Editors’ note: This reflection was written in conjunction with the author’s course, “History of Anthropology,” taught most recently in the 2025 spring semester at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. You can read the course syllabus in HAR’s Syllabus Collection.
My eyes fucking bleed
My brain fucking swells
On theoretical concepts
My brain fucking dwells
(Scholastic Deth, “Book Attack!”)
Introduction
In this essay, I consider my own recent and ongoing efforts to teach the history of anthropology to undergraduates. Along the way, I discuss how and why I have attempted to shift my teaching from a paradigmatic to a more history of science approach, one that prompts student to dwell not so much on ideas, but on the various contexts in which the discipline itself has been constituted and operationalized. To illustrate the value of this shift, I consider the need for a more inspirational history of anthropology against the backdrop of the latest incarnation of disciplinary and institutional crisis.
The Paradigmatic Approach
But before I begin, a bit of context. I have been researching and writing about the history of anthropology in one capacity or another for the past decade or so (e.g., Barron 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024). My first exposure to this strain of scholarship came in the form of an undergraduate senior thesis, which looked at the relationship between cultural anthropology, federal bureaucrats, and Indigenous communities in California. And while I have been teaching anthropology (mostly cultural) for several years now, I am relatively new to teaching the history of anthropology. Sure, I never miss an opportunity to inject a bit of disciplinary history into my other classes. For example, my Ethnographic Methods course has a whole section just on the history of social scientific funding apparatuses. As students learn about the practical dimensions of carrying out ethnographic research such as writing a data management plan and differentiating between structured, semi-structured, and unstructured interviews, they also learn about the “politics-patronage-social science nexus” (Solovey 2013) as seen through cases such as Manual Gamio’s account of Mexican immigration into the United States (funded by the Social Science Research Council) and the rise of the Human Terrain System initiative in the context of the War on Terror. But such circumscribed uses of the past do not constitute a history of anthropology course in any conventional sense of the term.
The summer of 2023 marked my first attempt to teach the history of anthropology in a more direct manner. As I am sure others have experienced before, the excitement of being able to teach material that is directly related to my own research interests quickly dissipated as the prospect of constructing a workable class became a reality. Building the course presented numerous obstacles—ones that might make for productive musings down the road, such as identifying and curating accessible and/or zero-cost versions of obscure texts (e.g., Do I direct students to the Internet Archive so that they can read Reinventing Anthropology?) and determining the feasible temporal and geographic parameters of the material (e.g., Do I talk about Herodotus? If so, how much detail do I need to provide about the ancient Greeks? More importantly, how much do I know about the ancient Greeks?!). However, I would like to dwell on another obstacle: my efforts to move from a paradigmatic to a more history of science informed pedagogy.
Having reviewed a number of course catalogues and syllabi, it would appear that most departments of anthropology do not offer history of anthropology per se. Rather, such course are devoted to the history of anthropological theory. I am still not sure why I found this surprising, for I too took a course in the history of anthropological theory as an undergraduate major once upon a time. Moreover, as an anthropology instructor, I have been borrowing heavily from John McGee and Richard Warms’s Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History (2024) for several years now, and I am not alone in this. According to the Open Syllabus, this textbook has appeared on 340 syllabi, 329 of which have been for anthropology courses. It is a tremendous resource, which I will say more about below.
But what happens when the history of the discipline is presented primarily as a history of theoretical paradigms? While the paradigmatic approach to teaching the history of anthropology compels students (and instructors) to dwell on theoretical conceptions, this can occur in a historical vacuum, which can (unintentionally) contribute to a progressive view of the discipline, one in which we are always already moving toward a more perfect and correct perspective (Singh and Guyer 2016). This movement might not be entirely linear or even cumulative, but, especially in the United States, a nation-state whose history is riven with the idea of “progress” (Noble 1970), such a movement implies “improvement.” This should not be too shocking. After all, a paradigmatic approach can be consistent with the Kuhnian brand of the philosophy of science if it narrates the history of science as a series of discernible epistemic breaks, shifts, or revolutions. But as a result, the paradigmatic view also runs the risk of reproducing the limitations of the Kuhnian approach. Kuhn makes little room for society in his history of revolutions. When musing on what a “fuller account” of the “astronomical crisis that faced Copernicus” might look like, Kuhn noted that one would need to examine a variety of “external factors” including “the social pressure of calendar reform,” “medieval criticism of Aristotle, the rise of Renaissance Neoplatonism, and other significant historical elements” (1962, 69). Motioning toward the demands of a history of science, Kuhn stopped short: “Though immensely important, issues of that sort are out of bounds for this essay” (1962, 69). With “external factors” bracketed out of view, science, for Kuhn, moves forward not through situated knowledges and networks of labor, but through the (natural? inevitable?) discovery of “anomalies” (1962).
While this is a productive rejoinder to his own mentor, James Conant, who viewed science as a cumulative process, it is ill-fitted for understanding the social sciences. How can one understand, for example, the formation or effects of Adam Smith’s conception of the invisible hand without attending to the political-economic landscape in which the Scottish Enlightenment materialized? George Stocking, who first introduced Kuhn’s paradigm to the history of anthropology, flagged these limitations and used Kuhn’s concept with appropriate reservation (1965, 214). Thus, shifting from a purely paradigmatic to a more history of science view guards against narratives of progress that partition ideas from the social, political, and economic conditions in which they have been developed and, most importantly, deployed.
To be clear, I do not mean to dismiss the paradigmatic approach. It does have immense pedagogical utility, which is precisely why I have retained much of it in my own course. I continue to thematically organize the majority of the course units around loose paradigms (e.g., evolutionism, historical particularism, functionalism, etc.). I have seen others use the paradigmatic approach to great effect, especially when it comes to teaching majors who are unlikely to pursue academic careers in the field. For example, one of my colleagues tasks students with developing a final research project that applies a theory (or theories) explored in the course. The assignment has led to the creation of wonderful poster presentations. While such an activity might not demonstrate comprehension of the process by which anthropological theories were constituted and enacted, it demonstrates comprehension of and application of the theories themselves, which is highly valuable in the context of undergraduate education, precisely because most majors will not go into careers in academic anthropology. As Dell Hymes once suggested, “The greatest contribution of anthropology departments might be to send into the world many lawyers, historians, activists, workers for various institutions and agencies, well trained in anthropological work. This might be in turn the only way in which adequate knowledge of many sectors of society would eventually be gained” (1972, 57).
Moreover, when done in the style of McGee and Warms, who make no overt claims to the Kuhnian tradition, the paradigmatic approach allows students to see how theories were operationalized in specific studies. I have found this to be far more engaging for undergraduates than reading grand declarations of theory. This also prevents a history of anthropology course from devolving into facile postmodern musings about the constructed and motivated nature of “science,” which has become all the more complicated with the proliferation and diversification of anti-science sentiments in the form of anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and deniers of anthropogenic climate change. But unless the instructor is actively incorporating McGee and Warms’s footnotes (which are fantastic!) into the curriculum, something the authors encourage in both their Preface and Introduction, it is very easy for such an approach to devolve into another dehistoricized series of ideas. And as any seasoned educator knows, expecting students to read the footnotes can be something of a fool’s errand.
(DIY) History of Science
What I have in mind for a history of science approach is unlikely to pass muster with proper historians of science. I am an anthropologist teaching anthropology students. My path to the history of anthropology has been circuitous and somewhat Do-It-Yourself (DIY) insomuch as my background is anthropology. I was never formerly trained in the history of science for that matter (but shout outs to Mark Anderson and David Dinwoodie for [unknowingly] sparking my interest in the history of anthropology through undergraduate and graduate course work respectively and the broader History of Anthropology Review community who have done so much to enhance and expand my understanding of these slippery pasts). With those caveats in mind, I attempted to scaffold the class with key terms and concepts that anthropology majors are unlikely to be familiar with: historiography, historicism, and presentism. Just getting anthropology students to recognize the distinction between history as the study of the past and historiography as the study of historical perspectives and the writing of history is a bit of a feat. Sure, most students are familiar with the old adage that history is written by the victors. But they do not always see, at the outset of the course, how that might apply to something as (seemingly) esoteric as the history of science. Science is science. Is it not? Unless we are talking about something as overt as the development of the atomic bomb during WWII, science has nothing to do with society, economics, politics, etc. … or so the thinking goes. This can be all the more apparent in departments where the subfields are geared more toward the hard science wing of the discipline and lack conversancy in science and technology studies. A little bit of Latour, I have found, goes a long way.
To open up these historiographic conversations with students, I have been experimenting with assigning George Stocking’s classic editorial “On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in the Historiography of Behavioral Sciences” (1965), which I pair with Ira Bashkow’s illuminating meta-historical account of the formation of Stocking’s jaundiced view of the presentist approach. The goal here is to get students to see that a principled history of anthropology is not so much about choosing sides in the historicist-presentist debate as much as it is about working toward an “enlightened presentism.” Following Stocking’s lead, I invoke Dell Hymes’s assertion that “[t]o the degree that we have lacked an active knowledge of the history of our field, we have been limited by lack of some of the perspectives that have not been transmitted to us, and by the partialness of some of those that have” (1965, 216). In doing so, I motion toward the utility of a history of anthropology for practicing anthropologists today. There are things that we are concerned with in the twenty-first century that our anthropological forebearers also took to be of great importance. The trick is that one cannot operationalize the utility of those past works without first understanding them in the context of their own time and place. This requires a combination of historicist and presentist insights. And in some cases, this might require us to temporarily “[suspend] judgment as to present utility, [so that we might] make that judgment ultimately possible” (1965, 217).
Students have various opportunities to practice deploying the two historical lenses including a midterm paper that calls for them to assess the work of Franz Boas as it relates to race, racism, and anti-racism in the US. Students are prompted to draw their conclusion from a combination of Boas’s original writings, the competing perspectives of early 20th century boosters of white supremacy (e.g., Madison Grant), and a variety of secondary mediations on Boas’s research and political impact, which students identify both on their own and with instructor guidance. In addition to gauging people’s comprehension of Boas’s work as well as their ability to identify and analyze relevant scholarly works on the topic, the intention is to provide an opportunity for students to practice toggling back-and-forth between the poles of historicism and presentism in order to arrive at their own evaluations of the Boasian legacy and its utility for thinking about questions of race, racism, and anti-racism today.
Footnotes, Dark History of Anthropology, & Inspiration
At a moment when the neoliberal university compels departments to duke it out in a zero-sum game for funding and future enrollments are undermined by the looming “demographic cliff,” it is incumbent upon academic anthropologists to ensure that the discipline is appealing to prospective students. Yes, we must also be concerned with ensuring that the major offers viable career pathways, especially for working-class students who do not come from generational wealth. Relatedly, we should be cognizant of the ways in which depictions of the liberal arts and social sciences as occupational dead ends now hold hands with characterizations of these same disciplines as sources of political radicalization and indoctrination, prompting some state legislators to call for the outright defunding of these supposed “garbage fields” (Santos 2025). But I suspect that a workforce readiness approach will only help us so much. Can we survive the ravages of corporately minded administrators with career pathways alone when our counterparts/competitors in business, computer science, economics, and engineering offer more straightforward and more lucrative career prospects? To be sure, professional development courses and internships should be arrows in our departmental quivers as we work to attract and retain anthropology students. But we need to lean on other strengths as well. And I believe our history is one of those strengths.
Of course, it is a complicated history, one that has led to tropes of grave robbers and handmaidens of colonialism, which understandably turn potentially interested students off. Fortunately, our disciplinary history is not all robbers and handmaidens. But you might not know it from recent meditations. Take for instance Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman’s much-discussed “Decolonizing US Anthropology” (2022). While this is not necessarily history of anthropology (either in the presentist or historicist mode), it does invoke the past in important ways. Emphasizing that we “cannot decolonize the discipline today without reinterpreting and rethinking the past,” Gupta and Stoolman offer a counterfactual approach to anthropology’s canon—one that explores the areas of study “left by the wayside” in the founding generations, areas that might have translated to a decolonizing tradition had they been pursued (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, 785-786). Though they do not demonstrate what they have in mind in any thorough detail, Gupta and Stoolman motion to numerous potential areas of speculation ranging from “genocides and mass killings” to “monopoly capitalism” (2022, 782-785). The underlying assumption being that if anthropologists had devoted more attention to these topics in their scholarship, anthropology and perhaps the US might be different today. To be sure, Gupta and Stoolman are appropriately “skeptical of the reductive claim that anthropologists and anthropology functioned simply as the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’” just as they are skeptical of the notion that their call for decolonizing the discipline is without precedent (2022, 782). As they observe (790):
…there was no shortage of calls for such changes in the 1960s and 1970s (Gough 1967; Hymes 1972), nor were exemplars of such a practice in short supply. We recognize that many, if not most, anthropologists see themselves as antiracist, and quite a few have been involved in the struggles for civil rights waged during the 1960s and afterward.
Unfortunately, this most intriguing qualification is confined to their footnotes. But even the footnote leaves much to be desired. Their nod to the canonical writings of Kathleen Gough and Dell Hymes suggests that Gupta and Stoolman’s footnoted historical purview is itself confined to prior, grand declarations of what anthropologists should do—not what they did. Though they suggest that “exemplars of such a practice” were abundant, they provide no references. This lacuna is quite curious given the growing body of non-counterfactual history on action anthropologists such as Sol Tax, Nancy Oestrich Lurie, and Robert Thomas (Arndt 2019, Braun 2019; Daubenmier 2008; Cobb 2008; Hancock 2019; Smith 2015). Why is it, I wonder, that these figures continue to be marginalized in discussions of anthropological decolonization? To what degree is a counterfactual approach productive when it leaves so much out?
Don’t get me wrong. I do not think the history of anthropology—as either a research pursuit or a course in the university catalogue—should become a mere avenue for good disciplinary PR. But I do think we walk and chew gum at the same time. That is to say, I think that just as we can pursue productive and inviting lines of historical research that do not necessarily lead to rose-colored pasts, we can also teach the history of anthropology in a non-pollyannaish manner without completely turning off students—both prospective students and those declared majors who might be teetering on the brink of calling it quits and just hopping over to psychology or economics. In my current history of anthropology course, students encounter plenty of what we might consider dark history of anthropology (a la Sherry Ortner 2016). That is to say, students encounter a variety of much-debated cases including Napoleon Chagnon’s Yanomami research and Alfred Kroeber’s relationship with the man called Ishi. Even when presented in a nuanced and historicist mode, one cannot be surprised if a younger generation in 2025 finds these cases unsettling, and, at least in my experience, they do.
But as much as the class considers these thorny pasts, we also read about and discuss the relationship between Indigenous rights activists and anthropologists in the twentieth century. Paying attention to the aforementioned action anthropologists and other post-WWII figures actually opens up a space to cultivate a more nuanced assessment of one of the most referenced, but little understood, bits of criticism—that of Vine Deloria Jr.. As Robert Hancock (2019) and Sebastian Braun (2019) have illustrated in their respective works, Deloria has been mis-remembered as an outright enemy of the discipline. This appears to be at least in part due to a very decontextualized—one might say presentist—reading of Deloria’s (in)famous chapter about anthropologists in his epic Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969). Such readings neglect to note that Deloria’s anger was largely directed at what he referred to as “workshop anthros”—not at anthropology writ large (Deloria 1969, 65). Such a label only makes sense if given a bit of historicist care. By workshop anthros, Deloria was referring to the Workshop on American Indian Affairs organized by Tax and Fred Gearing, which Deloria considered to be overly invested in premodern conceptions of Indigenous communities (Braun 2019, 340). While Deloria believed that re-tribalization was necessary in the fight for tribal rights, he did not think this meant “the artificial exclusion of modernity” (Braun 2019, 342). In his eyes, this is what workshop anthros preached—that white and Indian society were radically different and incapable of meeting (see Cobb 2008 for a detailed account of the workshop curricula, which contrasts sharply with Deloria’s characterization of their approach).
Or as Braun puts it, “Deloria’s beef with workshop anthros was that they defined and continue to define Native peoples as premodern” (2019, 342). Hancock further complicates the “deadliest enemies” view of Deloria and anthropology through Deloria’s participation in the 1970 meeting of the American Anthropology Association. Hancock sees in Deloria’s conference statements not a unidimensional polemic as is often assumed, but a sincere call for anthropologists “to do better” vis-a-vis Native communities. Hancock applies this re-interpretation to historians of anthropology as well: “When we think about doing better, we need to think not just in terms of working with Indigenous communities but also in terms of understanding and representing those relationships” (2019, 362).
Through lectures and discussions, I work to incorporate these nuanced views of Deloria into the course. This has become all the easier to do in recent years, thanks in part to a growing body of historical scholarship on the relationship between politically engaged anthropology, federal policy, and Indigenous activism in the US (e.g., Arndt 2019; Daubenmier 2008; Dinwoodie 2023; Cobb 2008; Morgan 2017, 2019; Smith 2015). This emergent literature includes critical attention being paid to Deloria’s close relationship with Lurie in their mutual and successful effort to restore the tribal status of the Menominee (Arndt 2023). While I hope to find a way to make room for these works as required readings in future iterations of the class, for now they appear as reference points in my lectures—as part of an admittedly over-encumbered and clunkily titled unit dubbed “The Post Modern Turn & Critiquing Anthropology in the Twentieth Century.”
At a moment when much of academic anthropological activism appears thematic and divorced from actual politics—whether that be of the grassroots or electoral variety, I have found that students find these otherwise forgotten cases to be inspiring. My students appear far more politically curious and engaged than I was as an undergraduate. So perhaps the inspiration comes from seeing in a Tax or a Lurie a kind of kindred spirit. Knowing you are not alone in your civic-minded thinking can be quite comforting. Students, of course, are still disturbed by Ishi’s story, Chagnon’s personality, the crudeness of Lewis Henry Morgan’s evolutionary typology, the patriarchal overtones of the phrase “the daughters of Boas,” and many other aspects of the discipline’s past (as well as how it has been framed). However, they recognize that there might be something worth salvaging in the discipline. Perhaps that something can be identified and cultivated through the paradigmatic approach, one in which students dwell on theories and canonical figures in something of a social vacuum, but I do not see how. If the History of Anthropology is going to be a place of dwelling, why not let it be more than mere ideas and celebrity-esque historical figures. Why not let it be a place where declared and prospective majors can cultivate a bit of inspiration.
Works Cited
Arndt, Grant. 2019. “Rediscovering Nancy Oestreich Lurie’s Activist Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 121 (3): 725–28.
———. 2023. “Joining the Ongoing Struggle: Vine Deloria, Nancy Lurie, and the Quest for a Decolonial Anthropology.” Journal of Anthropological Research 79 (4): 468–91.
Barron, Nicholas. 2020. “Renegades or Liberals? Recent Reflections on the Boasian Legacies in American Anthropology.” Of the Human Sciences, 095269512094119.
———. 2022. “Assembling ‘Enduring Peoples,’ Mediating Recognition: Anthropology, the Pascua Yaqui Indians, and the Co-Construction of Ideas and Politics.” History and Anthropology 33 (4): 452–71.
———.2023. “Lessons in Safe Logic: Reassessing Anthropological and Liberal Imaginings of Termination.” Journal of Anthropological Research 79 (4): 492–521.
———.2024. “The Limits of Control: Anthropology, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Federal Recognition in the United States.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 112 (3): 135–56.
Bashkow, Ira. 2019. “On History for the Present: Revisiting George Stocking’s Influential Rejection of ‘Presentism.’” American Anthropologist 121 (3): 709–20.
Braun, Sebastian F. 2019. “Rereading Deloria: Against Workshops, for Communities.” In Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories, edited by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, 339–52. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Cobb, Daniel M. 2008. Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Deloria, Vine. 1969. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan.
Dinwoodie, David W. 2023. “Decolonization and the History of Anthropology: The Implications of New Deal Anthropology from the 1930s to the 1950s.” Journal of Anthropological Research 79 (4): 439–67.
Gough, Kathleen. 1967. “New Proposals for Anthropologists.” Economic and Political Weekly 2 (36): 1653–55.
Gupta, Akhil, and Jessie Stoolman. 2022. “Decolonizing US Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 124 (4).
Hancock, Robert L. A. 2019. “‘Let’s Do Better This Time’: Vine Deloria Jr.’s Ongoing Engagement with Anthropology.” In Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories, edited by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, 353–65. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Hymes, Dell. 1972. “The Uses of Anthropology: Critical, Political, Personal.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 3–79. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McGee, R. Jon, and Richard L. Warms. 2024. Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. Sixth. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield.
Morgan, Mindy J. 2017. “Anthropologists in Unexpected Places: Tracing Anthropological Theory, Practice, and Policy in Indians at Work.” American Anthropologist 119 (3): 435–47.
Morgan, Mindy. 2019. “Look Once More at the Old Things: Ruth Underhill’s O’odham Text Collections.” In Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of History, edited by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, 319–38. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Noble, David W. 1970. The Progressive Mind, 1890-1917. Rand McNally.
Ortner, Sherry B. 2016. “Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73.
Santos, Jose Leonardo. 2025. “‘Eliminate Anthropology’: Attitudes toward Social Science in the Public Discourse.” American Anthropologist.
Scholastic Deth. 2002. Book Attack! Revenge…of the Nerds. 625 Thrashcore, Wake the Dead Records.
Singh, Bhrigupati, and Jane I. Guyer. 2016. “A Joyful History of Anthropology.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 197–211.
Smith, Joshua J. 2015. “Standing with Sol: The Spirit and Intent of Action Anthropology.” Anthropologica 57: 445–56.
Solovey, Mark. 2013. Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Stocking, George W. 1965. “On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences.” Journal of the History Behavioral Sciences Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1 (3): 211–18.
