Alice Kehoe’s recent book, Girl Archaeologist: Sisterhood in a Sexist Profession (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), has been selected as a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles, both print and digital, reviewed by Choice during the previous year and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community. Girl Archaeologist recounts Kehoe’s life, begun in an era very different from the twenty-first century in which she retired as an honored elder archaeologist. She persisted against entrenched patriarchy in her childhood, at Harvard University, and as she did fieldwork with her husband in the northern U.S. plains. The book recounts her experiences with the entrenched sexism and misogyny of academic archaeology, from being paid less than her male counterparts and sexual violence at the hands of male colleagues, to having her dissertation ambitions in archaeology thwarted by male Harvard faculty. Yet Kehoe persisted, and throughout her career found and fostered a sisterhood of feminist women archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians who have been essential to the field.

Alice Beck Kehoe is a professor of anthropology emeritus at Marquette University. She is the author or editor of twenty books, including North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account, The Land of Prehistory: A Critical History of American Archaeology, and North America Before the European Invasions. Congratulations, Dr. Kehoe!

Its editors are pleased to announce the launch of a new journal, History of Social Science, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS).

History of Social Science offers an international forum for the examination of the transformations of the social sciences since the early twentieth century. The journal covers a variety of disciplines, from the core social sciences of economics, political science, and sociology, to disciplines with links to natural science, such as anthropology, geography, and psychology, and disciplines closer to the humanities, such as history and philosophy. Related fields, including area studies, business, communication studies, criminology, law, and linguistics, are also included under the journal’s editorial scope. An important editorial commitment of the journal is to solicit and cultivate scholarship on the history of the social sciences throughout the world, as well as work that traces the transnational circulation and mutual shaping of ideas, practices, and personnel.

The journal is now accepting submissions. More information can be found on the journal’s website, including Author Guidelines and the Editorial Board. The first issue is slated to appear in Spring 2024.

The journal’s sponsor is the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS), which also hosts a small annual conference on the worldwide history of the social sciences in the twentieth century. Next year’s symposium will be held in Uppsala, Sweden, in June; see the call for papers for more details.

Please contact the journal editors with submission inquiries or any other questions.

Jamie Cohen Cole, Philippe Fontaine, and Jeff PooleyCo-editors, History of Social Science

HOAN (History of Anthropology Network) will host its next meeting online via Meet on November 18, 2022, 5 PM (CET) at the following link (no password required). All are welcome to attend.

At this meeting, HOAN has the honor to host Regna Darnell as keynote speaker, delivering the speech “A Critical Paradigm for the Histories of Anthropology: The Generalization of Transportable Knowledge.” An abstract for this talk can be found here.

Afterwards, HOAN’s Correspondents in the Netherlands (Peter G.A. Versteeg) and in Lithuania (Vida Savoniakaite) will present on the historiography of anthropological sciences in their respective countries, thus enriching our knowledge and perspectives. Last but not least, Frederico Delgado Rosa and Han Vermeulen will present their latest book Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922 (Berghahn, 2022). 

Coordinated by the HOAN convenors, HOAN Meetings (HOAN-M) are meant to be friendly spaces to meet and mingle and share ideas and news. HOAN-M offers an open stage to HOAN members and members of sister organizations to highlight new research, books, articles, and activities, as well as to discuss current or sensitive issues in our sub-disciplinary field.

For a further description of this event and past meetings, please visit the HOAN website.

This year, the History of Science Society will host its annual meeting in person, in Chicago, from November 17-20, 2022. The meeting schedule includes talks, roundtables, social events, prize ceremonies, plenary lectures, and listening sessions.

The HAR News editors would like to highlight several events on the program related to the history of anthropology, including presentations by HAR editors. Please note that the event times given are in Central Time (U.S.). Registration for the meeting is required; a discounted rate is available for graduate students. Please note that events are subject to change and it is best to check the program regularly for the events you are interested in. Abstracts for each panel can also be found in the full meeting program.

Thursday, November 17, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m.

Arctic Materialities: Objects, Collections, and Knowledge in and of the Far North

Brooke Penaloza-Patzak, University of Pennsylvania / University of Vienna: The Natural Science of Human Culture: Naturalized Data in Ancient Migration Research on the Strait, 1865-1907

Sarah Pickman, Yale University: “Exploration Was Already a Joke When I Came to Canada”: Archiving and Objects in the Making of a Scientific Legacy

Allegra Rosenberg, NYU: “Disappointed at finding nothing”: Failures of Inscription in the Polar Expeditions of Franklin and Cook

Eva Molina, Princeton University: “The Saddest of Membra Disjecta”: 19th Century Arctic Exploration and the Body as Object

Between Natural and Human Histories

Emma Kitchen, University of Chicago: Smoothing through Time: Liminal Fossils and their Narratives of the Past

David Sepkoski, University of Illinois: Biology and Critique: Jacques Monod and the Fate of Hegel in France Isabel Gabel, University of Chicago Geo-Eschatology and the Anthropocene

Sophia Roosth, NYU/Max Planck Institute for History of Science: The Fluent Sculpture of Time

Friday, November 17, 5:00 – 5:45 p.m.

HSS Listening Session

Members of HSS’s leadership will host a listening session to respond to concerns from HSS membership. All are welcome to attend.

Friday, November 18, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m.

Forum for the History of Human Science Meeting and Distinguished Lecture

FHHS welcomes historians of the human sciences, broadly defined, to attend a distinguished lecture, Body Arithmetic: Facts, Quantification, and the Human in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic by Pablo F. Gómez (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and celebrate emerging work in this field. Two awards will be presented: the FHHS/JHBS John C. Burnham Early Career Award and the the FHHS Dissertation Prize. Elections will be held for FHHS officers.

Friday, November 18, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Roundtable: Digitizing and Decolonizing Collections: Challenges and Experiences

Chairs: Catarina Madruga, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, and Adrianna Link, American Philosophical Society

Participants: Anita Guerrini, Oregon State University and University of California Santa Barbara; Nuala Caomhánach, New York University/American Museum of Natural History; Elaine Ayers, New York University; Adrianna Link, American Philosophical Society; Catarina Madruga, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin

Human Descent and Evolution Across Scientific and Popular Literatures in the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American World

Elizabeth Yale, University of Iowa: Illustrating Human Evolution: Wonder, Extinction, and Love in Victorian Children’s Literature

Tina Gianquitto, Colorado School of Mines: Roots of Consciousness: Darwin’s plant studies and human descent

Edwin Rose, Darwin College, University of Cambridge: Dynasties and the Adaption of Science: George Howard Darwin and the ‘Public’ Perception of the Solar System

James T. Costa, Highlands Biological Station, Western Carolina University: Wallace and Darwin on Human Evolution: Competing Visions of Race and Gender and Their Influence on Science and Society

Friday, November 18, 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.

Animal Knowledge Farther Afield: Menageries, Breeding Colonies, and Cities in the History of Animal Science

Alexander Clayton, University of Michigan: The (Living) Specimen: Knowledge and its Limits in the Atlantic Menagerie, 1760-1890

Oliver Lazarus, Harvard University: The Construction of the Industrial City and the Reconstruction of Nonhuman Life, New York City c. 1850-1900

Brigid Prial, University of Pennsylvania: Breeding Uncertainty: Caretaking and Reproduction in Robert Yerkes’ Chimpanzee Station, 1929 – 1955

Friday, November 18, 4:00 – 5:30 p.m.

Medicalizing Colonial Subjects: Peoples, Poisons, and Pupils

Zeynep Kuleli Karasahan, Johns Hopkins University: Melancholic Turks: Medical Theory, Race, and Climate in Early Orientalist Thought

Thomas C. Anderson, Yale University: Noxious Empiricism: Poison, Pharmacy, and Localized Science Between Early Modern France and the Colonial Caribbean

Miguel Angel Chavez, Vanderbilt University: “Colonial” Science: John Brian Christopherson and Sudanese Knowledge in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1904-1919)

Aparna Nair, University of Oklahoma-Norman: “Protecting” the Sight or “Passing” as Sighted?: Sunglasses and Eye Preservers in British India, 1850-1950

Saturday, November 19, 4:00 – 5:30 p.m

From Skulls to Complete Humans: Reconfigurations of Biological Anthropology in the Post-War Decades

Matthis Krischel, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf: Hans Nachtsheim, the UNESCO Declarations on Race and the Reintegration of West German science after 1945

Iris Clever, University of Chicago: Geoffrey Morant and the Unexpected Connections Between Racial Science and Human Growth Studies in the 1940s and 1950s

Fabio De Sio, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf: Adaptation: Biological, Social, Academic. Defining the science of Human Biology in postWWII Great Britain (ca. 1950s-1960s)

Explorations, Expeditions, and Extractions

Anne Ricculli, Morris Museum: Coral Fisheries, Neglected: Peter Lund Simmonds, H.M.S. Challenger, and the Economics of Depth-Dependent Research, 1873

Tatyana Bakhmetyeva and Stewart A. Weaver, University of Rochester: Extreme Science in the Age of Extremes: the Finsterwalders, Mountaineering, and the Emergence of Glacial Science, 1889 – 1934

Carlos Alberto Haag, York University: The Royal Society Expedition to Brazil (1969-1971)

Tainã Moura Alcântara: Notes on History of Archaeology in Brazil: “Only Foreigners Research Brazilian Prehistory”

Gender and Eugenics in Applied Social Sciences

Alex Worrall, University of Pennsylvania: Medicalizing Suffrage: The Use of Health and Disease Rhetoric in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States Woman Suffrage Movement

David Munns, John Jay College-CUNY: “A bad inheritance can be overcome by a good environment”: The Legacy of Euthenics in the History of American Eugenics

Gwen Kay, SUNY Oswego: How to De-Gender a Field in One Easy Step? The transformation of Consumer and Family Science

Abigail Grace Cramer, Kent State University: “Should Men Always Marry For Money”: A History of Psychology and IQ, Eugenics, and Manhood

Sunday, November 20, 11:00 a. m. – 12:30 p.m.

Paradigms of Scientific Knowledge in Colonial Contexts

Patrícia Martins Marcos, UCSD: Absented Presences: Rethinking Chronologies of Scientific (Early) Modernity

Edward J Gillin, UCL: The magnetism of empire: dipping needles and the experimental encounters of nineteenth-century expeditionary science

Sarah Qidwai, University of Regensburg: Situated Scientific Knowledge

Work on post-war African photographies over the last several years has attempted definitively to leave behind blunt understandings of the medium and practice as only an instrument of colonial control. Instead, scholars have shown the active role that photography and its institutions played in reimagining political citizenship and possibility in the waning colonial and newly independent African states, even as the continent was subjected to the wider geopolitical machinations of the Cold War. In this online session, we shall consider some of the most recent work on photography in Africa, and reflect on methodological issues and prospects in its study.

Drew Thompson, Darren Newbury, and Jennifer Bajorek are featured speakers, followed by a discussion.

Drew Thompson (Bard Graduate Center) – “Decolonization in Africa and Photography“

This story begins in Maputo and takes you to Cambridge (Massachusetts) via Johannesburg. I will start in April of 1974, when a coup toppled the Portuguese regime and initiated the end of colonial rule in Mozambique. Settlers left behind the photography business they started. To establish order the independent state nationalized the entire photography industry. Almost 8,000 miles away, Black American workers at the Polaroid Corporation’s U.S. headquarters protested the company’s business in South Africa. How then does the end of colonial rule in Mozambique connect to boycotts over Polaroid’s South African business? To answer this question, I highlight how the Polaroid worker protests conflicted with certain material realities and the protests unfolding in South(-ern) Africa. Decolonization in Southern Africa was anything but unified and straightforward, partially because of photography’s own disruptive nature.

Darren Newbury (University of Brighton) – “‘Don’t Touch Those Windows’: United States Information Service Exhibits in Africa“

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the emergence of newly independent African nations on the world stage precipitated a contest for influence on the continent by the Cold War superpowers. One response of the US government was to mount a campaign of ‘photographic diplomacy’. This presentation considers the forms in which photographs were brought to audiences across Africa through United States Information Service (USIS) field posts. USIS offices provided the network of distribution points for photographs arriving from the US either as specific field requests or in regular packets, and many had windows facing onto the street that were used to curate a changing series of exhibitions and displays. The monthly reports, frequent memos and occasional photographs that record these activities enable a kind of historical ethnography of photographic practice. They provide insights into the work that the photographs were being asked to perform, how the task was understood by those on the ground and the impact of local circumstances.

 Jennifer Bajorek (Hampshire College/VIAD Research Centre, University of Johannesburg) – “What we thought we knew“

We remain in a frenzy of activity thinking, rethinking, and reframing the nexus of photography and decolonization, perhaps particularly, but not exclusively, in Africa. How have the hypotheses and presuppositions that may once have sparked our research/art practice on this question been transformed by more recent work? What are the consequences of these transformations for how we understand both photography and decolonization? I am particularly interested in the persistent tensions between documentary or evidentiary and imaginative or poetic functions of the photographic image, or those between the grain of the voice (in oral history or testimony) and the grain of the image. I will touch on my own and others’ research and/or art practice.

Hosted by Birkbeck’s History and Theory of Photography Research Centre

Decolonization and Photography in Africa: Drew Thompson, Darren Newbury, and Jennifer Bajorek 
Friday, 10 June, 16:00 – 18:00 (BST) | 17:00-19:00 (CET)
Online, via Microsoft Teams

Please register in advance through the registration website.

An online lecture with Ricardo Roque (Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon): “Scientific Occupation” and the Timor Anthropological Mission in the late Portuguese Colonial Empire

Presented by Pacific Circle

Please register using the Zoom registration site. 
Wednesday, May 25, 2022 – 7:00 pm Honolulu time/1:00 am New York time/6:00 am Lisbon time

Abstract: Between the 1930s and 1974, several anthropological expeditions were organized by the Portuguese imperial state to the then Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, and finally East Timor – Portugal’s small remnant colony in the Asia-Pacific region. These state-sponsored expeditions aimed at collecting field data for the purposes of “colonial anthropology,” an eclectic form of racial science, also known as “anthropobiology.” They were also a political means to realize so-called “scientific occupation,” a prominent concept in Portuguese late imperial policy. This talk considers the history of the field studies and data produced by the latest of these expeditions – the ‘Timor Anthropological Mission,’ launched in 1953-54 – and reflects on its enduring legacies.

Ricardo Roque is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon and an Honorary Associate in the Department of History, University of Sydney. Dr. Roque’s research focuses on the history and ethnography of the human sciences, colonialism, race, and cross-cultural contact in the Portuguese-speaking world, from 1800 to the twentieth century. Among his publications are Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire (Palgrave 2010) and the edited volumes, Crossing Histories and Ethnographies: Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste (with E. G. Traube, Berghahn 2019) and Luso-Tropicalism and Its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism (with W. Anderson and R. Ventura Santos, Berghahn 2019).

The eighth issue of Etnografia. Praktyki, Teorie, Doświadczenia will focus on psychological anthropology, a subdiscipline of cultural anthropology that looks into interactions linking cultural phenomena with human psychological processes. Papers submitted in Polish or English may address both historical and contemporary topics of psychological anthropology. This special issue will focus on the intersection of cultural anthropology and psychology in the context of ethnographic research, exploring theoretical and practical dimensions involved in the translation of psychological concepts into broadly understood ethnographic methods of inquiry into human realities. How do psychological concepts translate into ethnographic practice?

Editor: Michał Żerkowski.
The call for papers is now open, until April 30, 2022.
Papers can be submitted via the journal’s website or to the editorial e-mail address.

From September 26-27, 2022, this Centennial Conference of Argonauts of the Western Pacific will take place at the Institute of Sociology of Jagiellonian University (Krakow). The organizers Grażyna Kubica-Heller (UJ Kraków), Dariusz Brzeziński (IFiS PAN, Warsaw), and Karol Piotrowski (UJ Kraków) encourage representatives of the social sciences and humanities to participate in this international conference. Paper abstracts (250 word maximum, in Polish or English) should be sent to malinowski2022@uj.edu.pl by April 30, 2022.

The hundredth anniversary of the publication of Malinowski’s monograph Argonauts of the Western Pacific presents an excellent opportunity to reflect upon its significance for contemporary social sciences and humanities. The following themes may be considered for paper presentations:

1. Reflection on the Polish context of the life and work of Bronisław Malinowski
2. The importance of Bronisław Malinowski for the formation of the identity of the humanities and social sciences in Poland
3. The importance of Bronisław Malinowski’s method of intensive fieldwork for the methodological and theoretical development of social sciences and humanities
4. Reinterpretation of the legacy of Bronisław Malinowski in the context of contemporary social and philosophical thinking
5. The concept of “practical anthropology” developed by Bronisław Malinowski and his vision of the role of anthropologists in a changing world
6. The concept of sociocultural change in the late works of Bronisław Malinowski
7. The author of Argonauts of the West Pacific as an iconic figure in cultural texts

The next meeting of HOAN (History of Anthropology Network) will take place via Zoom on April 22, 2022, at 5:00 PM (CET). The distinguished keynote speaker will be Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, with a lecture entitled “Franz Boas: Working for Social Justice and Battling Social Inequality.”

Abstract: Elsie Clews Parsons wrote Robert Lowie about her reactions to the chapter on Boas in his History of Ethnological Theory (1937). While offering praise for his “very just and discerning appraisal,” she remarked, “You do not mention his ardor in combating the scientific fallacies which bolster up social injustices. This has been more marked, of course, in recent years but it was always there and is an essential part of his make-up.” She mentioned a studio portrait of himself that Boas had given Parsons with the inscription, “Elsie Clews Parsons, fellow in the struggle for freedom from prejudice.” Parsons concluded, “I began that way and he ends that way. I suppose somewhere our trails crossed.” In this paper, I will draw from my recent manuscript – Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice (University of Nebraska, fall 2022) – for a focus on Boas’s work for social justice, specifically with respect to race.

HOAN Correspondents will present the historiography of anthropological sciences in their respective countries, thus enriching our knowledge and perspectives. HOAN cordially invites all members of HOAN and sister organizations to attend the meeting by using this link (no password required).

Berghahn Books has launched a new book series, Anthropology’s Ancestors, that will feature titles we believe will be of great interest to readers of HAR.  

Two titles in Anthropology’s Ancestors have appeared to date with a third scheduled for February, 2022. The descriptions below are from the publisher’s website:

Volume 1: Margaret Mead, by Paul Shankman (2021)

Tracing Mead’s career as an ethnographer, as the early voice of public anthropology, and as a public figure, this elegantly written biography links the professional and personal sides of her career. The book looks at Mead’s early career through the end of World War II, when she produced her most important anthropological works, as well as her role as a public figure in the post-war period, through the 1960s until her death in 1978. Criticisms of Mead are also discussed and analyzed. This short volume is an ideal starting point for anyone wanting to learn about, arguably, the most famous anthropologist of the twentieth century.

Volume 2: William Robertson Smith, by Aleksandra Bošković

William Robertson Smith’s influence on anthropology ranged from his relationship with John Ferguson McLennan, to advising James George Frazer to write about “Totem” and “Taboo” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he edited. This biography places a special emphasis on the notes and observations from his travels to Arabia, as well as on his influence on the representatives of the “Myth and Ritual School.” With his discussion of myth and ritual, Smith influenced generations of scholars, and his insistence on the connection between the people, their God, and the land they inhabited inspired many of the concepts later developed by Émile Durkheim.

Volume 3 : Françoise Héritier, by Gérald Gaillard (forthcoming, 2022)

A great intellectual figure, Françoise Héritier succeeded Claude Lévi-Strauss as the Chair of Anthropology at the Collège de France in 1982. She was both an Africanist, author of magnificent works on the Samo population, the scientific progenitor of kinship studies, the creator of a theoretical base to feminist thought, and an activist for many causes. This book follows the path of her life, which had a lasting impact on a generation of French anthropologists and continues to this day.

Berghahn has assembled an outstanding editorial board for the new series.

Anthropology’s Ancestors joins such well-established ongoing book series as Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology and Histories of Anthropology Annual (both from the University of Nebraska Press). HAR’s bibliography editors strive to include all titles in these series on HAR’s fully searchable Bibliography section, with complete contents added for edited works.  

The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association will be held online and in-person in Baltimore, MD, on November 17-21, 2021. The theme of this year’s meeting is “Truth and Responsibility”; a full schedule and additional details may be found on the Association’s website.

The News Editors at HAR are pleased to highlight several panels of interest to our readers. Event times are listed in Eastern Time (U.S.) and registration is required to attend in-person and online. Our thanks to Grant Arndt, co-director of the History of Anthropology Interest Group, for sharing news of these and other events related to the history of anthropology.

Thursday, November 18 10:15 AM – 12:00 PM ET

Session (2-1620) Anthropology at St. Louis and
Before

Location: In-Person, Baltimore, Convention Center 341

Sean O’Neill, “An Unfair Hearing for Global Cultural
Diversity: The Saint Louis World’s Fair as a Sounding Board for Primitivism, Racism, and Colonialism”

Christopher Lowman, “Imagining Asia Beyond the Exhibition”

Richard Warms, “Picture this: Boas, Photography and the Popular Presentation of Science”

Robert Launay, “Genealogies of the Secular and Sovereign State”

Discussant: Jon McGee

Thursday, November 18 2:00 – 3:45 PM ET

(2-1460) Entangled Histories and Bundles of Relations: Contemporary Ethnographic Work In and Around Collections

Location: In-Person, Baltimore, Convention Center 330

Panelists:

Catherine Nichols, Diana Marsh, Kristin Otto, Christopher Berk, Howard Morphy

Thursday, November 18 6:30 – 8:15 PM ET

Session (2-1621) Anthropology and Activism

Location: In-Person, Baltimore

Panelists:

Martin Schoenhals, Carol Mukhopadhyay, Yolanda Moses, Kathleen Fine-Dare, Linda Seligmann, Raymond Schwartz, Jeanne Simonelli

Session (2-0740) The World-Builders

Location: Live virtual session

Panelists:

Andrew Foster, Mariel Gruszko, Llerena Searle, Keith Murphy, Lee Cabatingan, Britt Van Paepeghem, Matthew C. Watson

Session (2-1190) Making Historical Truth: Material Engagements with the Past and the Politics of Responsibility after Mass Violence

Location: Live virtual session

Panelists:

Hilary Leathem, Chris Green, Dominic Bryan, Damani Partridge, Jonathan Evershed, Sultan Doughan, Michal Ran-Rubin, Jonah Rubin

Friday, November 19 10:15 AM – 12:00 PM ET

Session (3-2520) Alfred L. Kroeber: The Man, His Work and His Legacy

Location: In-Person, Baltimore, Convention Center 331

Herbert S. Lewis, “Alfred L. Kroeber: The Man, His Times, and His Work”

Stanley Brandes, “Alfred Kroeber and the Forging of a Discipline”

Paul Shankman, “Kroeber, Mead, and the Perils of Public Anthropology”

James Stanlaw, “Alfred Kroeber and the Development of Linguistic Anthropology”

Jack Glazier, “The Kroeber-Ishi Story: Cinematic Versions”

Nicholas Barron, “Anthros, Agents, and Federal (Un)Acknowledgment in Native California”

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Goodbye Kroeber, Kroeber Hall, and the Man Called Ishi”

Session (3-2330) Enduring Legacies of Ethnographic Field Schools, Part 1

Location: In-Person, Baltimore

Panelists:

Natalie Bourdon, Linda Easley, A Katherine Lambert-Pennington, Suzanne Kent, Keri Brondo, Tim Wallace, Quetzil Castaneda, Douglas Hume

(3-2122) Native Americans and Museums: International Perspectives and Collaborative Prospects.

Location: Live virtual session

Panelists:

Robert Collins, Justin Richland, Alaka Wali, Markus Lindner

Friday, November 19 2:00 PM – 3:45 PM ET

Session (3-2320) Enduring Legacies of Ethnographic Field Schools, Part 2

Location: In-Person, Baltimore

Panelists:

Tim Wallace, Keri Brondo, Bill Roberts, Walter Adams, James McDonald, Sharon Gmelch

Friday, November 19 4:15 PM – 6:00 PM ET

Session (3-1750) Vindication, Imagination, and Decolonization: African Americans and the Experience of Anthropology (The George W. Stocking, Jr. Symposium)

Location: Livestreamed and In-Person, Baltimore, Holiday Ballroom

Abstract: As we commemorate 50 years of the Association of Black Anthropologists, it is incumbent to recognize that African Americans have been bearing witness, taking action, and holding scholars accountable to the truth since the very beginning of anthropology in North America. Frederick Douglass, for example, wrote a critical response to Josiah Nott’s Types of Mankind in 1854. During every twist and turn in the history of anthropology, African American scholars have taken on the responsibility to insist that anthropology be a holistic social science that combats racism and oppression and leads to a more responsive and inclusive understanding of what it means to be human. At the same time, anthropologists throughout the African Diaspora have described and analyzed how violence, power, and oppression lead to atrocities and the worst forms of inhumanity. In this panel, we take a look at a sample of African American intellectuals who were leaders in the vindication struggle, were creative and imaginative describing culture, and worked hard towards achieving a decolonized anthropology.

Panelists:

Deborah Johnson-Simon, Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Lee D. Baker, Riché Barnes, Irma McClaurin, Rachel Watkins, Tracie Canada, Michael Blakey

Saturday, November 20 4:15 PM – 6:00PM ET

(4-3290) Clinical Encounters Across Difference: (Ac)countability and the Politics of Representation

Location: Live virtual session

Panelists:
Molly Fitzpatrick, Allison Odger, Adrienne Strong, Margaret MacDonald, Hatice Nilay Erten, Thandeka Cochrane, Cal Biruk

Sunday, November 21 10:15 AM – 12:00 PM ET

(5-0010) Historical Consciousness and Historicist Reckonings with the Anthropological Present

Location: Live virtual session

Panelists:
David Dinwoodie, Jim Weil, Kathryn Kozaitis, Nicholas Barron, Grant Arndt, Olga Glinskii, Paul Mitchell

The second meeting of the History of Anthropology Network (HOAN-M) will take place on Friday, November 19, 2021, at 17:00 CET. The meeting will take place via Zoom.

HOAN Correspondents from Brazil (Peter Schröder), Canada (Joshua Smith), Portugal (Patrícia Ferraz de Matos), Romania (Alina Branda), and Turkey (Hande Birkalan-Gedik) will present the historiography of anthropological sciences in their respective countries, thus enriching our knowledge and perspectives.

The meeting will also feature a keynote lecture from Thomas Hylland Eriksen titled “Forgotten Anthropologies from the Periphery.” An abstract may be found below.

Those wishing to attend are encouraged to contact HOAN co-conveners Fabiana Dimpflmeier & Frederico Delgado Rosa to receive the link to join the Zoom call: hoan.easa@gmail.com

“Forgotten Anthropologies from the Periphery”

There are many unknown pioneers in the history of anthropology, often publishing in smaller languages and based far from the centres of academic capital. I will present and compare two of them in this lecture. Eilert Sundt (1817–75) carried out systematic research on various aspects of everyday life in rural Norway in the mid 19th century, and is recognised as the first Norwegian social scientist. Mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, he wrote about controversial subjects such as extramarital sex and hygiene. Sundt, a contemporary of Comte and Marx, saw sociology and ethnology as tools for enlightened social policy. A century later, Gutorm Gjessing (1906–79), who held the Chair at the Ethnographic Museum, had comparable aims. Trained as an archaeologist, Gjessing published extensively on colonialism, inequality and environmental challenges, arguing that anthropology needed to take on urgent global challenges to remain relevant. Today, Sundt is revered but little read, while Gjessing virtually disappeared from the genealogy of anthropology in Norway. What they had in common was social engagement. This merits a reconsideration of their significance from the vantage-point of the Anthropocene.

Due to the ongoing pandemic, the History of Science Society (HSS) and the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) will not hold their planned in-person joint meeting this November in New Orleans, but will hold the joint meeting online, with a full schedule of talks, roundtables, social activities, prize ceremonies, a book exhibition, and more. It will take place from November 18 through November 21, 2021.

The HAR News editors would like to highlight several events on the program related to the history of anthropology. Please note that the event times given are in Central Time (U.S.). Registration for the meeting is required unless otherwise noted; a discounted rate is available for graduate students. Please note that events are subject to change and it is best to check the program regularly for the events you are interested in.

Thursday, November 18 12:00 – 1:00 PM CT

Redistribution and Reparation in the History of Science: an Open Listening Session

Where’s the money (and value and recognition)? We invite you to join an open listening session on redistributing scholarly resources to support early-career and underrepresented scholars and scholarship. We invite scholars who hold forms of academic capital, early career and underrepresented scholars, to talk about how we, as a Society and as a field, allocate value and resources. Where is value situated at different stages of the career, and where should it shift? What are scholars’ needs at different stages, places and positions? How can we think about redistribution and reparation in the history of science? This session is co-sponsored by Isis, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Forum for the History of the Human Sciences, Committee on Diversity and Inclusion and Graduate and Early Career Council.

Please note: Unlike other sessions on the program, this session is open to all, even those who have not registered for the annual meeting. Please register separately for this session at this link.

Thursday, November 18 3:00 – 4:30 PM CT

FHHS Distinguished Lecture and Business Meeting

Please join us for the Forum for the History of Human Science (FHHS) business meeting.  We welcome any scholar with interests in the history of the human sciences, broadly defined, and we look forward to seeing familiar faces and new members. The meeting will include the presentation of awards and the FHHS Annual Distinguished Lecture, delivered by Alexandra Hui, Associate Professor of History, Mississippi State University, on “Functional music and affective spaces: 100 years of the human science of background music.”

Thursday, November 18 3:30 – 4:30 PM CT

Darwin, Evolution, and Beyond

Bartlomiej Swiatczak, University of Science and Technology of China: Darwin within the body: Early theories of somatic evolution and their eclipse (1881-1910)

Jan Baedke, Ruhr University Bochum: Endosymbiosis and the Nazis: Adolf Meyer-Abich’s work at the German-Dominican Tropical Research Institute

Arya Mohan, The English and Foreign Languages University: “To Be Esteemed by My Fellow Scientists”: Examining the “Professional Man’s” Rhetoric in the Origin of Species

Liv Grjebine, Harvard University: A Darwinian Murder: The Role of the Barré-Lebiez Affair in the Diffusion of Darwinism in 19th Century France

Theology, Eugenics, and Constructions of Science & Medicine

Branden McEuen, Wayne State University: Eugenics as Preventive Public Medicine in Michigan

Vincent Auffrey, IHPST, University of Toronto: “Pour l’amélioration de la race humaine”: The Reception of Eugenics in the French-Canadian Press, 1912-1921

Nathan Bossoh, UCL: Christian “universalism” and the non-Western “other”: science, religion and racial boundaries

Thursday, November 18 5:45 – 8:00 PM CT

Joint Opening Plenary and Land Acknowledgment: Environment, Infrastructure, and Social Justice: Public Engagement in Historical and Multidisciplinary Research

Organizer and Chair: Gabrielle Hecht (Stanford University); Panelists: Alesia Montgomery (Stanford University Libraries), Jason Ludwig (Cornell University, Department of Science and Technology Studies), Gregg Mitman (University of Wisconsin–Madison) and Lisa Onaga (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Friday, November 19 9:00 – 10:00 AM CT

Constructing/Deconstructing Race

Monica Libell, Lund University: Time and Culture in Carl Linnaeus’ Ethno-racial Classifications

Erica Torrens, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico: The natural system and its relation to the process of racialisation in nineteenth-century Mexico through visual representation

Kelsey Henry, Yale University: “This milestone in their development as property”: Racially Stratified Child Development, 1820 – 1865 U.S.

Aparna Nair, University of Oklahoma-Norman: “Swadeshi” Spectacles, Eye Preservers and Dark Glasses: Race, Disability and Vision Aids in British India

Natural History Collections and Empire (1)

Lauren Williams, McGill University: The American Black Parrot: Exploring an 18th-century Paper Museum

Whitney Barlow Robles, Dartmouth College: The Kitchen in the Cabinet: Histories of Food and Natural Science

Dr Charmantier, The Linnean Society of London: Empire and the Linnean Society Botany collections

Luciana Martins, Birkbeck, University of London: Resources of hope: reactivating Indigenous biocultural knowledge

Working Theories: The Human Sciences and Motivation to Labor in the Twentieth Century

Nima Bassiri, Duke University: Simulation, Industrial Labor, and Economic Pathologies circa 1900

Danielle Judith Carr, Columbia University: It made human life seem like the worst kind of wage labor”: Imagining the Motivation to Produce From Behaviorism’s Stimulus-Wage to Cognitivism’s Innate Creativity

Simon Torracinta, Yale University: Time, Labor, and Motivation in Midcentury Economics

Charles Petersen, Cornell University: The 100xr Road to Neoliberalism: Engineers, Meritocracy, and Economic Inequality, 1950-2000

Friday, November 19 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM CT

Natural History Collections and Empire (2)

Sofia Boanova Viegas, CIUHCT- FCUL, University of Lisbon; Museum of Natural History and Science, University of Porto: African Herbarium Collections: A Trigger to Uncover ‘Colonial Botany’ at University of Porto.

melanie boehi, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research: Revisiting empire in a Southern African plant collections

Chanelle Adams, University of Lausanne: Empirical Aims, Empire Gains: Knowledge regimes in the Madagascar herbarium collection at Marseille’s Colonial Institute

Martha Fleming, Natural History Museum of Denmark: Colonialities of the storeroom: provenance matters in natural history collections

Histories of Evolutionary Thinking about Social Things

Michael Pettit, York University: How Faces Became Special (When Maybe They are Not)

Tara Suri, Princeton: Security, Territory, Primate: Rhesus Monkeys and the Politics of Development in Postcolonial India

Cameron Brinitzer, University of Pennsylvania: Social Learning Mechanisms: The Evolution of Culture and Its Sciences

Joint Session: Building Race into the Machine: The Ongoing Challenges of “Big Data”

Erik Peterson, The University of Alabama: Afraid of the Dark: Making the First ‘Index of Nigrescence’ (1850s-1900)

Iris Clever, University of Chicago: Tracing race in forensic anthropological data practices: the case of Fordisc

Abigail Nieves Delgado, Utrecht University, Freudenthal Institute: Making race (ir)relevant: historical biases in facial recognition technologies

Catherine Stinson, Queen’s University, Kingston: The artifice of AI mindreading

Friday, November 19 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM CT

Racialized Knowledges: Epistemology, Difference, and Sciences Beyond the Western Teleologies

Sarah Qidwai, University of Toronto: De-centering the History of evolutionary thought and theories of origin in the nineteenth century

Patrícia Marcos, University of California San Diego: Racialized Knowledges: Manipulating Nature, Blackness, and Epistemic Disciplining in the Portuguese Inquisition.

Taylor Moore, University of California, Santa Barbara: Of Seashells and Sand: Racing and Erasing Superstition in Khedival Egypt

Friday, November 19 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM CT

Indigenous Peoples, Settler Science, and Social Justice

Kelly McDonough, University of Texas at Austin: Indigenous Scientific Knowledges and the Archive: Health, Illness, and Healing in the 1577 Relaciones geográficas

Charlotte Williams, University of Pennsylvania: The Many Roads to El Dorado: transportation infrastructures in archaeological extraction

Alexi Baker, Yale Peabody Museum: Instruments of Science and Social Justice: Uses for Historical Scientific Artifacts in Higher Education

Adam Johnson, SMU: Structure, Constraint, and Revelation in the Paper Tools of 19th Century American Ethnology

Saturday, November 20 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM CT

Research Methods in the Social Sciences

Tom Kayzel, Universiteit van Amsterdam: Early Economic Planning and the Double Experience of Modernity

Ohad Reiss Sorokin, Princeton University: The Production of Knowledge: A Path Not Taken

Christopher Rudeen, Harvard University: “Anthropology at Home”: The Domestic Methods of Mass-Observation

Matthew Hoffarth, Consortium for History of Science, Technology & Medicine: Interactions with the Rorschach: Anthony F.C. Wallace and Mel Spiro’s Criticisms of the Culture Concept

Science in East Asia between Global, Regional, and Local Perspectives: Power, Colonialism and Knowledge Production, 19th – 21st Century

Noa Nahmias, York University: The universe of science at your doorstep: popular science between national and global in China, 1933-1937

Rachel Wallner, Northwestern University: Making Hydrography Modern: Late-Qing Empire and Reforming Knowledge of the Southern Chinese Coast, 1886-1902

Haesoo Park, Singapore Management University: Postcolonial Science in Korea: Gendered Stem Cells and Technoscientific Sovereignty

Midori Kawaue, Princeton University: Japanese Anthropology and its Colonial Enterprise: A Case Study of the 1903 Human Pavilion

Dates: August 22-24, 2022

Location: University of Oxford (hybrid: online and in person)

Language: Chinese and English

Organizers: Anke Hein (University of Oxford) & Julia Lovell (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Steering Committee and Discussants: Chen Xingcan, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Rowan Flad, Ye Wa

As proclaimed recently in the Washington Post, this is a golden age for Chinese archaeology. Major recent discoveries such as the new object pits at Sanxingdui receive extensive press coverage in China and to a lesser extent abroad, and articles reporting archaeological research in China are becoming increasingly common in scholarly journals around the world. Yet, these English-language articles represent only a tiny proportion of the archaeological work that is done in China and much of the archaeological process behind it is unknown to foreigners. Few outside specialist circles are aware that China is currently celebrating 100 years of Chinese archaeology, and with an investment of time, money, and media coverage that archaeologists in other countries can only dream of. It is thus clear that archaeology is of great importance in China, promoted by the government and followed eagerly by the public; this phenomenon needs to be better understood outside China.

This call for papers invites contributions for a workshop to prepare an edited volume on the topic “The History and Practice of Archaeology in China,” which aims to promote better understanding of the way archaeology is practiced in China, and of the history of the discipline. The organizers welcome papers including but not limited to the following areas: the precursors to and history of modern Chinese archaeology; the development of influential theories and methods; studies of key institutions and influential excavations; analysis of the sociology and technologies of archaeology in China, including gendered experiences of fieldwork; the interactions between specialist academic and public archaeology, including treatment of archaeological discoveries in museums and media.

If you are interested in participating in this endeavor, please submit an abstract (250-300 words) and a biographical note (50-100 words) to Anke Hein (anke.hein@arch.ox.ac.uk) and Julia Lovell (ubra235@mail.bbk.ac.uk). The deadline for submission of abstracts is December 3, 2021 and submissions will be reviewed by mid-January 2022.

The Forum for History of Human Science (FHHS), an Interest Group within the History of Science Society (HSS), promotes interest in the history of such disciplines as anthropology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, political science, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and statistics, as well as of related issues in medicine, education, politics, and the law.

FHHS is governed by a steering committee of seven officers elected during a business meeting held in conjunction with the annual meeting of HSS. Nominations for each position are open, and neither nominees nor office-holders need be members of HSS. FHHS positions are for two years. This year (2021), our open positions are Vice-Elect, Treasurer, Representative and Graduate Representative.

FHHS is now accepting nominations for open positions for the next two-year term. Please submit nominations or self-nominations here by November 1, 2021. The current open positions are:

Vice-Elect
FHHS Chairs lead the Steering Committee and, as a result, the Forum. They are responsible for running the annual business meeting, setting the agenda and priorities, and coordinating all the Forum’s other activities over the course of the year. The Vice-Elect assists the Chair(s) in the first year of service, and becomes Chair (or Co-Chair) the following year. Chairs may serve two terms.

Treasurer
FHHS Treasurer sees to the (modest) budget, including by recruiting and retaining members, coordinating with other officers around issues like prize money and honoraria, and providing an overall picture of the health of the organization at the annual business meeting.

Representative and Graduate Student Representative
FHHS Representatives (#1, #2 and #3) are responsible for specific issues within the Forum. One representative is a “Graduate Representative” and takes the lead on recruiting new members; another takes the lead on organizing and staffing committees for our two prizes (Article and Early-Career); a third aids the co-chairs in organizing the Distinguished Lecture and Sponsored Session at HSS.

The School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico is currently seeking applications for the William Y. and Nettie K. Adams Fund. This fellowship offers funding for short campus seminars or summer research projects focused on the history of anthropology and the theoretical implications of the culture concept. The Adams Fund selection process is guided by the School’s longstanding commitment to support research that advances knowledge about human culture, evolution, history, and creative expression. This year, in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the Indian Arts Fund collection which we hold on our campus, SAR would be particularly interested in proposals which critically reexamine the “salvage” anthropology era of the early 20th century.

Individual Projects:

Scholars with summer research projects that meet the requirements of the Adams Fund are eligible for $500 in travel support and up to $2000 in stipend support, depending on the length of their visit. On a space-available basis, campus housing may be provided for a nominal cost.

Short Seminars:

Seminar proposals meeting the requirements of the Adams Fund will receive three days of lodging and meals for up to ten participants at SAR’s Schwartz Seminar House. Travel costs to/from Santa Fe are not covered for short seminars.

How to Apply:

Applicants whose projects meet the terms of the Adams Fund should send a letter of inquiry and a brief project proposal to Paul Ryer (ryer@sarsf.org), Director of Scholar Programs, School for Advanced Research. Any questions about the application process or the Fund should also be directed to Paul Ryer. There is no application deadline; applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis.

The Bernice P. Bishop Museum is launching a transformative new program with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that builds internal curatorial capacity at the Museum in preparation for designing and implementing a training program in Indigenous curatorial practice for the next generation of museum curators. Building a Pacific Pipeline: Bishop Museum & The Te Rangi Hīroa Pacific Curators and Caretakers Program aims to diversify the pipeline of future cultural heritage professionals, increase the number of historically underrepresented Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the museum field, and demonstrate how museums can change their practices and positively impact their communities.  

The first phase of Building a Pacific Pipeline will increase staffing in the Bishop Museum’s Cultural Resources Division by hiring a team that includes two curators, a collections manager, and a collections technician to steward a collection that represents more than half of the world’s primary source material of Hawai‘i and the Pacific. The Bishop Museum is an ideal learning laboratory for examining how Oceania collections are understood, interpreted, and cared for.  

All those interested in these job opportunities should visit the “Careers” section of the Bishop Museum website, where they can also find information on how to submit applications for these positions. This is part of a major Andrew W. Mellon-funded project at the Bishop Museum to prioritize and support indigenous knowledge, values and practice in the custodial care and scholarship of these collections going forward. 

The European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) is offering free registration for its upcoming digital conference, “Anthropological Pathways and Crossings: Knowledge Production and Transfer in and Beyond Europe” until July 19, 2021. (After that date, registration will close completely.) The conference will take place on July 21 and 22, and is being organized jointly by EASA’s EuroNet group and the History of Anthropology Network (HOAN).

No knowledge, and particularly anthropological knowledge, is contingent upon a single tradition but is instead composed of multiple practices and contexts. Next to “major” European anthropological traditions, “minor” or “marginal” traditions in and beyond Europe bloomed and supported intellectual interactions at different points in time, and dynamically produced and disseminated anthropological knowledge. Based on these premises, the conference organizers aim to challenge the narrative of major, self-standing European traditions. Presenters will investigate the complexities and the embeddedness of anthropological knowledge transfer in and beyond European(ist) research, especially emphasizing the work at/between the “margins” — both geographic and conceptual — in past and present times.

Please visit the conference website to register and to read the full event program.

Musée du Quai Branly, Paris

May 25th, 2021, 4:30 p.m. (CET)

A session will take place at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris) on the 25th of May, 2021 at 4:30 p.m., during which Laurent Le Gall (Université de Bretagne Occidentale) and Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos (Université Paris 1/Panthéon Sorbonne) will comment on texts resulting from a colloquium dedicated to anthropologist Jean Cuisenier and published by BEROSE in a topical dossier organized by Martine Segalen (Université Paris-Nanterre) and Nicolas Adell (Université Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse). Please note, this is an in-person event.

French anthropologist Jean Cuisenier (1927-2017) was head of the polemical Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires beginning in 1968. Considered both a continuator and innovator of Lévi-Strauss’s legacy, this less known but fundamental figure in the history of the French school of anthropology promoted an anthropology freed from its ties to backward-looking “folklore,” and open to the study of contemporary French and European societies. When institutional difficulties and a hot public debate led to the closure of his museum of folk arts and traditions in 2005, Jean Cuisenier continued to develop his reflections on issues of folk art and ritual.

Among other recently released articles and other resources, the topical dossier published within BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology includes this biography of Jean Cuisenier by Martine Segalen:

Segalen, Martine, 2020. “Un ethnologue européaniste au défi d’un musée : biographie de Jean Cuisenier,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Learn more about how to attend this event. Because of space constraints, interestested participants are invited to register by sending an email to martine.segalen@gmail.com and to nicolas.adell@univ-tlse2.fr.

On view now at the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawai’i through October 24, 2021

(Re)Generations: Challenging Scientific Racism in Hawaiʻi explores a collection of photographs and plaster busts created by anthropologist Louis R. Sullivan as a tool to measure and classify the physical traits of a supposedly “pure” Native Hawaiian race. The collection was presented at the Second International Eugenics Conference (1921) with the Bishop Museum’s endorsement and support. Measuring, classifying, and categorizing people through “race science” has been used to justify slavery, displacement, colonial occupation, eugenics, and genocide. There is no biological truth to race, and research like Sullivan’s is now long discredited. Yet the myths of race and racial superiority, and the structural inequalities they support, have lasting and traumatic effects.

Though Sullivan’s photographs and busts are tied to a legacy of scientific racism, the collection has become one of the Bishop Museum’s primary sources for genealogical research in Hawaiʻi. (Re)Generations aims to celebrate the ways this collection has been reappropriated by Native Hawaiian descendants as a vehicle for (re)discovering ancestors, genealogical connections, and family. Photographs of persons celebrated in the exhibit were selected through collaboration with their living descendants. Photographs and busts are recontextualized outside of Sullivan’s eugenics research through meaningful histories, including the additions of descendant interviews and family heirlooms, which offer a glimpse into these people’s lives and legacies.

The Bishop Museum’s hope is that this exhibit is not an end in itself, but rather aims to start conversations on how the Museum can better connect with and serve Native Hawaiian communities and stakeholders.

For more information on how to see the exhibit, including relevant COVID-19 policies, please visit the Bishop Museum’s website.

The Royal Anthropological Institute will host a webinar and book launch for Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon’s Journals from his Expeditions to Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898, with the book’s editors Dr. Anita Herle (University of Cambridge) and Dr. Jude Philp (University of Sydney) on April 20, 2021 at 12:00 pm GMT (7:00 am EST).

To register, please click here.

Recording Kastom brings readers into the heart of colonial Torres Strait and New Guinea with the personal journals of Cambridge zoologist and anthropologist Alfred Haddon. Haddon’s journals highlight his comprehensive vision of anthropology and preoccupation with documentation and reveal the central role played by named Islanders who worked with him to record their kastom. The work of Haddon and the members of the 1898 Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait was hugely influential on the nascent discipline of anthropology and remains of great interest to Islanders and scholars working in the region.

Join the authors and editors for a discussion of the content and process of publishing the journals, involving collaboration with Islander communities and descendants of the people with whom Haddon worked. The session will also provide an opportunity to reassess the importance of Haddon’s work and consider the far-reaching value of anthropological archives today.

Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon’s Journals from his Expeditions to Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898 is published by Sydney University Press.

The Warburg Institute presents an online seminar via Zoom: Noga Arikha (Associate Fellow, Warburg Institute): ‘The Self as Other: Franz Boas between Psychology and Anthropology’

March 3, 2021 at 2:00 p.m. GMT

Psychology and anthropology have deep connections, since both are concerned with the study of humankind. The one focuses on the functioning of the embodied mind. The other focuses on how minds create culture. The psychology of our day, especially that concerning the embodied self, which is Arikha’s central focus, has established (and continues to show) how culture, which anthropologist Margaret Mead defined as “experiments with what could be done with human nature,” is indeed an aspect of our nature, and how biological evolution is a handmaiden to cultural adaptations. Insofar as we humans have evolved as social animals, and that anthropology can also be seen as a type of comparative psychology, the respective realms of these disciplines overlap – as Aby Warburg knew well – and have done so since their formation in the nineteenth century, in particular after Darwin. Arikha’s current project, a commissioned intellectual biography of Franz Boas, the German founder of cultural anthropology who created the first ever chair in the subject at Columbia University (and was a teacher of Mead, inter alia), is an occasion to unravel the complex interplay of ideas about biological constants and cultural variations in light of the history of the debates about what we understand as nature and what as culture, what as individual and what as social, what as evolved and what as acquired. In this talk, she will show how the history of the inherently multidisciplinary field that is anthropology, navigating as it does between empirical investigation and theoretical speculation, can throw light on the origins of current concerns about the embodied self in psychology. 

The Work in Progress seminar explores the variety of subjects studied and researched at the Warburg Institute. Papers are given by invited international scholars, research fellows studying at the Institute, and advanced Ph.D. students.

This program is free, but registration is required. Please sign up for the seminar here.

Conference: Paris, July 8-9, 2021   

Like Felix von Luschan, Richard Thurnwald started his career in the Habsburg Empire, before moving to Berlin. He was probably the most well-known German anthropologist outside of Germany between the two World Wars, when he developed what came to be known as historical functionalism. He was well integrated within ethnological research networks and being in contact with sociologists, he also tried to claim recognition in this field. His wife Hilde Thurnwald, who hadn’t been trained as an ethnologist, accompanied him in the field in East Africa (1930-31) and New Guinea (1933), developed her own research, and also began to publish in the 1930s. Although Richard Thurnwald expressed his opposition to the rising national-socialist party in letters, the couple left the USA in 1936 and returned to Germany, adapting to the new regime. After 1945, they both participated in the reorganization of ethnological research in Berlin, Hilde Thurnwald leading in fieldwork in 1946-47 about the situation of families and youth criminality, Richard Thurnwald (re)founding the review Sociologus (which still exists today), and continuing to publish. Their concessions to the Third Reich did not seem to overtly alert the Occupation Authorities, either Soviet or American. One can thus state that after 1945 the Thurnwalds were typical of the thematic and personal continuation of the previous era, a reason why, as with others, they were condemned in the 1960s when a new generation of German ethnologists started to investigate the history of the discipline.    

A reminder that the deadline to apply for pre and postdoctoral fellowships at the Library & Museum of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia is Friday, January 29, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. ET. 

The Library & Museum of the American Philosophical Society invites applications for predoctoral, postdoctoral, and short-term research fellowships from scholars at all stages of their careers, especially Native American scholars in training, tribal college and university faculty members, and other scholars working closely with Native communities on projects in Native American and Indigenous Studies and related fields and disciplines. 

Fellows will be associated with the APS’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR), which promotes greater collaboration among scholars, archives, and Indigenous communities. CNAIR focuses on helping Indigenous communities and scholars to discover and utilize the APS collection in innovative ways. The Collections comprise a vast archive of documentary sources (including manuscript materials, audio recordings, and images) related to over 650 indigenous cultures, predominantly from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The Indigenous Subject Guide may be accessed through the CNAIR webpage: http://www.amphilsoc.org/CNAIR

See individual fellowship descriptions below for more information and instructions on how to apply. 

History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research that provides the 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 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.

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 29th, 2021. The panel aims to make a decision by Friday, April 30th, 2021. 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

2019-20’s winner was Danielle Carr (Columbia University) for their essay, “Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism.” The committee also awarded a special commendation to Katie Joice (Birkbeck University) for their essay “Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67.” You can read more about these essays in interviews with Danielle and Katie 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 Enquiries

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