History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides a leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology, and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its annual prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognize a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply.

Guidelines for the Award

Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are asked to submit an up-to-date two-page C.V. (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines.

Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope.

Eligibility

Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a Ph.D. or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years”, with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in the calculation. They will also be sensitive to the disruption that the Covid 19 pandemic has had on career progression and will take such factors into account in their decision making. Candidates are encouraged to include details relating to any of these issues in their supporting documents.

Scholars who have submitted an essay for consideration in previous years are welcome to do so again. However, new manuscripts must not be substantially the same as any they have submitted in the past.  

Prize

The winning scholar will be awarded £250 and have their essay published in History of the Human Sciences (subject to the essay passing through the journal’s peer review process). The intention is to award the prize to a single entrant but the judging panel may choose to recognise more than one essay in the event of a particularly strong field.

Deadlines

Entries should be made by Friday, March 28, 2025. The panel aims to make a decision by the end of May 2025. The winning entry will be submitted for peer review automatically. The article, clearly identified as the winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, will then be published in the journal as soon as the production schedule allows. The winning scholar and article will also be promoted by History of the Human Sciences, including on its website, which hosts content separate to the journal.

Previous Winners

2023-24: Libby O’Neil (Yale University), ‘Thinking in Systems: Problems of Organization at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Society for General Systems Research, 1950-1957’; Alfred Freeborn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), ‘Testing Psychiatrists to Diagnose Schizophrenia: Crisis, Consensus and Computers in post-war Psychiatry’

2022-23: Freddy Foks (Manchester), “Finding modernity in England’s past: social anthropology and the transformation of social history in Britain, 1959-1977”

2021-22: Harry Parker (Cambridge), “The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain”. Special commendation: Ohad Reiss Sorokin (Princeton), “”‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)”.

2020-21: Liana Glew (Penn State), “Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history”, and Simon Torracinta (Yale), “Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants”. Special commendation: Erik Baker (Harvard), “The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian”.

2019-20: Danielle Carr (Columbia), “Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism”. Special commendation: Katie Joice (Birkbeck), “Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67”.

You can read more about these essays in interviews with the authors on the journal’s website.

To Apply

Entrants should e-mail an anonymized copy of their essay, along with an up-to-date C.V., to hhs@histhum.com. 

Further Inquiries

If you have any questions about the prize, or anything relating to the journal, please email hhs@histhum.com.

The HAR Editors are pleased to spread the word about the upcoming event “FAIRly Obscure: An Edit-a-thon Exploring Anthropology, Communities, and Wikipedia Representation.” The event is presented by The University of Maryland Center for Archival Futures, the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution; George Washington University’s Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology; The Bentley Historical Library and University of Michigan School of Information; the University of Missouri’s College of Information Studies; and the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR), and Wikimedia DC. It will take place, in a hybrid format, on Friday, December 13 from 11:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. EST.

Are you interested in the history of anthropology? In archival description, outreach, and linked data? In FAIR and CARE principles for social science and scientific information? Join a co-sponsored edit-a-thon event to support the ethical description of anthropological knowledge and anthropological records focused on reworking and expanding related Wikipedia and Wikidata entries. This edit-a-thon will focus on editing, adding, and checking information on these publicly available and publicly maintained databases relating to anthropologists and anthropology. Interested audience may include community members, anthropologists, graduate students in anthropology, graduate students in information science, linked data nerds, and others!

No Wikipedia editing experience is necessary. Opening ceremonial event will begin at 11:30 a.m. Training will be provided, taking place 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. (EST). Open editing time will run from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. (EST). At 2:30 p.m. there will be a Wikidata demo. If you’ve never edited before, please plan to attend the training session. 

Find out more by visiting the Wiki page and register using Eventbrite.

Event Locations

Primary site: University of Michigan: Whiting Room, Bentley Historical Library, 1150 Beal Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA

Satellite site: Room 2119, Hornbake Library-South, College of Information, University of Maryland, 4130 Campus Dr., College Park, MD 20740

Or online!

Event Preparation

Laptops are required. Please bring your own. Please create a Wikipedia account prior to the event. 

Please read or refresh on the following:

1. Wiki guide from Australia
2. Living persons guidance
3. Protocols for Native Archival Materials
4. CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance  
5. FAIR Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship 
6. On editing Wikipedia for history: Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (June 2006): 117-146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/4486062.  

Further Information

Training will be provided, and lunch will be provided for in-person participants who RSVP in advance, taking place December 13, 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. at the two host sites. Open editing time will run from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. (EST). If you’ve never edited before, please plan to attend the training session. 

Please fill out this quick Google Form to RSVP for lunch and indicate your interest in Wikipedia or Wikidata.

The HAR Editorial Board is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition, “Crania Americana and the Archive of Scientific Racism,” at the Library Company of Philadelphia, curated by HAR editor Paul Wolff Mitchell. The exhibition will be on display through October 2024.

There will be a free, public opening event for the exhibition on Tuesday, September 17 at 5:30 p.m. This exhibition comprises part of Project Obtuse, a collaboration between the Library Company, Mitchell, and Jicarilla Apache artist Zachariah Julian, whose composition will premiere the following evening. Together, Mitchell and Julian examined the work of Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), whose papers reside, in part, at the Library Company. Morton is known today as among the most influential architects of scientific racism in the United States, both for his publications – most notably Crania Americana (1839) – and for his collection of nearly one thousand human skulls from across the world, amassed and measured during his lifetime to supply the “data” for these works. In this exhibition, Mitchell contextualizes the work of Morton and explores how Morton’s thinking developed and how his theories still affect us today. During the opening reception and viewing event, guests will have the opportunity to meet Mitchell and Julian and ask questions about their work.

For more information on this event and directions to the Library Company of Philadelphia, please visit the Library Company’s website.

Congratulations, Paul!

First ISA-RC08 Online Conference
October 16, 2024 – 11:00-17:00 CET

The International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee on the History of Sociology (RC08) proposes an ongoing series of online conferences with three main objectives in mind: (1) creating a new, institutional venue to stimulate new research and new researchers in the history of global sociologies; (2) keeping every member of RC08 up-to-date about the most recent developments in research; (3) maintaining and strengthening scientific and social ties between RC08 members, and creating the preconditions for shared research projects.

A maximum of five papers will be selected for each half-day conference to save time for exchanges and debate. No fee will be charged for the online conference. The first ISA-RC08 online conference will focus on methods. Explicit reflection on research methods is still at an embryonic stage in
the history of sociology, especially when the latter is practiced by sociologists, whose methodological training is focused on techniques for the collection and treatment of contemporary data. We thus invite our colleagues to submit proposals on the following topics:

1) Selecting our objects and avoiding (or embracing) a whiggish understanding of the discipline(s);
2) Selecting a unit of analysis (actors, ideas, institutions, instruments, contexts), model cases, or samples;
3) Working in the archive;
4) Utilizing various kinds of sources (fieldnotes, diaries, letters, unpublished papers, questionnaires, interviews, machines, data matrixes, etc.);
5) Using oral histories and interviews collected by others;
6) The use of unconventional (especially digital or visual) sources;
7) Re-furbishing and re-calculating quantitative data;
8) Preparing comparative work. In particular, we would like to discuss with our junior and senior
colleagues about their work, research design, and troubleshooting: the selections they made, the difficulties they found, the decisions they took when finding themselves collecting and analysing historical data.

Timeline:
July 31, 2024 – Deadline for submitting title and abstract (max 250 words).

August 31, 2024 – Selected papers announced.
October 16, 2024 – Online conference.

Titles and abstracts (max 250 words) must be submitted by the deadline of July 31, 2024 to both organizers:
Matteo Bortolini: matteo.bortolini@unipd.it
Giovanni Zampieri: giovanni.zampieri.3@phd.unipd.it

The 6th HOAN (History of Anthropology Network) Meeting will be held on May 24 at 5:00 pm CET. No registration is required; just use this Zoom Link.

The 6th HOAN Meeting will be opened by a keynote speech from John Tresch (Warburg Institute, University of London, History of Anthropology Review). The title of his talk is From Cosmologies to Cosmograms: Updating a Concept from the History of Anthropology and the abstract of his talk is available at the HOAN Meetings page.

Program of the Meeting:

17:00 Welcome by HOAN convenors, Fabiana Dimpflmeier and Hande Birkalan-Gedik

17:05 Keynote speaker: John Tresch (Warburg Institute; University of London)
From Cosmologies to Cosmograms: Updating a Concept from the History of Anthropology

17:25 Open forum for questions and comments

17:30 HOAN Correspondents presentation: Michael Edwards (Australia)

17:35 Dorothy L. Zinn (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano): presentation of Ernesto De Martino The End of the World: Cultural Apocalypse and Transcendence, University of Chicago Press, 2023.

17:45 Han Vermeulen (Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Beatrice Di Brizio (MODI – University of Bologna): presentation of the research project Early Ethnographers in the Long Nineteenth Century (2024-2026)

17:55 Open forum for questions and comments

18:00 Closing and farewell words by HOAN convenors 

The Forum for the History of Human Science of the History of Science Society is pleased to announce the call for its annual awards. The deadline for both awards is June 1.

Dissertation Prize: The Forum for History of Human Science awards a biennial prize of US $250 for the best recent doctoral dissertation on some aspect of the history of the human sciences.The competition takes place during even-numbered years. The winner of the prize is announced at the annual History of Science Society meeting. Entries are encouraged from authors in any discipline, as long as the work is related to the history of the human sciences, broadly construed. To be eligible, the dissertation must be in English and have been formally filed within the three years previous to the year of the award. A dissertation may be submitted more than once, as long as it meets the submission requirements.

Burnham Award: The Forum for History of Human Science (FHHS) and the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Science (JHBS) encourage researchers in their early careers to submit unpublished manuscripts for the annual John C. Burnham Early Career Award, named in honor of this prominent historian of the human sciences and past-editor of JHBS. The publisher provides the author of the paper an honorarium of US $500 at the time the manuscript is accepted for publication by JHBS. (see details below). Unpublished manuscripts in English dealing with any aspect of the history of the human sciences are eligible. The paper should meet the publishing guidelines of the JHBS. Eligible scholars are those who do not hold tenured university positions (or equivalent) and are not more than seven years beyond the Ph.D. Graduate students and independent scholars are encouraged to submit. Manuscripts may be re-submitted for the prize, as long as they have not been published or submitted to another journal and the submitting scholar is still in early career. The manuscript cannot be submitted to any other journal and still qualify for this award. Please also submit a CV. Past winners are not eligible to submit again.

Full details about the awards can be found on the Forum’s website. Submissions should be sent in PDF format to eherman@uoregon.edu.

October 10-11, 2024
American Philosophical Society (APS)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) at the APS’s Library & Museum, this hybrid conference will be an opportunity for people to gather together and share their experiences, insights, and visions for the future surrounding collaborative, community-engaged work in language and cultural revitalization, particularly the relationships between Indigenous knowledge and archives. 

Submission Deadline: May 31, 2024

The conference committee welcomes proposals for presentations from Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants throughout North America, Latin America, and beyond. They hope this event will facilitate a space to create new connections and reaffirm long-standing relationships and reflect upon what they can teach for cultivating newer ones, to give mutual encouragement and inspiration, and to spotlight emerging new initiatives and approaches.

For this hybrid conference, we welcome proposals for in-person or virtual presentations. This gathering is intended especially to highlight the work happening within and by Indigenous communities. We envision this conference being attended by members of Indigenous communities working in many capacities, museum and archives professionals, academic researchers, and anyone else with an interest in these topics.

Suggested topics include:

• Current work by Indigenous archives and cultural centers
• Language revitalization: Current work in teaching Indigenous languages, or the use of archives for language reclamation.
• Beyond paper: how Indigenous knowledge in archives is activated in everyday life, or how it relates to land, ethnobotany, art-making, material culture, law, and more.
• Reflections and relationships: conversations with former fellows or interns, or how archival materials impact relationships within communities, and beyond.
• Relational reciprocity in scholarship: what are some best practices, models of successful partnerships, or the place of archives in such work
• Projects that engage with collections at the APS

The committee welcomes a wide variety of creative and unique presentation styles such as:

• Group conversation or panel discussion
• Workshop, training, or class
• Talk story or show-and-tell
• Performance, reading, or art sharing
• Listening session
• Tour
• Presentation
• Community sharing
• Propose your own format! 

Anyone interested is encouraged to reach out to staff at CNAIR (cnair@amphilsoc.org) to discuss their idea for presenting.

Applicants should submit a title and a 250-word proposal related to these themes by May 31, 2024 via Interfolio: https://apply.interfolio.com/145175

Proposals will be accepted in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Proposals in Indigenous languages are also welcome as long as a translation into one of the above languages is provided. Spanish interpretation will be offered for all of the conference sessions online.

Decisions will be announced in July. 

All in-person presenters will receive travel subsidies and hotel accommodations. Accepted presenters will be asked to prepare remarks appropriate for a broad range of audiences and for video streaming. Presenters who wish to create a scholarly journal-style version of their presentation will have the opportunity to publish such a version of their presentation in the APS’s Transactions. 

For more information contact CNAIR at cnair@amphilsoc.org.

This exhibition at CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge), curated and researched by Paula López Caballero, displays photographs and ethnographic fieldnotes produced by Cambridge-based anthropologist Susan Drucker-Brown (1936-2023) in the Mixtec-speaking village of Jamiltepec (Oaxaca, Mexico) in 1957 and 1958. She was one of the first women anthropologists in Mexico, and a pioneer in the study of women’s clothing and the changes clothes were undergoing, with the replacement of handmade (loom) garments by industrial ones.

The exhibition not only presents this little-known aspect of Drucker-Brown’s work, it also invites us to reflect on three topics: firstly, the processes of mestizaje, indigeneity and modernization experienced in Mexico in the mid-twentieth century at an indigenous and rural locality. Secondly, the everyday life of ethnographic research and, in particular, the role of women in fieldwork. And thirdly, the afterlives of the materials produced during fieldwork, either as collections in museums or archives, or as part of restitution efforts to the villages where the anthropologists worked.

HAR readers may be familiar with the exhibition’s curator, López Caballero’s, recent HAR piece on medical practices in Zinacantán, Mexico, in the 1940s.

The exhibition on Drucker-Brown’s work will be open from April 22 to May 31, 2024 at CRASSH. An opening reception will be held on April 22, along with the related symposium ‘Rethinking anthropological fieldwork in historical perspective,’ held by CRASSH and the Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology on the same date. For more information about the exhibition and these events, please see the exhibition page.

This exhibition is organized with the support of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova, Fundación Harp Helú, Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, Department of Social Anthropology, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, Brown Family.

HAR’s editors are pleased to share this CFP, which now includes a new deadline of March 22, 2024.

Historical Approaches in Cultural Analysis Working Group Interim Meeting

Where? Herder Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung (Marburg, Germany), and online (a hybrid event).

When? June 13-14, 2024

CALL FOR PAPERS

Europe can be approached from various angles: as a geographical, political, and economic historical entity; as an embodiment of cultural diversity rooted in national, regional, and local identities, histories, and languages; and as a subject of yearning or a cultural construct. Contemporary transnational and post colonial viewpoints perceive Europe as a dynamic, complex web of wider transnational interactions and exchanges, highlighting the influences of intertwined and intersecting, yet simultaneously contested and competing historical narratives, memories, and identities. These encounters in the past and present have played a significant role in the historical imagination and contemporary formation of Europe, as they shaped distinct practices, methodologies, and traditions in the disciplinary landscape of folklore studies, European ethnology, and social and cultural anthropology across the continent.

HAR readers will be interested in the recent event “The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall,” which was recorded and is now available for viewing or listening online.

Recorded on January 19, 2024, this “Authors Meet Critics” panel centered on the book, The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California, by Andrew Garrett, Professor of Linguistics and the Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Professor Garrett was joined in conversation by James Clifford, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz; William Hanks, Berkeley Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology; and Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot), a storyteller, poet, artist, graphic designer, and writer, and author of “Ararapikva: Karuk Indian Literature from Northwest California.” Leanne Hinton, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, moderated the panel. The event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology, Department of Linguistics, Department of Ethnic Studies, Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, and Native American Studies. 

About the Book

In January 2021, at a time when many institutions were reevaluating fraught histories, the University of California removed anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber’s name from a building on its Berkeley campus. Critics accused Kroeber of racist and dehumanizing practices that harmed Indigenous people; university leaders repudiated his values. In “The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall,” Andrew Garrett examines Kroeber’s work in the early twentieth century and his legacy today, asking how a vigorous opponent of racism and advocate for Indigenous rights in his own era became a symbol of his university’s failed relationships with Native communities. Garrett argues that Kroeber’s most important work has been overlooked: his collaborations with Indigenous people throughout California to record their languages and stories. “The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall” offers new perspectives on the early practice of anthropology and linguistics and on its significance today and in the future. Kroeber’s documentation was broader and more collaborative and multifaceted than is usually recognized. As a result, the records Indigenous people created while working with him are relevant throughout California as communities revive languages, names, songs, and stories. Garrett asks readers to consider these legacies, arguing that the University of California chose to reject critical self-examination when it unnamed Kroeber Hall.

Watch the panel on YouTube, or listen to it as a podcast on Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts.

The Journal of Anthropology Research (JAR) is looking for papers on the history of different national traditions of anthropology as well as international connections and networks, concentrating on any of the subfields of anthropology. Of particular interest are papers that contextualize the history of anthropology within the history of the sciences and humanities more generally, and/or within political history including colonialism, decolonization, and nation building.

Submission details and more information about the journal can be found on its homepage.

Most recently, JAR ran a special issue on Decolonization and the History of American Anthropology featuring articles from HAR editor Nick Barron, Grant Arndt, and David Dinwoodie (as well as an introductory essay from Arndt).

The HAR editors wish to bring readers’ attention to a new publication by Professor Benjamin Breen: Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Hachette/Grand Central). The book tells the history of social scientists’ fascination with psychedelic drugs and their possibilities during the middle of the twentieth century, and how that fascination and optimism soured over time. Breen focuses his narrative on Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and the diverse circle of scholars, artists, and government agents that gathered around the pair. We anticipate that the book will be of interest to many HAR readers.

To learn more about Tripping on Utopia, we invite you to read David Lipset’s interview with Breen about the book, recently published in the Los Angeles Times. Congratulations, Dr. Breen!

History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides a leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its annual prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognize a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply.

Guidelines for the Award

Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are asked to submit an up-to-date two-page CV (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines.

Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope.

Eligibility

Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a PhD or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years,” with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in the calculation. They will also be sensitive to the disruption that the Covid 19 pandemic has had on career progression and will take such factors into account in their decision making. Candidates are encouraged to include details relating to any of these issues in their supporting documents.

Scholars who have submitted an essay for consideration in previous years are welcome to do so again. However, new manuscripts must not be substantially the same as any they have submitted in the past.  

Prize

The winning scholar will be awarded £250 and have their essay published in History of the Human Sciences (subject to the essay passing through the journal’s peer review process). The intention is to award the prize to a single entrant but the judging panel may choose to recognize more than one essay in the event of a particularly strong field.

Deadlines

Entries should be made by Friday, January 26, 2024. The panel aims to make a decision by Friday, May 10, 2024. The winning entry will be submitted for peer review automatically. The article, clearly identified as the winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, will then be published in the journal as soon as the production schedule allows. The winning scholar and article will also be promoted by History of the Human Sciences, including on its website, which hosts content separate from the journal.

Previous Winners

2022-23: Freddy Foks (Manchester), “Finding modernity in England’s past: social anthropology and the transformation of social history in Britain, 1959-1977”

2021-22: Harry Parker (Cambridge), “The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain”. Special commendation: Ohad Reiss Sorokin (Princeton), “‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)”

2020-21: Liana Glew (Penn State), “Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history”, and Simon Torracinta (Yale), “Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants”. Special commendation: Erik Baker (Harvard), “The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian”

2019-20: Danielle Carr (Columbia), “Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism”. Special commendation: Katie Joice (Birkbeck), “Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67”

You can read more about these essays in interviews with the authors on the journal’s website.

To Apply

Entrants should e-mail an anonymized copy of their essay, along with an up-to-date CV, to hhs@histhum.com. 

Further Enquiries

If you have any questions about the prize, or anything relating to the journal, please email hhs@histhum.com.

The American Philosophical Society invites all who are interested to a Lunch at the Library series presentation from Sebastián Gil-Riaño, who will be discussing his new book, The Remnants of Race Science: UNESCO and Economic Development in the Global South (Columbia University Press, 2023).

After World War II, UNESCO launched an ambitious international campaign against race prejudice. Casting racism as a problem of ignorance, it sought to reduce prejudice by spreading the latest scientific knowledge about human diversity to instill “mutual understanding” between groups of people. This campaign has often been understood as a response led by British and U.S. scientists to the extreme ideas that informed Nazi Germany. Yet many of its key figures were social scientists either raised in or closely involved with South America and the South Pacific.

The Remnants of Race Science traces the influence of ideas from the Global South on UNESCO’s race campaign, illuminating its relationship to notions of modernization and economic development. Sebastián Gil-Riaño examines the campaign participants’ involvement in some of the most ambitious development projects of the postwar period. In challenging race prejudice, these experts drew on ideas about race that emphasized plasticity and mutability, in contrast to the fixed categories of scientific racism. Gil-Riaño argues that these same ideas legitimated projects of economic development and social integration aimed at bringing ostensibly “backward” indigenous and non-European peoples into the modern world. He also shows how these experts’ promotion of studies of race relations inadvertently spurred a deeper reckoning with the structural and imperial sources of racism as well as the aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade.

Shedding new light on the postwar refashioning of ideas about race, this book reveals how internationalist efforts to dismantle racism paved the way for postcolonial modernization projects.

This event will take place on Wednesday, January 31, 2024 at 12:00 p.m. ET in the Society’s Benjamin Franklin Hall and will also be livestreamed. This event is free to attend but registration is required. Please register to attend in-person and online. Lunch will be provided to those attending in person.

Sebastián Gil-Riaño is an Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Born in Colombia and raised in Canada, he is a historian of science who studies transnational scientific conceptions of race, culture, and indigeneity in the twentieth century. His first book, The Remnants of Race Science: UNESCO and Economic Development in the Global South was published by Columbia University Press on August 29th, 2023.

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, U.S.

May 31-June 1, 2024

This two-day conference of the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS), at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, will bring together researchers working on the history of post-World War II social science. It will provide a forum for the latest research on the cross disciplinary history of the post-war social sciences, including but not limited to anthropology, economics, psychology, political science, and sociology as well as related fields like area studies, communication studies, design, history, international relations, law, linguistics, and urban studies. The conference aims to build upon the recent emergence of work and conversation on cross-disciplinary themes in the postwar history of the social sciences.

Submissions are welcome in such areas including, but not restricted to:

• The interchange of social science concepts and figures among the academy and wider intellectual and popular spheres
• Comparative institutional histories of departments and programs
• Border disputes and boundary work between disciplines as well as academic cultures
• Themes and concepts developed in the history and sociology of natural and physical science, reconceptualized for the social science context
• Professional and applied training programs and schools, and the quasi-disciplinary fields (like business administration) that typically housed them
• The traffic of social science into science and technology programs
• The role of social science in post-colonial state-building governance
• Social science adaptations to the changing media landscape
• The role and prominence of disciplinary memory in a comparative context
• Engagements with matters of gender, sexuality, race, religion, nationality, disability and other markers of identity and difference

The two-day conference will be organized as a series of one-hour, single-paper sessions attended by all participants. Ample time will be set aside for intellectual exchange between presenters and attendees, as all participants are expected to read pre-circulated papers in advance.

Proposals should contain no more than 1000 words, indicating the originality of the paper. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is February 2, 2024. Final notification will be given in early March 2024 after proposals have been reviewed. Completed papers will be expected by May 1, 2024.

Please note that published or forthcoming papers are not eligible, owing to the workshop format.

The organizing committee consists of Jamie Cohen-Cole (George Washington University), Bregje van Eekelen (TU Delft & Erasmus University Rotterdam), Philippe Fontaine (École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay), Leah Gordon (Brandeis University), and Jeff Pooley (Muhlenberg College).

All proposals and requests for information should be sent to submissions@hisress.org.

The annual meeting of the History of Science Society will be held in-person in Portland, Oregon from November 9-12, 2023.

The HAR News editors are please 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.

Thursday, November 9

Authors Roundtable: Global Histories
Authors Roundtable Session
12:30 to 2:00 pm

Participants:
Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology,
Christopher Heaney, Penn State
The Remnants of Race Science: UNESCO and Economic Development in the Global South,
Sebastián Gil-Riaño, University of Pennsylvania
Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940, Elizabeth O’Brien, Johns Hopkins University

Intimacy, Indigeneity and Science: Knowledge Production under Settler Colonialism
2:30 to 4:00 pm

Participants:
Indigenous Vibrations: Science, Time, and Affect in the Indianist Music Movement, Eli Nelson
Colonial Botany, Romantic Performativity, and “Go-Betweens” in Aotearoa New Zealand, Geoffrey Bil, University of Delaware
Intimacies of Past and Present: Scientific Ghosts in Indigenous Brazil, Rosanna Dent, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Bureaucratic Intimacy: Research Sovereignty in Alaska, Jennifer K. Brown
Session Organizer:
Ahmed Ragab, John Hopkins University
Chair:
Ahmed Ragab, John Hopkins University
Commentator:
Sonya Atalay, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Friday, November 10

Forum for the History of Human Science Distinguished Lecture and Business Meeting
9:00 to 10:30 am

Chair:
Jamie Cohen-Cole, George Washington University
Lecturer:
How are You? The History of Sentiment Analysis, Worker Surveillance, and Internment Camps,
Wendy Chun, Simon Fraser University

Exclusion, Adaptation, and Expansion: Defining Standards in Mathematics and its History
Sponsored by Forum for the History of Mathmatical Sciences
11:00 to 12:30 pm

Participants:
Indigenous Mathematics: Standards of Exclusion of Anthropological and Historical Research in the American Southwest (1880 – 1920), Alma S. McKown, Simon Fraser University
An “Acknowledged National Standard” for All?: Views on Pedagogical Standards in Black Educators’ Adaptations of Charles Davies’s Mathematics Textbooks, Amy Ackerberg-Hastings,
MAA Convergence
The Expansion of Mathematics Classroom Benchmarks, Standards, and Testing into US Education Policy, Emily Hamilton, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Session Organizer:
Emily Hamilton, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Chair:
Emily Hamilton, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Shifting Methodologies in Sexual Science: Sexology and the Human Sciences in South Asia
2:00 to 3:30 pm

Participants:
Studying Science and Signs of Sex in Early Modern North India, Sonia Wigh, Independent Scholar
Gender Appropriation Through Imagination in an Alternative Science of Sex, Anuj Kaushal, University of Texas-Austin
The Not So “Noble Savage”: Colonial Anthropology and the Construction of Pathology in Indian Sexual Science, Arnav of Bhattacharya, University of Pennsylvania
Sexology, Confession, and the Racial Life of the Case History in Colonial India, Rovel Sequeira, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Session Organizer:
Arnav of Bhattacharya, University of Pennsylvania
Chair:
Caleb Shelburne, Harvard University

Founder Effects and Disciplinary Memory in the History of Science and Linguistics
4:00 to 5:30 pm

Participants:
Sound and Text: The Study of Phoneme and the Formation of Language Studies, Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang, Academica Sinica
Medium, Genre, and Geopolitics in George Sarton’s Disciplinary Projects, Alex Csiszar, Harvard University
Linguistic Historiography Remembered and Remade, Judith Kaplan, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Session Organizer:
Judith Kaplan, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Chair:
Kristine Palmieri, University of Chicago
Commentator:
Kristine Palmieri, University of Chicago

Saturday, November 11

Categorising Humanity: Paper Tools and the Nascent Human Sciences
9:00 to 10:30 am

Participants:
Seeing Data: The Visual Strategies of Joseph Priestley, Daniel Rosenberg, University of Oregon
Deracialising Health: ‘Africans’, ‘Europeans’ and William Fergusson’s Colonial Reports from Sierra Leone, Matthew Eddy, Durham University
Race, Tribe and Nation in Franz Boas’s Anthropometric Studies of Native Americans, Staffan Mueller-Wille, Cambridge University
Silent Architects: Negotiating Categories in the German Commission for the Study of Native Law, c. 1907/08, Anna Echterhölter, University of Vienna
Session Organizer:
Matthew Eddy, Durham University
Chair:
Matthew Eddy, Durham University

Eugenics and Racial Science
2:00 to 3:30 pm

Participants:
The Communal Creed: Eugenic Knowledge Production and the International Dissemination of Eugenics, Abigail Grace Cramer, Kent State University
Inherited Landscapes: Imagery and Eugenics in the Sierra Nevada, Margaret Maeve Spaulding, UCLA
The work of João Baptista de Lacerda (1846-1915): connections with evolutionary theories and scientific racism, Anderson Ricardo Carlos University of Sao Paulo; Maria Elice de Brzezinski Prestes, University of Sao Paulo
The Emergency: a Historian & an Anthropologist Investigate Modern Eugenics, Erik L. Peterson, The University of Alabama; Lesley Jo Weaver, The University of Oregon

Sunday, November 12

Human and Social Sciences at the Computer Interface
Sponsored by the Forum for the History of Human Science
9:00 to 10:30 am

Participants:
Determining Races with Computers: William Howells and Multivariate Analysis in Postwar Physical Anthropology, Iris Clever, University of Chicago
The Limits to Formalization: Logic, Embodiment, and Human Cognition at the University of Illinois in the 1960s-1970s, Ekaterina Babintseva, Purdue University
Thinking Red, White, and Blue: Machine Political Intelligence in the 1980s National Security State, Joy Rohde, University of Michigan
Operationalizing the Inner Life: On Facebook’s Contagion Experiment of 2012, Rebecca Lemov, Harvard University
Session Organizer:
Ekaterina Babintseva, Purdue University
Chair:
Stephanie Dick, Simon Fraser University

Bodies and the Law in the Colonial Iberian World
9:00 to 10:30 am

Participants:
The Latent Man: Fixing Sex to Anatomy and the Government of Reproductive Futurity, Patrícia Martins Marcos, UCLA
Medics, Enslaved Litigants, and the Construction of Disability in Late Colonial Lima, Peru, Adam Warren, University of Washington
Of Traveling Wombs, Mothers, and Freedom: Enslaved Motherhood in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Iberian World, Elizabeth O’Brien
Session Organizer:
Elizabeth O’Brien, Johns Hopkins University
Chair:
Elizabeth O’Brien, Johns Hopkins University

The organizers of the Australian Research Council-Discovery Project “Keeping Kinship in Mind,” directed by Prof. Rob Wilson, are excited announce a study group on philosophy of anthropology. This group will meet online and is open to all.

The study group will run fortnightly, starting on the 8^th of November. All the readings will be sent to participants’ email, together with the Zoom/Teams link to the meeting. 

Meetings will be 1:30 hours long, starting at 1:00 pm, Perth time (7:00 am Central European Summer Time; 1:00 am Eastern Daylight Time). 

There will be four meetings before the end of December, which will be focused on the concept of kinship in anthropology. After a winter break, the group will explore the recent literature on the concept of animism, continuing the discussions started in the Project’s seminar with Dr. Jeff Kochan, a visiting research fellow of the “Keeping Kinship in Mind” Project for August 2023.  

Philosophy of anthropology is an exciting and unexplored area, and this study group offers a great introduction to some of its issues. The study group is open to all and will be particularly relevant to those in the humanities and social sciences, both undergraduates and postgraduates.  

Feel free to join all or selected meetings, according to your availability and interest. If you plan to attend, please let the organizers know by sending an email to Jorge Mendonca. More information can also be found on the “Keeping Kinship in Mind” website.

Reading list 

8^th of November 

Introduction: Conceiving Kinship in the Twenty-First Century. Bamford, S. (2019). The Cambridge Handbook of Kinship (1st ed). Cambridge University Press. Pp. 1-18.

Schneider, D. M. (1984). A critique of the study of kinship. University of Michigan Press. Pp. 95-112.

22^nd of November 

Shapiro, W. (2015). Not “From the Natives’ Point of View.”—Why the New Kinship Studies Need the Old Kinship Terminologies. Anthropos, 110(1), 1–14.  

Wilson, R. A. (2022). Kinmaking, progeneration, and ethnography. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 91, 77–85.  

6^th of December 

Chapter 1, Introduction. Leaf, M. J., & Read, D. (2020). Introduction to the Science of Kinship. Rowman & Littlefield. Pp. 1-13.

Voorhees, B., Read, D., & Gabora, L. (2020). Identity, Kinship, and the Evolution of Cooperation. Current Anthropology, 61(2), 194–218.  

(Only pages 194-204) 

20^th of December 

One of the issues raised in the discussion of the new kinship studies is the over-inclusivity of the term “kinship” in its performativist version. In the fourth meeting, Levine (2008) extends our kinship horizons, discussing new forms of kinship present in our society. In this meeting, we will also look at a concept that risks being conflated with kinship and is often neglected in anthropology, namely, friendship.  

Readings: 

Levine, N. E. (2008). Alternative kinship, marriage, and reproduction. Annual Review of Anthropology, 37, 375-389. 

Beer, B., & Gardner, D. (2015). Friendship, Anthropology of. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (pp. 425–431).  

[Dates for the next meetings to be determined] 

In the past few decades, interest in the histories of anthropology in Europe and worldwide has expanded steadily in terms of numbers of scholars, publications, and research activities, moving from the margins to the center of discussions about anthropological practice within the discipline. Today, contemporary anthropological theory and practice pose a challenge to historians of anthropology about their actual and prospective roles in studying, practicing and structuring the discipline.

Against this backdrop, the key stakeholders in the field of the histories of anthropology have decided to collaboratively organize a conference in order to discuss the methodological and theoretical, pedagogical, and ethical aspects of the histories of anthropologies as a step toward sustainable capacity-building for the global community of historians of anthropologies.

The First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies, “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures,” will be hosted online between December 4-7, 2023. As the first event of this kind, the conference will allow historians of anthropologies from around the world to meet with one another, share their personal and disciplinary experiences, and enhance their ability to address current debates in anthropology.

To view the full conference program, please visit the Conference’s website. Attendance is free and pre-registration is not required; links to access the Conference’s streaming sessions will be available through the website. Conference participants include a number of History of Anthropology Review editors and contributors, and HAR is an official stakeholder in the Conference’s organization. The Conference organizers look forward to seeing you online in December!

HAR News Editor Paul Wolff Mitchell (University of Amsterdam) recently presented a talk for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas entitled “The Politics of Disarticulation: Strategic Depersonalization, the traffic in human remains, and the afterlives of colonial science in museum collections.” The complete talk can now be viewed on YouTube.

Comparative anthropological human remains collections began in the second half of the eighteenth century in northwestern Europe. These collections arose when medical-anatomical expertise met questions about the nature and origins of racial difference posed by Europeans in colonial encounters. In this presentation, Mitchell focuses on how practices and presumptions filling dissection halls with the bodies of socially marginalized people in Europe, and later North America, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were extended into expanding colonial-imperial networks to amass the bones of racialized others for collection and study. Through attention to cases entangled in anthropology’s disciplinary formation, centered in present-day Germany, Indonesia, South Africa, Scotland, Australia, Liberia, and the United States, he will trace a “politics of disarticulation” – acts of strategic concealment and depersonalization by which anatomists intentionally detached identities and histories from human remains to enable collection of these remains in the face of resistance from the deceased’s kin and community. These cases suggest that much of what is unknown about the history of the bodies in historical anthropological human remains collections may be by design. Moreover, they show how colonial power relations structure what information anatomists recorded and published about the human remains they collected. Mitchell concludes with reflections on how the emergence and persistence of anthropological human remains collections has always crucially hinged on acts of strategic concealment and depersonalization, and how these histories complicate present ethical considerations concerning repatriation and the embodied afterlives of racial science.

The University of Groningen seeks a highly motivated candidate for a postdoc position within a project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), for a period of 35 months.

The project is entitled “Culture Wars and Modern Worldviews: A Transnational Conceptual History” and is located in the Department of Christianity and the History of Ideas. The core research team will consist of the P.I., Prof. Dr. Todd H. Weir, and two postdoctoral scholars, with one focusing on the history of anthropology and/or religious studies, and the second providing expertise in digital humanities.

The aim of this project is to develop a model of the formative power of culture wars in shaping modern thought, politics and religion by investigating the history of the concept of “worldview.” It is a transnational and multilingual project, that traces the history of worldview from its popularization in nineteenth-century Germany, to its invocation by Dutch and North American Christian thinkers, to its use by political ideologies such as National Socialism, to its contemporary usage in Latin America in the context of arguments about indigenous rights.

The postdoctoral scholar will contribute to research into the impact of worldview-thinking on theory production in academic disciplines concerned with religion and the secular. Following training in the project methodology, which combines conceptual history with digital humanities techniques, the postdoc will co-design and then carry out research into the role of worldview in the history of religious studies and anthropology from around 1900 to the recent calls for replacing religious studies with “worldview studies.” In particular, the postdoc will look at the role of international anthropological research in the translation of Weltanschauung into the Spanish cosmovisión and its application to indigenous cultures in Latin America. The project team is interested in the role of theories of worldview/cosmovisión in the “ontological turn” in contemporary anthropology and will explore its appropriation by public actors advocating for indigenous rights.

Tasks and responsibilities:

• Semi-autonomous research in the history of anthropology and/or religious studies from ca. 1900 to the present, with the ability to engage in transnational investigations
• Learning and utilization of digital humanities techniques of conceptual history
• Presenting research results at conferences and workshops
• Publishing academic articles
• Participating in regular meetings with the other project team members
• Participation in teaching activities related to the research
• Assisting in communication tasks, such as co-managing project website, writing blog posts, participating actively in creation of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).

Applications are due October 5, 2023. For more information, including salary and desired qualifications, please visit the full job posting page. Questions can be directed to Prof. Dr. Todd Weir.

The international conference “Histories of Latin American Anthropologies: Contemporary Experiments,” held at the Centro Universitário Maria Antonio (University of São Paulo) and the Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth (University of Campinas) between June 12 and 15, 2023, is dedicated to the history of ethnography and anthropology in several Latin American countries (19th–21st centuries) from a comparative and transatlantic perspective.

In order to compose a diverse and heterogeneous picture of anthropologies as practiced in the south of the continent and in the Caribbean, the conference explores the uses and meanings of the past within the anthropologies practiced today and projected for the future. Contemporary experiments around the histories of Latin American anthropologies can be of various types: experiments with (and against) history; theoretical and methodological experiments; institutional experiments (museographic and museological experiments); experiments with various types of knowledge (academic and non-academic); also with the natural sciences, arts and literature. In this sense, participants are encouraged to present case studies allowing wider reflections on the transits of knowledge and transatlantic flows; materials and materialities; inflections of gender, race and sexuality; new museographic knowledge and shared curatorships. The guiding idea of the conference is to radically play with the idea of experimentation, bringing new topics, new actors and their problematics to the fore as a reflection of risky and daring experiments. By listening to them and thinking with them, alternative tools and unexpected memories and histories of anthropology may emerge. The central goal of this meeting is thus to review – and play with – the diverse anthropologies developed in Latin America, and to consider their potential for a broader reflection on anthropological knowledge and its reconfigurations.

This conference is organized by Fernanda Arêas Peixoto (USP), Christiano Tambascia (Unicamp), Gustavo Rossi (Unicamp), Stefania Capone (CNRS, EHESS, Césor), Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima (PPGAS – Museu Nacional, UFRJ) within the HITAL International Research Network (IRN), made up of researchers from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, France and Portugal, in collaboration with BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. The conference program is now accessible online.

The Forum for History of Human Science awards a biennial prize (a nonmonetary honor) for the best article published recently on some aspect of the history of the human sciences. The article prize is awarded in odd-numbered years. The winner of the prize is announced at the annual History of Science Society meeting.

Entries are encouraged from authors in any discipline, as long as the work is related to the history of the human sciences, broadly construed, and is in English. To be eligible, the article must have been published within the three years previous to the year of the award. Preference will be given to authors who have not won the award previously.

The submission deadline will be June 1, 2023. Please submit your article (in PDF format) to eherman@uoregon.edu

2021 Prize: Carola Ossmer, “Normal Development: The Photographic Dome and the Children of the Yale Psycho-Clinic,” Isis, vol. 111, no. 3, 2020. 

HAR readers may be interested in the new film In A Field All His Own: The Life and Career of James C. Scott, a documentary that offers an unprecedented look at the lauded Yale political scientist and activist. Created and produced by UC Berkeley Oral History Center (OHC) historian Todd Holmes, the film draws from nearly thirty hours of oral history interviews with Scott and affiliated scholars at Yale and UC Berkeley to trace the intellectual journey of the award-winning social scientist from his childhood in New Jersey through each of the ground-breaking works he produced throughout his accomplished career. Overall, the film presents an intellectual biography of one of the world’s preeminent academics.

The documentary is currently available for viewing online on YouTube, and more information about the film can be found on the Berkeley Library’s website. In a Field All His Own developed out of the Yale Agrarian Studies Oral History Project, which Dr. Holmes conducted between 2018 and 2020.

The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group presents an online conference, “Geographical Relativities,” on April 14, 2023.

This conference marks the publication of Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt’s recent work, Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice (2022), the follow up installment to Franz Boas, The Emergence of the Anthropologist (2019).

Franz Boas (1858 – 1942) has been memorialized for his important role in fostering of cultural relativity, a key research methodology in social anthropology. Yet, as a boy, Boas was interested in geography. Later, at the time of his doctoral studies his interests swung from physics to anthropology, a move that was sealed during his 1883-84 fieldwork on Baffin Island. Boas also authored an early paper about geography (1887). However, with a few exceptions (Bravo 2009; Powell 2015) Boas has received less attention from geographers and historians of geography, and his fashioning of the geographies of geography has been little explored. Why was this so? In what ways does Boas’s own disciplinary shift inform the epistemological, disciplinary and institutional flux of the twin disciplines of fin-de-siècle anthropology and geography? With him we can examine the tensions between anthropogeography, geography and anthropology (and ethnology) in universities and other institutions such as savant societies and museums. We can also locate where he fits into the longer running entanglement of anthropogeography, cultural ecology in anthropology, and political ecology. 

This conference affords the chance to share reflections on the place or absence of Boas in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century geographical and historical geographical research. The evolutionism, historicism, cosmography and the productive dynamism of attempts to reconcile understandings of local conditions and universality seen in Boas’s works are similarly features in late nineteenth-century geographers, including anarchist geographers. It explores wider concepts, and practices, of relativity in geography and historical geography. In addition, it asks what the shift in Boas’s interests tells us about broader disciplinary and institutional transformations, and how these might inform the relationships between emergent geographical practices and practitioners and those in cultural ecology, and cultural, social and physical anthropology. It seeks to reflect upon the spatial aspects of his thought and his spatializing practices. The papers in this conference address Boas’s work on race and anthropometric measurements, his subsequent resonance across the transnational histories of geographical theory, as well as methods and practice around the turn of the 19th and 20th century in British and European thought and practice. They attend to the places and subsequent resonance of his ideas across the interdisciplinary fields of geography, anthropology and their shifting places within wider epistemic maps. Other papers bring to light broader historical geographies of relativist geographical, ‘cultural’ or other, frames of understanding. 

The conference is open to both faculty and postgraduate students and will take place online on Friday, April 14th, from 15h00 – 18h00 (GMT)

To attend, please email: Dr. Emily Hayes (Oxford Brookes University) or visit the conference Eventbrite page. More information can also be found on the RGS website or on the homepage for the RGS-IBG History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG).

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

15h00 –15h15: Emily Hayes – Welcome and Introduction

15h15-16h00 (GMT): Rosemary Zumwalt, Keynote: Franz Boas’s Cartographic and Ethnographic work on Baffin Island (1883 – 1884)

16h00-16h20 (GMT): Federico Ferretti, The relativity of cultures between geography and anthropology: Early anarchist geographers in humane and empathetic sciences, and Franz Boas 

16h20-16h40 (GMT): Peter R. Martin, Franz Boas and the Search for the ‘Origins of the Inuit’

16h40-17h00 (GMT): Emily Hayes, ‘[T]he relativity of all cultivation’ (Boas, December 23, 1883 in Cole, 1983, 33): a short comparative study of Boas and Mackinder

The HAR editors are pleased to draw your attention to an upcoming event: this year’s Gatty Lecture, delivered by Juan Fernandez (Ph.D. candidate, Cornell University), on “Sex and Gender in the Ethnographic Encounter in the Highlands of the American Colonial Philippines.” The lecture will take place on Thursday, February 2, 2023 at 12:30pm EST.

This talk examines three foundational ideas in the history and anthropology of sex and gender in Southeast Asia in the context of the colonial Philippines: the “high” status of women; the image of the man of prowess; and the concept and practice of gender pluralism. Drawing from episodes of the ethnographic encounter between the earliest generation of American anthropological field-workers during the first decade of the twentieth century and their Indigenous interlocutors, the talk aims to rethink the assumptions behind the axioms of the study of gender and sexuality in the region, as well as tracing their roots in the history of anthropology.

Juan Fernandez is a historian of modern Southeast Asia. He received his M.A. from the University of Chicago, and his B.A. from the University of the Philippines at Baguio. He has two forthcoming publications: one is a contribution to an edited volume on Indigenous Studies in the Philippines, and the other is an article in the journal Philippine Studies, entitled “‘From Savages to Soldiers’: The Igorot Body, Militarized Masculinity, and the Logic of Transformation in Dean C. Worcester’s Philippine Photographs.” He will be joining the faculty of the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in Fall 2023 first as an Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellow, and subsequently as assistant professor of history in Fall 2024.

This Gatty Lecture will take place in-person at the Kahin Center at Cornell University, but guests are also welcome to join on Zoom. Online attendees must register in advance at this registration link.

More information can be found on the event page. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.