HAR is happy to share information about an exciting upcoming international workshop from our friends at HOAN-EASA. 

Transnational Entanglements of Racial Anthropology: History and Legacy, will take place in Berlin and online between September 11 and 13, 2025 (all times CET), bringing international scholars worldwide. 

The workshop has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, DFG (German Research Council), and HOAN, and will be livestreamed, enabling our online HOAN viewers to listen to the various presentations to ask questions through the chat.

Overview: Racial anthropology, emerging in (post-)colonial contexts, first developed in Europe and North America before spreading globally. Responding to the renewed calls for overcoming the legacies of colonialism, imperialism and racism in anthropology, the workshop examines the transnational afterlives of scientific racism in all fields of anthropology. This workshop will explore the ways in which racial anthropology took shape—and spreaded—through global scientific networks and how we should confront the enduring legacies of racism in science. Departing from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin (KWI-A), this workshop will discuss these questions and trace the transnational entanglements of racial knowledge in science and politics since the twentieth century.

See program and more information below OR in the attached pdfs:

Participation: 

Thursday: https://nomadit-co-uk.zoom.us/j/89804339971?pwd=sXLEU1B5XWvRu3Q1FurWPRhpOARWz7.1

Friday: https://nomadit-co-uk.zoom.us/j/85683553165?pwd=bQhYgSrXVJkGEHyRjQZ2nmGVCR0X7L.1

Saturday: https://nomadit-co-uk.zoom.us/j/82901405394?pwd=TZlPi3aSQbApNYZQAqUca128t5qSCF.1

We are looking forward to seeing you!

HOAN Convenors

Program:

Thursday, Sept. 11

14:15–15:00 Introduction: Dr. Manuela Bauche (FU Berlin), Prof. Dr. Hande Birkalan-Gedik (GU Frankfurt) & Dr. Thiago Pinto Barbosa (U Leipzig)

15:00–16:30 Paper Session 1:

·        Weicheng Huang (FU Berlin) – From “Racial Crossing” to “Migration and Isolation of Culture”: Tao Yunkui (1904–1944) and the Reassembling of German Anthropology on China’s Ethnic Frontier

·        Dr. Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi (U Michigan) – tba

Discussion: Dr. Udo Mischek & Dr. Lisa Gottschall 

17:30–19:00 Keynote Lecture (PUBLIC EVENT, FU Berlin, Ihnestraße 21, Room A):

·        Prof. Dr. Hans-Walter Schmuhl (U Bielefeld), author of The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927-1945: Crossing Boundaries (2008)

Friday, Sept. 12

9:00–10:30 Paper Session 2:

·        Prof. Dr. Katharina Schramm (U Bayreuth) – The Politics of Lambs’ Hair: Circulating Ideas about Race and Phenotype in Colonial Karakul Breeding

·        Lukas Alex (U Bayreuth) – Epistemic One-Way-Street: Eugenic Knowledge and Population Genetics in the Legacy of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics

Discussion: Prof. Dr. Carola Sachse & Lisette Jong

13:30–15:00 Paper Session 3:

·        Lisette Jong (U Amsterdam) – Old Bones in New Databases: Historical Insights into Race, Statistics, and Ancestry Estimation in Anthropology

·        Prof. Dr. Carola Sachse (U Vienna) – Uyghurs in the Spotlight of Evolutionary and Forensic Genetics: The End of a Long-standing German-Chinese Scientific Collaboration

Discussion: Prof. Dr. Katharina Schramm & Lukas Alex 

15:30–17:00 Paper session 4:

·        Dr. Lisa Gottschall (ÖAK-IKW, Vienna) – Anthropological Research on “Colonial Soldiers” in WWII POW Camps: A Preliminary Report

·        Prof. Dr. Marius Turda (Oxford Brookes U) – Racial Science in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust: The Case of Dr Gh. Stroescu

Discussion: Prof. Dr. Amos Morris-Reich & Dr. Katja Geisenhainer

18:30–20:00 Book reading and discussion (PUBLIC EVENT, FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum) 

 ·        An Indian student in a German school of racial anthropology and eugenics: Presentation of the book Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve (2024), with authors Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, discussed by Lisette Jong.

—

Saturday, Sept. 13

9:30–11:30 Paper Session 5:

·        Prof. Dr. Amos Morris-Reich (Tel Aviv U) – Race and Antisemitism: a Historical and Philosophical Re-evaluation

·        Dr. Katja Geisenhainer (Frobenius Inst.) – The Relationship between early German-language Ethnology and Physical Anthropology

·        Prof. Dr. Hande Birkalan-Gedik (GU Frankfurt) –  From Dahlem to Ankara: Afterlives of Racial Science, Knowledge Transfer, and the Turkish Anthropology

Discussion: Prof. Dr. Marius Turda, Dr. Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi & Dr. Thiago Pinto Barbosa 

12:00–13:00 Wrapping Up

We are pleased to announce continuation of the working group on the History of the Language Sciences, hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Meetings will take place via Zoom on the second Tuesday of each month at 9:00 Eastern in the upcoming academic year. This year, presentations and discussions will focus on archives in the history and historiography of the language sciences (linguistic anthropology notably included). The co-conveners welcome proposals for presentations as well as general group participation.

Archives scaffold research in both in history and the sciences. Far from passive repositories, they assert order and give shape to the world. In the midst of what feels like daily media revolutions, archives have attracted widespread interest from historians of science in recent years. “The archive” has been newly re-conceptualized as a cross-disciplinary focus of reflection and analysis. At the same time, political impulses to decolonize the archive, alongside the ambitions and anxieties made possible by new media, have motivated highly specific interventions in the discipline of linguistics. From the corpora of computational linguistics to the digitization of resources documenting endangered languages, linguists have reckoned explicitly and enthusiastically with the affordances of their collections. 

In the 2025-26 academic year, our working group will explore the relationship between these two traditions of thinking with and about archives. What can a cross-disciplinary perspective bring to bear on the uniqueness of archival practices in linguistics? Reciprocally, how might the particularities of linguistics inform the broader historiographic conversation around archives in the history of science? Do examples of linguistic corpora, for example, resist the notion that archives are inherently historical or not? How might conversations about governance in other fields relate to practices in linguistics? We look forward to exploring such questions with those who are interested from any disciplinary background. 

Again, the co-conveners welcome proposals for presentations in the next season of our working group. Please get in contact with Judy Kaplan (jrk@chstm.org), Raúl Aranovich (raranovich@ucdavis.edu) or James McElvenny (james.mcelvenny@mailbox.org) for more information or to pitch a session on this theme. Thanks!

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English) on Alfred Lyall’s colonial ethnography and anthropology in India.

Fuller, Chris, 2025. “‘The Most Subtle‑Minded and Profoundly Devout People in Asia’: Alfred Lyall on Hinduism, Caste and the State in Colonial India,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall (1835–1910) was a member of the Indian Civil Service from 1856 to 1887. He began his official career in north India from 1856–1864; he was then promoted and stationed in the Central Provinces between 1864–1867 and in adjacent West Berar from 1867–1873. In 1874–1878, he was the governor-general’s agent in Rajputana, the western Indian region made up of princely states under indirect rule. He was an official in the government of India’s Foreign Department in 1878–1882 and ended his career as lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh from 1882–1887. Lyall’s first work as a colonial, official anthropologist was done in the 1860s; in particular, he wrote the report on the Berar census of 1867 in which he enumerated its castes, tribes and religious groups and discussed how to classify them cogently. In central India and Rajputana, he collected a large amount of ethnographic material, which he used to write a series of perceptive articles in British periodicals that were later collected in two volumes of Asiatic Studies, first published in 1882 and 1899. The essays on clans and castes, Rajput princely states and popular Hinduism, which were widely read, were Lyall’s major contributions to the anthropology of India. He also wrote numerous articles and several books on political topics, most of them concerned with British rule in India.

All these publications significantly contributed to Lyall’s reputation as an official anthropologist, an expert on India and, more widely, a distinguished Victorian intellectual and “man of letters.” By his contemporaries, he was often compared with Henry Maine, whose work he admired, and even though Lyall had less influence than Maine on the overall development of social anthropology, his effective use of Indian ethnographic data to criticize the work of F. Max Müller and James G. Frazer on myth and religion attracted considerable attention. Later official anthropologists, such as H. H. Risley, were familiar with Lyall’s work, especially his concept of “Brahmanising,” whereby tribal communities were raised to low-caste Hindu status by transforming their local deities and rituals into pan-Indian, Brahmanical ones. Compared with these later anthropologists, Lyall’s writings look fairly slight, but as Chris Fuller upholds in this path-breaking study, several of his articles still make impressive reading—especially those on popular polytheistic Hinduism, which according to Fuller he discussed more perceptively, as well as more sympathetically, than most other official anthropologists or Victorian writers in general.

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.”

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: two articles (in English) on Margaret Mead’s fieldwork experience and its ethnographic outcomes.

Shankman, Paul, 2025. “The Forgotten Ethnographic Legacy of Margaret Mead (1925‑1930),” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Shankman, Paul, 2025. “The Forgotten Ethnographic Legacy of Margaret Mead (1931‑1939),” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

The author of a prolific body of work, Margaret Mead (1901–1978) is the best known US anthropologist of the twentieth century, and the person who epitomized anthropology in the eyes of the public. She is widely known for her popular works, including Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). These works were commercial, highly visible, and often worked against her reputation as a scholar. Yet Mead was a dedicated fieldworker and serious ethnographer, publishing a number of professional ethnographic monographs that covered her fieldwork in eight different cultures during the years 1925 to 1940. Although relatively less known, these works were often well regarded, contributing to the ethnographic record. Mead was also a pioneering and innovative ethnographer, advocating team research, the use of psychological testing, photography, and film, and the importance of fieldnotes.

In the first of two articles highlighting Mead’s trajectory, Paul Shankman covers Mead’s fieldwork and publications between 1925 and 1931. From 1928 and throughout the 1930s, she and her successive husbands, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, conducted ethnographic experiments in New Guinea and Bali. Shankman’s second article is dedicated to the years from 1931 to 1940, namely to Mead’s fieldwork among the Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli, Balinese, and Iatmul. A disciple of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, Mead was one of the first female anthropologists to graduate from a US university (1929). She was a pioneer in her thinking on the methodology of ethnographic observation, through her research on child rearing, sexuality and gender relations, psychological anthropology, and visual anthropology. She worked for the US government during the Second World War and for major international organizations after the war, such as UNESCO, on studies of national character, social change and nutrition. She spent most of her career at the American Museum of Natural History. After her death, her work on Samoa was the subject of a violent controversy with Derek Freeman. Mead remains both an inspirational and a much-debated figure in the history of the discipline.

The History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) has launched a new initiative. Every two years, HPGRG will offer a small award of £150 to support projects which seek to widen audience engagement within the history and philosophy of geography.

Projects which meet our criteria might include public engagement through presentations, media presence, artwork, workshops, exhibitions, and other events, ideally in collaboration with museums, archives, learned societies and institutions, galleries and libraries, whose collections and purposes relate to themes about the histories and philosophies of geography. Examples include:

• public events or performances, installations, museum trails, and exhibitions;
• displays and content for actual or virtual spaces of public engagement, including posters, non-academic publications such as museum catalogues, and informal learning sheets;
• media articles, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, video and audio files;
• specific events for school children or other diverse demographics.

This biannual award is open to doctoral students and early career postdoctoral researchers of geography and associated disciplines, both in academia and other sectors. Applications from around the world and from non-Anglophone countries are particularly encouraged but these would need to be submitted in the English language. Collaborative projects between geographers and practising artists, poets, musicians, actors, sculptors, or other performers will also be welcome. HPGRG also seeks to encourage applications from minority and underrepresented identity groups.

Recipients of this award will be offered the chance to showcase their work during the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of HPGRG (usually held at the end of August or early September) and on the HPGRG website.

The application form can be downloaded from our website.

The scheme is designed to further the ambition of HPGRG to diversify participation in, and methods of presenting and practising, the history and philosophy of geography via works that communicate, integrate, and encourage geographical insights across diverse wider publics.

Any queries and/or completed application forms should be emailed to: Dr. Emily Hayes, ehayes@brookes.ac.uk by July 30, 2025. Please circulate details widely.

The History of Anthropology Interest Group (HOAIG) of the American Anthropological Association is pleased to announce the inaugural competition for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper in the History of Anthropology. HOAIG is an interest group of the AAA’s General Anthropology Division that provides a gathering place for discussions of the history of anthropology and the human sciences. This prize will be awarded to a paper about the history of anthropology, broadly construed.

We encourage students to submit papers they have written based on original, primary source research, or that analyze ideas, texts, contexts, or figures (whether marginalized or centralized) in the discipline’s history. Papers may reflect the influence of global anthropologies, Indigenous studies, Black studies, Science and Technology Studies, information science, the history, sociology, or philosophy of science, or other scholarly fields on the history of anthropology. They may challenge conventional histories of the discipline and its traditional geographic and institutional centers. The winning author will a receive a $100 award, and recognition by HOAIG at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (November 19-23 in New Orleans, LA).

Eligibility Criteria

1. Applicants must be in a degree-granting program (including master’s and doctoral programs) or have graduated during the 2024 or 2025 calendar years.
2. Papers must be the original work of the author. Course papers, dissertation chapters, and journal articles in preparation, under review, or accepted/published during the 2025 calendar year are eligible for consideration.
3. Papers must be 5,000-12,000 words including bibliography and references. Images should be embedded within the document itself and citations and references should be consistent with Chicago style.
4. Papers should submitted as a Word document (.doc/docx) along with a 1-2 page CV for the author.
   

Submission (paper and CV) must be emailed by Friday, September 26, 2025 to Andrew Newman (Andrew.Newman@wayne.edu). Please reach out to the same email for questions about the award. HOAIG looks forward to your contributions!

Contributions are invited for the fourteenth special issue of the journal Esclavages & post-Esclavages/Slaveries & Post Slaveries on the theme of “Slavery and Human Remains.” This special issue is being coordinated by Klara Boyer-Rossol (Boon University), Magali Bessone (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), and Ricardo Roque (ICS, University of Lisbon). The editors look forward to receiving proposals in French, English, Spanish, or Portuguese by June 1, 2025.

This issue explores how the relationship with human remains has evolved in the context of slavery and post-slavery. It takes a multidisciplinary approach, bringing together history, anthropology, philosophy, archaeology, bioarchaeology, and law.

The question of the legal status of human remains (Fontanieu 2014) raises ethical and heritage issues that are highly relevant today from the perspective of human dignity. In France, a report on the “repatriation of human remains abroad” was drawn up on January 8, 2025, following the law of December 26, 2023, aimed at facilitating the repatriation of human remains belonging to public collections. The right to burial is now widely accepted and enshrined in the laws of various countries. However, it does not, or only marginally, concern(s) enslaved people. The treatment of the “marginalized” dead has been addressed in part by the fields of history and archaeology (Carol & Renaudet 2023). Philosophy has also taken an interest in these unburied bodies that cannot be mourned (Butler 2004). For many descendants of formerly enslaved people, mainly Africans, the process of tracing ancestral remains has proven complex. This is due to the lack of individual graves and the difficulty of identifying ancestors buried in collective graves. The discovery, preservation, and study of cemeteries of enslaved people and all human remains unearthed during archaeological excavations (for example, in Mauritius and Manhattan) are therefore proving invaluable sources of information about the identities and lives of people in slavery and post-slavery situations (Seetah et al. 2010; Blakey 2014).

Can the protection of such cemeteries of enslaved people, or even the return or repatriation of the remains of enslaved people (especially in France to the overseas territories), be seen as forms of reparation: existential, social, political, epistemic? Can the links between the dead and the living be re-established in this way? And what should be the nature of these links if the dead are to be treated with respect?

Themes:

Contributions may focus on the following themes, among others:

• What kind of material and immaterial sources do cemeteries and tombs contain about the identities, lives, and deaths of enslaved people
• Funerary rites, religious cults, spiritual and cultural practices about ancestral remains (localized or absent)
• The scientific exploitation of the dead bodies of people of African and servile descent: medical and surgical experiments, post-mortem measurements, and casts
• Scientific racism and collections of “slaves” and “Blacks” skulls and bones
• Deportation, anonymization, and objectification of human remains in the context of slavery and post-abolitionism
• Restitutions, repatriations, and reburials of human remains whose history is linked to that of slavery and its abolition.
• Patrimonialization and memorial policies of slavery burial sites

Submission Information:

Proposals of articles (between 500 and 800 words) must be sent by June 1, 2025, to ciresc.redaction@cnrs.fr. Decisions on manuscripts will be announced on July 1, 2025.

Accepted papers (45,000 characters maximum, spaces included, bibliography included) must be submitted in French, English, Spanish, or Portuguese before November 2, 2025. They must be accompanied by an abstract or résumé of no more than 3,600 characters. The complete list of recommendations to authors is available here. Final versions must be ready by July 1, 2026.

To view the full CFP, please visit the journal website.

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)

We are happy to announce and share the program of the Workshop, Transnational Folklore: Rethinking the Nineteenth-Century History of Folklore Studies.

The two-day event will take at the Institute of European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis at LMU Munich on May 22 and 23, 2025.

The Workshop is part of the project “Actors ‒ Narratives ‒ Strategies: Constellations of Transnational Folklore Research, 1875‒1905,” funded by the German Research Foundation, and isorganized by:

• Frauke Ahrens (Institute for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis, LMU Munich)
• Fabiana Dimpflmeier (Department of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, Gabriele d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara)
• Christiane Schwab (Institute for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis, LMU Munich)

The Workshop program is available in the PDF inserted below.

The workshop explores ‘transnational folklore’ in nineteenth-century Europe and beyond, with the aim to investigate how transnational processes influenced the development, professionalisation, and systematisation of folklore theories and practices. Challenging established histories of folklore, the goal is to reveal alternative framework analysis and approaches by examining the new insights offered by a transnational perspective in understanding folklore knowledge production and circulation. Among its guiding questions, pursued in diverse national and disciplinary contexts, are the following:

1. Transnational Practices and Knowledge Formats. How was transnational folklore research organised? In what ways did it manifest through personal connections, cross-border methodologies, publications, events, and other forms of intellectual and practical collaboration?
2. Agendas and Logics of Regional and National Folklore Research within Transnational Frameworks. What significance did transnational collaboration hold for regional and transnational processes of institutionalisation? What were the motives and goals behind establishing and maintaining transnational contacts? How did transnational projects contribute to delineating disciplinary boundaries and strengthening folklore research as an independent discipline in different national/regional contexts?
3. Actors of Transnational Folklore Research. Who were the key players in folklore studies whose relationships and knowledge practices transcended nation-state borders? What were their motifs, strategies, and socioeconomic and biographical preconditions that enabled them to operate on a transnational scale? And what factors may have posed challenges to them?
4. Narratives in Transnational Folklore Research. Which narratives determined transnational cooperation and/or were produced and reproduced within it? How did these narratives function as instruments of shared knowledge horizons, interests, and problems, creating a ‘disciplinary identity’? How has transnational collaboration been affected by different perceptions of the role and methodology of folklore studies?  
5. Impact of Early Transnational Endeavours. How can research on transnational folklore studies change the way we look at the development of the discipline in different national/regional research contexts? In which ways might it broaden the historiography of folklore studies and add new facets to established narratives of the field’s history?
6. Doing Transnational Historiography. How can we investigate the history of folklore research beyond national concepts and methodologies? What sources lead us to transnational networks, actors, and endeavours? What are the difficulties in researching transnational folklore and how can we overcome them methodologically and theoretically?

The project is supported by BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology.

The HAR editorial team is pleased to announce the program for HAR‘s first conference, “Environmental Anthropologies: Pasts, Presents, Futures,” which will take place at Yale University from March 31 to April 1, 2025. This event is co-organized by History of Anthropology Review and Yale’s History of Science and Medicine Program. This event is free and open to all who are interested in attending.

This workshop revisits the past 150+ years of anthropological and ethnographic research on relationships among human lifeways, cultures, and environments. How can the errors and insights of earlier paradigms help us grapple with shifting, unpredictable ecologies today? Experts from Anthropology, History, Science Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Environmental Science will reflect on earlier encounters, and on ways for these fields to talk, think, and work together now.

Organized by: Laetitia Guerlain, Université de Bordeaux, IUF; Florence Renucci, CNRS, IMAF; Baudouin Dupret, CNRS, LAM

This seminar aims to understand how the actors of colonizing nations (missionaries, colonial administrators, practicing or academic lawyers, etc.) apprehended the normative systems of the respective territories before colonization, during colonization, and then afterwards, in the context of decolonization.

In the various parts of (future) colonial territories, how did Westerners ‘learn [about] legal norms,’ often linked to religion, and sometimes very different in spirit and form from their own legal culture? For the colonizers, understanding local norms was often an essential prerequisite for controlling colonized societies. In many territories, for example, magistrates were competent to apply some of these local norms in disputes involving Indigenous populations (Renucci, 2016). More generally, however, the interest shown by certain actors in local norms gave rise to an ethnological type of scholarly production that was divorced from the issues of colonial domination. Far from the dialectic between knowledge and power, some academics have taken advantage of work on local rights to rework the problem of the classification of rights within the framework of a broader comparative law.

From the perspective of the history of knowledge, this seminar aims to identify the ways in which local norms have been apprehended and reworked. In the different zones of the colonial empires, who were the actors in the early days of legal ethnology, and what genealogies did they follow? How, by whom, and with what methodology (translations, questionnaires, informants, intermediaries) were these norms investigated? What types of scholarly production did this work give rise to (travel accounts, teaching manuals, articles in specialist journals, grey literature, etc.)? What links did the jurists have with ethnologists? In what organizations and with what support and funding did they carry out their work? What were the different stages in the development of ethnological knowledge of law (teaching, disciplinarization, creation of dedicated journals or publishing collections, creation of chairs or institutions, etc.)? This question is all the more important given that scholarly production on local rights was frequently subsequently taught in various institutions, thus freezing a certain vision of these norms, sometimes passed on to the Indigenous students themselves.

To address all these issues, this seminar aims to break down barriers in two ways.

• Firstly, far from confining ourselves to French colonial areas, we wish to compare the history of legal ethnology in the different colonial empires, emphasizing the links and reciprocal influences between the practices of the different colonizing nations (individual links between jurists, the role of international congresses, etc.)
• We also wish to cross the dividing line between pre-colonial and colonial times, on the one hand, and between colonization and decolonizing times, on the other, by examining the transformations in legal knowledge of local rights at the time of independence. How did legal ethnology survive the end of the colonial empires and through what channels (ORSTOM, cooperation, development ideology, etc.)? What did the states that became independent do with their standards transformed by colonization and what was the role of French jurists, particularly in the context of legal cooperation? (codification process of the 1960s-1970s, transformations in the teaching of law, etc.).
  

This seminar will take place on Zoom, every month from January to June. Speakers who wish to do so may submit their contributions for publication in the ‘History of the relationship between law and anthropology’ section of the peer-reviewed encyclopedia Bérose. Encylopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie.

PROGRAM

Session 1 – February 17, 2024, 10:00-12:00 (CET)
Lena Foljanty (University of Vienna), “Classification et exotisme : les représentations de l’Asie orientale dans les débuts de l’anthropologie juridique en Allemagne”
Session 2 – March 24, 2024, 10:00-12:00 (CET)
Kentaro Matsubara (University of Tokyo), “The study of Chinese customary law in Japanese jurisprudence: colonial rule and legal scholarship”
Session 3 – April 24, 2024, 10:00-12:00 (CET)
Tsung-Mou WU (Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica), “L’ethnologie et le façonnage du droit à Formose/ Taïwan”
Session 4 – May 26, 2024, 10:00-12:00 (CET)
Bérengère Piret (Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles/ Archives générales du Royaume de Belgique), “‘Fournir un guide à ces centaines de juridictions créées.'” Le Bulletin des
juridictions indigènes, vecteur des coutumes judiciaires”
Session 5 – June 23, 2024, 10:00-12:00 (CET)
Monica Cardillo (Université de Nantes), “L’anthropologie au service du programme colonial (comparaison France-Italie)”

Please join the seminar on Zoom by using this Zoom ID: 975 4028 1399, with the passcode 220881

Ce séminaire vise à comprendre comment les acteurs des nations colonisatrices (missionnaires, administrateurs coloniaux, juristes praticiens ou universitaires, etc.) appréhendent les systèmes normatifs des territoires avant la colonisation, pendant celle-ci puis après, en contexte de décolonisation. Dans les différentes parties des (futurs) territoires coloniaux, comment les Occidentaux font-ils leur « apprentissage [de] normes juridiques », souvent liées à la religion, et d’esprit comme de forme parfois très éloigné(e)s de leur propre culture juridique ? Du côté des colonisateurs, la compréhension des normes locales était souvent un préalable indispensable au contrôle des sociétés colonisées. Dans nombre de territoires, les magistrats, par exemple, étaient compétents pour appliquer une partie de ces normes locales dans des litiges impliquant des autochtones. Mais, de manière plus générale, l’intérêt de certains acteurs pour les normes locales a pu donner lieu à une production savante de type ethnologique décorrelée des enjeux de domination coloniale. Loin de la dialectique entre savoir et pouvoir, certains universitaires ont en effet tiré profit des travaux sur les droits locaux pour retravailler la problématique de la classification des droits dans le cadre d’un droit comparé élargi.

Dans une perspective d’histoire des savoirs, ce séminaire souhaiterait repérer la ou les manières dont les normes locales ont été appréhendées et retravaillées. Dans les différentes zones des empires coloniaux, qui sont les acteurs des balbutiements de l’ethnologie juridique et dans quelles généalogies s’inscrivent-ils ? De quelle manière, par qui et avec quelle méthodologie (traductions, questionnaires, informateurs, intermédiaires) des enquêtes sur ces normes ont-elles été réalisées ? À quels types de productions savantes ces travaux ont-ils donné lieu (récits de voyage, manuels d’enseignement, articles dans des revues spécialisées, littérature grise, etc.) ? Quels étaient les liens des juristes avec les ethnologues ? Dans quels organismes et avec quels soutiens et financements menaient-ils leurs travaux ? Quelles ont été les différentes étapes de la constitution des savoirs ethnologiques sur le droit ? (enseignements, disciplinarisation, création de revues ou de collections éditoriales dédiées, création de chaires ou d’institutions, etc.). Cette question est d’autant plus importante que la production savante sur les droits locaux était fréquemment, par la suite, enseignée dans diverses institutions, figeant ainsi une certaine vision de ces normes, parfois transmises aux étudiants autochtones eux-mêmes.

Pour envisager toutes ces questions, ce séminaire souhaite opérer un double décloisonnement:

Tout d’abord, loin de nous cantonner à l’espace colonial français, nous souhaitons comparer l’histoire de l’ethnologie juridique dans les différents empires coloniaux, en mettant l’accent sur les liens et les influences réciproques entre les pratiques des différentes nations colonisatrices (liens individuels entre juristes, rôle des congrès internationaux, etc.).

Nous souhaitons également franchir la ligne de démarcation entre les temps précoloniaux et coloniaux d’une part et entre les temps de la colonisation et de la décolonisation d’autre part, en interrogeant les transformations des savoirs juridiques sur les droits locaux à l’heure des indépendances. Comment l’ethnologie juridique a-t- elle survécu à la fin des empires coloniaux et par quels biais ? (ORSTOM, coopération, idéologie du développement, etc.). Qu’ont fait les États devenus indépendants de leurs normes transformées par la colonisation et quel a été le rôle des juristes français, particulièrement dans le cadre de la coopération ? (processus de codification des années 1960-1970, transformations de l’enseignement du droit, etc.)

PROGRAMME

Séance 1 – 17 février 2025, 10h-12h
Lena Foljanty (Université de Vienne), “Classification et exotisme : les représentations de l’Asie orientale dans les débuts de l’anthropologie juridique en Allemagne”
Séance 2 – 24 mars 2025, 10h-12h
Kentaro Matsubara (Université de Tokyo), “The study of Chinese customary law in Japanese jurisprudence: colonial rule and legal scholarship”
Séance 3 – 24 avril 2025, 10h-12h
Tsung-Mou Wu (Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica), “L’ethnologie et le façonnage du droit à Formose/ Taïwan”
Séance 4 – 26 mai 2025, 10h-12h
Bérengère Piret (Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles/ Archives générales du Royaume de Belgique), “‘Fournir un guide à ces centaines de juridictions créées.'” Le Bulletin des juridictions indigènes, vecteur des coutumes judiciaires”
Séance 5 – 23 juin 2025, 10h-12h
Monica Cardillo (Université de Nantes), “L’anthropologie au service du programme colonial (comparaison France-Italie)”

Le séminaire se tiendra en zoom : ID de réunion : 975 4028 1399 – Code secret : 220881

To mark publication of the 50th and final volume in the series “Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia,” there will be a book launch at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Main Seminar Room, Thursday 23 January 2025, 16:00-17:30 CET. This is an in-person event but those unable to participate in person may do so via this link: https://mpi-eth.webex.com/mpi-eth/j.php?MTID=mc71ecd9ada4b2c70a6b1d7c95e31250a.You will need to register with Anke Meyer: meyer@eth.mpg.de

Jack Goody (1919–2015) was a giant of social anthropology, who worked for sixty years to transcend the view that anthropology was the study of “other cultures”. He wanted to move it in the direction of a more sociological, postcolonial, comparative social science. The most important precondition for this science was the freeing of world history from centuries of Eurocentric bias. From his base in Cambridge, Goody’s influence and inspiration spread out internationally. In Germany, as a long-term adviser to the Max Planck Society, he played a key role in the establishment of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale) in 1999. Many of his 46 books were translated into French, Italian, Turkish, etc.

The book presents twelve Goody Lectures delivered in Halle between 2011 and 2022, an unpublished lecture given in Halle in 2004 by Jack Goody himself, as well as three biographical and bibliographical essays by the editors. For further details and the Table of Contents, see the attached poster.

Chris Hann and Han F. Vermeulen (eds.) Jack Goody between Social Anthropology and World History. Berlin/Münster: LIT Verlag (Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia 50), 2024. x + 397 pp. ISBN 978-3-643-91598-6.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English) on the history of Soviet anthropology in the 1960s–1970s.

Alymov, Sergei, 2024. “How Moscow Did Not Become a World Centre of Marxist Anthropology: Liudmila V. Danilova and the Fate of Soviet ‘Revisionism’ in the 1960s‑1970s,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

The article analyzes the trajectory of Liudmila Valerianovna Danilova (1923–2012), a Soviet/Russian historian who specialized in the history of medieval Russia and agrarian history, and a Marxist theoretician of history and social evolution. She worked at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR/Russia for more than half a century from 1952 onward. Author of two monographs, Essays on the History of Land Ownership and Economy in the Novgorod Land in the 14th-15th Centuries (1955) and Rural Community in Medieval Russia (1994). In the mid-1960s, she was part of the collective group of the department of the methodology of history at the Institute of History, who tried to reinvigorate Soviet Marxism and challenge its Stalinist interpretations. The article analyzes the theoretical and methodological discussions in Russian ethnography and historiography of the 1960s, which were focused on the critique of the Stalinist dogma of the five-stage scheme of world history and gave way to “revisionist” ideas concerning the number and sequence of Marxist socioeconomic formations. As one of the leaders of this collective, Danilova edited the collection of articles Problems of the History of Pre-capitalist Societies (1968), a manifesto of Soviet “revisionist” historical Marxism of the 1960s. This heterodox text received a wide response among historians and anthropologists both in the USSR and worldwide; it attracted a number of commentaries and reviews, including those of British anthropologist Ernest Gellner. Danilova planned to expand this volume into a series which would include authors from Eastern and Western Europe and focus on Marxist interpretation of the whole world history as well as “primitive society.” Danilova’s alternative Marxism negatively affected her academic career. Her main work, Theoretical Problems of Feudalism in Soviet Historiography, remained unpublished during her lifetime, as well as the following volumes of the projected series “Problems of the History of Pre-capitalist Societies.” 

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English) on the history of Swedish researcher, Erland Nordenskiöld.

Gustavsson, Anne, 2024. “Fieldwork on the Banks of the Pilcomayo River: The Place of Erland Nordenskiöld in Pre-Malinowskian Traditions of Ethnography,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Swedish ethnologist and Americanist scholar Erland Nordenskiöld (1877–1932) was a prominent Nordic anthropologist, internationally renowned as an expert on the indigenous cultures and societies of Latin America. Between 1899 and 1927, he undertook six expeditions to different parts of this region (Patagonia, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, etc.), reorienting his interest from zoology to ethnography and archaeology following his encounter with the Indigenous populations of the Pilcomayo River in 1902. He contributed significantly to the development of the discipline in his country as head of the Ethnographic Department at the Museum of Gothenburg as well as eventually obtaining a professorship in 1924 in ethnography at the University of Gothenburg, the first of its kind in Sweden. Nordenskiöld became acquainted with the South American Chaco for the first time in 1902 when the Chaco-Cordillera expedition (1901–1902) made an incursion into the northern area of the Pilcomayo River, where various indigenous societies partially maintained their traditional ways of life. This encounter marked him profoundly. It not only reoriented his research interests towards ethnography, archaeology and ethnology but also made him dedicate the rest of his life and work to the study of the “South American Indian.” In this article, Anne Gustavsson (Umeå University, Sweden; Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Argentina) discusses the type of field work Nordenskiöld undertook on the banks of the Pilcomayo River in the border region between Bolivia and Argentina, reflecting upon the place of these practices in pre-Malinowski traditions of ethnography. The analysis is based on Nordenskiöld’s publications as well as archival material (correspondence, field notes, newspaper articles) consulted at the Museum of World Culture and the Royal Library of Sweden.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English) on Leo Frobenius’ Australian anthropology.

Kuba, Richard, 2024. “Frobenius’ Culture History in Australia: Dead Ends and New Insights,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Leo Frobenius is one of the most famous and influential German anthropologists of the 20th century. While his collection of ethnographic data and oral traditions enjoyed general recognition, as well as his comprehensive documentation of African rock art, in which he saw a kind of “Picture Book of Cultural History,” Frobenius was already an intensely controversial figure during his lifetime. One of the first Europeans to recognize the historicity of African cultures, he became a principal reference for the protagonists of “Négritude,” who aimed at re-establishing the cultural self-awareness of African peoples. This article explores the less-known Australian side of Frobenius’ anthropology, namely the scientific and political contexts of the final research expedition initiated by him in 1938–1939, when he sent five members of the Institut für Kulturmorphologie (directed and founded by him; today Frobenius-Institut) to the Kimberley region in northwestern Australia. This expedition followed the tradition of nearly two dozen others that Frobenius had led or initiated since 1904, primarily in Africa, with the aim of documenting what were perceived as “ancient” cultures threatened by imminent disappearance. In the Kimberley, the expedition was among the earliest ethnographic research efforts in the area, focusing particularly on documenting rock art along with related myths and narratives. The specific theoretical and practical approaches developed by Frobenius over more than 25 years significantly shaped the resulting documentation—whether visual, written, phonographic, or through the selection of collected objects. The article reconstructs the context and course of the expedition, primarily based on archival sources. While Frobenius’s distinct anthropological approach, characterized by the “ethnographic expedition” and an idiosyncratic emphasis on “culture,” continued to influence his collaborators and successors for a few decades after his death, the gap between Frobenius’s approach and international trends in anthropology was perceptible from the 1930s onwards. This contrast would only grow, reinforcing the “maverick”—or, for that matter, anachronistic—aspect of his endeavors. Richard Kuba (Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology, Frankfurt), however, examines the Frobenius-Institut Australian expedition’s aftermath, drawing on historical publications by its members and insights from a recent collaborative research project. Eighty-five years later, the extensive materials from this expedition are being rediscovered, reassessed, and digitally returned to the source communities, giving new relevance and meaning to the historical archive.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English) on a 1951 expedition to Mauritania by Swiss anthropologist Jean Gabus and painter Hans Erni.

Reubi, Serge, 2024. “Anthropology, Photography, and Painting: Jean Gabus and Hans Erni in Mauritania 1951‑1952”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Swiss scholar Jean Gabus (1908–1992) received an education in humanities and worked first as a journalist and explorer. After an expedition to Canada in 1938–1939, he wrote a dissertation on the Inuit, under the supervision of Wilhelm Schmidt. In 1945, he was appointed director of the Musée d’ethnographie of Neuchâtel (until 1978) and professor of geography and ethnography at the University of Neuchâtel (until 1974). He spent most of his career studying the nomad populations of Mauritania, Niger and Algeria, but his most important achievements were museological: he radically modernized the Neuchâtel museum and was an international renowned expert for museums for UNESCO from 1958 to the 1980s, popularizing the concept of objet-témoin. This article discusses the category of minor anthropological traditions and suggests that it is better understood as a historiographical artefact, not an undisputed fact. Intellectual practices that do not fit hegemonic narratives should not be positioned in terms of backwardness in time—or forwardness, for that matter; instead, one should accept the synchronic diversity of scientific activities. To demonstrate this, Serge Reubi (Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris) uses the conceptual lens of Daston and Galison’s objectivity theory and examines the 1951 expedition to Mauritania that Gabus organized with the painter Hans Erni, during which he tried to combine the use of mechanical means of recording (photo, records, films, artefacts) with the more subjective approach of an artist. By doing so, he believed that the expedition would be able to grasp both singular and specific events of the local populations and general human behaviors.

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in Spanish) on anachronistic and dyschronic motives in disciplinary history, focused on José Imbelloni—a controversial representative of 20th-century Argentinian anthropology. The English version is forthcoming.

Lazzari, Axel, 2024. “En torno al argumento del anacronismo y la Escuela Histórico‑Cultural en la Argentina: hacia un abordaje discrónico,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Born in Italy, José Imbelloni (1885–1967) emigrated to Argentina in 1908, where he began his career as an anthropologist in 1921, with previous training in the natural sciences. His anthropological work of a craniological and historical-philological nature contributed to the debates on the settlement of the American continent and the diffusion of cultural cycles. During the 1930s, as head of the Physical Anthropology Section of the Museo de Ciencias Naturales, Imbelloni gained greater visibility with the publication of Epítome de Culturología (1936), where he summarized the doctrine and method of the cultural-historical school and contributed his own empirical studies. In 1948 he took over the direction of the Museo Etnográfico, created the Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas at the University of Buenos Aires, and the journal Runa. During these years he established strong ties with academic sectors of Peron’s regime and became one of the world’s leading figures in Americanist anthropology. Imbelloni developed a culturalist-racialist approach that was not free of polemic tones, but his career is fundamental for understanding the development of Argentine anthropology.

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

Guidelines for the Award

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

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

Eligibility

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

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

Prize

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

Deadlines

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

Previous Winners

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Apply

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

Further Inquiries

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

HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article on American Cultural Anthropologist Paul Radin and his triadic approach to the study of culture.

Szoke, Zsofia Johanna, 2024. “Through the Speculum of the Psyche: Paul Radin at the Eranos ‘Tagungen’”, in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.

Paul Radin (1883–1959) was an American cultural anthropologist. Son of a rabbi, he was born in Poland in 1883, and he studied anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas. After completing his PhD in 1911, he became a prolific ethnographer who devoted a lifetime study to the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk). He was particularly interested in the matters of the mind, myth, ritual drama, religious experience, language, history and the role of the individual in “primitive” societies, a label he utilized with considerable caution. Radin became a fellow of the Bollingen Foundation, in part devoted to the dissemination of Carl Jung’s work. He was also an invited lecturer at the Eranos meetings in Ascona, Switzerland. In 1952 he moved to Lugano and lived there until 1956. During this time, he lectured at Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and at the Carl Jung Institute in Zürich. Then he joined Brandeis University in 1957, where he worked until his death in 1959. He never deserted his research on the Winnebago Tribe.

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

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

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

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

Event Locations

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

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

Or online!

Event Preparation

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

Please read or refresh on the following:

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

Further Information

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

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

Organized by Nickolas Surawy-Stepney, Jennifer Fraser, Thandeka Cochrane & Shagufta Bhangu (King’s College London), for the Royal Anthropological Society Health, Environment, and AnThropology (HEAT) 2025 two-day conference.

April 23-24, 2025

Durham University, U.K.

The climatic and environmental changes brought about by the forces of industrialisation, capitalism, empire, and global ‘development’ are becoming increasingly visible. But vital too are changes wrought that are less visible – the chemical alterations induced in water, soil, air, crops, animal and human bodies that are having profound effects on health and wellbeing. Responsibility and consequences are distributed in deeply unequal ways (Choy 2016). In this panel we focus specifically on the carcinogenic effects of this toxicity. While scientific investigation into links between industrial environmental contamination and carcinogenesis has been underdeveloped in favour of that which foregrounds personal agency and individual choice, a growing body of anthropological scholarship has begun to reorient this research agenda. Drawing on examples such as peanut production in Senegal (Tousignant 2022), open-pit mining in Spain (Fernández-Navarro et al., 2012), nuclear waste disposal in the USA (Cram 2023 & Masco 2021), and agricultural pesticide use in Kenya (Prince 2021), scholars have started to probe the connections between corporate and industrial interests and the ‘epidemic’ of cancer, in an effort to think through the relationship between the living and its milieu in novel ways (Canguilhem 2001). We invite papers that advance these analyses of ‘carcinogenic accountability’, and examine how risks of carcinogenic exposure are made visible and invisible, embraced and resisted, and studied. We are particularly interested in research which undertakes semiotic and material cultural analyses of the following concepts: ‘exposed’, ‘toxic’, ‘safe’, ‘carcinogenic’, and/or interrogate the ethical, epistemic, and regulatory conjunctures within which these categories operate.

To propose a paper please use the Abstract Management system linked here. The call for papers ends Monday, January 13, 2025. You do not have to be an RAI or ASA member to propose a paper.

Proposals should consist of:

• The title of the panel
• The title of the paper you wish to present
• An abstract of no more than 250 words.
  Paper proposals must be submitted via the submission system and will be reviewed by panel convenors.

The 2024 American Anthropological Association meeting will be taking place this week from the 20th to the 23rd in Tampa, Florida. For those who plan on attending, we would like to highlight a workshop that is likely to pique the interest of those working on the history of anthropology. The full program can be found here.

3775 Archival Search & Research 101

Friday, November 22, 2024 

2:30 PM-4:00 PM

TCC 104

To be held at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 6-7 June 2025.

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

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

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

The two-day conference will be organized as a series of one-hour, single-paper sessions attended by all participants. Ample time will be set aside for intellectual exchange between presenters and attendees, as all participants are expected to prepare unpublished papers (not longer than 10,000 words, excluding footnotes and references) for circulation to other participants and read all pre-circulated papers in advance.

Proposals should contain no more than 1000 words, indicating the originality of the paper. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is February 3, 2025. Final notification will be given in March 2025 after proposals have been reviewed. Completed papers will be expected by May 15, 2025.

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

The conference sponsor, HISRESS (the Society for the History of Recent Social Science), is launching a new journal (History of Social Science), to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The journal is accepting submissions for its initial volumes.

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