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