Alfred L. Kroeber, Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, Prehistory (New York: Harcout, Brace and Company, 1948).
I was sixteen, browsing the shelves in the public library downtown in Mount Vernon, New York—a suburb just north of the Bronx—when I pulled out a thick tome, Anthropology, by A. L. Kroeber. Taking it home, I read it through, all 856 pages. ANTHROPOLOGY! Everything in the world, everything could be studied through Anthropology! Humans are ubiquitous.
Continue readingEvon Z. Vogt, Fieldwork among the Maya: The Harvard Chiapas Project (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).
There is a moment in Evon Vogt’s Fieldwork Among the Maya: Reflections on the Harvard Chiapas Project when Paul Lazersfeld—the sociologist famous for his methodological rigor—passes a stack of books sitting on Vogt’s desk on the Chukchee of northeastern Siberia and remarks: “My God, you anthropologists know a lot. You don’t know how you found it all out, but you certainly know a lot” (47). How Vogt knows what he knows—and more generally, the methods through which anthropologists come to know other cultures—is the motivating question in this “autobiography of his fieldwork.”[1] Fieldwork Among the Maya traces the impact of Vogt’s participation in multiple interdisciplinary, collaborative ethnographic projects— including W. Lloyd Warner’s study of social stratification in the Midwest and Clyde Kluckhohn’s investigation of values in five cultures in Ramah, New Mexico—on the development and operation of the Harvard Chiapas Project.[2] Written fifteen years after the “official” conclusion of the project, Vogt’s memoir traverses, in a personal and intimate fashion, over forty years of tumultuous transformation in anthropology.
Continue readingHAR is pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. This article by João Leal (Centre for Research in Anthropology, NOVA University, Lisbon) presents the complex anthropological legacy of Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, who played a key role in the emergence of the anthropology of Afro-Brazilian religions (and especially the Candomblé studies) at the turn of the twentieth century.
Leal, João, 2020. “Nina Rodrigues e as religiões afro‑brasileiras”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906) is a key figure – albeit a controversial one – in the history of Brazilian anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century. He was a major representative of the racialist theories that prevailed in Brazil at that time, but was also a pioneer in the study of Afro-Brazilian religions, to which he devoted his best-known work, The Fetishist Animism of Bahian Blacks (1896-97). Resulting from his own ethnographic fieldwork, this paradoxical work combines evolutionary and racialist ideas with a thorough first-hand description of candomblé. It launched several themes – such as syncretism – that were to inspire later representatives of this subdisciplinary field, namely from the 1930s and 1940s, when Arthur Ramos (1903-1949) revitalized Afro-Brazilian studies.
On June 11, 2020 at 1pm EDT/11am PDT the American Anthropology Association is hosting a webinar titled: “Anthropology of Policing: The Persistence of Racialized Police Brutality and Community Responses – What Can Anthropologists Contribute?”
Featuring a variety of panelists, including Ramona Perez, Kalfani Ture, Donna Auston, Shanti Parikh, and Avram Bornstein, discussions will be guided by two principle questions: (1) What should an Anthropology of policing look like and (2) What practical and actionable steps should anthropologists, as cultural experts of the lived experiences of impacted communities, take to transform American policing.
This webinar is FREE and open to the public. Instructions for how to access this event can be found here. The full event abstract is provided below.
Continue readingOn June 9, 2020 the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship & Globalisation and the Science and Society Network is hosting an online workshop titled “Seeing Indigenous Land Struggles in COVID-19.”
Drawing on examples from the Philippines and Malaysia, this event will explore how indigenous struggles for land and livelihood are central to understanding the emergence of a zoonotic pathogen like SARS-CoV-2.
The seminar will be available to stream on YouTube live on June 9, 2020 from 10am – 11:30am (Australian Eastern Standard Time, GMT+10). Registration information can be found here.
More information about this event can be found below.
Continue readingThe Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) seeks to appoint an Honorary Reviews Editor to start shadowing the current Reviews Editor (Dr Dolores Martinez) from September 2020, and taking over from April 2021.
He or she will work closely with the Editors of the JRAI (The incoming editorial team includes Dr Tom Yarrow, Dr Hannah Knox, Dr Adam Reed, and Dr. Chika Watanabe, who will take over the editorship from September 2020).
The deadline to apply fo this position is July 30, 2020. More information about this opportunity can be found below.
Continue readingHAR is happy to continue to draw readers’ attention to a remarkable and growing online source for History of Anthropology. BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology reflects the diversity of anthropological traditions and currents, whether hegemonic or pushed to the margins. BEROSE welcomes and fosters the pluralization of the history of anthropology and aims at recovering the dialogues or tensions between classical protagonists and forgotten, sometimes excluded and sometimes cursed figures.
Today, we are pleased to announce the latest release from BEROSE – an essay by Stafania Capone (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris) and Fernanda Peixoto (University of São Paulo) on the history of anthropology in Brazil. The article is available in both Portuguese and English.
Continue readingThis 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 readingThe Royal Anthropological Institute is currently accepting submissions for an online and physical exhibition on “Illustrating Anthropology,” which explores the potential of illustration for anthropological research and dissemination.
If you’re looking for a creative way to engage with your research data during lockdown, or have sketches that express your ethnographic findings or experience, feel free to send them their way!
The deadline for submissions is May 22, 2019. More information about the exhibition, as well as detailed submission instructions can be found below.
Continue readingWe are pleased to share a new page of HAR with our readers: Doing the History of Anthropology Online: Resources for COVID-19 and Beyond. This page follows up on an initiative announced in our Spring 2020 Update to gather HoA-relevant virtual resources for researchers who have lost access to physical collections during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to research collections, you will find resources to support teaching, scholarly community, and public engagement in the history of anthropology online.
We would like to draw special attention to the second section, HoA Scholarly Literature, since some of these resources are set to expire as soon as 31 May. The University of Nebraska Press in particular has extensive publications in the history of anthropology that it is making freely available through the end of the month (find more information under “Project MUSE”).
This list will be updated periodically and we welcome suggestions from our readers. Please email us with more resources or other comments at news@histanthro.org.
HAR is happy to draw readers’ attention to a remarkable and growing online source for History of Anthropology. BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology reflects the diversity of anthropological traditions and currents, whether hegemonic or pushed to the margins. BEROSE welcomes and fosters the pluralization of the history of anthropology and aims at recovering the dialogues or tensions between classical protagonists and forgotten, sometimes excluded and sometimes cursed figures. This pluralization makes it possible to highlight the richness of World Anthropologies. The same challenge is addressed to Western or Northern anthropologies as well: these are sometimes reduced to a monolithic vision of the most famous theoretical currents and major actors, thus masking the wealth of national anthropological traditions and the vitality of specializations in cultural, geographical or thematic areas.
Continue readingWendy Wickwire. At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging. 400pp., 5 maps, 26 b/w illus., notes, index. Vancouver and Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2019. $34.95 (paperback, pdf, epub), $95 (hardcover)
The purpose of this book is to redress an injustice committed against someone who could have had a central place in the history of anthropology. According to Wendy Wickwire, this might have been the case of James Teit (1864-1922) if he had not been pushed to the margins of the discipline as an amateurish ethnographer in the service of Franz Boas. In comparison with the legendary George Hunt, who has been the subject of several studies (and, recently, a series of events at the AAA/CASCA in Vancouver, 2019), James Teit is practically “unknown” (12). In her monograph on him—the outcome of several decades of archival research and ethnographic encounters with the concerned communities—Wendy Wickwire makes a challenging comparison with Boas himself, hoping that her reassessment of Teit as a visionary anthropologist in his own right will not be like other episodic rediscoveries of forgotten figures who, after a certain time, fall back into obscurity. According to her, Boas played his part in obscuring Teit’s stature (particularly after his death in 1922), and subsequent narratives kept reproducing, if at all, the portrait of an untrained collector subordinated to the academic expert. In fact, she argues that the professionalization of anthropology was one of the causes in this process: “For a new scientific discipline housed in the university, a high school diploma did not measure up” (273). The time has come, she writes, to question “the authority of mainstream history” (22), according to which Teit provided Boas with the field data that allowed the latter to produce a series of eleven monographs on the Nlaka’pamux and other Plateau groups, starting with The Thompson Indians of British Columbia (1900), the fourth in the twenty-seven-part series of Jesup North Pacific Expedition monographs.[1] Wickwire’s perusal of their correspondence allows her to affirm that this is “wrong” (15) and that Teit’s authorial status was paramount.
Continue readingTo HAR readers:
Because the work of the History of Anthropology Review is largely conducted online, during these COVID days we continue much as we have. But most members of our editorial board are early career scholars, including graduate students and post-docs, and we are acutely aware of the anxieties and uncertainties the current situation presents for precarious workers of all kinds, including in the academy. We wish everyone safe passage through these times, and stand in solidarity with academic workers who are demanding protections and extensions to cope with these conditions.
As research travel and archival visits are extremely restricted, HAR would like to provide lists and links for electronic resources for the history of anthropology. Our “kin” page lists various journals, but we are now planning to publish a list of archives and collections for the history of anthropology available online. Do you know of any from your research, or from your place of employment? Please send suggestions and links to news@histanthro.org, and we will get these up as soon as we can!
We do have some good news. Last fall we invited applications to join our editorial collective, and we are delighted to add to our masthead the following new associate editors, who will keep HAR growing: Tracie Canada (University of Virginia); Abigail Nieves Delgado (Ruhr University Bochum); Olga Glinksii (University of New Mexico); Sophie Hopmeier (St. Andrews); Patricia Marcos (UC San Diego); Sarah Pickman (Yale); Shu Wan (University of Iowa); and Paul Wolff Mitchell, Brigid Prial, and Koyna Tomar (University of Pennsylvania). We’re thrilled to welcome them to the team.
Further, we would like to announce the addition of four new members to our Advisory Board: William Carruthers (University of East Anglia), Christine Laurière (CNRS, codirector of Bérose), Joanna Radin (Yale), and Han Vermeulen (Max Planck Institut, Halle, co-convener of HOAN). We’re honored to have the advice and support of these distinguished scholars.
As always, we welcome readers’ suggestions and submissions to any of our departments—short essays for Field Notes, book Reviews (of those currently listed or others), new publications for Bibliography, any News of interest to the discipline, and archival curiosities for Clio’s Fancy.
We are grateful to have such a strong and wide community of readers and contributors. As human life on this planet undergoes significant changes yet again, anthropology and its histories remain vital.
–The editors
Had Selected Writings by Sigmund Freud been published by the Pelican press in 1948, it is likely Ashley Montagu—the prolific British-American anthropologist, and the work’s main compiler—would today have been recognized as a noteworthy figure in Freud’s postwar US reception. Yet after several months reading Freud’s corpus, deciding which texts and passages to include, writing an introduction, and compiling a bibliography, Montagu was forced to shelve the project, thwarted by the Freud family’s famous reluctance to allow such maverick publications. His attempts, a decade later, to initiate a sibling study under a new title, Freud Re-Examined, comprised of reprints of scholarly essays mostly by contemporary psychologists, also went nowhere, frustrated by a publisher’s aversion to the genre. By the 1980s, if Montagu discussed these works at all, he presumed them “irretrievably lost.”
Continue readingIn response to COVID-19, which has resulted in the closure of many universities and university libraries, Berghahn Books is providing researchers with free access to their entire journal archive up until June 30 2020.
Of special interest to historians of anthropology are:
Berghahn Books is an independent scholarly publisher in the humanities and social sciences. A comprehensive list of their journals can be found here.
Every once in a while, an important figure makes an appearance, makes a difference, and then disappears from the public record. James Teit (1864-1922) was such a figure.
Join Dr. Wendy Wickwire in conversation with Brian Carpenter, Curator of Native American Materials at the American Philosophical Society, as they discuss Teit’s life and work and the continued impact of the records he left behind.
Continue readingBuilding on the collaborative, community-engaged work of the American Philosophical Society’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR), the APS Library & Museum launched The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative (NASI) in 2016 to foster the development of the next generation of Indigenous and allied students and scholars.
Continue readingGrant Arndt, Iowa State, is seeking a few more participants for a panel on the relationship between research into the history of anthropology and the modes of historical self-consciousness evident in contemporary anthropological work.
Continue readingRobert Launay. Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder. 272 pp., notes, bibl., index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. $32.50 (paper), $97.50 (cloth), $10-32.50 (e-book)
Since its inception, Edward Said’s Orientalism has enjoyed tremendous and well-deserved influence across the humanities and social sciences.[1] While this text has never been without its critics,[2] Said’s underlying assertion that representations of the “other” have been intimately embedded in imperial domination has contributed to a disciplinary commonplace that assumes European imaginings of non-Europeans are inevitably and eternally domineering. It is this overextension (and perhaps simplification) of Said’s thesis that Robert Launay critically addresses in Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder.
Continue readingThe History of Anthropology Interest Group at the American Anthropological Association encourages the organization of panels and events related to history of anthropology for this year’s annual meeting in St. Louis, MO (November 18-22). Submissions must be started by April 3rd and are due by April 8th. Visit the AAA’s website for information on how to submit proposals.
The HOA Interest Group would also appreciate information on HOA related panels and events being planned for the meeting. Messages may be sent directly to the listserv address: history-of-anthropology@virginia.edu.
2018 marked the bicentennial of the birth of Lewis Henry Morgan (d. 1881), a Rochester, New York attorney and founding figure in American anthropology and archeology. Morgan established his reputation with League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (Morgan 1851), a comprehensive study of sociopolitical organization and material culture that grew out of his youthful fascination with Native American traditions. The book was made possible by the assistance of Ely S. Parker (Hasanoanda), who authored some sections, and his sister Caroline G. Parker (Gahano), members of a prominent Tonawanda Seneca family who facilitated Morgan’s fieldwork. Although manifestly ethnocentric, League of the Iroquois is one of the earliest recognizably anthropological accounts of culture as a distinctive and coherent system of thought and action. Morgan’s dedication of the book to Ely Parker acknowledges the fundamental if uneasy collaboration between anthropologists and their interlocutors that underlies all ethnographic research.[1]
Continue readingThis 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 readingEditor’s Note: Alice B. Kehoe works in both archaeology and American First Nations histories, seeing the continuum between American archaeology and the histories of the nations whose sites are studied. She explains here how her training in Boasian anthropology prepared her to write A Passion for the True and Just: Felix and Lucy Kramer Cohen and the Indian New Deal.
In the late 1970s, I began to read key works in history/philosophy of science, attempting to figure out Lewis Binford’s naïve notion of scientific method that was somehow attracting disciples in American archaeology.[i] Not until, decades later, when I read Mark Solovey’s account of Cold War strategy promoting the physical sciences,[ii] and George Reisch’s description of McCarthyism curtailing humanistic dimensions of philosophy of science,[iii] could I understand how Binford’s cold “objective” version of archaeology fit the tenor of the time, winning National Science Foundation funds and graduate students. Binford’s “New Archaeology” was also deeply colonialist, abjuring any historical approach to “prehistoric” America (endnote 5). Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin’s Natural Order woke me up.[iv] Rationality is, as Peter Novick would have said, a “noble dream.”[v] Cultural context is key.
Continue readingDavid A. Varel. The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought. 304pp., 16 halftones, notes, index. University of Chicago Press, 2018. $45 (cloth)
David Varel’s biography of Allison Davis, The Lost Black Scholar, is aptly named. Davis is rarely cited by anthropologists today, but he has little in common with the “excluded ancestors and invisible traditions” after whom a volume of the History of Anthropology series was named.[1] On the contrary, Davis was hardly invisible. Rather, he was a remarkably well-known, highly-respected figure who was important intellectually and institutionally in anthropology, someone whose story and influence has not been repressed or erased but, as Varel puts it, “lost.” In this trim and athletic volume, Varel successfully shows us the importance of Davis’s work and life, revealing a remarkable scholar who should be remembered for his incredible personal story, his intellectual contributions to the study of structural injustice, and his role as a model of a politically committed but non-activist scholar.
Continue readingThe History of Anthropology Review (HAR) is pleased to announce the recent publication of Ricardo A. Fagoaga‘s book chapter: “Primeras etnografías en México: su método, su olvido y la construcción de una idea la antropología mexicana.”
In this chapter, Fagoaga explores the history of the Huasteca expedition, an ethnographic fieldwork project carried out by María Atienza, Isabel Gamboa and Luz Islas during the early twentieth century. A short description of the chapter, along with its citation information, can be found below:
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. We welcome submissions.
We sponsor a history of anthropology working group that meets monthly, hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
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