Richard L. Anderson is, in my view, the most respected and influential aesthetic anthropologist alive today (see Anderson 1979, 1993, 1999, 2004, 2015, 2021, 2023). I first met him in the 1980s when I was teaching a course called Creativity and Society at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, using one of his works (1979) as a required text. He was teaching in the Liberal Arts section of the Kansas City Art Institute, a mere hour’s drive away, so I invited him to come and speak to my class. The students were delighted to hear from their text’s author, and he and I hit it off right away. Before long, we were collaborating on a book of readings (Anderson and Field 1993), a project in which I learned a great deal from him. Because of those experiences, and because Richard is now in his 80s, I feel it is crucial to preserve his thoughts and experiences so that they may be shared with other anthropologists interested in the field of art and aesthetics. The following discussion is one that we conducted via email over the past several months and one in which I hope to capture his role in the history of that tradition.
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Bibliography (page 1 of 2)
We have added twenty-four new items to HAR‘s bibliography of references. This includes several recently published edited volumes such as the second installment in the Franz Boas Papers series on James Teit (Laforet et al. 2024) and Fabrics of Anthropological Knowledge: Changing Perspectives in Europe and Beyond (Birkalan-Gedik and Dimpflmeier 2025).
Continue readingTwenty four new bibliographic references relevant for research into the history of anthropology have been added to HAR‘s bibliography page. Authors appearing here for the first time include Gwyneira Isaac, David Nugent, and Norman E. Witten, Jr. Two recent doctoral dissertations, by William Eck and Tugba Batuhan, have also been added.
HAR’s Bibliography Editors are pleased to post our latest additions to the bibliography of works on the history of anthropology. In our effort to highlight recently published works, please note that we have included Prakash Shah’s 2025 article on Durkheim’s focus on religion in India and Vincent L. Femia’s article, also from 2025, on the relatively unknown late 19th century American anthropologist Anita Newcomb McGee. Both authors are new to HAR‘s bibliography.
Continue readingHAR’s Bibliography Editors are pleased to post our latest additions to the bibliography of works on the history of anthropology. We have been working to identify and add newer works, and you will find many 2024 and 2025 references here.
Continue readingHAR’s Bibliography Editors are pleased to post our latest additions to the bibliography of works on the history of anthropology.
Continue readingHAR’s Bibliography Editors are pleased to post our latest additions to the bibliography of works on the history of anthropology.
Continue readingMany readers of HAR may already be familiar with the book series History of Anthropology, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Eleven themed volumes of papers appeared, with volumes one to eight edited by George W. Stocking, Jr. and volumes nine to eleven by Richard Handler. The twelfth and final title, an autobiography by Stocking (who died in 2013), appeared in 2010.
Continue readingHAR’s Bibliography Editors are pleased to post our latest additions to the bibliography of works on the history of anthropology. This latest batch of citations includes several titles on linguistic anthropology, including “James Cowles Prichard and the Linguistic Foundations of Ethnology,” as well as biographically-focused pieces on the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead, Harry Shapiro, and Alfred Kroeber.
Don’t forget that you can search the Comprehensive Bibliography, which now includes almost 600 unique authors, by keywords including personal names, places, and concepts.
Continue readingThe bibliography section of HAR features citations to recently published works in all formats and covering all aspects of the history of anthropology. This page displays a comprehensive list of citations that we’ve collected since 2016 (dating back as far as 2013); our recent batches and posts and a search tool are also available separately. You may also browse this list in Zotero.
HAR’s team of bibliography editors was recently expanded from two to four people, and an upside is that we have added expertise in both linguistic anthropology and archaeology, which means we hope to present a more citations in those sub-fields of anthropology in the future.
We welcome suggestions from readers. If you come across something of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.
Continue readingLatour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
US anthropology was already suffering the “suffering subject” when the abject cruelty of fascist culture warmongers assumed power here in the grotesque form of our Erdoğan, our Putin, our Bolsonaro: Donald Trump.[1] After this hard-right turn, appeal to a political imaginary of the late-1990s and early aughts might seem, to put it mildly, a neoliberal nostalgia. All the more so if this political philosophy identified an a priori distinction between politics and science as the problem paralyzing democracy and portending a climactic horizon of climate disaster. How quaint!
Continue readingThis page displays our most recent batch of citations; a comprehensive bibliography of citations we’ve collected since 2016 (going back as far as 2013) and a search tool are also available.
Seven authors new to HAR’s Bibliography are being included here: they are Paul Basu, Paul Dukes, Rita Eder, Albina Girfanova, Keith Hart, Emmanuelle Loyer, and Shalon Parker, writing about colonial anthropology in British West Africa, Vilhjalmur Stefansson in the Arctic, and Miguel Covarrubias’s reliance on the theories on cultural contact of Gordon Eckholm and Robert-Heine-Geldern, among other subjects.
We welcome suggestions from readers. If you come across something of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.
Continue readingThis article introduces an expandable research bibliography of over 365 monographs by 220 ethnographers working in the fifty years preceding the publication of Malinowski’s classic 1922 monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, in the years between 1870 to 1922.
An earlier version of this text and resource was published as “Appendix: Selected Bibliography of Ethnographic Accounts, 1870–1922” in Frederico Delgado Rosa and Han F. Vermeulen, eds., Ethnographers Before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870–1922, EASA Series 44 (New York: Berghahn, 2022), 474–501. For a wide-ranging discussion of this book (with the participation of Sophie Chevalier, Barbara Chambers Dawson, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Michael Kraus, Adam Kuper, Herbert S. Lewis, Andrew Lyons, David Mills, David Shankland, James Urry, and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt), please see this link at BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: “Before and After Malinowski: Alternative Views on the History of Anthropology [A Virtual Round Table at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 7 July 2022].”
Those wishing to share their knowledge of further references—i.e. ethnographic monographs published in book form or of book length (over 100 pages) in the period 1870–1922 or resulting from fieldwork carried out in the same period—are cordially invited to participate. Please either contact the authors or add the bibliographical information directly in the “Leave a Comment” box at the end of this page.
Continue readingThis page displays our most recent batch of citations; a comprehensive bibliography of citations we’ve collected since 2016 (going back as far as 2013) and a search tool are also available.
We welcome suggestions from readers. If you come across something of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.
Continue readingThis page displays our most recent batch of citations; a comprehensive bibliography of citations we’ve collected since 2016 (going back as far as 2013) and a search tool are also available.
We welcome suggestions from readers. If you come across something of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.
Continue readingWith this batch of new citations to HAR’s Bibliography page, we mark a milestone! There are now over 500 authors represented in the bibliography, each one having contributed important scholarship to the discipline of the history of anthropology. (Our bibliography begins with publications dated 2013; paper issues of History of Anthropology Newsletter, published from 1973 to 2012, each contained a bibliography of relevant publications, and you can see them here.)
We’ve decided to mark this occasion by briefly highlighting two of the authors appearing in this batch of citations. Making his first appearance is Paul Henley, an ethnographic filmmaker and now Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. A prolific writer, Henley has several recent publications included here, including his 2020 book Beyond Observation: A History of Authorship in Ethnographic Film, which is a detailed historical analysis of the authoring of ethnographic films between 1895 and 1915. Our second noted author, already in the bibliography and now represented by an additional two works, is Anthony Q. Hazard, Jr., an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies department with a courtesy appointment in the History department at Santa Clara University. One of his new articles is concerned with Ashley Montagu and the other with Margaret Mead, and both continue his exploration of “race” in 20th century American history.
For additional information on works by these authors and others, please see below.
Continue readingThis page displays our most recent batch of citations; a comprehensive bibliography of citations we’ve collected since 2016 (going back as far as 2013) and a search tool are also available.
We welcome suggestions from readers. If you come across something of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.
Continue readingThis page displays our most recent batch of citations; a comprehensive bibliography of citations we’ve collected since 2016 (going back as far as 2013) and a search tool are also available.
We welcome suggestions from readers. If you come across something of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.
Continue readingThis page displays our most recent batch of citations; a comprehensive bibliography of citations we’ve collected since 2016 (going back as far as 2013) and a search tool are also available.
We welcome suggestions from readers. If you come across something of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.
Continue readingThis page displays our most recent batch of citations; a comprehensive bibliography of citations we’ve collected since 2016 (going back as far as 2013) and a search tool are also available.
We welcome suggestions from readers. If you come across something of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.
Continue readingThis page displays our most recent batch of citations; a comprehensive bibliography of citations we’ve collected since 2016 (going back as far as 2013) and a search tool are also available.
We welcome suggestions from readers. If you come across something of interest during your own fieldwork in the library, whether that be physical or virtual, please let us know by emailing us at bibliographies@histanthro.org.
Continue readingMary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).
A sharp, comparative analysis of symbolic boundary maintenance across times and cultures, Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger intervened in the anthropology of religion and ritual, as well as in the theoretical development of the field as a whole. It is a key text in symbolic anthropology, an approach that, in viewing symbols as the building blocks of socio-religious worlds, sought to analyze the ways symbolic constructions either generated order or disorder. Innovative for its time, Douglas follows E. E. Evans-Pritchard ethnographic account of The Nuer when she claims that we cannot understand ideas of purity or pollution—that is, hygiene—in isolation.[1] Solid anthropological knowledge comes from an analysis that attends to the ways systems relate to one another and form the structural “backbone” of a society.
Continue readingAlfred L. Kroeber, Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, Prehistory (New York: Harcout, Brace and Company, 1948).
I was sixteen, browsing the shelves in the public library downtown in Mount Vernon, New York—a suburb just north of the Bronx—when I pulled out a thick tome, Anthropology, by A. L. Kroeber. Taking it home, I read it through, all 856 pages. ANTHROPOLOGY! Everything in the world, everything could be studied through Anthropology! Humans are ubiquitous.
Continue readingEvon Z. Vogt, Fieldwork among the Maya: The Harvard Chiapas Project (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).
There is a moment in Evon Vogt’s Fieldwork Among the Maya: Reflections on the Harvard Chiapas Project when Paul Lazersfeld—the sociologist famous for his methodological rigor—passes a stack of books sitting on Vogt’s desk on the Chukchee of northeastern Siberia and remarks: “My God, you anthropologists know a lot. You don’t know how you found it all out, but you certainly know a lot” (47). How Vogt knows what he knows—and more generally, the methods through which anthropologists come to know other cultures—is the motivating question in this “autobiography of his fieldwork.”[1] Fieldwork Among the Maya traces the impact of Vogt’s participation in multiple interdisciplinary, collaborative ethnographic projects— including W. Lloyd Warner’s study of social stratification in the Midwest and Clyde Kluckhohn’s investigation of values in five cultures in Ramah, New Mexico—on the development and operation of the Harvard Chiapas Project.[2] Written fifteen years after the “official” conclusion of the project, Vogt’s memoir traverses, in a personal and intimate fashion, over forty years of tumultuous transformation in anthropology.
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Since 1973, the History of Anthropology Review (formerly the History of Anthropology Newsletter) has been a venue for publication and conversation on the many histories of the discipline of anthropology. We became an open access web publication in 2016. Please subscribe to our emails below to receive updates as we publish new essays, reviews, and bibliographies. We welcome submissions.
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