The Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953) originated at a moment of limitless optimism for a “new lingua franca” where a “universal language of information, feedback, and homeostasis” would lead to a capacity to “model all organisms from the level of the cell to that of society” (Kline, 2020: 13). It would be difficult to find another meeting with quite the same scope and soaring ambitions. Including the physical sciences, biology, neuroscience, linguistics, psychology alongside anthropology, the Macy conferences seemed to herald a new era where experts could speak to each other with a common language that would underwrite post-war technocratic dreams. And, as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson hoped, anthropology would prove key to the development of that language.

In this, the Macy conferences could be seen as an obdurate failure. In anthropology, at least, cybernetics fizzled out by the 1970s. Not even the post-human turn that began in the 1980s seems to have revived the project that Mead and Bateson began in these conferences. Not just “cybernetics” as a term, but the dreams of anthropological cybernetics seemed to have disappeared. And since the conferences ended, the sciences and (other) social sciences have continued apace without much need for our anthropological contributions.

On the other hand, there’s ample evidence that the Macy Conferences succeeded all too well. The technologies that currently dominate our world—the algorithms, the AI models, the networks—all have at least some of their origins with Macy conferences participants: game theory (John von Neumann), neural nets and circular causality (Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenbluth and Julian Bigelow) and information as the ratio of signal-to-noise (Claude Shannon). As Hayles laments in “How We Became Posthuman,” the Macy conferences helped usher in a world where everything—including our subjectivity—could be reduced to flows of fungible information, information that can be commodified and manipulated. From this perspective, the Macy conferences were a first salvo in what Haraway would call the “Informatics of Domination,” (Haraway, 1991), in which, as Bateson later suggested, “control” was elevated over “communication” (Bateson, 1991).

Of course, it would a mistake to view this hegemony as inevitable, and many scholars in recent decades have elaborated on alternatives. Second-order cybernetics, for example, (re)introduced subjectivity into the information equation in the question of the observer (Maturana and Varela 1980), while others (like N. Katharine Hayles and Andrew Pickering) have looked to models of embodiment, practice and performance that were also implicit in the physicality of interaction and apparatus (Hayles, 1999; Pickering, 2010).

But what has been the anthropological contribution to all of this debate? Has there been a similarly recuperative moment in the field? This is, I think a fair question: Mead and Bateson were present at every conference. Reading through the (admittedly incomplete) transcripts, it is hard not to notice that the anthropologists were especially loquacious. They brought with them many insights, perhaps none so frequent as what we might call the “anthropological exception”: counterexamples from the anthropological record puncturing the universalist pretensions of the Macy conferees. As Mead sagely notes to Lawrence Kubie’s sweeping generalities: “If you look at some other cultures, you don’t necessarily find that same contrast” (Pias, 2016: 426).

The anthropological exception is the twentieth century inversion of the anthropological universal—that nineteenth century rhetorical tool that allowed Edward Burnett Tylor, James George Frazer and others to build gigantic abstractions like “animism” or “barbarism” out of decontextualized and more-than-occasionally inaccurate “facts” collected by legions of travelers, missionaries and colonial officials. There are many examples of the anthropology of exception – the critique implicit in the culture and personality school of the early twentieth century depends upon it, although the genre arguably crystallized with Bronislaw Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society, where he argues that the Oedipus complex is not universal (Malinowski, 1927). This would not exorcise universalism from anthropology, but it would, at least, help to undermine the hierarchies underwriting anthropology as a colonial machine.

The Macy transcripts are filled with examples drawn from Mead’s and Bateson’s fieldwork—exceptions to the “rules” adduced by Macy conferees. But do they make any difference? In the example above, Kubie is hardly disarmed by Mead, and soldiers on in his inexplicitly Freudian way. And looking back, it is hard to see the anthropological dimensions of our world of networked communication and machine learning that are the two of the legacies of the conferences. So what was the anthropological contribution?

We could call the anthropological contribution “misunderstanding”—hardly a term with positive connotations, and one seemingly at odds with the point of an academic conference. The Macy conferences were intended to erect the scaffolding of a universalist science of cybernetics, one that would cut across disciplinary silos. And, yet, Macy conferees reported many misunderstandings. For example, Mead and Bateson critiqued their colleague in a 1976 interview with Stewart Brand: “So we used the model, ‘feedback,’ and Kurt Lewin—who didn’t understand any known human language, but always had to reduce them to concepts—he went away with the idea of feedback as something that when you did anything with a group you went back and told them later what had happened [  . . . ] So the word ‘feedback’ got introduced incorrectly into the international UNESCO type conferences where it’s been ever since” (Brand, 1976: 3).

This is something other than a garden variety misunderstanding. We might instead say that the anthropological contribution had to do with the idea of difference, as in the following example: in the 1950 meeting, J.C.R. Licklider (who would later be one of the architects of ARPANET) delivered a paper entitled “The Manner in Which and the Extent to Which Speech Can Be Distorted and Remain Intelligible.” It is really a paper on sound engineering, full of graphs showing frequency and clipping. It is just the sort of materialism that Shannon engages in his work—albeit in an even drier tone. Mead, however, re-frames Licklider’s presentation in terms of human communication across different languages, and the other conferees enthusiastically add their own anecdotes amidst Mead’s topical hijacking. Mead interjects: “I should like to get back to the question: Is this a translation or isn’t it? What is translation?” (237). While this wasn’t really Licklider’s question at all, Mead plunges ahead. It is, she concludes, “a question of framing. Some people frame all European languages together, so that the idea of learning any Indo-European language is regarded as just another language to be learned; the idea of learning Hawaiian or Japanese, however, would be regarded as something quite different. What is translation for one person is not translation for another” (237). Mead has, in the end, taken things rather far from Licklider’s materialist and quantitative starting point into an interesting meditation on the cultural politics of translation.

The pragmatic effect of Mead’s comments will be familiar to people who have attended academic conferences: the questions that are really comments, the endless self-aggrandizement and digression. Even if we are generous, it would be difficult to see Mead’s comments as helping to elaborate on Licklider’s work; in fact, they seem to accomplish exactly the opposite, jumping the rails entirely to something else, and leading conferees into anecdotes about their own foreign travel that hardly do much to cement the science of cybernetics. But what if the point of the exercise (at least as Mead and Bateson saw it) wasn’t to arrive at a consensus?

The second-generation cyberneticist Gordon Pask built an installation he called “The Colloquy of Mobiles,” consisting of hanging, robotic machines that would rotate towards each other in response to sequences of lights and sounds.

Together, these cybernetic agents produced complex behavior, but what made the installation even more complex was the human component. Pask intended for people to interact with the robots and participants and generate their own patterns using small mirrors to interact with the Mobile. The question here: Is the “communication” between the machines the same as the communication between people? The mobiles, Pask concede, “cannot, of course, interpret these sound and light patterns. But human beings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they will also aim to achieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with the system at a higher level of discourse” (Pask, 1971, quoted in Pickering, 2010: 359-360). Humans and machines are interacting, but not “sharing” a communicative system from machine to human. Here, Pask encourages human participants to productively “misunderstand” or inject their own meaning into what his Mobiles are up to and strive to build patterns “pleasing” to them. The mobile is not “communicating”; lights would be discharged when capacitors reached a certain level, mobiles would discharge a light, which would be “answered” by a sound. As a cybernetic apparatus, Pask’s Colloquy was interesting, but as a piece of art it invited multiple levels of anthropomorphic interaction, including eliciting affective response in human participants. The point, here, was not to understand the servo-mechanisms, but to interact with the device.

Was the purpose of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics to reduce everything to information and feedback? Or was it to create a forum for people and ideas to interact without reduction to a single set of terms? For Mead, Licklider’s paper is an opportunity to interject notes on language and translation; it starts her down a chain of anthropological examples, rather than, say, reducing anthropological linguistics to acoustics.

Gregory Bateson’s 1970 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture elaborates on his celebrated definition of information:

In fact, what we mean by information–the elementary unit of information–is a difference which makes a difference, and is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continuously transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We might even say that the question is already implicit in them (Bateson, 1972: 459).

The sense here (which, perhaps, takes some inspiration from the work of Humberto Maturana, in his co-authored paper, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” (Lettvin et al, 1959)), is that the “differences” in the pathway are already there—internally produced even though the stimuli might be initially external. Applied to cybernetics itself, it means interacting across different disciplines, not to unite, but to stimulate differences that, perhaps were already there. Differences without generating differences within. As Pickering writes, “the cybernetic sense of control was rather one of getting along with, coping with, even taking advantage and enjoying, a world one cannot push around in that way” (Pickering, 2010: 383).

Here, the anthropological contribution is difference itself, anthropological examples that lead conferees outside the closed loop of cybernetic interpretation into other frames: the generation of more difference. If we return to Wiener’s definition of cybernetics as “control and communication in the animal and the machine,” then anthropology’s contribution lay almost entirely on the “communication” side (Wiener, 1948). More than that, it’s a refractory communication that escapes the boundaries of the topic and extends—through difference—into something else entirely. To be fair, that seems to be the most successful part of the conference: it continued over almost a decade without, perhaps, ever building consensus on anything.

Yes, one legacy of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics has been the domination of life by “code,” and the reduction of action, cognition and life itself to flows of information (Geoghegan, 2023). But it is not the only legacy. Another is the capacity to interact across differences in a way that is generative of more difference. It is, I am suggesting, the anthropological imperative—one that remains an unacknowledged contribution of anthropology, and one that presents an increasingly necessary alternative to the constantly expanding empire of the informatics of domination.

At present, we are again assailed by a nightmarish, cybernetic future where tasks that we have classified as definitively human—art, poetry, literature, music—are produced by generative AI models. We are encouraged to understand these outputs as the same as our human work, and that we are little better, in other words, than the stochastic machines that threaten jobs and educational assessment. In this, generative AI is heir to the insights of the Macy conferences, and, like them, leads to a series of invidious comparisons between the human and the machine. But perhaps an anthropology might shift the discourse into something else entirely—to refuse to see AI as a human simulacrum. Can we change the subject? Hijack this deterministic discourse onto another register altogether?

References

Bateson, Gregory. A Sacred Unity. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Brand, Stewart. “For God’s Sake, Margaret.” Co-Evolution Quarterly (Summer 1976): 32-44.

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. Code. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katharine. How We Became Post-Human. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Kilne, Ronald. “How disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human sciences in the United States, 1940-80.” History of the Human Sciences 33, no. 1 (2020): 12-35. 

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927.

Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela. Autopoesis and Cognition. Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980.

Pias, Claus, ed. Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences, 1946-1953. New York: diaphanes, 2016.

Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1948.

Anthropology is often identified as an academic discipline that explores human diversity and the concept of Otherness (see Leistle 2017), offering an opportunity for the anti-hegemonic presentation of plural lifeworlds (Bertelsen and Bendixen 2016: 8). The focus on Otherness has therefore been considered a prominent paradigm, an epistemological basis for anthropological scholarship (Leistle 2015). The earliest instruction for collecting ethnological data compiled by Gerhard Friedrich Müller in 1740, for his follower Johann Eberhard Fischer, accordingly emphasizes the need for collecting “curiosities” that can be contrasted with European experiences (Bucher 2002; Gisi 2007). However, not all (proto-) anthropologies focused on presenting alterity and contrasting non-European peoples with their European counterparts. In Hungary and a few other (semi-) peripheral academic circles in Europe, the concept of Sameness and similarity occupied a significant role in the development of non-European studies.

This two hundred year-old anthropological research legacy is not just a methodological curiosity; it has significantly impacted the field and the research environment for Hungarian anthropologists in Siberia and Inner Asia. The widespread assumption of a common origin based on a shared nomadic heritage, and hence an indelible bond between Hungarian anthropologists and local Turco-Mongolic peoples in Asia, remains a prevalent condition of fieldwork in this area.

In the nineteenth century, Hungarian nation-building and identity construction were heavily influenced by the idea that Hungarians originated from Asia, unlike any other European nation (Klaniczay 2020). The Finnish national awakening had a similar focus on the Finns’ Siberian kinsfolk (Antonen 2012: 343), whereas Estonian nation-building intensely concentrated on Finno-Ugric linguistic relatedness (Raun 2003; Petersoo 2007).

As a result, rather than pursuing colonial agendas, Hungarian travelers in Asia were interested in finding distant relatives or fellow Hungarians (Mészáros et al. 2017). From the mid-nineteenth century, this focus on finding similarities and connections rather than emphasizing differences and exoticizing alterity inspired generations of Hungarian linguists, ethnographers, and anthropologists to conduct field studies in Siberia and Inner Asia. Consequently, Hungarian anthropological scholarship in Asia primarily catered to domestic interests, and was strongly related to the study of Hungarian prehistory; aligning with the major scholarly paradigms of the Anglo-Saxon world was only a secondary goal (Sárkány 2016).

The Self as Other

Several anthropologists have drawn attention to French Enlightenment debates on liberty, equality, and human dignity (Harvey 2012; Graeber and Wengrow 2021). These debates often invoked real and imagined outsiders to critique contemporary European social realities. This well-known hybrid discourse (academic and literary) had an immense impact on the development of anthropology in Europe. 

This was not, however, the only discourse critiquing eighteenth-century European social formations. As a counter-discourse to Western-European experiences of colonial encounters, a robust corpus of texts emerged in German-speaking regions in which fictional ancient German protagonists, rather than contemporary non-Europeans (“savages” or “Oriental others”), articulated their dissatisfaction with the social conditions of the period (Reusch 2008). Alongside the contrastive power of the classical, the primitive, and the Oriental other, a new construction emerged, that of the uncorrupted “same”: the ancestor who lives in original, virtuous social conditions. The ancient German tribespeople appeared as a version of, or rather, a better alternative to, the savage. An essential difference between the two schemes is that the image of the Germanic tribespeople was impregnated with the idea of the “Heimat,” the homeland (Kuehnemund 1953; Skarsten 2012). 

The outsider’s view, provided by the nationally and linguistically identical, but spatially and/or temporarily remote, played an intrinsic role in nation-building processes in Hungarian and to some extent in other (Finnish, Estonian) academic discourses (Merivirta et al. 2021; Annist – Kaaristo 2013). For these academic circles, Siberian and Oriental Sameness represented a point of alignment rather than a contrast. The powerful image of Germanic tribesmen living in an arboreal homeland provides a critical parallel, if not a direct preview, of similar discourses that developed in Hungary in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the case of Hungary, however, the uncorrupted tribesmen and lost homeland are found not in the distant past, but in Siberia or the Orient. 

The representational scheme of Sameness was particularly successful in Hungary. It influenced national discourse and the development of Oriental studies, literary oeuvres, and anthropological interest. It first appeared in the early 1800s as identicality (Békés 1997): the image of the linguistically-nationally identical but uncorrupted Hungarians residing in Asia. Several authors did their best to recognize Hungarian linguistic and cultural traits in Asia, and to create reports about contemporary Hungarians residing in the Orient. This endeavor resulted in a highly varied discourse of different generic and epistemological statuses, such as scholarly articles, reports, pseudo-ethnographies, and literary works (Mészáros 2023). What are the common features of this representational scheme?

First, a fairly uniform portrayal of Hungarians living in Asia came out of this discourse. Their language was reportedly not only similar to Hungarian, but completely identical to it. Therefore, Hungarians from the Carpathian Basin meeting Asian Hungarians could allegedly carry out a conversation easily, and linguists did not need a refined methodology to show that all spoke the same language. Furthermore, the indigenous Hungarian protagonists of these literary works residing between Greenland and China mutually recognized one another as Hungarians (Szeverényi 2002). 

This representational scheme suggested that Hungarians living in Europe and Asia shared a profound sympathy; they were happy to find one another. Furthermore, Hungarians in Asia were portrayed living virtuous lives in abundance and liberty. Compared to Hungarians in Europe, they usually occupied a higher position in the hierarchy of nations. Their language was richer and more authentic, their customs more original, and their religious life more devout. Asian Hungarians encountered outside of Asia in these reports usually expressed dissatisfaction with the degenerate social realities of nineteenth-century Hungary, and were in a hurry to return to their people and homeland (Mészáros 2023). This supposed homeland was said to be located in the Northern Caucasus, Mongolia, Siberia and even in Kandia (Crete).

According to these works, Hungarians living in Asia preserved what Hungarians in Europe had already forgotten: the original meaning of Hungarian words, customs, and personal virtues. At the same time, they maintained economic and cultural traits that were slowly disappearing in Hungary. This element of cultural conservation was one of the main motives for further research and subsequent expeditions to Asia.

Inspired by the discourse on Hungarians living in Asia, and by the European academic currents pointing to the Oriental origin of the Hungarians (Vermeulen 2015; Carhart 2019), more than a dozen research expeditions were organized by Hungarian noblemen and institutions to find Hungarian kinsfolk in Russia and the Orient up to the outbreak of World War I (Mészáros et al. 2017). By cherry-picking those elements from the local lifeworlds that researchers regarded as ancient traits of Hungarian culture, this variety of anthropology created its own frozen, timeless object in Asia: a people who maintained the uncorrupted Asian traits of Hungarian living in Europe.

This object was, therefore, not the Other, but the Self. As a result, popular research topics in Hungary diverged from contemporary mainstream European or American anthropology well into the twentieth century. Instead of focusing on kinship systems or the development of forms of religion, Hungarian (and to some extent Finnish and Estonian) researchers in the late nineteenth century usually focused on fishing and hunting methods, traps (Urbeschäftigungen), and the collection of epic songs in the Urals and Asia (Munkácsi 1893; Jankó 1900; Sirelius 1906). Inspired by earlier studies, in the early-twentieth century Géza Róheim made efforts to reconstruct an ancient Hungarian belief system as a version of Siberian shamanism (Róheim 1954). Based on these ideas, Vilmos Diószegi conducted several field studies in the Soviet Union and Mongolia in the 1960s and 70s, exploring parallel features in local shamanic practices. As a result, he hypothesized an ancient Hungarian pagan belief system (Diószegi 1958, 1968). After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, indigenous researchers in Siberia and Central Asia celebrated his work as a resource for national spiritual revival (Quijada et al. 2015).

The Return of the Idea of Sameness to the Field

Besides developing a set of analytical tools based on the concept of Sameness, Hungarian travelers and anthropologists also established a unique fieldwork methodology based on approaching local peoples in Asia as relatives, rather than exotic others (Klima 2019). Hungarian travelers distinguished themselves from other European travelers and researchers in the region, asserting their desire to reconnect with their kinfolk and visit their homeland (Herman 1898; Szádeczky Kardoss 1895). Notably, Zichy Jenő and Béla Széchenyi, two Hungarian noblemen who organized and financed research expeditions in Asia, sought research permits from the Chinese authorities to conduct research in their ancient homeland (Fajcsák 2023), and in the case of Széchenyi, to visit the graves of Hungarian ancestors, offering prayers for the Hungarian nation (Széchenyi 1890: xix–xxi).

Hungarian researchers highlighted their distinctive position in Asia during their research trips in Siberia among the Obugric peoples. Bernát Munkácsi and Károly Pápai often mentioned their aim to seek out the relatives of the Hungarian nation in Siberia in their fieldwork (Munkácsi 2008:73–74, 93; Pápai 1888: 623–624). A few years later, János Jankó, although heavily reliant on support from the Russian state, assured the indigenous peoples that his intentions differed from those of the Russians (Jankó 2000). When Vilmos Diószegi conducted fieldwork in the Soviet Union and Mongolia after World War II, he also often stressed to the local academic circles and beyond that his main interest was to find parallels between Siberian shamanism and ancient Hungarian religious beliefs (Sántha 2002). Even recent ethnomusicological research trips carried out by János Sipos, Gergely Agócs, and Dávid Somfai Kara reinforce the idea among academic communities and in field studies that Hungarian folk music is part of a great Turkic musical ecumene (Agócs 2020; Sipos 2020).

Sameness and the Diverse Landscape of Anthropology

Hungarian anthropology, focusing on the idea of Sameness, has led to a wealth of research in Asia and has given Hungarian researchers a special position there. This approach has also fostered enduring partnerships with local researchers and communities (Sipos 2003), and facilitated the exchange of information between academic circles and local people (Somfai 2023).

The diversity of the global academic landscape of anthropology is increasingly apparent as research methods and paradigms crisscross between schools and regional varieties. Recently, there has been a growing emphasis on portraying the development of anthropology not only through the major paradigm shifts in metropolitan centers (Kuklick 1991; Candea 2018), but also by giving a detailed picture of the diverse co-development of different anthropologies (Boškovic 2008; Barrera-Gonzalez et al. 2017). The emergence of local (in some cases parallel) disciplines in Europe (Hofer 2018) demonstrates that there is room for diverse and possibly incongruent methodologies and terminologies under the umbrella of anthropology (Sárkány 2013; Mészáros 2022).

The Hungarian example points out that regional academic communities demarcate with a certain degree of independence which activities can be regarded as full-blown academic research, and which do not fulfill the conditions of scientific inquiry. Therefore, not only do the different linguistic, methodological, and sociocultural backgrounds define the national boundaries of anthropological discourse, but also the dissimilar epistemic status of scholarly activities. Texts that may be an organic part of academic discourse in one tradition may be discredited in another.

In Central-Eastern Europe, in what Michal Buchowski has called the “twilight zone of anthropology” (Buchowski 2014), the epistemological status of texts and scholarly contributions is particularly diverse. In the Hungarian ethnological tradition, the epistemological status of texts that focus on Hungarians living in Asia has been the subject of a long debate, preventing their inclusion in retrospective historical studies. This exclusion has led to other contentious debates about Oriental versus primitive Otherness, and the identification of other peoples as kinsfolk in Hungarian ethnology. The irreconcilable difference between the scholarly discourse on Sameness and ideas of Oriental Otherness resulted in incommensurate research epistemologies in Hungary. The extent to which a shared discourse space can be created within anthropology is determined by methodological and epistemological differences and academic networks. Furthermore, many regional varieties of anthropology directly challenge mainstream anthropological or scientific methods, which makes it challenging to find a common ground among anthropological schools.

In anthropologies focusing on Otherness and human diversity, the idea of Sameness is an underlying condition of anthropological work, postulating that “despite, or perhaps because of their differences, all societies embody the same cultural value and worth” (Argyrou 2002:1). That is, “Sameness understood as human unity has always been the ethnological a priori. It has been the axiomatic proposition that demarcated the epistemological space within which it became possible to study Others” (Argyrou 2002:23).

In Hungarian Oriental studies, however, the idea of Sameness had a different epistemological status. Here, Sameness was not an underlying research condition; it had to be unfolded, explored, and demonstrated by subsequent field studies. Not all Asian peoples were identical (or kinfolk) to Hungarians (or ancient Hungarians): only those who conformed to the representational scheme of Sameness established in Hungarian discourse on national origins and prehistory.

Although Sameness is a representational scheme rather than an a priori in Hungarian anthropology, it has been immune to anthropological reflection. The political motivations behind the portrayal of “the Other” as “the Self,” and the perception of Asian cultures as maintaining identical cultural elements from Hungarian prehistory have not been thoroughly explained, and Hungarian anthropological scholarship provides little in the way of a critique of this perspective. Studies on the development of anthropology have pointed out that colonial encounters and dominant European representational schemes of Otherness heavily influenced ethnographic records, but little is known about how the representational scheme of Sameness in Hungary created its own unique Other: the Self. 

References:

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Annist, Aet, and Maarja Kaaristo. “Studying Home Fields: Encounters of Ethnology and Anthropology in Estonia.” Journal of Baltic Studies 44 (2013): 121–51. .

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Barrera-González, Andrés, Monica Heintz, and Anna Horolets, eds. European Anthropologies. New York: Berghahn, 2017.

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John Tresch and Richard Handler, guest editors

Anthropology’s intense concern with its own past stands out among the social sciences. After a quick review of current literature, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and even historians can jump right into their presentation of new findings. But few anthropologists writing about the contemporary world do so without at least an acknowledgement, and often a careful reckoning, of how anthropology’s previous theoretical frames and (geo-) political position continue to shape current anthropological work on the issues at hand.

In-depth study of the histories of anthropology adds detail and complexity to these briefer acknowledgements. Careful, contextual, polyphonic history reveals hidden contradictions and ambiguities; it can highlight the complicities of canonized figures and movements; it might produce an unwanted empathy for actors and developments we were inclined to condemn. Moreover, historical researchers focused on anthropology—or anthropologists focused on history—can often be deliberate and explicit about the ways in which their archival research, oral history, and hermeneutic reconstruction addresses and engages with current concerns.

This Special Focus Section is the result of a series of panels held in the First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies, “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures,” hosted online between 4 and 7 December, 2023. This conference—a landmark for history of anthropology, with nearly 100 presentations from scholars around the world—was organized by the history of anthropology network [HOAN].

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