The Editors

Crania Americana and the Archive of Scientific Racism: New Exhibition in Philadelphia

September 11, 2024 / Sarah Pickman and The Editors

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!

New Publication: Benjamin Breen’s “Tripping on Utopia”

January 17, 2024 / Sarah Pickman and The Editors

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!

2024 New Year’s Update from HAR Editors

January 1, 2024 / The Editors

The start of a new year seems a good time to look back on what has been happening and to give you, faithful HAR readers, a sense of what’s ahead with our online journal. As always, we are very grateful to you for checking in with us, submitting new works, alerting us to upcoming events and opportunities, and letting us know about the work you and others are doing.

Postdoctoral Fellowship: “Archaeology of Indigeneity and Race” at the University of Virginia

October 12, 2022 / The Editors

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.

Call for Applications: Associate Editors, History of Anthropology Review (HAR)

August 15, 2022 / The Editors

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.

Announcement: Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship

April 18, 2022 / The Editors

HAR would like to bring this petition to reinstate the SSRC’s Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) program to the attention of our readers. The IDRF is a tremendous source of support for international research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and it is also a vital source of support for international students pursuing doctoral degrees at US institutions (where other fellowship opportunities often require US citizenship).

The fields of anthropology and the history of anthropology have benefited heavily from this program, and the IDRF supports a huge amount of scholars across different disciplines (for example, in 2019 there were 70 fellows). More information about the program can be found on the SSRC website.

The full text of the SSRC’s announcement regarding the end of this program can be found here, below:

An Announcement from the SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program

After an extraordinary 25-year run supporting graduate students conducting research across the globe, the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) program is coming to a close. The 2022 IDRF cohort, to be announced this spring, will be the program’s final class of fellows. We are immensely grateful to IDRF’s selection committee members, evaluators, and fellows, whose dedicated work over the past two and a half decades has ensured the program’s success and cemented its enduring legacy.

Since its inception in 1997, in partnership with the Mellon Foundation, the International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) program has funded more than 1,600 emerging scholars pursuing research that advances knowledge about non-US cultures, histories, politics, and societies around the world, as well as about US Indigenous communities. IDRF fellows have had a meaningful impact on the landscape of higher education, making significant achievements in scholarship, teaching, and beyond.

Few of the Mellon Foundation’s grantmaking commitments have extended for as long as its quarter of a century of support for IDRF, and during that time, IDRF accomplished many of the goals it had set for itself. “The Mellon Foundation is privileged to have supported the invaluable mission of IDRF, and the work of many cohorts of graduate students. Over the last 25 years, the program has demonstrated to the academy and beyond the indispensable value of immersive international research to first-rate scholarly production,” said Phil Harper, program director for Higher Learning at the Mellon Foundation.

Although the IDRF program is coming to an end, promoting global research and collaboration remains a key commitment of the Council’s work. “Global scholarship has been central to the mission of the SSRC, and over the last 25 years the International Dissertation Research Fellowship has been critical to fulfilling that mission,” said SSRC president Anna Harvey. “Going forward, we will continue to develop new opportunities to support social and behavioral science around the world, including directly funding the work of researchers in the global South.”

While the program will not hold any further fellowship competitions, its current fellows, as well as members of the soon-to-be announced 2022 cohort, will continue to receive the support of the Council through their fellowship terms. We thank the Mellon Foundation for their many years of past support and look forward to future partnerships.

Source

In Memoriam: Jean Jamin

February 7, 2022 / The Editors

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 the Possession and Unethical Use of the Remains of Tree and Delisha Africa

April 30, 2021 / The Editors

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.

Resources for Doing HoA Online

May 21, 2020 / The Editors

We are pleased to share a new page of HAR with our readers: Doing the History of Anthropology Online: Resources for COVID-19 and Beyond. This page follows up on an initiative announced in our Spring 2020 Update to gather HoA-relevant virtual resources for researchers who have lost access to physical collections during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to research collections, you will find resources to support teaching, scholarly community, and public engagement in the history of anthropology online.

We would like to draw special attention to the second section, HoA Scholarly Literature, since some of these resources are set to expire as soon as 31 May. The University of Nebraska Press in particular has extensive publications in the history of anthropology that it is making freely available through the end of the month (find more information under “Project MUSE”).

This list will be updated periodically and we welcome suggestions from our readers. Please email us with more resources or other comments at news@histanthro.org.

Announcing BEROSE: International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology

May 12, 2020 / Christine Laurière, Frederico Delgado Rosa and The Editors

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.

HAR Update, Spring 2020

April 29, 2020 / The Editors

To HAR readers:

Because the work of the History of Anthropology Review is largely conducted online, during these COVID days we continue much as we have. But most members of our editorial board are early career scholars, including graduate students and post-docs, and we are acutely aware of the anxieties and uncertainties the current situation presents for precarious workers of all kinds, including in the academy. We wish everyone safe passage through these times, and stand in solidarity with academic workers who are demanding protections and extensions to cope with these conditions.

As research travel and archival visits are extremely restricted, HAR would like to provide lists and links for electronic resources for the history of anthropology. Our “kin” page lists various journals, but we are now planning to publish a list of archives and collections for the history of anthropology available online. Do you know of any from your research, or from your place of employment? Please send suggestions and links to news@histanthro.org, and we will get these up as soon as we can!

We do have some good news. Last fall we invited applications to join our editorial collective, and we are delighted to add to our masthead the following new associate editors, who will keep HAR growing: Tracie Canada (University of Virginia); Abigail Nieves Delgado (Ruhr University Bochum); Olga Glinksii (University of New Mexico); Sophie Hopmeier (St. Andrews); Patricia Marcos (UC San Diego); Sarah Pickman (Yale); Shu Wan (University of Iowa); and Paul Wolff Mitchell, Brigid Prial, and Koyna Tomar (University of Pennsylvania). We’re thrilled to welcome them to the team.

Further, we would like to announce the addition of four new members to our Advisory Board: William Carruthers (University of East Anglia), Christine Laurière (CNRS, codirector of Bérose), Joanna Radin (Yale), and Han Vermeulen (Max Planck Institut, Halle, co-convener of HOAN). We’re honored to have the advice and support of these distinguished scholars.

As always, we welcome readers’ suggestions and submissions to any of our departments—short essays for Field Notes, book Reviews (of those currently listed or others), new publications for Bibliography, any News of interest to the discipline, and archival curiosities for Clio’s Fancy.

We are grateful to have such a strong and wide community of readers and contributors. As human life on this planet undergoes significant changes yet again, anthropology and its histories remain vital.

–The editors

Announcing a Name Change: The History of Anthropology Review

October 7, 2019 / The Editors / 4 Comments

In 2016 we relaunched this website as an online, collectively-edited update of the History of Anthropology Newsletter. We’re delighted to have celebrated our third birthday this summer. Our editorial collective has made the transition to a digital format, preserving not only HAN’s back issues (under the editorship of George Stocking and Henrika Kuklick) but, we believe, its goals and vision.

The site is serving as a regular channel for news of the discipline, including reviews (of books, conferences, and exhibits), essays, special issues (as with our recent dossiers on a landmark of Brazilian anthropology and on Canguilhem’s philosophy of the milieu), a record of recent and classic publications, plus tidbits from the archives in Clio’s Fancy (most recently, on the Dell Hymes-Gary Snyder correspondence). With the support of our Advisory Board and our remarkable contributors— coming from an enormous variety of nations, disciplines, and career stages—the site is helping to sustain the worldwide community of researchers exploring the vast range of topics and approaches that continue to reshape the history of anthropology.

Considering this expansion, and the ways in which people read, write, and organize today, we have felt that the name ‘Newsletter’ no longer quite fits what we do. We publish online nearly continuously, with considerably more new content than before. And while we welcome the radical associations of the term “newsletter”—as highlighted in Ira Bashkow’s past and recent essays on its meaning for Stocking— we no longer use a mimeograph or stapler, or aim primarily at a focused group of fellow travelers.

After much discussion, the editorial collective has decided to give the site a new name: History of Anthropology Review. This title strikes us as both modest and august. It emphasizes the importance for us and our readers of reviews of books, conferences, and exhibitions, while underlining our commitment to rethinking and re-evaluating the long and complex history, current trends, and future developments of both anthropology and its history.

It strikes us that this new name (and its piratical abbreviation, HAR) keeps our aims and accomplishments intact. We hope, further, that it will encourage even more scholars to contribute to a publication that is not only a timely and relevant messenger for a discrete community, but an enduring, widely-accessible historical document in its own right.

We will make this change official later this month, in October 2019; our web address and other contact information will remain the same, and issues of HAR will simply be joined to those of HAN.

As always, we warmly welcome contributions: in the forms of reviews, announcements, suggestions for articles, special issues, or archival finds (please write to the editors of each of the website’s departments with your suggestions or inquiries), and encourage you to continue to spread the word to potential contributors and subscribers. We also warmly thank all our authors, advisors, and readers—and look forward with great excitement to the future development of the field and of the History of Anthropology Review.

HAN on HAU

June 22, 2018 / The Editors

The History of Anthropology Newsletter editorial board is troubled by recent reports of abuses of power at HAU—an online journal of ethnographic theory that has been publishing since 2011. Complaints of financial misconduct, violations of open access policies, and bullying, harassment, and intimidation of staff members recently appeared as two anonymous statements from former editorial staff on the blog Footnotes and on their own site, and have led to significant discussion online.

The fact that HAU has been a source of inspiration for our own open access web publication makes these reports all the more disturbing for HAN. As HAN is an unpaid, volunteer organization of mostly junior scholars who have functioned together on the basis of trust and informal agreements, we’re aware of the potential for exploitation and failures of transparency in publication venues, as well as the fraught power dynamics which may exist in collaborations between junior and senior scholars.

We are therefore taking this occasion to make explicit our commitment to maintaining kind, fair, supportive, mutually-beneficial working conditions for all who contribute to HAN as editors, authors, or otherwise; to maintaining open access publishing, with content available for free in perpetuity; and to establishing principles and safeguards for protection and accountability at this year’s HAN Annual Meeting. We recognize the valuable work that has has been done at HAU as well as the problematic and abusive conditions under which much of it appears to have been carried out; we are grateful to those who have brought this situation to light and catalyzed these important conversations.

Update for Late 2016, Start of 2017

December 21, 2016 / The Editors

As the first half-year of the revived History of Anthropology Newsletter closes, we’d like to bring your attention to a handful of posts which will appear in the next months, and some interesting changes to the site:

A revised Bibliographies section, with regular updates of recent books and articles in the field;
An ongoing publication series planned in collaboration with the Center for Indigenous and Native Research at the American Philosophical Society;
An upcoming series of short essays from leading scholars on the past, present, and future of the history of anthropology (in Field Notes);
In Participant Observations, an upcoming report on the “Translating Across Time and Space” conference at the APS;
Recent and upcoming Reviews: Amos Morris-Reich’s Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876–1980 and Travels with Frances Densmore (we have many other books available for review);
And just in time for the holidays, Ira Bashkow’s Clio’s Fancy entry on “George Stocking’s Stockings.”

Stay tuned for more, and please keep us informed by submitting news, publications, and potential contributions!

Renewing the History of Anthropology Newsletter

June 20, 2016 / The Editors

The History of Anthropology Newsletter officially relaunches in online form on June 20, 2016. Originally edited by George W. Stocking, Jr., then by Henrika Kuklick, the HAN is now under the direction of a new editorial team based at the University of Pennsylvania, with the guidance of an esteemed advisory board—several of whom have been involved in the HAN since its inception.

The first aim of the relaunched newsletter is to make available online, in a searchable mode, all the earlier issues of the HAN, originally published from 1973 to 2012. Thanks to a grant from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and the Mellon Foundation, and thanks to the generous assistance of Penn Libraries, you can now find all those back issues online.

The newsletter also features:

News of interest to those working in the history of anthropology, including announcements about conferences and funding opportunities.
Reviews of books and other relevant works.
Bibliographies of recent publications in the field.
Field Notes, a space for pointed observations on questions in the history of anthropology; our first issue contains fascinating reflections on the history of the newsletter itself, from Richard Handler, Ira Bashkow, and Regna Darnell, as well as notes on the history of anthropological collections and museums by Ira Jacknis.
Clio’s Fancy, a section devoted to oddities and curiosities found in the archives, which was originally edited by George Stocking and which we’re renewing with a wedding announcement connecting the Boasian tradition to the history of science fiction.
A Twitter feed with frequent updates of interest to the history of anthropology community.

We invite you to explore the newsletter, either as a return or for the first time. We also invite you to post responses, offer suggestions, submit news, articles, and reviews, and keep the conversation going.

The Past and Future of the History of Anthropology Newsletter

January 1, 2016 / The Editors

The first issue of the History of Anthropology Newsletter was published in 1973. As a project launched and directed by George Stocking—a founder and leading practitioner of the history of anthropology—HAN has played an important role in the field for four decades.

From the beginning, its mission has been to connect dispersed scholars working on the history of anthropology from a variety of geographical, institutional, and disciplinary locations, and to serve as a repository for resources which might otherwise be missed or neglected. The biannual newsletter has included sections listing and describing recently acquired papers and collections, newly published monographs and manuscripts, dissertations and research in progress, as well as news, notes, and queries. Continue reading