoxes of the missionary condition, and dedicated himself to a comparative history of missions abroad. Far from the postmodern and postcolonial critique, Mary analyses Leenhardt’s masterpiece Do Kamo (1947) by remaining as truthful as possible to the missionary’s ethnolinguistic inquiry, while evoking his conversations with Indigenous interlocutors on Kanak notions of person and body, mythical consciousness, and worldview.
HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. This paper, in English, concerns the German ethnographer Adolf Jensen, disciple of Leo Frobenius, who did fieldwork in southern Ethiopia in the 1930s and 1950s.
Thubauville, Sophia, 2020. “Of Phallic Stele, Heroes and Ancient Cultures. Adolf Ellegard Jensen’s Research in Southern Ethiopia,” in BEROSE – International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Adolf Ellegard Jensen (1899-1965), a major disciple of the legendary Leo Frobenius, was himself one of the most influential German anthropologists of his time. His intellectual activity mainly concerned the fields of religion, myth, and ritual. A new article by Sophia Thubauville is dedicated to Jensen’s pioneering expeditions to southern Ethiopia in the 1930s and 1950s. Jensen’s research took place before Protestant missions converted the local population in large numbers and before the socialist revolution led to radical cultural and social change among the peoples of Ethiopia. As there exist no other descriptions of this region from that time, his accounts are a cultural archive for anthropologists, historians, and the people of southern Ethiopia. In addition to his extensive publications, Jensen also succeeded in interesting numerous young researchers in the region; their students and successors collaborate with a new generation of German anthropologists pursuing anthropological research in present-day southern Ethiopia.
Grégoire Mallard. Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea. xi + 293pp., notes, bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Is there a more celebrated and contested text in the history of anthropology than Marcel Mauss’s The Gift?[1] Tucked away in the pages of Émile Durkheim’s old Année Sociologique upon its initial publication in 1925, this careful, erudite, even gnomic essay by the doyen of French anthropology contained a thicket of five hundred footnotes so dense they often relegated the main text to a few sentences adorning the top of its hundred-and-fifty-odd pages. Its interest in forms of exchange in “sociétés dites primitives” was predated by the works of Richard Thurnwald and Bronislaw Malinowski, yet unlike these pioneers his writings were not informed by direct ethnographic study.[2] The Gift (hereafter TG, subtitle: “The Form and Sense of Exchange in Archaic Societies”) was instead, in our contemporary academic parlance, something more like a review essay of armchair anthropology.
Continue readingHAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. This paper, in English, is about a forgotten figure in Afro-Brazilian studies, Rüdiger Bilden.
Pallares–Burke, Maria Lúcia G., 2020. “An Intellectual Portrait of Rüdiger Bilden, Forgotten Forerunner of Gilberto Freyre,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
In her touching portrait of a forgotten figure in Afro-Brazilian studies, Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke brings to life German anthropologist Rüdiger Bilden (1893-1980), disciple of Franz Boas and colleague of Melville Herskovits at Columbia University. As early as 1929, Bilden coined the expression which identified Brazil as a “laboratory of civilizations,” a concept that has been highly controversial ever since. Bilden’s analyses of the effects of slavery on Brazilian society and culture are little known, however, in comparison to the thesis of his lifelong friend, the famous Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre. Bilden did not finish his Ph.D. at Columbia in the 1920s, published little and was unable to build a career. At a broader level, Bilden’s most important contribution concerned the question of race relations in the United States, a cause to which he gave increasing attention as the prospect of finishing his ambitious volumes on Brazilian slavery was diminishing.
HAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. This paper, in French, concerns Haitian author Jacques Roumain, French Guyanese poet and politician Léon-Gontran Damas, and Haitian anthropology intellectual networks in the 1930s-1940s.
Palisse, Marianne, 2020. “Jacques Roumain, Léon-Gontran Damas, et les filiations de l’anthropologie haïtienne des années 1930-1940 : vers la constitution d’espaces intellectuels transcoloniaux ?,” in BEROSE – International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
The article builds on the crossing of paths of the Haitian Jacques Roumain and the French Guyanese Léon-Gontran Damas, and tries to shed light on the intellectual networks that inspired the practice of anthropology in the French-speaking Black Americas in the 1930s-1940s. The Institut d’Ethnologie de Paris, where Roumain and Damas studied, had a big influence on their own ideas of anthropology. But Damas and Roumain were also active members of Black intellectual networks on both sides of the Atlantic. These networks were connected with antifascist and antiracist groups of intellectuals but also with surrealism groups. Within these linkages, Haiti played a special role. Damas and Roumain saw anthropology as a tool for their project of improving the status of Black cultures and popular cultures. From their viewpoints as intellectuals from colonized countries and their refusal of assimilation, they took part in an in-depth reinterpretation of the discipline.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, the History of Science Society (HSS) and the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) will not hold their planned in-person joint meeting this October, but will hold an online-only Virtual Forum, with a full schedule of talks, roundtables, social activities, flash talks, book presentations, and more. It will take place from October 8 through October 11, 2020.
The HAR News editors would like to highlight several events on the program related to the history of anthropology. Please note that the event times given are in Eastern Standard Time (U.S.) Registration for the Virtual Forum is required; a discounted registration rate is available for graduate students and unemployed and precariously employed scholars, and grant funding is available to fully reimburse graduate student registration fees. Please note that events are subject to change and it is best to check the program regularly for the events you are interested in.
Continue readingHistory of the Human Sciences– an international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognize a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well as work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply.
Continue readingHAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. This paper, in French, examines Arnold Van Gennep’s fieldwork in Algeria in 1911 and 1912, his only ethnographic work outside of Europe.
Pouillon, François, 2020. “Arnold Van Gennep en Algérie. Le détour exotique d’un ethnologue de l’Europe,” in BEROSE – International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Arnold van Gennep is best known today for his rites of passage theory, his contributions to the international debate on totemism, and his folklore studies. In this paper, François Pouillon reveals a less known facet: Van Gennep’s field experience in a colonial context, namely in Algeria, from 1911-1912. He invites the reader to browse through Van Gennep’s articles, archives, and his fascinating monograph En Algérie (In Algeria, 1914). Van Gennep developed a demanding research practice and a kind of reflexivity that was quite innovative at the time. Pouillon convincingly demonstrates that this Algerian experience was indeed a turning point in Van Gennep’s career, as it encouraged him to pursue his ethnography in rural France for reasons related to the predicaments of research in Muslim countries under European rule. Pouillon’s reading of the fascinating key text Les demi-savants (The Semi-Scholars, 1911), written in the same period, sheds further light on Van Gennep’s personality and on his singular place in the history of anthropology.
The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research will host a webinar on September 23rd at 2:00 PM PST/5:00 PM EST on “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn? Race, Racism, and Its Reckoning in American Anthropology,” sponsored by the UCLA Department of Anthropology Race, Racism, Policing and State Violence Committee, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
To register for this event click here.
Moderators: Kamari M. Clarke & Deborah Thomas
Introduction by Danilyn Rutherford, President, Wenner-Gren Foundation
Lucia Cantero, Assistant Professor of International Studies, University of San Francisco
Ryan Jobson, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago
Chris Loperena, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center
Jonathan Rosa, Associate Professor of Education, Stanford University
Savannah Shange, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz
Zoe Todd, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Carleton University
Jennifer Cool, Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Anthropology at the University of Southern California, is both a social anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that she has spent the past few years experimenting with staged performances and film in an attempt to draw out what she has described as “the performative entanglements of media.”[1]
Continue readingThis extended review is a collaboration between the Reviews and Field Notes sections of HAR.
Regna Darnell, Michelle Hamilton, Robert L. A. Hancock, and Joshua Smith (editors). The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism. 408 pp., 18 illus., index. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.
William Y. Adams. The Boasians: Founding Fathers and Mothers of American Anthropology. 356 pp., 10 illus., bibl. Lanham, MD: Hamilton, 2016.
Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner (editors). Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas. 416 pp., 28 illus., index. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Anthropologists and historians of anthropology readily acknowledge the role played by European empires in the making of the discipline. Although practitioners occasionally challenged existing power structures, they more frequently worked to inform and justify the dispossession, marginalization, murder, and enslavement of Indigenous and colonized peoples. These processes culminated in the Social Darwinist evolutionism of the Victorian period, which lent prevailing racial hierarchies a patina of scientific authority. This began to shift in the early twentieth century, when, amid a welter of social and cultural upheavals in Western society, anthropology’s imperial foundations appeared ripe for reconsideration. In America, the foremost proponent of these changes was the Jewish German-American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942). Traditional disciplinary histories point especially to Boas’s pivotal rejection of evolutionary anthropological approaches in favor of viewing cultures as integrated wholes, apprehensible solely within the contexts in which they are produced and maintained. These protocols were disseminated broadly, with Boas’s students founding university anthropology departments throughout the United States. On these grounds, Boas is frequently celebrated as “a major turning point from the evolution and racism of the nineteenth century to the historical particularism and cultural relativism of the twentieth century.”[1]
Continue readingThe editorial collective at the History of Anthropology Review (HAR) is pleased to announce the launch of a new reading group, hosted in collaboration with the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM). The “History of Anthropology Working Group” will allow anyone interested in the history of anthropology to take part in monthly discussions about topics of vital interest to the field. We warmly invite all HAR readers to join us for these online conversations. This year, spurred by Black Lives Matter protests, the reading group’s focus will be anthropology’s relationships to (and studies of) racism, racial science, white supremacy, anti-racism, and policing.
Continue reading“The Anthropology and Geography: Dialogues Past, Present and Future” conference is jointly organized by the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Geographical Society, the British Academy, the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, and the BM’s Department for Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The conference was originally planned as a face to face conference to be held in June 2020, but it will now be an online conference to be held 14-18 September 2020.
Continue readingSince 1973, the History of Anthropology Review (formerly the History of Anthropology Newsletter) has been a venue for publication and conversation on the many histories of the discipline of anthropology. We became an open access web publication in 2016. Please subscribe to our emails below to receive updates as we publish new essays, reviews, and bibliographies.
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