The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association will be held in-person in New Orleans, LA from November 19-23, 2025.
The HAR News editors are pleased to share a selection of panels that may be of interest to our readers. Other panels and additional details can be found in the preliminary program.
Continue readingThe annual meeting of the History of Science Society will be held in-person in New Orleans, LA from November 13-16, 2025.
The HAR News editors are pleased to share a selection of panels that may be of interest to our readers. Other panels and additional details can be found in the conference program.
Continue readingAt the Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London. Tuesday, November 11, 6:00-7:30 p.m.
Join us for a conversation with Noga Arikha about her new biography of Franz Boas: In Praise of Open Minds. This event aims to introduce Boas’s ideas, outline their genesis in Germany, their impact in the US and beyond – and their continuing relevance today. This accessible intellectual biography traces Boas’s life and scientific passions, from his roots in Germany and his move to the United States in 1884, partly in response to growing antisemitism in Germany, to his work with First Nations communities and his influential role as a teacher, mentor, and engaged activist who inspired an entire generation. The book pays particular attention to Boas’s ethnographic and museum work, as well as his connections with Aby Warburg, founder of the Warburg Institute. Noga Arikha will discuss her book with John Tresch, professor of history of art, science, and folk practice and HAR co-editor.
Continue readingThis workshop, timed to follow the Economic History Society conference, aims to bring together scholars who have engaged with the Murdock Atlas in their research, and who are interested in an open, cross-disciplinary, and forward-looking conversation on the merits, limitations, and pitfalls of using the Atlas in social science research.
Continue readingRichard Handler (2012, 179) once called Erving Goffman “the most anthropological of all the great sociologists.” This trenchant remark draws attention to Goffman’s distinctive relationship with anthropology and, more broadly, to the close—yet often overlooked—ties between the sociology and anthropology programs at the University of Chicago, where Goffman was trained.
Continue reading
Sergei Kan
A Maverick Boasian: The Life and Work of Alexander A. Goldenweiser
University of Nebraska Press, 2023
268 pages, 16 photographs, notes, references, index.
A Maverick Boasian is a biography of a distinctive and exasperating figure in early American cultural anthropology. Alexander Goldenweiser (1880–1940) was a lesser-known member of the first cohort of Franz Boas’s graduate students at Columbia University. A Russian émigré who did fieldwork among eastern Iroquois, he was the most theoretically oriented of his eminent peer group. He was affectionately referred to as Shoora or, alternatively, as Goldie, by kith and kin—and by his biographer Sergei Kan, who claims that Goldenweiser was Papa Franz’s favorite student, but also his most disappointing one.
Continue readingHAR’s Bibliography Editors are pleased to post our latest additions to the bibliography of works on the history of anthropology. In our effort to highlight recently published works, please note that we have included Prakash Shah’s 2025 article on Durkheim’s focus on religion in India and Vincent L. Femia’s article, also from 2025, on the relatively unknown late 19th century American anthropologist Anita Newcomb McGee. Both authors are new to HAR‘s bibliography.
Continue readingHAR is pleased to announce two complementary articles (in English) on recent and crucial chapters in the history of Brazilian Anthropology in the (newly renamed) Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie.
De Souza Lima, Antonio Carlos, & Caio Gonçalves Dias, 2025. “Waking the Zombies: Anthropology in Ultra /Neoliberal Brazil,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie.
Tambascia, Christiano Key, Fernanda Arêas Peixoto, & Gustavo Rossi, 2025. “What’s the Story? Contemporary Brazilian Experimentations and Alternative Histories of Anthropology,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie.
What does anthropology have to say in neoliberal contexts, in postcolonial states marked by extractivism and the wholesale violation of rights? What can be done to awaken realistic perceptions in a world irrigated by fake news and anti-scientism? With a focus on the Brazilian case, these articles explore the connections between ultra/neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and the challenges faced by anthropology in defending its epistemological, theoretical, and ethical frameworks.
Continue readingHAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from Bérose: an article (in English) on a lesser-known facet of Van Gennep’s anthropology. This is one of a series of 11 articles dedicated to Van Gennep in the (newly renamed) Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie.
Laurière, Christine, 2025. “The Struggle for Ethnography: Van Gennep and Marcel Mauss as Enemy Brothers,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie.
French anthropologist, folklorist and ethnographer, Arnold Van Gennep (1873–1957) is a key figure in the history of the discipline. His international fame is mainly linked to the rereading of his famous work Les Rites de passage (1909) from the 1960s onwards by anthropologists such as Max Gluckman, Victor Turner and Rodney Needham. Since the 1970s, he has also been recognized in France as the founding father of French ethnography at home—among other works, his monumental Manuel de folklore français contemporain appeared in several volumes from 1937 onwards. This double portrait, however, is incomplete. Van Gennep also played a key role in the rise of the legitimacy of French anthropology in the 1900s–1920s but in an unusual way, as he was a troublemaker and somewhat of a trickster. This biographical essay offers a deliberately alternative reading of Van Gennep’s bumpy scientific path. It shows that he had a highly original notion of ethnography as an independent science, refusing to subordinate it to either sociology or ethnology, and refusing the great divide between “us” and “them.” While following his unfruitful attempts to build closer relations with Durkheimian sociologists, the article traces the transformations of Van Gennep’s views on disciplinary frontiers in the first quarter of 20th century. These attempts failed partly for theoretical and methodological reasons, but also for reasons of political philosophy, namely about the place of the individual in society according to Van Gennep’s anarchist sensibilities. His intellectual and institutional rivalry with Marcel Mauss—which has not been addressed properly so far—is highlighted as one of the reasons why Van Gennep abandoned “exotic” anthropology altogether and for good, devoting himself to European and French folklore from the 1920s onwards. The affirmation of ethnography as a scientific discipline was at stake, generating fierce power struggles over definitions and methods to eventually determine who would legitimately bring it to the baptismal font of French academia. Arnold Van Gennep’s antagonistic views provide an excellent vantage point from which to highlight this decisive moment.
HAR is happy to share information about an exciting upcoming international workshop from our friends at HOAN-EASA.
Transnational Entanglements of Racial Anthropology: History and Legacy, will take place in Berlin and online between September 11 and 13, 2025 (all times CET), bringing international scholars worldwide.
The workshop has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, DFG (German Research Council), and HOAN, and will be livestreamed, enabling our online HOAN viewers to listen to the various presentations to ask questions through the chat.
Overview: Racial anthropology, emerging in (post-)colonial contexts, first developed in Europe and North America before spreading globally. Responding to the renewed calls for overcoming the legacies of colonialism, imperialism and racism in anthropology, the workshop examines the transnational afterlives of scientific racism in all fields of anthropology. This workshop will explore the ways in which racial anthropology took shape—and spreaded—through global scientific networks and how we should confront the enduring legacies of racism in science. Departing from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin (KWI-A), this workshop will discuss these questions and trace the transnational entanglements of racial knowledge in science and politics since the twentieth century.
See program and more information below OR in the attached pdfs:
Participation:
Thursday: https://nomadit-co-uk.zoom.us/j/89804339971?pwd=sXLEU1B5XWvRu3Q1FurWPRhpOARWz7.1
Friday: https://nomadit-co-uk.zoom.us/j/85683553165?pwd=bQhYgSrXVJkGEHyRjQZ2nmGVCR0X7L.1
Saturday: https://nomadit-co-uk.zoom.us/j/82901405394?pwd=TZlPi3aSQbApNYZQAqUca128t5qSCF.1
We are looking forward to seeing you!
HOAN Convenors
Program:
Thursday, Sept. 11
14:15–15:00 Introduction: Dr. Manuela Bauche (FU Berlin), Prof. Dr. Hande Birkalan-Gedik (GU Frankfurt) & Dr. Thiago Pinto Barbosa (U Leipzig)
15:00–16:30 Paper Session 1:
· Weicheng Huang (FU Berlin) – From “Racial Crossing” to “Migration and Isolation of Culture”: Tao Yunkui (1904–1944) and the Reassembling of German Anthropology on China’s Ethnic Frontier
· Dr. Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi (U Michigan) – tba
Discussion: Dr. Udo Mischek & Dr. Lisa Gottschall
17:30–19:00 Keynote Lecture (PUBLIC EVENT, FU Berlin, Ihnestraße 21, Room A):
· Prof. Dr. Hans-Walter Schmuhl (U Bielefeld), author of The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945: Crossing Boundaries (2008)
Friday, Sept. 12
9:00–10:30 Paper Session 2:
· Prof. Dr. Katharina Schramm (U Bayreuth) – The Politics of Lambs’ Hair: Circulating Ideas about Race and Phenotype in Colonial Karakul Breeding
· Lukas Alex (U Bayreuth) – Epistemic One-Way-Street: Eugenic Knowledge and Population Genetics in the Legacy of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics
Discussion: Prof. Dr. Carola Sachse & Lisette Jong
13:30–15:00 Paper Session 3:
· Lisette Jong (U Amsterdam) – Old Bones in New Databases: Historical Insights into Race, Statistics, and Ancestry Estimation in Anthropology
· Prof. Dr. Carola Sachse (U Vienna) – Uyghurs in the Spotlight of Evolutionary and Forensic Genetics: The End of a Long-standing German-Chinese Scientific Collaboration
Discussion: Prof. Dr. Katharina Schramm & Lukas Alex
15:30–17:00 Paper session 4:
· Dr. Lisa Gottschall (ÖAK-IKW, Vienna) – Anthropological Research on “Colonial Soldiers” in WWII POW Camps: A Preliminary Report
· Prof. Dr. Marius Turda (Oxford Brookes U) – Racial Science in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust: The Case of Dr Gh. Stroescu
Discussion: Prof. Dr. Amos Morris-Reich & Dr. Katja Geisenhainer
18:30–20:00 Book reading and discussion (PUBLIC EVENT, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum)
· An Indian student in a German school of racial anthropology and eugenics: Presentation of the book Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve (2024), with authors Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, discussed by Lisette Jong.
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Saturday, Sept. 13
9:30–11:30 Paper Session 5:
· Prof. Dr. Amos Morris-Reich (Tel Aviv U) – Race and Antisemitism: a Historical and Philosophical Re-evaluation
· Dr. Katja Geisenhainer (Frobenius Inst.) – The Relationship between early German-language Ethnology and Physical Anthropology
· Prof. Dr. Hande Birkalan-Gedik (GU Frankfurt) – From Dahlem to Ankara: Afterlives of Racial Science, Knowledge Transfer, and the Turkish Anthropology
Discussion: Prof. Dr. Marius Turda, Dr. Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi & Dr. Thiago Pinto Barbosa
12:00–13:00 Wrapping Up
We are pleased to announce continuation of the working group on the History of the Language Sciences, hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Meetings will take place via Zoom on the second Tuesday of each month at 9:00 Eastern in the upcoming academic year. This year, presentations and discussions will focus on archives in the history and historiography of the language sciences (linguistic anthropology notably included). The co-conveners welcome proposals for presentations as well as general group participation.
Archives scaffold research in both in history and the sciences. Far from passive repositories, they assert order and give shape to the world. In the midst of what feels like daily media revolutions, archives have attracted widespread interest from historians of science in recent years. “The archive” has been newly re-conceptualized as a cross-disciplinary focus of reflection and analysis. At the same time, political impulses to decolonize the archive, alongside the ambitions and anxieties made possible by new media, have motivated highly specific interventions in the discipline of linguistics. From the corpora of computational linguistics to the digitization of resources documenting endangered languages, linguists have reckoned explicitly and enthusiastically with the affordances of their collections.
In the 2025-26 academic year, our working group will explore the relationship between these two traditions of thinking with and about archives. What can a cross-disciplinary perspective bring to bear on the uniqueness of archival practices in linguistics? Reciprocally, how might the particularities of linguistics inform the broader historiographic conversation around archives in the history of science? Do examples of linguistic corpora, for example, resist the notion that archives are inherently historical or not? How might conversations about governance in other fields relate to practices in linguistics? We look forward to exploring such questions with those who are interested from any disciplinary background.
Again, the co-conveners welcome proposals for presentations in the next season of our working group. Please get in contact with Judy Kaplan (jrk@chstm.org), Raúl Aranovich (raranovich@ucdavis.edu) or James McElvenny (james.mcelvenny@mailbox.org) for more information or to pitch a session on this theme. Thanks!
Participant Observation (Conference Report), History of Anthropology Review
Yale University, March 31-April 1, 2025
In the face of palpable climate change, contemporary anthropologists increasingly explore how social forms, subsistence technologies, and administrative logics respond to—and may also drive— ecological transformations. Contemporary ethnographers detail sites of nonhuman agency, Indigenous knowledge, extractive destruction, and climate-related migration.
The terms and emphases have changed, but such questions are far from new. Anthropology has studied human-environment relations since its inception. Some of its neglected or rejected approaches—such as early studies of diffusion, adaptation, and cultural ecology—are marred by association with colonialism and racial determinism. Yet they may also hold overlooked insights relevant to today’s crises. The conference, “Environmental Anthropologies: Pasts, Presents, Futures,” held at Yale March 31st and April 1st 2025, invited a reassessment of those and other past frameworks. What can they offer current thinking, and how do we confront toxic aspects of their legacies?
Continue readingHAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English) on Alfred Lyall’s colonial ethnography and anthropology in India.
Fuller, Chris, 2025. “‘The Most Subtle‑Minded and Profoundly Devout People in Asia’: Alfred Lyall on Hinduism, Caste and the State in Colonial India,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall (1835–1910) was a member of the Indian Civil Service from 1856 to 1887. He began his official career in north India from 1856–1864; he was then promoted and stationed in the Central Provinces between 1864–1867 and in adjacent West Berar from 1867–1873. In 1874–1878, he was the governor-general’s agent in Rajputana, the western Indian region made up of princely states under indirect rule. He was an official in the government of India’s Foreign Department in 1878–1882 and ended his career as lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh from 1882–1887. Lyall’s first work as a colonial, official anthropologist was done in the 1860s; in particular, he wrote the report on the Berar census of 1867 in which he enumerated its castes, tribes and religious groups and discussed how to classify them cogently. In central India and Rajputana, he collected a large amount of ethnographic material, which he used to write a series of perceptive articles in British periodicals that were later collected in two volumes of Asiatic Studies, first published in 1882 and 1899. The essays on clans and castes, Rajput princely states and popular Hinduism, which were widely read, were Lyall’s major contributions to the anthropology of India. He also wrote numerous articles and several books on political topics, most of them concerned with British rule in India.
All these publications significantly contributed to Lyall’s reputation as an official anthropologist, an expert on India and, more widely, a distinguished Victorian intellectual and “man of letters.” By his contemporaries, he was often compared with Henry Maine, whose work he admired, and even though Lyall had less influence than Maine on the overall development of social anthropology, his effective use of Indian ethnographic data to criticize the work of F. Max Müller and James G. Frazer on myth and religion attracted considerable attention. Later official anthropologists, such as H. H. Risley, were familiar with Lyall’s work, especially his concept of “Brahmanising,” whereby tribal communities were raised to low-caste Hindu status by transforming their local deities and rituals into pan-Indian, Brahmanical ones. Compared with these later anthropologists, Lyall’s writings look fairly slight, but as Chris Fuller upholds in this path-breaking study, several of his articles still make impressive reading—especially those on popular polytheistic Hinduism, which according to Fuller he discussed more perceptively, as well as more sympathetically, than most other official anthropologists or Victorian writers in general.
In partnership with BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, HAR is honored to announce the release of a previously unpublished manuscript by Signe Howell, who passed away on January 26, 2025.
Howell, Signe, 2025. “My Anthropology: A Personal and Intellectual Adventure,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Signe Howell (1942–2025) was a Norwegian social anthropologist, trained at the University of Oxford. After an 18-month long (1977–1979) fieldwork season with the egalitarian Chewong peoples living in the Malaysian rainforest, she earned a PhD in 1980 under the supervision of Rodney Needham. For a short while, she was a member of the Erasmus research group led by Daniel de Coppet at the École de hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris), centered around Louis Dumont, and taught for three years in the Department of Anthropology at Edinburgh University before joining the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo in 1987. She revisited the Chewong frequently until 2018. As a counterpoint to her first ethnographic experience, she also conducted lengthy fieldwork among the Lio, a highly structured society in the mountains in Flores, Eastern Indonesia, and visited several countries in connection with her subsequent research on international adoption from the 2000s. She wrote and edited influential books such as Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia (1984), Societies at Peace: Anthropological Perspectives (with Roy Willis, 1989), The Ethnography of Moralities (1997), The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective (2006), and Returns to the Field: Multitemporal research and contemporary anthropology (with Aud Talle, 2011).
Bérose has the privilege of releasing an unpublished manuscript by Signe Howell, edited and presented by her widower in the following terms: “To write this memoir was very important to Signe, my wife. She began working on it in 2023, and we discussed it as it developed through several drafts. In agreement with Signe, I took responsibility for completing this text, which was nearing its final form when she died. She was insistent on maintaining the shifting “I/she” form in the narrative, by which she sought to convey the ambivalent feelings she experienced on describing and reflecting upon her time in the field.”
HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: two articles (in English) on Margaret Mead’s fieldwork experience and its ethnographic outcomes.
Shankman, Paul, 2025. “The Forgotten Ethnographic Legacy of Margaret Mead (1925‑1930),” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Shankman, Paul, 2025. “The Forgotten Ethnographic Legacy of Margaret Mead (1931‑1939),” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
The author of a prolific body of work, Margaret Mead (1901–1978) is the best known US anthropologist of the twentieth century, and the person who epitomized anthropology in the eyes of the public. She is widely known for her popular works, including Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). These works were commercial, highly visible, and often worked against her reputation as a scholar. Yet Mead was a dedicated fieldworker and serious ethnographer, publishing a number of professional ethnographic monographs that covered her fieldwork in eight different cultures during the years 1925 to 1940. Although relatively less known, these works were often well regarded, contributing to the ethnographic record. Mead was also a pioneering and innovative ethnographer, advocating team research, the use of psychological testing, photography, and film, and the importance of fieldnotes.
In the first of two articles highlighting Mead’s trajectory, Paul Shankman covers Mead’s fieldwork and publications between 1925 and 1931. From 1928 and throughout the 1930s, she and her successive husbands, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, conducted ethnographic experiments in New Guinea and Bali. Shankman’s second article is dedicated to the years from 1931 to 1940, namely to Mead’s fieldwork among the Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli, Balinese, and Iatmul. A disciple of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, Mead was one of the first female anthropologists to graduate from a US university (1929). She was a pioneer in her thinking on the methodology of ethnographic observation, through her research on child rearing, sexuality and gender relations, psychological anthropology, and visual anthropology. She worked for the US government during the Second World War and for major international organizations after the war, such as UNESCO, on studies of national character, social change and nutrition. She spent most of her career at the American Museum of Natural History. After her death, her work on Samoa was the subject of a violent controversy with Derek Freeman. Mead remains both an inspirational and a much-debated figure in the history of the discipline.
The History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) has launched a new initiative. Every two years, HPGRG will offer a small award of £150 to support projects which seek to widen audience engagement within the history and philosophy of geography.
Projects which meet our criteria might include public engagement through presentations, media presence, artwork, workshops, exhibitions, and other events, ideally in collaboration with museums, archives, learned societies and institutions, galleries and libraries, whose collections and purposes relate to themes about the histories and philosophies of geography. Examples include:
This biannual award is open to doctoral students and early career postdoctoral researchers of geography and associated disciplines, both in academia and other sectors. Applications from around the world and from non-Anglophone countries are particularly encouraged but these would need to be submitted in the English language. Collaborative projects between geographers and practising artists, poets, musicians, actors, sculptors, or other performers will also be welcome. HPGRG also seeks to encourage applications from minority and underrepresented identity groups.
Recipients of this award will be offered the chance to showcase their work during the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of HPGRG (usually held at the end of August or early September) and on the HPGRG website.
The application form can be downloaded from our website.
The scheme is designed to further the ambition of HPGRG to diversify participation in, and methods of presenting and practising, the history and philosophy of geography via works that communicate, integrate, and encourage geographical insights across diverse wider publics.
Any queries and/or completed application forms should be emailed to: Dr. Emily Hayes, ehayes@brookes.ac.uk by July 30, 2025. Please circulate details widely.
The History of Anthropology Interest Group (HOAIG) of the American Anthropological Association is pleased to announce the inaugural competition for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper in the History of Anthropology. HOAIG is an interest group of the AAA’s General Anthropology Division that provides a gathering place for discussions of the history of anthropology and the human sciences. This prize will be awarded to a paper about the history of anthropology, broadly construed.
We encourage students to submit papers they have written based on original, primary source research, or that analyze ideas, texts, contexts, or figures (whether marginalized or centralized) in the discipline’s history. Papers may reflect the influence of global anthropologies, Indigenous studies, Black studies, Science and Technology Studies, information science, the history, sociology, or philosophy of science, or other scholarly fields on the history of anthropology. They may challenge conventional histories of the discipline and its traditional geographic and institutional centers. The winning author will a receive a $100 award, and recognition by HOAIG at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (November 19-23 in New Orleans, LA).
Eligibility Criteria
Submission (paper and CV) must be emailed by Friday, September 26, 2025 to Andrew Newman (Andrew.Newman@wayne.edu). Please reach out to the same email for questions about the award. HOAIG looks forward to your contributions!
In the anthropological canon, Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) has emerged in recent decades as one of the most important—and overlooked—ethnographers of her time. She was a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, but poor health and financial troubles plagued her final years. After Hurston’s passing in 1960, Alice Walker rediscovered her unmarked grave (along with much of her work) thirteen years later. Walker, a prominent novelist, championed Hurston’s literary contributions and promoted her oeuvre (Walker 1975). Following this resurgence, Hurston’s manuscripts, plays, and films continue to posthumously circulate. Her most recent print release, The Life of Herod the Great, became available in early 2025 and acts as a sequel to her 1939 biblical retelling, Moses, Man of the Mountain. As Hurston’s work continues to emerge through the press and on screen, those who seek to understand the uneven and unpredictable trajectory of her life actively mediate her legacy.
There’s a lot happening at the History of Anthropology Review.
First, this spring’s Environmental Anthropologies: Pasts, Presents, Futures conference, co-hosted by HAR and the Yale History of Science and Medicine Program, was a great success. Across two days of panels and conversations, we explored how anthropologists have studied and theorized relations among social forms, ideas, and environments from the late nineteenth century to today—looking at useful insights as well as toxic legacies from both celebrated and neglected paradigms. The event brought together an exceptional group of scholars—anthropologists, historians of science, environmental researchers— spanning career stages and thematic interests. They offered deeply engaging contributions on questions of ecology, empires, political economy, Indigenous knowledge, collecting practices, the more-than-natural, and speculative futures. It also offered an important opportunity to test the capacity of HAR not just as a publishing platform, but as a site of intellectual gathering. Further it was a great example of HAR advisors lending a major hand: Ramah McKay and Joanna Radin were co-organizers, and Joanna generously welcomed us at Yale, gave an inspiring closing talk, and rounded up both an engaged audience and considerable financial support from her department and others. We’ll publish a detailed report on the conference soon, as well as most of the talks—stay tuned.
Continue readingIt is overwhelming to comment on the panel of a brilliant group of women—towering figures in the field—whose work I have long admired and whose personal friendship and mentoring I have benefited from since arriving in Australia five years ago as a newly minted PhD. I of course can’t do justice to this collection of papers—either their theoretical insights or the power of their personal experiences. Hence, I’ll instead contexualize the panel in the past and future: how the panel came about and where the panel may take us.
The inspiration for this conversation came about in good old feminist fashion—from a consciousness raising exercise. Ben, Shiori, and I were regular attendees at the anthropology node of the ANU Gender Institute, which we had styled as a reading and writing workshop, but which always included (in line with our shared feminist principles) a personal and experiential dimension of mentoring and dialogue. At one of the workshops, Kathy and Margaret discussed feminism and activism during their PhD years. This remarkable conversation eventually expanded to a broader discussion about their position as feminist scholars. We realized it was crucial to tell this story, particularly as feminist anthropology in Australia was shaped differently from the more widely discussed North American experience.
It is here that I would like to reflect on what this panel and the special collection that followed has accomplished. The provocation about the production and reproduction of theory, and its rootedness in a fieldwork discipline, has led to some poignant insights. Whether shaking our certainty about sexual violence and its universality, or fundamentally questioning “what is a woman?”, or demanding intersectional analysis of anthropological fieldwork, I would like to echo Margaret’s call to celebrate how feminism can transform anthropology.
Building on this celebration, I would like to offer one more provocation. What comes through so strongly in the discussion is the longstanding feminist concern not just with reproduction (of theory, of sociality, of persons), but also with a sense of obligation. For many of these scholars, that sense of commitment was nurtured in the field (commitment to our long-term friends and collaborators, systematized in works like Martha’s contributions to “Gender and Fieldwork” and Francesca’s long-term work on the shifting hegemonies in indigenous/settler dynamics). In fact, this is precisely what Danilyn Rutherford stakes out as the key to our discipline’s “kinky empiricism”: in her words, “An empiricism that is ethical because its methods create obligations, obligations that compel those who seek knowledge to put themselves on the line by making truth claims that they know will intervene within the settings and among the people they describe” (Rutherford 2012, 465). I propose that this panel pushes us to take an additional step. These interventions and obligations are not limited to the settings and people of our fieldwork, but extend to our universities, teaching, collegiality, friendships, and mentorship.
Feminism has always been obligated, and its obligations reach beyond a particular theoretical turn in our scholarship. Given the foundational place obligation occupies within our anthropological theories—from the intergenerational obligations that stitch together kinship structures and their modes of relational belonging, to the obligation to return at the heart of “gift” and theories of value, to ritual obligations that propitiate spirits or deities—obligation is at the heart of the anthropological theories of “the social.” By rooting obligation(s) within the politics and experiences of gender justice, the papers of this roundtable force us rethink feminism as the master trope of anthropology.
Read another piece in this series.
Works Cited
Rutherford, Danilyn. 2012. “Kinky Empiricism.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (3): 465–479.
In addition to the work of the guest editors, this piece was edited by Allegra Giovine.
We are here for a conversation about gender as an analytical lens on the relationship between theory and fieldwork in anthropology. It has been suggested that we talk about this through personal narratives from those of us who have been involved in anthropology in Australia for some time. In Papua New Guinea, where my husband (and colleague) Alan Rumsey and I have been going since 1981, I have recently written about the changing roles and relations of women to warfare, which was colonially suppressed but then has re-emerged at times in the region of the Western Highlands we are familiar with. The continuity of some forms and grounds of hostility through significant change at many levels has provided a way of looking at some aspects of gender relations there. But today I want to focus on my experience of perhaps comparable changes in (especially northern) Australia.
Continue readingRe: Creation of the International Institute for Afro-American Studies
For years there has been the intention of founding a center devoted especially to the problems of the Black populations of America, of their study, their history, their cultures, etc. But time and again, opposition to this project had arisen…The time seemed to have come to build such an organism, without official status and with merely scientific purposes for the special study of these problems (emphasis mine). The idea was enthusiastically received and on October 20 [1943] in Mexico City, the act creating the International Institute of Afro-American Studies was signed. (Instituto Internacional de Estudios Afroamericanos 2016, 145).[1]The letters and memorandums included in this article have been translated by the author.
Founded in Mexico in November 1943, the International Institute of Afro-American Studies (IIAAS) was not just a scientific endeavor. Its founders had a significant political agenda. Fernando Ortiz, a Cuban anthropologist and prominent scholar of Afro-Cuban culture, led efforts to establish the IIAAS. His work on transculturation and the cultural history of African-descended populations positioned him as a key figure in studying racial and cultural dynamics in the Americas.[2]At the time, Ortiz had recently published one of his most renowned works, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940), and had already conducted extensive research on Afrodescendant populations in Cuba. His previous works included De la música afrocubana: Un estímulo para su estudio (1934) and Glosario de Afronegrismos (1924). Ortiz’s efforts to establish the IIAAS reveal the intricate power dynamics within anthropology and underscore his ability to create a center with a clear postcolonial agenda. He envisioned an institute that would unite the Americas in the study of Afro-descendant populations, fostering intellectual exchange across countries while also challenging the dominance of perspectives from certain US scholars, such as Melville J. Herskovits.
Continue readingNotes
| ↑1 | The letters and memorandums included in this article have been translated by the author. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | At the time, Ortiz had recently published one of his most renowned works, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940), and had already conducted extensive research on Afrodescendant populations in Cuba. His previous works included De la música afrocubana: Un estímulo para su estudio (1934) and Glosario de Afronegrismos (1924). |
Zora Neale Hurston
The Life of Herod the Great: A Novel
Edited and with commentary by Deborah G. Plant
Amistad, 2025
xxvii + 334 pages
Review followed by an editor Q&A.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), an African American novelist, scholar, and filmmaker, was born to a Baptist minister and a schoolteacher in Alabama. In 1894, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, where her father was elected mayor, and she discovered an early love for literature. The first of her family to attend college, she attended Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., where she became active in the student newspaper and in the literary club. After earning her associate’s degree, she was offered a scholarship to Barnard College of Columbia University, the first Black student to attend (Chen 2025). While there, she took classes in anthropology from Franz Boas and worked alongside fellow students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. She received a Bachelor of Arts in 1928 but continued to study at Columbia for two more years. During this time, Hurston published short stories and essays, becoming a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance alongside other African American scholars and artists, such as Alain Locke, Duke Ellington, and Langston Hughes, all challenging negative stereotypes of African Americans and celebrating their traditional cultures (see Charles Rivers Editors 2018; Murrell 2024). In 1937, she published her now-acclaimed novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, set in Florida, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship to do research on voodoo in Haiti and Jamaica, resulting in the ethnography Tell My Horse ([1938] 1990). In 1942, Hurston published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, and during the 1940s lived in Honduras, where she researched the cultures of mixed Indigenous and African communities like the Garifuna and Miskito. Hurston went on to publish an impressive number of empirical studies and ethnographic fictions; she also wrote plays like Color Struck ([1926] 2022) and (with Langston Hughes [1931] 2008) Mule Bone; and she made films to capture African American life in her hometown of Eatonville. Though these works attracted some attention during her lifetime, her later years found her in financial difficulty, and by the 1950s she supported herself by freelance writing, substitute teaching, and working as a maid and public assistant. After Hurston’s death in 1960, the quality of her work went largely unnoticed until Alice Walker published her article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. Magazine (1975), stimulating new appreciation of her many contributions to both anthropology and literature.
Continue readingAll memorializing practices afford new forms of synthesis. Writing now in my late sixties about myself as a feminist anthropologist foregrounds for me the importance of the habitus we acquire in our primary socialization for shaping what we consciously think of and write about as our own, or even as collective, intellectual and political projects.
Continue readingHAR’s Bibliography Editors are pleased to post our latest additions to the bibliography of works on the history of anthropology. We have been working to identify and add newer works, and you will find many 2024 and 2025 references here.
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