This biography of Max Gluckman (1911-1975) is part of a series of pocket introductions to major figures in Euro-American Anthropology. From what I can gather, having now read a couple of them, its editor, Aleksandar Bošković, does not ask authors for much more than a clear, concise life and thought narrative of its hero, which Hugh Macmillan certainly delivers.
Robert Gordon’s brilliant biography (2018), which casts a rather meticulous shadow over this book, should not go unacknowledged, not only because Macmillan relies on it but also because of how they differ. The title of Gordon’s biography, “The Enigma of Max Gluckman,” foregrounds a mysterious figure, whose self-fashioning struggled to overcome obstacles that might have done lesser men in. Macmillan also recognizes his hero’s personal and political ambiguities, but what nevertheless develops is somewhat less puzzling. Here is a sketch of the remarkable life that emerges in the book’s six chapters.
We have added twenty-four new items to HAR‘s bibliography of references. This includes several recently published edited volumes such as the second installment in the Franz Boas Papers series on James Teit (Laforet et al. 2024) and Fabrics of Anthropological Knowledge: Changing Perspectives in Europe and Beyond (Birkalan-Gedik and Dimpflmeier 2025).
Lisbon hosts, from May 13 to 15, 2026, the international conference Histories of Anthropology and Restitutions,a gathering that examines—through the lens of disciplinary history—a topic that has become unavoidable in the fields of heritage and the humanities: restitution. Far from being limited to the return of objects to their places of origin, the conference proposes to think of restitution as a set of processes that also involves knowledge, words, sounds, and images embedded in ethnographic and anthropological collections and archives—and that may produce unforeseen effects and outcomes, not always reducible to the material act of returning. The international debate on restitution has a longer history than recent discussions might suggest. Today, protocols and political, scientific, and ethical positions—sometimes ambivalent—are multiplying within a contested terminological field, ranging from repatriation to reparation, from return to healing. This landscape highlights how different histories and regimes of value—sometimes different ways of understanding the world—shape complex negotiations among institutions, collectives, and individuals.
The program features the participation of Indigenous voices from Brazil with a decisive role in current debates on memory and restitution. Indigenous researcher and curator Tonico Benites (Guarani Kaiowá) delivers the opening keynote. At the closing session, artist, researcher, and activist Glicéria Tupinambá (Tupinambá) presents a performative intervention at the National Museum of Ethnology, centered on the Tupinambá mantle and ancestral technologies, bringing together artistic creation, restitution, and territory. With panels organized along three thematic lines—“Reconstitutions and Provenance,” “Archives in the Field,” and “From the Museum Object to the Restituted Subject”—the conference also features João Pacheco de Oliveira (Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro) in connection with the launch of his recent book O Fogo avassalador e a nova semeadura (The Overwhelming Fire and the New Sowing. On Museums, Anthropologies, and Indigenous Protagonism, Mórula Editorial, Rio de Janeiro, 2nd edition, 2026). The Portuguese Film Archive (Cinemateca Portuguesa) joins the event with two sessions dedicated to the tentative restitution of Margot Dias’s (1908-2001) films to the Makonde of Mozambique, expanding the discussion to moving images and the historical responsibilities of film archives.
This conference, marking the conclusion of the CNRS-sponsored International Research Network dedicated to the Transatlantic History of Latin American Anthropologies, brings together more than 15 institutions from six countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, France, and Portugal). Held at NOVA University and the National Museum of Ethnology, this in-person event uses Portuguese and Spanish as its working languages.
Organizing committee: João Leal (CRIA/IN2PAST); Christine Laurière (CNRS/HÉRITAGES; IRL2034 – Mondes en transition); Frederico Delgado Rosa (CRIA/IN2PAST; IRL2034 – Mondes en transition); Sónia Vespeira de Almeida (CRIA/IN2PAST); Rodrigo Lacerda (CRIA/IN2PAST).
Histórias da Antropologia e Restituições / download the program (in Portuguese) here.
This series of essays is the result of the April 2025 conference, Environmental Anthropologies: Pasts, Presents, Futures organized by the History of Anthropology Review in collaboration with Yale’s History of Science and Medicine Program, held in New Haven.
Edited by HAR editors and advisors, the series includes contributions by anthropologists and historians of science: Elaine Ayers, Eduardo S. Brondizio with Ryan Adams and Stefano Fiori, Sophie Chao, Deborah Coen, Michael Degani, Mayanthi Fernando, Megnaa Mehtta, Anand Pandian, and Josh Sterlin.
The essays address environmental anthropology’s diverse intellectual and political histories; ethnobotany; plantation ecologies; legal-material approaches to land and sediment; and seasonal “modes.” It appears as part of Fieldsights’ “Theorizing the Contemporary” initiative.
On 12 February 2026, the World Anthropological Union (WAU), through its scientific chamber, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), established the IUAES Commission on the History of Anthropology (CHOA), addressing a thematic gap among existing commissions. The Chair and Deputy Chair of the new IAEUS Commission on the History of Anthropology are, respectively, Celso Castro (Fundação Getulio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro) and Frederico Delgado Rosa (Nova University, Lisbon).
CHOA’s overall objective is to reflect on the complex trajectories of anthropology as a plural discipline encompassing a diversity of professional practices and shifting scholarly boundaries. It aims to uncover both the scholarly legacies—theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic—and the broader biographies of individuals who dedicated themselves to anthropology, as well as the histories of organizations related to anthropological knowledge, such as higher education and research institutions, museums, journals and archives, governmental or professional bodies, etc.
Time Work.Debt, inheritance, and intergenerational practice
Let’s call it “time work”: Those practices that negotiate the relations between the living and the dead. Time work is not merely conducted by archivists and historians, but by grave diggers and undertakers, documentary filmmakers and memoirists, knowledge bearers, politicians, war journalists, practitioners of living traditions, speakers of dead languages, as well as by any and all who keep something – a story, a trinket, an heirloom, a song – holding onto it to remember. Time work is not easily done without feeling; It is driven by the weight of mattering, it is attention called by the fact that now – this, ‘our’ now – is in-part composed by the shadows of what and who came before. Time work is haunting work, it whispers of recurrences (this happened before), and implicitly describes the present as a thing pushed to the surface of existence by the collective force of innumerable spent lives, over centuries, over millennia.
In the summer 2026 Studies in Remoteness symposium, we explore the ways that time work might destabilise the remoteness of history (its absence, distance, and neglect). How might we describe the work that transforms time into a weighted force that accumulates, persists, and can be carried forward, often across generations? Through what actions is one accountable to the past? What does it mean to hold or carry an inheritance? In what ways are people indebted to those who came before, and how might the living “pay the debts” that have accumulated over generations? What kinds of temporalities do different approaches to time work produce, and what social relations are then enabled or foreclosed? Through these questions, the symposium reflects on the entanglement of debt and history, exploring debt as an enduring paradigm that variously informs intergenerational relations, systems of oppression, and historical justice. We particularly invite proposals that engage with voices and worldviews often marginalized or erased in dominant knowledge systems.
While anthropology has produced a vast body of published work, far more remains unpublished. Begun in 2025, Anthropology’s Lost Library (ALL) will soon be offering a digital home for anthropological writings that were intended for scholarly and public consumption but were never completed—essays, books, and articles; theses and dissertation chapters; grant applications, journalistic pieces, and op-eds. Though ALL is still taking shape, the repository will be designed both to offer a stable and searchable home for these works and also to contribute broadly to the study of anthropology and its histories by documenting the reasons why these works were never ultimately published.
If this new project resonates with you, please contact Joshua Rubin at AnthrosLostLibrary@proton.me. While we are particularly focused at this stage on expanding our network of interested scholars, we are also seeking people who might be open to contributing pieces that can serve as a foundation for the collection. Manuscripts of any length and level of completeness are eligible for inclusion, provided that they were written with the intention of publication.
The “Forum on Anthropology and Literature” at next year’s Modern Language Association conference, which will be held in Los Angeles (January 7-10, 2027), is seeking papers for history of anthropology related sessions.
It is hard to do full scholarly justice to John Rankine Goody (1919–2015), a rare occurrence in the anthropological world of the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Originally a student of literature at Cambridge, Goody switched to anthropology shortly after the Second World War and became an Africanist baptized by fieldwork in Ghana. In the early stage of his career, Goody was an integral member of the structural functionalist orthodoxy of the British school, though of a younger cohort than its top leaders. Alfred Gell would later recall that as a student at Cambridge he had viewed Goody, in the spirit of undergraduate silliness, as a sidekick to the “functionalist Satan” Meyer Fortes (Gell 1999, 4). Among Goody’s specializations was the emblematic and arcane field—kinship studies—that, at the time, bore witness to some of the most esoteric discussions.
If Goody’s early career was marked by belonging to an orthodoxy, his later career clearly defies any simple pigeonholing. Already before he replaced Fortes as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University in 1973, he had started to tinker with topics that were rather uncommon among his colleagues, for instance, the role of agricultural technology or orality and literacy in the organization of society. He later developed his interests into several books, progressively becoming a specialist on topics as diverse as domestic production and reproduction, cognitive anthropology, cooking, flowers, metals, history of anthropology, comparative world history, and historical sociology. Even if he shared these concerns with Marxists, postmodernists, and cognitive anthropologists from the 1970s onwards, he did not belong to any of these camps.
This past fall, the History of Anthropology Interest Groupof the American Anthropological Association awarded its inaugural Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Prize to Nala K. Williams, doctoral candidate in anthropology and Black Studies at Yale University, for the paper “‘Feather-Bed Resistance’ and Racial Vindication in Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey.” In an exceptionally well-researched and well-argued paper, Williams profiles the intellectual and professional journey of Eslanda Robeson, a Black expatriate American anthropologist who trained at the London School of Economics in the 1930s and subsequently authored a multi-genre ethnography entitled African Journey. In a nuanced analysis, Williams examines the innovative yet fraught efforts by Robeson to develop an anthropological approach towards race and racism at the LSE during a period when Malinowski was at the height of his powers. William’s history reminds us of the ways that anthropology has been a paradoxical tool that reinscribes its own authority while also serving the subversive political projects of others.
The runner-up was Maria Murad, doctoral candidate in anthropology at Oxford University, for her paper, “The Life of Kaatxwaaxsnéi: A Biography of Florence Shotridge.” Murad’s paper examines the work of Kaatxwaaxsnéi or Florence Shotridge, the first known Indigenous American woman to lead an anthropological expedition, the Wanemakar expedition, in the 1910s. Through a careful analysis of Shortridge’s varied forms of work as a Chilkat blanket weaver, cultural exhibition performer, and an assistant at the Penn Museum, Murad restores indigenous agency in the history of anthropology and unsettles received narratives of knowledge production.
For more information about this prize, please contact Dr. Andrew Newman, andrew.newman@wayne.edu.
An invitation for all working on the history of anthropology, broadly construed: Are you reading and writing about classic anthropology texts in courses or research? Do you use primary sources created by anthropologists in your scholarship? Is your work concerned with definitions and classifications of human kinds, or are you reckoning with legacies of anthropological fieldwork or collections in the present?
Come learn about publication opportunities with the History of Anthropology Review, an online, open access, scholarly magazine. HAR is the work of an editorial collective of early career researchers and offers a wide variety of formats particularly suited to early publishing experiences.
We hope to support you to leverage your coursework, Master’s research, or a tangent you’ve had to cut from your doctoral thesis into something to be shared with our readers. HAR is also actively looking for new members to join our collective and shape our (online) pages.
There are signs of a Goffmanian turn in political economy, alongside renewed interest in the biographical trajectory of Goffman himself. What are, or could be, the hallmarks of a Goffmanian political economy? How did political economy concerns and questions figure in Goffman’s work and thought? What might the systematic incorporation into political economy scholarship (broadly defined) of Goffmanian concepts and sensibilities look like? What distinctive insights does the existing Goffman-influenced political economy scholarship offer?
As a title, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Racism in Postcolonial Thought is refreshing, in that it identifies as a keyword not a supposed religion (“Judaism”) nor yet an ascription to a certain set of humans (“Jews”), but rather a powerful cultural construction that is the shared product of those who identify with “Jewishness” and those who do not. Thakkar’s study is grounded in a critical study of UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race. As she documents, that statement and the anthropological and other scholarly discourses connected with it understood race as “plastic,” meaning that the apparent inferiority of certain races—immigrant Jews were an example for Franz Boas—was largely the effect of environmental factors and was therefore subject to amelioration under the right conditions. The further assertion was that anti-racist education was the best response to racism and its then recent genocidal consequences. The postcolonial critique of such a position is, in essence, that these interventions left in place structures of racism and the forms of domination that emerged from them.
This 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.
Coordinated by Fabiana Dimpflmeier (Gabriele d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara), Maria Beatrice Di Brizio (Centro di Ricerca MODI – Università di Bologna), and Elena Emma Sottilotta (University of Cambridge) the panel aims to overcome polarised histories of anthropologies, exploring the multiple roles of female scholars in the development of the emerging disciplines of ethnography and folklore between the mid-19th and the early 20th centuries.
The Call for Papers closes on 26 January 2026. Further details are available on the webpage for Panel 083.
Since 1973, the History of Anthropology Review (formerly the History of Anthropology Newsletter) has been a venue for publication and conversation on the many histories of the discipline of anthropology. We became an open access web publication in 2016. Please subscribe to our emails below to receive updates as we publish new essays, reviews, and bibliographies. We welcome submissions.
