In partnership with BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, HAR is honored to announce the release of a previously unpublished manuscript by Signe Howell, who passed away on January 26, 2025.

Howell, Signe, 2025. “My Anthropology: A Personal and Intellectual Adventure,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Signe Howell (1942–2025) was a Norwegian social anthropologist, trained at the University of Oxford. After an 18-month long (1977–1979) fieldwork season with the egalitarian Chewong peoples living in the Malaysian rainforest, she earned a PhD in 1980 under the supervision of Rodney Needham. For a short while, she was a member of the Erasmus research group led by Daniel de Coppet at the École de hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris), centered around Louis Dumont, and taught for three years in the Department of Anthropology at Edinburgh University before joining the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo in 1987. She revisited the Chewong frequently until 2018. As a counterpoint to her first ethnographic experience, she also conducted lengthy fieldwork among the Lio, a highly structured society in the mountains in Flores, Eastern Indonesia, and visited several countries in connection with her subsequent research on international adoption from the 2000s. She wrote and edited influential books such as Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia (1984), Societies at Peace: Anthropological Perspectives (with Roy Willis, 1989), The Ethnography of Moralities (1997), The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective (2006), and Returns to the Field: Multitemporal research and contemporary anthropology (with Aud Talle, 2011).

Bérose has the privilege of releasing an unpublished manuscript by Signe Howell, edited and presented by her widower in the following terms: “To write this memoir was very important to Signe, my wife. She began working on it in 2023, and we discussed it as it developed through several drafts. In agreement with Signe, I took responsibility for completing this text, which was nearing its final form when she died. She was insistent on maintaining the shifting “I/she” form in the narrative, by which she sought to convey the ambivalent feelings she experienced on describing and reflecting upon her time in the field.”

Jamie Cohen-Cole, Philippe Fontaine, and Jeff Pooley, co-editors of the journal History of Social Science, are pleased to announce that the inaugural issue of History of Social Science has been published with free access online. The editors invite you to browse the issue and its contents.

The journal, published twice a year by Penn Press, is sponsored by the Society for the History of Recent Social Science (HISRESS).

• A New Space for the History of Social Science (Jamie Cohen-Cole, Philippe Fontaine, Jefferson Pooley)
• The “Myth” of Intellectual Decline: Old-Age Psychometrics and Mandatory Retirement (Jamie Leach)
• Taming Tyrants: Tibor Scitovsky’s Understanding of the Mass Market (Viviana Di Giovinazzo)
• A Philosophy of Exhaustion: On Foucault’s Le Discours philosophique (Michael C. Behrent)
• Historicizing a Classic: Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966) (Herman Paul)
• Review: The World that Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era by Margarita Fajardo (Sarah Foss)
• Review: The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire by George Steinmetz (Ian Merkel)
• Review: Camillo Pellizzi: Un intellettuale nell’Europa del Novecento by Mariuccia Salvati (Matteo Bortolini)
• Review: Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk (Emily Klancher Merchant)
• Review: The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America by Adrian Johns (Peter D. McDonald)
• Review: Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (Robin Manley Mihran)

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!

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!

HAR is pleased to forward the following exciting postdoctoral fellowship announcement on the Archaeology of Indigeneity and Race at the University of Virginia:

Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in The Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia

http://graduate.as.virginia.edu/rising-scholars

Review of applications will begin January 16, 2023

Department of Anthropology – Archaeology of Indigeneity and Race

As part of the Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Mellon Foundation, the UVA Department of Anthropology hopes to provide a departmental home to a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Archaeology of Indigeneity and Race. We seek a rising scholar who will have received their Ph.D. degree between August 24, 2020, and August 24, 2023. To access the application portal, please follow the link above.

This two-year fellowship is part of the College of Arts and Sciences’ mission to further our understanding of the experiences and conditions of Indigeneity and racial inequality, and to enhance the career trajectory of an underrepresented scholar whose work engages its long- term, global, comparative dimensions. The geographical focus is open. This position reflects our collective commitment to pursuing an on-going reexamination of anthropological archaeology, its fraught colonial legacies, and its potential for grounded theory and collaborative research.

We welcome applications from all eligible scholars working in these areas, including but not limited to those who:

• Tend to situational intersections of Indigeneity, race, colonialism, diaspora, migration, and social inequality through archaeological research.
• Use collaborative and participatory research methodologies.
• Do research in connection with Indigenous ontologies and histories, cultural heritagemanagement, colonization, landscape, gender, memory, health, and foodways.
• Have active field programs including public engagement.

Please find more details and contact information at the link above.

The History of Anthropology Review (HAR) seeks applications from graduate students, early career scholars, or other interested parties to join its editorial team as Associate Editors. HAR has remained a critical venue for conversations and publications on the histories of the practice and impact of anthropology since 1973. We aim to continue this legacy by providing a platform for innovative and reflexive interdisciplinary dialogue on the discipline of anthropology, and the many ways of narrating its past, present, and future.

We seek new members interested in expanding the boundaries of the history of anthropology and challenging normative interpretations of the field and its purview. This includes, but is not limited to, those with interests that decenter Western Europe and North America as the primary sites of the discipline’s development, and white, Western experts as its only arbiters of knowledge production. Applicants should have or be pursuing graduate training in Anthropology, Museum Studies, Area Studies, History, History of Science, or a related field.

Please submit a CV, a short statement of no more than 500 words describing your academic work, your interest in the position, and, if applicable, relevant background or experience with editing. We particularly encourage applications from those with a geographical focus in Africa, Asia, and/or the Pacific and Oceania. Applicants may specialize in any time period. Please indicate which of HAR’s sections you are interested in joining (see “more information” below): News, Bibliographies, or Field Notes sections. We regret that all positions at HAR are unpaid.

Please send materials via email to notes@histanthro.org with the subject heading “Associate Editor.” The deadline for Associate Editor applications is September 02, 2022.

More information:

The following sections seek new members: News gathers announcements and current events relevant to anthropology and its history. Bibliographies correlates and publishes citations of recently published works in all formats and covering all aspects of the history of anthropology. We also publish announcements of publishing projects, web sites, electronic resources, and archival collections, as well as longer essays on both retrospective and newer resources. Field Notes is devoted to focused reflections and original essays engaging the history of anthropology, broadly construed. We publish non-peer-reviewed special focus sections and single-authored short essays including empirical work, theoretical musings, and explorations of historical or methodological issues. Examples of recent work in this direction include our Special Focus Sections on “Engaging ‘The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology’,” “Structures,” and “The Morton Cranial Collection and Legacies of Scientific Racism in Museums.”

Associate editors’ primary responsibilities include gathering and posting announcements about happenings in the field; collecting and publishing information on new publications; inviting contributions for Field Notes, Generative Texts, or Archival Developments; designing and coordinating special focus sections; and conceptual, line, and copy editing for our non-peer reviewed online publications. 

Jean Jamin, 1945-2022

The editors regret to inform HAR readers of the death of Jean Jamin last week in Paris; see the notice in Le Monde. A founder of Gradhiva, Revue d’histoire et d’archives de l’anthropologie, Jamin was a pre-eminent historian of anthropology who made significant contributions to the field in research, writing, teaching, editing, and mentorship, with a singular emphasis on anthropology’s relations to music, art, and museums. We had the pleasure of translating and publishing his essay on Lévi-Strauss, Leiris, and opera in HAR recently. He will be greatly missed.

On May 13, 1985, the city of Philadelphia killed eleven people by bombing the home of the MOVE organization. Local Philadelphia media recently reported that for the 36 years since then, anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology and Princeton University kept remains attributed to two children killed in that bombing, Tree and Delisha Africa, without their family’s knowledge or consent. They also filmed these remains for online lectures on forensic anthropology in 2019. During one of these videos, some of these remains were shown to the camera while the Morton Cranial Collection, including the remains of Black Philadelphians and enslaved people, filled shelves in the background. The objectification of human remains and the dehumanization of non-white people remain among the most insidious and persistent legacies of scientific racism in anthropology, archaeology, and museums. 

HAR is happy to draw readers’ attention to a remarkable and growing online source for History of Anthropology. BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology reflects the diversity of anthropological traditions and currents, whether hegemonic or pushed to the margins. BEROSE welcomes and fosters the pluralization of the history of anthropology and aims at recovering the dialogues or tensions between classical protagonists and forgotten, sometimes excluded and sometimes cursed figures. This pluralization makes it possible to highlight the richness of World Anthropologies. The same challenge is addressed to Western or Northern anthropologies as well: these are sometimes reduced to a monolithic vision of the most famous theoretical currents and major actors, thus masking the wealth of national anthropological traditions and the vitality of specializations in cultural, geographical or thematic areas.