Dear HAR readers: 

Here is a quick midsummer note on recent activity in our online journal. 

Recently: Over the past few months we’ve been serially publishing entries in a Special Focus Section on “Histories of Ethnoscience,” guest edited by Raphael Uchôa, Staffan Müller-Wille and Harriet Mercer. We invite you to peruse what is now a substantial and diverse collection of perspectives on an important field whose history has received far too little attention.  

Now: This week we’re publishing another exciting collection of essays, a round-table discussion of Bernard Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, which places mid-century anthropology at the center of the “cybernetic apparatus”– where the technosciences of communication, major institutional funding strategies, colonial legacies and imperial ambitions all overlap– revealing a crucial hidden history of humanist research in the digital age. Scholars from anthropology, sociology, and history of science answered the same three questions about the book: we present their essays both as stand-alone pieces, and clustered as “round table” replies to each question, followed by the author’s response.

Soon: Some of these threads will be picked up in an exchange which we will publish later this summer between anthropologist Philippe Descola and philosopher of the social sciences Bruno Karsenti. “Anthropology and Philosophy” reflects on the epistemology of structuralism, its precursors and inheritors, and on anthropology’s current philosophical centrality. 

Many thanks to all of these authors, coming from so many different fields, nations, and specialties.

And a particular thanks to our editorial teams for all their work to realize these collections– for “Ethnosciences,” Field Notes, led by Rosanna Dent and Cameron Brinitzer, and for “Code,” Reviews editors Allegra Giovine and Michael Edwards. 

And thanks to all of you, for reading and contributing to HAR!

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.

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

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. 

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.

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!

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 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