Field Notes (page 1 of 5)

Field Notes is a forum for focused, engaged reflections on the history of anthropology, broadly conceived. We welcome contributions including (but not limited to) short articles, theoretical musings, reports on cultural and academic events and displays, and discussions of intellectual resources of interest to our readers. We are particularly interested in expanding the boundaries of the history of anthropology and challenging normative interpretations of the field. This includes, but is not limited to, decentering Western Europe and North America as the primary sites of the discipline’s development, and white, Western experts as its only arbiters of knowledge production. If you’re interested in submitting such a piece, please email us at notes@histanthro.org.

Gender as a Dimension in Changing Hegemonies

We are here for a conversation about gender as an analytical lens on the relationship between theory and fieldwork in anthropology. It has been suggested that we talk about this through personal narratives from those of us who have been involved in anthropology in Australia for some time. In Papua New Guinea, where my husband (and colleague) Alan Rumsey and I have been going since 1981, I have recently written about the changing roles and relations of women to warfare, which was colonially suppressed but then has re-emerged at times in the region of the Western Highlands we are familiar with. The continuity of some forms and grounds of hostility through significant change at many levels has provided a way of looking at some aspects of gender relations there. But today I want to focus on my experience of perhaps comparable changes in (especially northern) Australia.

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The Creation of the International Institute for Afro-American Studies: Power Dynamics and Ortiz’s Postcolonial Vision

Re: Creation of the International Institute for Afro-American Studies

For years there has been the intention of founding a center devoted especially to the problems of the Black populations of America, of their study, their history, their cultures, etc. But time and again, opposition to this project had arisen…The time seemed to have come to build such an organism, without official status and with merely scientific purposes for the special study of these problems (emphasis mine). The idea was enthusiastically received and on October 20 [1943] in Mexico City, the act creating the International Institute of Afro-American Studies was signed. (Instituto Internacional de Estudios Afroamericanos 2016, 145).[1]The letters and memorandums included in this article have been translated by the author.

Founded in Mexico in November 1943, the International Institute of Afro-American Studies (IIAAS) was not just a scientific endeavor. Its founders had a significant political agenda. Fernando Ortiz, a Cuban anthropologist and prominent scholar of Afro-Cuban culture, led efforts to establish the IIAAS. His work on transculturation and the cultural history of African-descended populations positioned him as a key figure in studying racial and cultural dynamics in the Americas.[2]At the time, Ortiz had recently published one of his most renowned works, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940), and had already conducted extensive research on Afrodescendant populations in Cuba. His previous works included De la música afrocubana: Un estímulo para su estudio (1934) and Glosario de Afronegrismos (1924). Ortiz’s efforts to establish the IIAAS reveal the intricate power dynamics within anthropology and underscore his ability to create a center with a clear postcolonial agenda. He envisioned an institute that would unite the Americas in the study of Afro-descendant populations, fostering intellectual exchange across countries while also challenging the dominance of perspectives from certain US scholars, such as Melville J. Herskovits.

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Notes

Notes
1 The letters and memorandums included in this article have been translated by the author.
2 At the time, Ortiz had recently published one of his most renowned works, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940), and had already conducted extensive research on Afrodescendant populations in Cuba. His previous works included De la música afrocubana: Un estímulo para su estudio (1934) and Glosario de Afronegrismos (1924).

A Feminist Postcolonial Journey: Moving Between Countries, Academic Disciplines and Institutions

All memorializing practices afford new forms of synthesis. Writing now in my late sixties about myself as a feminist anthropologist foregrounds for me the importance of the habitus we acquire in our primary socialization for shaping what we consciously think of and write about as our own, or even as collective, intellectual and political projects.

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Problems and Possibilities of Being a Feminist Anthropologist

I have chosen to present a selection of statements made to me by senior anthropologists, which highlight ideas about the relationship between feminism and anthropology in the 1980s. For me, feminism expanded the scope of anthropology by acknowledging women’s lives and the historical changes wrought by colonialism. For others, especially male anthropologists, concentrating on women and introducing historical factors into ethnographic research was seen as narrowing the field.

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A Lone Woman in the Jungle

I have two stories to tell, each of which narrates a larger story about feminism and anthropology. My first story relates to my period as a newly-arrived pre-fieldwork PhD student at the Australian National University (ANU) in the early 1980s. I had come to ANU to research and write a PhD about Borneo’s Indigenous Dayak peoples. After I had been in Canberra for less than a week, I made a morning tea visit to the departmental tea-room. When my Head of Department saw me enter the room he announced loudly to everyone present that he was not comfortable with the idea of me doing fieldwork in Borneo. “I’m not happy with the idea of a lone woman floating around the jungles of Borneo,” he said.

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Syllabus Attack!: Dwelling on the History of Anthropology

Editors’ note: This reflection was written in conjunction with the author’s course, “History of Anthropology,” taught most recently in the 2025 spring semester at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. You can read the course syllabus in HAR’s Syllabus Collection.

My eyes fucking bleed

My brain fucking swells 

On theoretical concepts

My brain fucking dwells 

(Scholastic Deth, “Book Attack!”)

Introduction

In this essay, I consider my own recent and ongoing efforts to teach the history of anthropology to undergraduates. Along the way, I discuss how and why I have attempted to shift my teaching from a paradigmatic to a more history of science approach, one that prompts student to dwell not so much on ideas, but on the various contexts in which the discipline itself has been constituted and operationalized. To illustrate the value of this shift, I consider the need for a more inspirational history of anthropology against the backdrop of the latest incarnation of disciplinary and institutional crisis.

The Paradigmatic Approach

But before I begin, a bit of context. I have been researching and writing about the history of anthropology in one capacity or another for the past decade or so (e.g., Barron 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024). My first exposure to this strain of scholarship came in the form of an undergraduate senior thesis, which looked at the relationship between cultural anthropology, federal bureaucrats, and Indigenous communities in California. And while I have been teaching anthropology (mostly cultural) for several years now, I am relatively new to teaching the history of anthropology. Sure, I never miss an opportunity to inject a bit of disciplinary history into my other classes. For example, my Ethnographic Methods course has a whole section just on the history of social scientific funding apparatuses. As students learn about the practical dimensions of carrying out ethnographic research such as writing a data management plan and differentiating between structured, semi-structured, and unstructured interviews, they also learn about the “politics-patronage-social science nexus” (Solovey 2013) as seen through cases such as Manual Gamio’s account of Mexican immigration into the United States (funded by the Social Science Research Council) and the rise of the Human Terrain System initiative in the context of the War on Terror. But such circumscribed uses of the past do not constitute a history of anthropology course in any conventional sense of the term. 

The summer of 2023 marked my first attempt to teach the history of anthropology in a more direct manner. As I am sure others have experienced before, the excitement of being able to teach material that is directly related to my own research interests quickly dissipated as the prospect of constructing a workable class became a reality. Building the course presented numerous obstacles—ones that might make for productive musings down the road, such as identifying and curating accessible and/or zero-cost versions of obscure texts (e.g., Do I direct students to the Internet Archive so that they can read Reinventing Anthropology?) and determining the feasible temporal and geographic parameters of the material (e.g., Do I talk about Herodotus? If so, how much detail do I need to provide about the ancient Greeks? More importantly, how much do I know about the ancient Greeks?!). However, I would like to dwell on another obstacle: my efforts to move from a paradigmatic to a more history of science informed pedagogy. 

Having reviewed a number of course catalogues and syllabi, it would appear that most departments of anthropology do not offer history of anthropology per se. Rather, such course are devoted to the history of anthropological theory. I am still not sure why I found this surprising, for I too took a course in the history of anthropological theory as an undergraduate major once upon a time. Moreover, as an anthropology instructor, I have been borrowing heavily from John McGee and Richard Warms’s Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History (2024) for several years now, and I am not alone in this. According to the Open Syllabus, this textbook has appeared on 340 syllabi, 329 of which have been for anthropology courses. It is a tremendous resource, which I will say more about below. 

But what happens when the history of the discipline is presented primarily as a history of theoretical paradigms? While the paradigmatic approach to teaching the history of anthropology compels students (and instructors) to dwell on theoretical conceptions, this can occur in a historical vacuum, which can (unintentionally) contribute to a progressive view of the discipline, one in which we are always already moving toward a more perfect and correct perspective (Singh and Guyer 2016). This movement might not be entirely linear or even cumulative, but, especially in the United States, a nation-state whose history is riven with the idea of “progress” (Noble 1970), such a movement implies “improvement.” This should not be too shocking. After all, a paradigmatic approach can be consistent with the Kuhnian brand of the philosophy of science if it narrates the history of science as a series of discernible epistemic breaks, shifts, or revolutions. But as a result, the paradigmatic view also runs the risk of reproducing the limitations of the Kuhnian approach. Kuhn makes little room for society in his history of revolutions. When musing on what a “fuller account” of the “astronomical crisis that faced Copernicus” might look like, Kuhn noted that one would need to examine a variety of “external factors” including “the social pressure of calendar reform,” “medieval criticism of Aristotle, the rise of Renaissance Neoplatonism, and other significant historical elements” (1962, 69). Motioning toward the demands of a history of science, Kuhn stopped short: “Though immensely important, issues of that sort are out of bounds for this essay” (1962, 69). With “external factors” bracketed out of view, science, for Kuhn, moves forward not through situated knowledges and networks of labor, but through the (natural? inevitable?) discovery of “anomalies” (1962). 

While this is a productive rejoinder to his own mentor, James Conant, who viewed science as a cumulative process, it is ill-fitted for understanding the social sciences. How can one understand, for example, the formation or effects of Adam Smith’s conception of the invisible hand without attending to the political-economic landscape in which the Scottish Enlightenment materialized? George Stocking, who first introduced Kuhn’s paradigm to the history of anthropology, flagged these limitations and used Kuhn’s concept with appropriate reservation (1965, 214).[1]Stocking also noted the awkward fit of anthropology in the Kuhnian model, for anthropology and other similarly internally discordant disciplines within the behavioral sciences that have yet to reach a state of consensus would be deemed “pre-paradigmatic” (1965, 215). For a more detailed discussion of Stocking’s use of Kuhn see Bashkow (2019). Thus, shifting from a purely paradigmatic to a more history of science view guards against narratives of progress that partition ideas from the social, political, and economic conditions in which they have been developed and, most importantly, deployed. 

To be clear, I do not mean to dismiss the paradigmatic approach. It does have immense pedagogical utility, which is precisely why I have retained much of it in my own course. I continue to thematically organize the majority of the course units around loose paradigms (e.g., evolutionism, historical particularism, functionalism, etc.). I have seen others use the paradigmatic approach to great effect, especially when it comes to teaching majors who are unlikely to pursue academic careers in the field. For example, one of my colleagues tasks students with developing a final research project that applies a theory (or theories) explored in the course. The assignment has led to the creation of wonderful poster presentations. While such an activity might not demonstrate comprehension of the process by which anthropological theories were constituted and enacted, it demonstrates comprehension of and application of the theories themselves, which is highly valuable in the context of undergraduate education, precisely because most majors will not go into careers in academic anthropology. As Dell Hymes once suggested, “The greatest contribution of anthropology departments might be to send into the world many lawyers, historians, activists, workers for various institutions and agencies, well trained in anthropological work. This might be in turn the only way in which adequate knowledge of many sectors of society would eventually be gained” (1972, 57).

Moreover, when done in the style of McGee and Warms, who make no overt claims to the Kuhnian tradition, the paradigmatic approach allows students to see how theories were operationalized in specific studies. I have found this to be far more engaging for undergraduates than reading grand declarations of theory. This also prevents a history of anthropology course from devolving into facile postmodern musings about the constructed and motivated nature of “science,” which has become all the more complicated with the proliferation and diversification of anti-science sentiments in the form of anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and deniers of anthropogenic climate change. But unless the instructor is actively incorporating McGee and Warms’s footnotes (which are fantastic!) into the curriculum, something the authors encourage in both their Preface and Introduction, it is very easy for such an approach to devolve into another dehistoricized series of ideas. And as any seasoned educator knows, expecting students to read the footnotes can be something of a fool’s errand.  

(DIY) History of Science

What I have in mind for a history of science approach is unlikely to pass muster with proper historians of science. I am an anthropologist teaching anthropology students. My path to the history of anthropology has been circuitous and somewhat Do-It-Yourself (DIY) insomuch as my background is anthropology. I was never formerly trained in the history of science for that matter (but shout outs to Mark Anderson and David Dinwoodie for [unknowingly] sparking my interest in the history of anthropology through undergraduate and graduate course work respectively and the broader History of Anthropology Review community who have done so much to enhance and expand my understanding of these slippery pasts). With those caveats in mind, I attempted to scaffold the class with key terms and concepts that anthropology majors are unlikely to be familiar with: historiography, historicism, and presentism. Just getting anthropology students to recognize the distinction between history as the study of the past and historiography as the study of historical perspectives and the writing of history is a bit of a feat. Sure, most students are familiar with the old adage that history is written by the victors. But they do not always see, at the outset of the course, how that might apply to something as (seemingly) esoteric as the history of science. Science is science. Is it not? Unless we are talking about something as overt as the development of the atomic bomb during WWII, science has nothing to do with society, economics, politics, etc. … or so the thinking goes. This can be all the more apparent in departments where the subfields are geared more toward the hard science wing of the discipline and lack conversancy in science and technology studies. A little bit of Latour, I have found, goes a long way. 

To open up these historiographic conversations with students, I have been experimenting with assigning George Stocking’s classic editorial “On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in the Historiography of Behavioral Sciences” (1965), which I pair with Ira Bashkow’s illuminating meta-historical account of the formation of Stocking’s jaundiced view of the presentist approach. The goal here is to get students to see that a principled history of anthropology is not so much about choosing sides in the historicist-presentist debate as much as it is about working toward an “enlightenment presentism.” Following Stocking’s lead, I invoke Dell Hymes’s assertion that “[t]o the degree that we have lacked an active knowledge of the history of our field, we have been limited by lack of some of the perspectives that have not been transmitted to us, and by the partialness of some of those that have” (1965, 216). In doing so, I motion toward the utility of a history of anthropology for practicing anthropologists today. There are things that we are concerned with in the twenty-first century that our anthropological forebearers also took to be of great importance. The trick is that one cannot operationalize the utility of those past works without first understanding them in the context of their own time and place. This requires a combination of historicist and presentist insights. And in some cases, this might require us to temporarily “[suspend] judgment as to present utility, [so that we might] make that judgment ultimately possible” (1965, 217).

Students have various opportunities to practice deploying the two historical lenses including a midterm paper that calls for them to assess the work of Franz Boas as it relates to race, racism, and anti-racism in the US. Students are prompted to draw their conclusion from a combination of Boas’s original writings, the competing perspectives of early 20th century boosters of white supremacy (e.g., Madison Grant), and a variety of secondary mediations on Boas’s research and political impact, which students identify both on their own and with instructor guidance. In addition to gauging people’s comprehension of Boas’s work as well as their ability to identify and analyze relevant scholarly works on the topic, the intention is to provide an opportunity for students to practice toggling back-and-forth between the poles of historicism and presentism in order to arrive at their own evaluations of the Boasian legacy and its utility for thinking about questions of race, racism, and anti-racism today.

Footnotes, Dark History of Anthropology, & Inspiration

At a moment when the neoliberal university compels departments to duke it out in a zero-sum game for funding and future enrollments are undermined by the looming “demographic cliff,” it is incumbent upon academic anthropologists to ensure that the discipline is appealing to prospective students. Yes, we must also be concerned with ensuring that the major offers viable career pathways, especially for working-class students who do not come from generational wealth. Relatedly, we should be cognizant of the ways in which depictions of the liberal arts and social sciences as occupational dead ends now hold hands with characterizations of these same disciplines as sources of political radicalization and indoctrination, prompting some state legislators to call for the outright defunding of these supposed “garbage fields” (Santos 2025).[2]Of course, we should not assume that this is the first time that anthropology has functioned as a scapegoat in national politics (Price 2004). Perhaps this is another instance in which the history of anthropology will prove to be a source of utility for practicing anthropologists today. But I suspect that a workforce readiness approach will only help us so much. Can we survive the ravages of corporately minded administrators with career pathways alone when our counterparts/competitors in business, computer science, economics, and engineering offer more straightforward and more lucrative career prospects? To be sure, professional development courses and internships should be arrows in our departmental quivers as we work to attract and retain anthropology students. But we need to lean on other strengths as well. And I believe our history is one of those strengths. 

Of course, it is a complicated history, one that has led to tropes of grave robbers and handmaidens of colonialism, which understandably turn potentially interested students off. Fortunately, our disciplinary history is not all robbers and handmaidens. But you might not know it from recent meditations. Take for instance Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman’s much-discussed “Decolonizing US Anthropology” (2022). While this is not necessarily history of anthropology (either in the presentist or historicist mode), it does invoke the past in important ways. Emphasizing that we “cannot decolonize the discipline today without reinterpreting and rethinking the past,” Gupta and Stoolman offer a counterfactual approach to anthropology’s canon—one that explores the areas of study “left by the wayside” in the founding generations, areas that might have translated to a decolonizing tradition had they been pursued (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, 785-786). Though they do not demonstrate what they have in mind in any thorough detail, Gupta and Stoolman motion to numerous potential areas of speculation ranging from “genocides and mass killings” to “monopoly capitalism” (2022, 782-785). The underlying assumption being that if anthropologists had devoted more attention to these topics in their scholarship, anthropology and perhaps the US might be different today. To be sure, Gupta and Stoolman are appropriately “skeptical of the reductive claim that anthropologists and anthropology functioned simply as the ‘handmaiden of colonialism’” just as they are skeptical of the notion that their call for decolonizing the discipline is without precedent (2022, 782). As they observe (790):

…there was no shortage of calls for such changes in the 1960s and 1970s (Gough 1967; Hymes 1972), nor were exemplars of such a practice in short supply. We recognize that many, if not most, anthropologists see themselves as antiracist, and quite a few have been involved in the struggles for civil rights waged during the 1960s and afterward.

Unfortunately, this most intriguing qualification is confined to their footnotes. But even the footnote leaves much to be desired. Their nod to the canonical writings of Kathleen Gough and Dell Hymes suggest that Gupta and Stoolman’s footnoted historical purview is itself confined to prior, grand declarations of what anthropologists should do—not what they did. Though they suggest that “exemplars of such a practice” were abundant, they provide no references. This lacuna is quite curious given the growing body of non-counterfactual history on action anthropologists such as Sol Tax, Nancy Oestrich Lurie, and Robert Thomas (Arndt 2019, Braun 2019; Daubenmier 2008; Cobb 2008; Hancock 2019; Smith 2015). Why is it, I wonder that these figures continue to be marginalized in discussions of anthropological decolonization? To what degree is a counterfactual approach productive when it leaves so much out? 

Don’t get me wrong. I do not think the history of anthropology—as either a research pursuit or a course in the university catalogue—should become a mere avenue for good disciplinary PR. But I do think we walk and chew gum at the same time. That is to say, I think that just as we can pursue productive and inviting lines of historical research that do not necessarily lead to rosed colored pasts, we can also teach the history of anthropology in a non-pollyannaish manner without completely turning off students—both prospective students and those declared majors who might be teetering on the brink of calling it quits and just hopping over to psychology or economics. In my current history of anthropology course, students encounter plenty of what we might consider dark history of anthropology (a la Sherry Ortner 2016). That is to say, students encounter a variety of much-debated cases including Napoleon Chagnon’s Yanomami research and Alfred Kroeber’s relationship with the man called Ishi. Even when presented in a nuanced and historicist mode, one cannot be surprised if a younger generation in 2025 finds these cases unsettling, and, at least in my experience, they do. 

But as much as the class considers these thorny pasts, we also read about and discuss the relationship between Indigenous rights activist and anthropologists in the twentieth century. Paying attention to the aforementioned action anthropologists and other post-WWII figures actually opens up a space to cultivate a more nuanced assessment of one of the most referenced, but little understood, bits of criticism—that of Vine Deloria Jr. As Robert Hancock (2019) and Sebastian Braun (2019) have illustrated in their respective works, Deloria has been mis-remembered as an outright enemy of the discipline. This appears to be at least in part due to a very decontextualized—one might say presentist—reading of Deloria’s (in)famous chapter about anthropologists in his epic Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969). Such readings neglect to note that Deloria’s anger was largely directed at what he referred to as “workshop anthros”—not at anthropology writ large (Deloria 1969, 65). Such a label only makes sense if given a bit of historicist care. By workshop anthros, Deloria was referring to the Workshop on American Indian Affairs organized by Tax and Fred Gearing, which Deloria considered to be overly invested in premodern conceptions of Indigenous communities (Braun 2019, 340). While Deloria believed that re-tribalization was necessary in the fight for tribal rights, he did not think this meant “the artificial exclusion of modernity” (Braun 2019, 342). In his eyes, this is what workshop anthros preached—that white and Indian society were radically different and incapable of meeting (see Cobb 2008 for a detailed account of the workshop curricula, which contrasts sharply with Deloria’s characterization of their approach).

Or as Braun puts it, “Deloria’s beef with workshop anthros was that they defined and continue to define Native peoples as premodern” (2019, 342). Hancock further complicates the deadliest enemies view of Deloria and anthropology through Deloria’s participation in the 1970 meeting of the American Anthropology Association. Hancock sees in Deloria’s conference statements not a unidimensional polemic as is often assumed, but a sincere call for anthropologists “to do better” vis-a-vis Native communities. Hancock applies this re-interpretation to historians of anthropology as well: “When we think about doing better, we need to think not just in terms of working with Indigenous communities but also in terms of understanding and representing those relationships” (2019, 362). 

Through lectures and discussions, I work to incorporate these nuanced views of Deloria into the course. This has become all the easier to do in recent years, thanks in part to a growing body of historical scholarship on the relationship between politically engaged anthropology, federal policy, and Indigenous activism in the US (e.g., Arndt 2019; Daubenmier 2008; Dinwoodie 2023; Cobb 2008; Morgan 2017, 2019; Smith 2015). This emergent literature includes critical attention being paid to Deloria’s close relationship with Lurie in their mutual and successful effort to restore the tribal status of the Menominee (Arndt 2023). While I hope to find a way to make room for these works as required readings in future iterations of the class, for now they appears as reference points in my lectures  as part of an admittedly over-encumbered and clunkily titled unit dubbed “The Post Modern Turn & Critiquing Anthropology in the Twentieth Century.”

At a moment when much of academic anthropological activism appears thematic and divorced from actual politics—whether that be of the grassroots or electoral variety, I have found that students find these otherwise forgotten cases to be inspiring.[3]This piece was originally conceived in 2023 prior to the most recent attacks on academic freedom and free speech on college campuses in the US. If anthropological activism has yet to address this wave of authoritarianism in a grassroots or electoral fashion, it may be a reflection of the increasingly illiberal and precarious conditions in which academic anthropologists operate. My students appear far more politically curious and engaged than I was as an undergraduate. So perhaps the inspiration comes from seeing in a Tax or a Lurie a kind of kindred spirit. Knowing you are not alone in your civic-minded thinking can be quite comforting. Students, of course, are still disturbed by Ishi’s story, Chagnon’s personality, the crudeness of Lewis Henry Morgan’s evolutionary typology, the patriarchal overtones of the phrase “the daughters of Boas,” and many other aspects of the discipline’s past (as well as how it has been framed). However, they recognize that there might be something worth salvaging in the discipline. Perhaps that something can be identified and cultivated through the paradigmatic approach, one in which students dwell on theories and canonical figures in something of a social vacuum, but I do not see how. If the History of Anthropology is going to be a place of dwelling, why not let it be more than mere ideas and celebrity-esque historical figures. Why not let it be a place where declared and prospective majors can cultivate a bit of inspiration. 

Works Cited

Arndt, Grant. 2019. “Rediscovering Nancy Oestreich Lurie’s Activist Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 121 (3): 725–28.

———. 2023. “Joining the Ongoing Struggle: Vine Deloria, Nancy Lurie, and the Quest for a Decolonial Anthropology.” Journal of Anthropological Research 79 (4): 468–91.

Barron, Nicholas. 2020. “Renegades or Liberals? Recent Reflections on the Boasian Legacies in American Anthropology.” Of the Human Sciences, 095269512094119.

———. 2022. “Assembling ‘Enduring Peoples,’ Mediating Recognition: Anthropology, the Pascua Yaqui Indians, and the Co-Construction of Ideas and Politics.” History and Anthropology 33 (4): 452–71. 

———.2023. “Lessons in Safe Logic: Reassessing Anthropological and Liberal Imaginings of Termination.” Journal of Anthropological Research 79 (4): 492–521. 

———.2024. “The Limits of Control: Anthropology, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Federal Recognition in the United States.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 112 (3): 135–56.

Bashkow, Ira. 2019. “On History for the Present: Revisiting George Stocking’s Influential Rejection of ‘Presentism.’” American Anthropologist 121 (3): 709–20.

Braun, Sebastian F. 2019. “Rereading Deloria: Against Workshops, for Communities.” In Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories, edited by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, 339–52. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Cobb, Daniel M. 2008. Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Deloria, Vine. 1969. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan.

Dinwoodie, David W. 2023. “Decolonization and the History of Anthropology: The Implications of New Deal Anthropology from the 1930s to the 1950s.” Journal of Anthropological Research 79 (4): 439–67.

Gough, Kathleen. 1967. “New Proposals for Anthropologists.” Economic and Political Weekly 2 (36): 1653–55.

Gupta, Akhil, and Jessie Stoolman. 2022. “Decolonizing US Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 124 (4).

Hancock, Robert L. A. 2019. “‘Let’s Do Better This Time’: Vine Deloria Jr.’s Ongoing Engagement with Anthropology.” In Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of Histories, edited by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, 353–65. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Hymes, Dell. 1972. “The Uses of Anthropology: Critical, Political, Personal.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 3–79. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McGee, R. Jon, and Richard L. Warms. 2024. Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. Sixth. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield. 

Morgan, Mindy J. 2017. “Anthropologists in Unexpected Places: Tracing Anthropological Theory, Practice, and Policy in Indians at Work.” American Anthropologist 119 (3): 435–47.

Morgan, Mindy. 2019. “Look Once More at the Old Things: Ruth Underhill’s O’odham Text Collections.” In Disruptive Voices and the Singularity of History, edited by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, 319–38. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Noble, David W. 1970. The Progressive Mind, 1890-1917. Rand McNally.

Ortner, Sherry B. 2016. “Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73. 

Santos, Jose Leonardo. 2025. “‘Eliminate Anthropology’: Attitudes toward Social Science in the Public Discourse.” American Anthropologist

Scholastic Deth. 2002. Book Attack! Revenge…of the Nerds. 625 Thrashcore, Wake the Dead Records.

Singh, Bhrigupati, and Jane I. Guyer. 2016. “A Joyful History of Anthropology.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 197–211.

Smith, Joshua J. 2015. “Standing with Sol: The Spirit and Intent of Action Anthropology.” Anthropologica 57: 445–56.

Solovey, Mark. 2013. Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Stocking, George W. 1965. “On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences.” Journal of the History Behavioral Sciences Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1 (3): 211–18.

Notes

Notes
1 Stocking also noted the awkward fit of anthropology in the Kuhnian model, for anthropology and other similarly internally discordant disciplines within the behavioral sciences that have yet to reach a state of consensus would be deemed “pre-paradigmatic” (1965, 215). For a more detailed discussion of Stocking’s use of Kuhn see Bashkow (2019).
2 Of course, we should not assume that this is the first time that anthropology has functioned as a scapegoat in national politics (Price 2004). Perhaps this is another instance in which the history of anthropology will prove to be a source of utility for practicing anthropologists today.
3 This piece was originally conceived in 2023 prior to the most recent attacks on academic freedom and free speech on college campuses in the US. If anthropological activism has yet to address this wave of authoritarianism in a grassroots or electoral fashion, it may be a reflection of the increasingly illiberal and precarious conditions in which academic anthropologists operate.

Anthropology as a Feminist Project of Collective Practice

Second wave feminism, or women’s liberation, grew out of the new political energy that emerged in the USA in the 1960s. Movements for women’s liberation were a product of the social disquiet and dissent associated with US war in Vietnam and, for my generation of activists, Australia’s involvement in that conflict. These associated political movements were concerned with power and inequality; in addition, they had a phenomenological character, a concern with the inwardness of experience and inwardness of experience understanding the world .

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The “F” Word: Anthropology, Positionality, and Intersecting Lives in Oz

The organisers have invited us to reflect on the history of feminist anthropology in Australia through a key episode in our ethnographic experience. I have been delinquent in my response to that invitation by broadening the brief greatly to think ethnographically about Australian anthropology and its relation to feminism in the broader public sphere. I hope you will indulge my rather rambling personal reflections, which I orchestrate chronologically.

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Theory as Reproduction: Histories of Doing Feminist Anthropology in Australia

The relationship between feminism and anthropology has never been straightforward. The launch in 2020 of Feminist Anthropology, the journal of the Association for Feminist Anthropology section at the American Anthropological Association, may be one indicator of the consolidation of the field. However, only a few decades earlier, significant political, institutional, and intellectual struggles were waged to make this possible. A relationship between feminism and anthropology was not a natural alliance but was forged through contested debates such as those over the universality of women’s oppression (Ortner 1972), the incompatibility of a relativism and feminism (Strathern 1988), and through the “sex wars” in the United States (Rubin 2011). Feminist anthropologists have also pioneered new possibilities for representation in the ethnographic genre (Visweswaran 1994). In this moment of intensifying attacks on feminist thought globally, on women’s and trans people’s reproductive rights and in universities, it is crucial for anthropology to reflect on feminist histories of the discipline and what they can tell us about reproducing knowledge in the present moment.[1]This collection entered production in early 2025, during the period between the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2024, his inauguration for a second term, and subsequent steps taken by his administration to restrict women’s and trans people’s rights in profoundly troubling ways. The many ways that the women in our roundtable struggled against misogynistic academic institutions, and their ability to link intersectional feminist political struggles to their work in the classroom, may offer inspiration in dark times (see also hooks 1994).

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Notes

Notes
1 This collection entered production in early 2025, during the period between the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2024, his inauguration for a second term, and subsequent steps taken by his administration to restrict women’s and trans people’s rights in profoundly troubling ways. The many ways that the women in our roundtable struggled against misogynistic academic institutions, and their ability to link intersectional feminist political struggles to their work in the classroom, may offer inspiration in dark times (see also hooks 1994).

Special Focus: Feminist Anthropology in Australia

HAR editors are pleased to bring you this Special Focus Section, guest edited by Benjamin Heagarty, Shiori Shakuto, and Caroline Schuster. The pieces in this collection will be published on a rolling basis, and the table of contents will be updated accordingly.

This special section brings together seven essays which were originally presented at the roundtable Theory as Reproduction: Reflections on the History of Doing Feminist Anthropology in Australia. It also includes an introduction, co-authored by Benjamin Hegarty, Shiori Shakuto, and Caroline Schuster. The event was held at the annual Australian Anthropological Society conference held on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people (Australian National University, Canberra) on Monday 2 December 2019. Part oral history and part conversation, the organizers brought together a group of women to reflect on their experiences of a politically and intellectually dynamic period in Australian feminist anthropology during the 1970s and 1980s. For this roundtable, held at the campus where Derek Freeman penned his famous series of polemics denouncing Margaret Mead’s research, feminist researchers came together to reflect on the work of producing theory and the labour involved in its reproduction through the maternal line.

Table of Contents

May 2025

Theory as Reproduction: Histories of Doing Feminist Anthropology in Australia

Benjamin Hegarty, Shiori Shakuto, and Caroline Schuster

The “F” Word: Anthropology, Positionality, and Intersecting Lives in Oz

Margaret Jolly

Anthropology as a Feminist Project of Collective Practice

Kathryn Robinson

A Lone Woman in the Jungle

Christine Helliwell

June 2025

Problems and Possibilities of Being a Feminist Anthropologist

Martha Macintyre

A Feminist Postcolonial Journey: Moving Between Countries, Academic Disciplines and Institutions

Kalpana Ram

Traces of Multivocal Botany: Lars Montin’s Travels in Sápmi in 1749 and the Case of Angelica archangelica

On the 15th and 16th of July 1749 the small village Kvikkjokk (Huhttán in Lule Sápmi) in northern Sweden became the scene of a heated debate on epistemology and botany between a Linnaean field naturalist, local clergy and Indigenous Sámi people. At the forefront were local botanical names and uses of Angelica archangelica, also known simply as the angelica, wild celery, or Norwegian angelica (or “kvanne” in Swedish). Sámi people, temporarily present at the location in order to attend two compulsory church gatherings were called in not once but twice to settle issues relating to nomenclature and identity. The first time they responded, they sided with the travelling naturalist Lars Montin (1723-1785), and, by extension, his teacher Linnaeus’s descriptions published in Flora Lapponica (1737).[1]Lars Montin, ’Beskrifning öfver en resa, på Kongl: Wetenskaps Societetens uti Uppsala, men i synnerhet Wälb. Herr Arch. Linnæi anmodan år 1749 om sommaren förrättad til Lapska Fiællarne Åfvan Luleå Stad’, MSS BANKS COLL MON, Botanical Collections, The Natural History Museum, London, 416, see also below discussion of the Angelica archangelica The second time, they dismissed the information detailed by Linnaeus in the same flora. Nor did they agree with the views of the local vicar Olof Olofsson Modéen (1696-1754), who translated the exchanges for Montin, that the plant in question was lethally poisonous.[2]Montin, ’Beskrifning öfver en resa’, 421–422. The plant in question here was Angelica sylvestri, which Modéen seems to have confused with Hyoscyamus niger.   

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Notes

Notes
1 Lars Montin, ’Beskrifning öfver en resa, på Kongl: Wetenskaps Societetens uti Uppsala, men i synnerhet Wälb. Herr Arch. Linnæi anmodan år 1749 om sommaren förrättad til Lapska Fiællarne Åfvan Luleå Stad’, MSS BANKS COLL MON, Botanical Collections, The Natural History Museum, London, 416, see also below discussion of the Angelica archangelica
2 Montin, ’Beskrifning öfver en resa’, 421–422. The plant in question here was Angelica sylvestri, which Modéen seems to have confused with Hyoscyamus niger.

“The world is an amazing place”: Anthropology and the 1990s

by Michael Edwards

When I was growing up in Australia in the early 1990s, my parents were a little strict about not letting me watch too many cartoons and ads on commercial TV. Instead, I watched a lot of SBS. One of Australia’s two public broadcasters, SBS (the Special Broadcasting Service) aims, according to its 1991 charter, to “inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society.” Its programming was distinctive: news in English and the languages of diaspora communities combined with current affairs shows, often racy foreign art-house films, and European football matches. The joke was that the initials really stood for “Sex Before Soccer.” 

This and subsequent images are screenshots from the music video for Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby” (1992).

There are no specific images or scenes from these films that I remember now, though some are probably lodged deep in the recesses of my psyche. What I do remember is something of the mood of watching SBS as a kid on our living room floor in Sydney in the 1990s, a mood shaped as much by my own family histories—my mum the child of European Jewish refugees, my dad the descendant of Irish settlers—as by the political shifts then underway in Australia. This was a time when the Labor government of Prime Minister Paul Keating was pursuing its agenda of reconciliation with First Nations people, deepening the country’s connections with Asia, and promoting its vision for a multicultural society. Keating opened SBS’s new headquarters in Sydney in 1993. My parents and their friends were big fans of both Keating and SBS.

There is a more complex story about Australian multiculturalism in the 90s which anthropologists had already begun to tell close to the time. In White Nation (1998), Ghassan Hage delineates how official multiculturalism left structures of white supremacy and racial hierarchy intact, allowing space for certain, permissible forms of cultural difference while denying it to others. Elizabeth Povinelli, in The Cunning of Recognition (2002), shows how multiculturalism’s insistence on authentic expressions of traditional culture fell heavily on Indigenous peoples. If my parents thought about of these contradictions inherent in liberal multiculturalism, it’s not a topic I recall from what I remember as optimistic and enthusiastic conversations around our dinner table.

A couple of years ago a friend sent me a link to a video that brought that childhood mood, that feeling rushing back. It was the music video for Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby” from 1992, which SBS used in the early and mid 90s as its promo, broadcasting it regularly in the breaks between shows. Recent comments below the video on YouTube suggest it has had the same effect on others. It’s the combination of the music and images that is achingly familiar. At the heart of the song is a Baegu-language lullaby from the Solomon Islands titled “Rorogwela,” sung by a woman named Afunakwa, about an older brother comforting his younger brother after they are orphaned. Recorded by the ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp in the late 1960s, it was included on a UNESCO collection, from which it was sampled by Deep Forest’s French producers, and then, accompanied by a drum track and synthesizers, went on to become a 90s “world music” hit.

As the anthropologist Steven Feld put it in an article in the year 2000, the story of this song’s creation reveals how “companies, performers, recordists, organizations, and media can now find their identities embroiled in complex multilocal song histories … signs of anxious and celebratory contradictions in world music” (p. 165). For Feld, the increasing pop cultural prominence and commercial success of “world music” in the 90s threw into relief broader issues and anxieties then coming to surround globalisation: the “tensions that characterize global processes of separation and mixing … [and the] increasingly complicated pluralities, uneven experiences, and consolidated powers” (p. 146).

The music video for “Sweet Lullaby”, by the Indian director Tarsem Singh, reinforces the picture. Nominated for the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, it’s a montage of scenes from around the world, from a muddy shipyard in India to a rainy street in post-Soviet Russia, from the Empire State Building in New York to the Great Wall of China to Gaudi’s Park Güell in Barcelona. Our guide is a young girl, travelling by tricycle through each of the spaces, before returning to an older girl—an older sister?—who cradles her in the opening and closing scenes. Gestures and objects repeat: an arm outstretched to give directions, a mirror, a small wooden frame which the girl and the people she encounters hold up to the world, to each other, and sometimes to us.

When SBS ran the music video in the 90s it added a line, “The world is an amazing place,” at the end.

It’s not just nostalgia that’s had me recently watching the video on repeat. I’ve also been wondering if it can also tell us something more about that 90s moment, one whose legacies continue to shape anthropology today.

In the histories of anthropology that we tend to tell, certain decades loom large: the 1920s, for instance, the time of Argonauts, or the 1980s, the time of Writing Culture. The 1990s, if considered at all, tend to be treated with nostalgia, derision, or some combination of the two—though there are important exceptions. For Joel Robbins, the 90s is the moment anthropology left the “savage slot,” taking on the “suffering subject” as its principal ethnographic and theoretical domain, with a host of ethical and political implications. For Robbins, anthropology in the 90s changes “its relation to those it studies from one of analytic distance and critical comparison focused on difference to one of empathic connection and moral witnessing based on human unity” (p. 453).  

In the wake of the Cold War, with the end of the millennium fast approaching, and with the implications of the World Wide Web rushing into view, the 90s were the setting for an anthropology that placed increasing emphasis on connection and movement, on what Feld referred to as the “transnational flows of technology, media, and popular culture” and related “global processes of separation and mixing, … genericization, hybridization, and revitalization” (p. 146). Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, in their defining volume from the mid-1990s, described the period as “a time of great uncertainty for anthropology, … [and] also one of enormous possibilities,” one in which anthropologists needed to “try to find our feet in a strange new world” (p. 26).  

What does that time look like from today’s vantage? Did anthropologists ever find their feet? Or did the world grow stranger still?

Thirty years ago, around the time that the video clip for “Sweet Lullaby” was getting nominated for the MTV Awards, Anna Tsing was publishing In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. A reflection on the ironic construction of marginality in an “out-of-the-way place” in Indonesia, it is also a study of how her Meratus interlocutors engage with a wider world in Indonesia and beyond, of how certain types of esoteric Meratus knowledge rely, like anthropology, on practices of travel both physical and imaginative. In the 90s, it became impossible for anthropologists to ignore that it was not just they who travelled; the “cultures” they studied did too.

Nowhere was the point more clearly made than in the then expanding anthropological literature on diaspora. It was also in 1994 that James Clifford published his much-cited essay on the topic, locating diaspora in an “unruly crowd of descriptive/interpretive terms [that] now jostle and converse in an effort to characterize the contact zones of nations, cultures, and regions: terms such as border, travel, creolization, transculturation, hybridity” (p. 303). Diaspora, for Clifford and the growing number of scholars whose work he cites, was a term with significant, though complex, potential. Diasporic histories and identities, their complex and contradictory attachments to place, their alternate networks and models of cosmopolitan life, might be able, it was hoped, to push not just against the boundaries of exclusivist nationalism, but also to “reach beyond mere ethnic status within the composite, liberal state” (p. 310), beyond those limited visions of pluralism and tolerance enshrined in official policies and practices of multiculturalism.

Clifford drew on two then recent works: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) and an essay by Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin titled “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity” (1993). The latter offers a reading of Jewish diasporism, arguing that it “involves a principled renunciation of both universalism and sovereignty, and an embrace of the arts of exile and coexistence” (Clifford 1994: 322). For the Boyarins, the formation of the modern State of Israel represents “the subversion of Jewish culture and not its culmination … capturing Judaism in a state” (quoted in Clifford, ibid.). In his conclusion, Clifford notes the recent signing of the Oslo Accords, suggesting that “diasporist skills for maintaining difference in contact and accommodation” may be needed to reach a sustainable political solution for Israelis and Palestinians.

Thirty years on, and as Israel’s assault on Gaza has unfolded over the past year, politicians and journalists in Australia have lamented the fraying of “social cohesion,” a fraying felt to threaten the country’s proud multicultural self-mythologizing. Often in their sights are the large number of Australians protesting and rightly angry that the current Labor government hasn’t taken a stronger stand against Israel’s violence. This discourse has been, in large part, about the role and proper behaviour of diaspora communities—Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Muslim—in Australia’s multicultural fabric. All this was thrown into sharp relief last July when Fatima Payman, a senator who had come to Australia as a refugee from Afghanistan in the early 2000s, quit the Labor Party after defying it to cast her vote with the Greens to support a motion that would recognise a Palestinian State. Payman said she’d been intimated by Labor colleagues after the vote. Journalists relayed party insider concerns that Payman, a Muslim woman, had been somehow inappropriately guided by God in ways that were, again, apparently a threat to social cohesion.

The lessons of Hage’s White Nation stay relevant. As the Payman affair unfolded, Hage himself wrote on Facebook,

Leaving Sydney as the White establishment is laying into Payman. The ‘Eureka Stew’ syndrome strikes again as the White multiculturalist cooks (politicians and journalists) unite in telling Payman that while she is welcome as a multicultural ingredient, her desire to have even a minimal say in how the stew is cooked cannot be tolerated. Here’s white multicultural tolerance on full display for you.

In 2023, White Nation was reissued alongside some of Hage’s other writings in a new volume titled The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism. Some upcoming proceeds from the sale of the book are to be donated to Olive Kids, an Australian charity supporting children in Palestine, where Israel’s war on children has been so catastrophic that it has coined a new acronym, WCNSF: Wounded Child No Surviving Family. Gestures and objects repeat. In a video from Al Jazeera, a small boy in Gaza returns to where his family’s house stood before it was destroyed by an Israeli bomb, retrieving his tricycle from the rubble.  

References

Boyarin, Daniel, and Jonathan Boyarin. 1993. “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4: 693–725.

Clifford, James. 1994. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3: 302–338.

Feld, Steven. 2000. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12, no. 1: 145–171.

Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1997. “Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era.” In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 1–30. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 3: 447–462.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

“Good Anthropology of the Past, for the Present”: James Teit, the Written and the Oral History of the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe

On May 10th 1911, several Interior Salish St’át’imc Chiefs, accompanied by ethnographer James A. Teit, drafted, signed and distributed the charter Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe in Spences Bridge B.C. to articulate clearly to developers, government and other settlers who they are, how their traditional territory has been impacted by colonial expansionist agendas and what their creative visions for a self-determined, just and healthy future is. Based on long-term ethnographic, collaborative and oral history research with St’át’imc elders, chiefs and community members, this paper explores the important messages and original context of the declaration. Building on this, our co-authorship and friendships spanning almost two decades now and drawing on interviews and observations made at an annual gathering to mark the Declaration’s 100 year anniversary, it highlights the consequential and powerful ways in which this signal document is currently mobilized to ensure the continuity of a St’át’imc way of life and fully realize nationhood vis-à-vis colonial doctrines and institutions.

The 100-year celebration of the charter position document at the annual St’át’imc Gathering in May 2011, which invited 100 St’át’imc drums and all descendants of the signatory chiefs to self-identify and be witnesses, provides a pivotal example. Here, we assess James Teit’s theories and methods as political activist, ethnographer, hunter and associate of Franz Boas and examine the importance of these relationships and representations in revisionist and historicist fashion. Together, we draw some critical and pertinent insights for action anthropological, collaborative and ethnohistorical research methods to better equip us to deal with the challenges of our times.

British Colonialism, Indigenous Political Protests and Scottish-Born, Interior Salish-based James A. Teit

At the end of the nineteenth Century, British Columbia’s policies were marked by the colony’s refusal, after the Douglas Treaties, to negotiate or to recognize any Indian title. St‘át‘imc Title and Rights regarding Interior Salish lands and resources were un-settled and unsettling. In the decades between the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1886 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914 tensions surrounding settler colonial expansion heightened. As a result of the growing settler population of British Columbia, Indigenous[1]The terms “Indigenous”, “Native” and “Indian” will be used analogously in this text to accurately denote the historical periods in which they are and were mobilized politically, by other scholars and historians. communities worried about their loss of access to lands, resources, economic marginalization, and increasing institutionalized discrimination and racism (Cole 2006, 16; Wickwire 1998, 209; Galois 1992, 1). It was in this difficult context that James Teit came to Spences Bridge, ultimately becoming an important ally of Indigenous peoples in their struggles for rights, lands, livelihood and recognition. During this time of frontier-pushing, native political protest was becoming organized. Between the imposition of the Indian Act and federal and provincial disputes over the colonial reserve geography, the growing Indian Rights movement asserted a “nation-to-nation relationship” (Galois 1992; Ware 1983).

Engaging ethnographer and ethnologist James Teit as secretary-treasurer in 1909 (Galois 1992), the Interior Tribes of B.C. made a number of formal requests to the government, known as appeals to the Honour of the Crown. Teit had come to Spences Bridge in 1884 from the Scottish Shetland Islands to work at his uncle’s store. The main customers were local Nlaka’pamux families. Teit soon made friends with many and started to learn their language, joining hunting, fishing and land trips. In 1892 he married a Nlaka’pamux woman, Susanna Lucy Antko from Nkaitu’sus (Tswall Valley), acquiring a profound insider and nonconformist gender perspective onto Salish life (Ray Fogelson, personal communication, November 2016). His familiarity with the Nlaka’pamux ways and language brought him to the attention of Franz Boas in 1894, the then leading figure in North American anthropology. Teit became a close collaborator with Boas and soon affiliated with other major contemporary anthropologists. Under and beyond Boas’ mentorship, Teit meticulously collected field notes on songs and language, traditions, relationship terms, animal legends, mythology, comparative vocabularies, place names, personal names and ethnographic materials (cf. Teit 1906, 1909, 1912). St’át’imc author Joanne Drake-Terry highlights the fact that Teit’s engagement as secretary and interpreter for many Interior tribal chiefs established him as a key witness and advocate for native rights (1989, 246; cf. Wickwire 2019; Laforet et al. 2024)(see Figure 1).

Figure 1. James Teit with remains of Indian earth oven in Botanie ca. 1913. Source: Vancouver City Archives (AM505-S1-: CVA 660-886)

Around this time, the Interior Chiefs decided to affiliate with the coastal Indian Rights Association to demand a settlement of their land question (Drake-Terry 1989, 246). Southern Interior Chiefs met at Spences Bridge in the summer of 1910 to study the demands of the Indian Rights Association. Galois (1992, 23) notes that in pursuing this resolution, native people took their protest activities beyond the bureaucratic channels of the Department of Indian Affairs, seeking access to the centres of political power in white society—imperial, federal and provincial governments. These endeavours involved the use of forms of protest that were readily intelligible to white politicians including letters, petitions and delegations while involving extensive, exhausting and expensive journeys (Galois 1992, ibid.). In the process two basic strategic alternatives for resolving the “Indian land question” were defined: a negotiated settlement—a treaty—or a court decision.

The Interior Chiefs understood how important it was for them to define, and speak for, their own concerns: their treaty rights, demands for compensation for lands appropriated, enlargement of reservations toward permanent and secure title. Overall there was a concern with defining and asserting their inherent rights. They had Teit “write it all down and in essence” in point-by-point form so it could be easily shared and understood (Qwa7yán’ak, personal communication, summer 2016; cf. Drake-Terry 1989; Laforet and York 1998). In the words of the late St’át’imc Elder Sam Mitchell, “the chiefs would get together and deliberate all night long with Teit listening” (quoted by an anonymous Elder, personal communication, August 2016).

The Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe, 1911

A formal and specific St’át’imc assertion of sovereignty over territorial lands and a strong opposition to the confiscation of land by non-St’át’imc settlers was drafted, narrated and written down as the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe 1911 (see Figure 2), signed by seventeen St’át’imc Chiefs and witnessed by Teit, on May 10, 1911, in Spences Bridge. A key excerpt asserts:

We claim that we are the rightful owners of our tribal territory and everything pertaining thereto. We have always lived in our country; at no time have we ever deserted it, or left it to others. We have retained it from the invasion of other tribes at the cost of our blood. Our ancestors were in possession of our county centuries before the whites came. It is the same as yesterday when the latter came, and like the day before when the first fur trader came. We are aware the B.C. government claims our country, like all other Indian territories in B.C.; but we deny their right to it. We never gave it nor sold it to them. They certainly never got the title to the country from us, neither by agreement nor conquest, and none other than us could have any right to give them title. In early days we considered white chiefs like a superior race that never lied nor stole, and always acted wisely, and honourably. We expected they would lay claim to what belonged to themselves only. In these considerations we have been mistaken and gradually have learned how cunning, cruel, untruthful, and thieving some of them can be. We have felt keenly the stealing of our lands by the B.C. Government, but we could never learn how to get redress. We felt helpless and dejected; but lately we began to hope. We think that perhaps after all we may get redress from the greater white chiefs away in the King‘s country, or in Ottawa. It seemed to us all white chiefs and governments were against us, but now we commence to think we may get a measure of justice.

Figure 2. The Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe. Photograph: Sarah Moritz.

“The Ability to See Clearly, to See into the Future”: The Context, Spirit, Intent, Agency and Legacy of the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe and James Teit, 1911 to the Present

Reflecting on the significance, context, spirit and intent of the Declaration, a variety of St’át’imc leaders and descendants’ perspectives emerge as follows. Tsal’alh Elder Desmond Peters Sr. (personal communication, June 2016) explained the implicit nature of the declaration as follows:

The Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe is about Tsciwalus—the ability to see clearly, the ability to see into the future. It reminds us of the natural boundaries of the land, not those on a map the way we map things today. The chiefs could see in the future and know that things would be taken, that which was their livelihood, and they could already see the destruction. The Declaration was about protecting the land. The chiefs all gathered at Spences Bridge because it was the most central point. They were all of hereditary descent. I think we called this declaration “Nt’ákmen‘kalha” which means using the good ways (Nt’ákmen), the laws and standards (Nxékmen) of the people of the land as passed down through the generations. The role of James Teit was his meticulous documentation and by writing in his journal he could compare all the differences between the people and how they belonged to the land and this way owned it while the other sama7s—the white men—just figured that the land was up for grabs. Teit translated from what people said and what they wanted and helped them phrase it into a “we declare”.

Similarly, Xwisten Elder Qwa7yán’ak (Carl Alexander) noted that James Teit did very well by the St’át’imc people (personal communication, August 2016; cf. Smith 1988). He said:

You have to remember that all Interior chiefs had interpreters for their declarations and that’s what they declared and they talked about the land. They did not have to have sama7s, white men, to state ownership, just someone to translate and write it with them. Teit could speak. He could talk. He spoke the language the way we did. That was one of his powers. He knew what the chiefs were saying. He helped us write our language down. He was a good person, an anthropologist.

100 Drums, 100 Years Later: The Declaration’s Significance in the 21st Century

Figure 3. Drum Circle at the Declaration Gathering in Tsal’alh, May 2011. Photograph: Sarah Moritz.

Moving forward in time: the 100-year celebration of the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe in Tsal’alh during the annual St’át’imc Declaration Gathering on May 10th 2011 was concurrent with the planned signing of a charter Hydro Settlement Agreement to compensate for past grievances. To celebrate 100 years of the Declaration, 100 drums were gathered in a large sacred circle (see Figure 3). The Declaration was read in its full length, and a 2011 commemorative Declaration attesting to its validity and continuous use was voiced loudly through the microphone. Many speeches were given regarding what it means to be St‘át‘imc and Úcwalmicw, a people of the land. Everyone who self-identified or was appointed by others as descendant of any of the signatory Chiefs of the Lillooet Tribe was invited onto the stage to explain their relations to the signatory Chiefs and their ancestry. Representatives of the Crown and of the electrical distributor and dam operator BC Hydro came on stage to express their respect and acknowledgement of the gathering and 100 years of the Declaration, speaking about an era of a “better” and “new” relationships based on a “small of measure of justice” as demanded by the Chiefs at the beginning of the twentieth Century.[2]Co-author Qwalqwalten specifies: The Declaration speaks of “a measure of justice.” Grand Chief Saul Terry phrases this agreement as a small measure of justice for our people, and today, there is talk of “a small measure of a measure of justice”—an important difference. This one agreement does not mean that we have stopped pressing for redress, or compensation on the suite of issues that need to be dealt with between the St’at’imc and the other levels of Government. I am co-authoring this text via my current position as Political Lead for the Joint Planning Forum with St’át’imc Government Services and BC Hydro. It is only through that capacity that I am the political lead, or there would be more noise being made on several fronts.

Qwalqwalten, the political lead of St’át’imc Government Services (SGS), remarked quickly that “this is an acknowledgement of our ancestors and the Declaration, an incredibly strong statement of our people practising their St‘át‘imc Title and Rights” (personal communication, May 2011). Led by Qwalqwalten, the St’át’imc Constitution song was sung, a sovereignty tune composed in 1980 when eight hundred Indigenous people travelled to Ottawa to meet Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who was trying to take away native status, title and rights through the White Paper policy. Lines include, for example: “We don’t need your constitution! Canada is all Indian land! We are all in solidarity!” (See here: Constitution Song (St’at’imc)).

During the Declaration gathering in May 2011, many St‘át‘imc people echoed that “The Declaration is our law, it says who we are, where we‘re from and where our territory is” (personal communication, May 10th 2011 at the St‘át‘imc gathering, see Figure 4). Another local leader’s perspective on the significance of the Declaration was the following: “My biggest issue is with the B.C. modern treaty process and some of our people trying to go that way—how is that possible, they’re giving away their rights. Instead, the Declaration should be honoured like a treaty” (personal communication, July 2016).

Figure 4. Declaration Weaving for the 100-year Celebration, May 2011. Photograph: Sarah Moritz.

Qwalqwalten (personal communication, October 2020) added that the St’át’imc political stance to reclaiming and maintaining land, labour, resources and nationhood demands a real treaty relationship:

In our case, we have the wealth, the resources in the land, but someone else is taking our wealth. We should be able to say, Canada, kiss our ass, we don’t need your transfer anymore. We need our fair share. Then we do agreements with BC as part of Canada but not as a separate entity. It could be a treaty with us as a nation. We don’t treaty with low levels of government. The prime minister said nation-to-nation which is Canada and BC is only a part of this. So we’d deal with Canada. It can’t call for extinguishment of our inherent right to our land base. It’s going to take some creative energy.

For this endeavour toward a nation-to-nation or treaty relationship, St‘át‘imc members held that the Declaration and James Teit’s legacy would be instrumental. “Teit’s knowledge, is our knowledge,” Tsal’alh hereditary chief Randy James reflectively stated (personal communication, July 2016, emphasis ours), and added, “it helps us reclaim what colonial forces are working to suppress” (cf. Introduction in Laforet et al. 2024; Wickwire 2019).

These revisionist St‘át‘imc discourses question a tokenistic and cursory Euro-Canadian rhetoric of reconciliation which establishes political legitimations through employing modernist notions built upon European enlightenment values (Cassirer 1951; Adorno and Horkheimer 1993; Asch 2002; Povinelli 2002). They highlight a genuine reconciliatory treatied or treaty-able relationship between equals (Borrows 1998; Noble 2009). Accordingly, Canadian anthropologist Michael Asch (2020, 2014) reminds us that a relationship established through treaty entails that the Indigenous parties agree to share their lands in perpetuity with those subjects of the British Crown who wish to settle on them by establishing an enduring partnership akin to one that exists between relatives in a family. More specifically, the partnership is based on an equality of political standing between the parties in which the kind of sharing and mutual aid that flows from kindness are foundational principles. In the ardent words of Sharon Venne (2007, 2) writing from a Cree Treaty 6 perspective, “[w]hen Indigenous Peoples talk about the land and the making of Treaty, we are talking about our life and the life of the future generations. Land is central to the process. We have a relationship with our Creation based on a legal system designed to protect and honour the land.” This aligns closely with the Declaration vision and the ongoing memory, reinterpretation, honouring and spirit of it.

One enquiry during oral history and life story circles posed to many Elders was “How can we honour the declaration now?” While replying, Elder Desmond Peters Sr. pointed at the interview camera, indicating it could be our role to help get his wisdom out and heard, with reference to the history of anthropology. He inspired us to think about how James Teit attended to the St’át’imc ways, respectfully applied himself alongside Franz Boas in solidaristic alliance while pursuing a variety of interests and supported the long battle for a “measure of justice” proclaimed with urgency in 1911 and the healthy treaty relationship that was envisioned when the first fur traders came. The example of Teit’s collaboration with St’át’imc Elders—pointedly recalled one hundred years later— now appears as an excellent example of a Taxian action anthropology approach following paradigms of truth, freedom, co-production of knowledge and non-interventionism (Smith 2015; Tax 1975). It models a relevant and admirable treaty praxis which protects the interests of the Indigenous communities and focuses on the results of the relationship and work being directly and reciprocally beneficial to their self-determination efforts (Asch 2014; Dinwoodie 2015; Laforet et al. 2024; Noble 2009).

Esteemed Xaxli’p Elder Isaac Adolph‘s words on the ongoing essence of the Declaration (personal communication, August 2011) provide us with an excellent conclusion for reflecting on more than a century of St’át’imc self-determination efforts and if not a good then at least a decent anthropology to support it: “The Declaration is the effort to sacrifice yourself today for the benefits of tomorrow because we have not forgotten the past.”

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the important contributions of many St’át’imc Elders, leaders and community members, many of whom are descendants of the Chiefs who co-drafted the Declaration in 1911. We also acknowledge the very constructive comments and feedback we have received from John Tresch and Richard Handler. The ideas, visions and stories outlined in this text have benefited greatly from conversations and insights with a diverse range of individuals and snúk̓wa7s with whom we have had the opportunity to interact, live and work. We further acknowledge the support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Kukwstumúlhkacw.


Read another piece in this series.

Works Cited:

Asch, Michael. On Being Here to Stay: Treaties and Aboriginal Rights in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.

———. “From Terra Nullius to Affirmation: Reconciling Aboriginal Rights with the Canadian Constitution.” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 17, no. 2 (2002): 23–39.

———. “UNDRIP, Treaty Federalism, and Self-Determination.” Review of Constitutional Studies 24, no. 1 (2019): 1.

Blackburn, Carole. “Producing Legitimacy: Reconciliation and the Negotiation of Aboriginal Rights in Canada.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, no. 3 (2007): 621–638.

Boas, Franz. “James A. Teit.” The Journal of American Folklore 36, no. 139 (1923): 102–103.

Borrows, John. “Frozen Rights in Canada: Constitutional Interpretation and the Trickster.” American Indian Law Review 22, no. 1 (1997): 37–64.

———. “Re-living the Present: Title, Treaties, and the Trickster in British Columbia.” BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly 120 (1998): 99–108.

Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Reimagining Home and Sacred Space. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003.

Cole, Peter. Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing: Coming Home to the Village. Vol. 42. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.

Coulthard, Glen. “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada.” Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 4 (2007): 437–460.

Dinwoodie, David. “Anthropological Activism and Boas’s Pacific Northwest Ethnology.” In The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism, edited by Regna Darnell, Michelle Hamilton, Robert L. A. Hancock, and Joshua Smith, 17–42. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Drake-Terry, Joanne. The Same As Yesterday: The Lillooet Chronicle—The Theft of Their Lands and Resources. Lillooet, BC: Lillooet Tribal Council, 1989.

Galois, Robert M. “The Indian Rights Association, Native Protest Activity and the ‘Land Question’ in British Columbia, 1903–1916.” Native Studies Review 8, no. 2 (1992): 1–34.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1993.

Irlbacher-Fox, Stephanie. Finding Dahshaa: Self-Government, Social Suffering, and Aboriginal Policy in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009.

Laforet, Andrea L., and Annie York. Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808–1939. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998.

Laforet, Andrea, Angie Bain, John Haugen, Sarah Carmen Moritz, and Andie Diane Palmer. The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 2: Franz Boas, James Teit, and Early Twentieth-Century Salish Ethnography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024.

Moritz, Sarah Carmen. “Tsuwalhkálh Ti Tmícwa (The Land is Ours): St’át’imc Self-Determination in the Face of Large-Scale Hydro-Electric Development.” Master’s thesis, University of Victoria, 2012. Available at: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/.

Noble, Brian. “Tripped up by Coloniality: Anthropologists as Agent/Tools of Indigenous Political Autonomy?” Paper presented at University of Victoria Colloquium, Victoria, BC, 2009.

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Smith, Joshua J. “Standing with Sol: The Spirit and Intent of Action Anthropology.” Anthropologica 57, no. 2 (2015): 445–456.

Smith, Trefor. Our Stories Are Written on the Land: A Brief History of the St’át’imc 1800–1940. Lillooet, BC: USCLES, 1988.

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Teit, James. The Lillooet Indians. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History 4, no. 4 (1906): 193–300.

———. “The Shuswap.” In The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, edited by Franz Boas, 443–758. New York: AMS Press, 1909.

———. “The Thompson Indians of British Columbia.” In The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, edited by Franz Boas, 167–392. New York: AMS Press, 1900.

———. “Traditions of the Lillooet Indians of British Columbia.” Journal of American Folklore 25 (1912): 287–371.

Venne, Sharon. “Treaties Made in Good Faith.” In Natives & Settlers, Now & Then: Historical Issues and Current Perspectives on Treaties and Land Claims in Canada, edited by Paul W. DePasquale, 5–10. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007.

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Wickwire, Wendy. At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019.

———. “‘They Wanted … Me to Help Them’: James A. Teit and the Challenge of Ethnography in the Boasian Era.” In With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada, edited by Celia Haig-Brown and David A. Nock, 307–316. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006.

———. “‘We Shall Drink from the Stream and So Shall You’: James A. Teit and Native Resistance in British Columbia, 1908–22.” Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 2 (1998): 199–236.

Notes

Notes
1 The terms “Indigenous”, “Native” and “Indian” will be used analogously in this text to accurately denote the historical periods in which they are and were mobilized politically, by other scholars and historians.
2 Co-author Qwalqwalten specifies: The Declaration speaks of “a measure of justice.” Grand Chief Saul Terry phrases this agreement as a small measure of justice for our people, and today, there is talk of “a small measure of a measure of justice”—an important difference. This one agreement does not mean that we have stopped pressing for redress, or compensation on the suite of issues that need to be dealt with between the St’at’imc and the other levels of Government. I am co-authoring this text via my current position as Political Lead for the Joint Planning Forum with St’át’imc Government Services and BC Hydro. It is only through that capacity that I am the political lead, or there would be more noise being made on several fronts.

Tackling the Legacies of Racism through Anthropology’s Past: Topology and Critical Presentism as Historical Approaches to Scientific Racism

The problem of racism in science is one that concerns all disciplines dealing with human differences, from biological to social and cultural sciences. As race and racism(s) have been central to colonial projects (Grosfoguel 2013), the last decade’s renewed interest in decolonial and postcolonial theories mirrors the incessant and justified preoccupation with understanding and tackling racism today. Anthropology, once again, stands in the spotlight of critical assessments of the colonial roots of scientific racism. While engagements with anthropology’s colonial past are not new, having come and gone in waves (Hymes 1973; Harrison 2010 [1991]; Allen and Jobson 2016), the current upsurge and mainstreaming of decolonial critique seems to bother some—usually grey-haired—anthropologists who, often in a defensive gesture, have problematized critical historical reassessments of their discipline as anachronistic or presentist. Anthropologists defending the discipline against updated charges of complicity with colonialism and racism argue that such critiques are either one-sided, pessimistic or historically shallow; for some of these anthropologists, the role of anthropology in colonial projects was simply circumstantial and reflects neither the intentions nor the many positive contributions of the discipline.[1]

While I understand some—but wouldn’t agree with any— of those defensive reactions vis-à-vis a decolonial (self-)criticism of anthropology, my own critical engagement with anthropology’s past also comes from a place of care and worry for the discipline. Having studied anthropology and other social sciences in Brazil before undertaking my MA and PhD in Germany, I have come to ponder the discipline’s Eurocentric biases, a characteristic that surely does not only affect anthropology among all other social sciences but one that starkly contrasts with anthropology’s commitment to understanding the diversity of human experience. In my own examination of the legacies of racism and colonialism in the discipline (Barbosa 2025, I was inspired by Anand Pandian’s (2019, 117–120) ruminations on critique in anthropology: critically examining anthropology’s past can be an insightful way to multiply alternatives and affirm possibilities. At the same time, as some of my own hair starts to go grey, and after spending some years teaching a younger—and usually much more critical—generation of soon-to-be anthropologists, I also worry about the actuality and preparedness of the discipline to understand and withstand the difficult troubles of the present as well as the current waves of unforgiving, perhaps even (self-)destructive criticism, which have even taken the form of metaphorical self-immolation (Jobson 2020).[2]

Taking these critiques to heart, I started a research project to investigate the history and legacy of scientific racism in anthropology, particularly in physical and biological anthropology (see Barbosa et al. 2016). My research dealt with the history and legacy of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A), an infamous research center located from 1927 until 1945 in Berlin and founded by Eugen Fischer, a German anthropologist who had built a career researching “racial mixing” in the  colony of German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia. Moving beyond an Eurocentric spatial delimitation of this history, I focused on the international influence of this German school of racial anthropology, particularly in India, a place where many of the KWI-A students came from and went back to, including the famous Indian anthropologist Irawati Karve (1905–1970).

Thinking with the case of Karve, whose oeuvre comprises more than 100 publications in different topics and fields of anthropology, I analyzed the tensions and contradictions that make up the work of a physical-biological anthropologist working throughout the mid-twentieth century.This was a time of pivotal discussions and reconsiderations of the scientific and political affordances of race. While Karve’s work is vast and multifaceted, I focused on her physical anthropological work not only because some selection was necessary with such a massive oeuvre, but also because physical anthropology is the subfield most affected by ground-shaking discussions and contradictions regarding the concept of race in the discipline of anthropology. In sum, I strove to understand Karve’s knowledge-making practices in their historical situatedness, considering both her biographical trajectory and agency, especially as she was the only researcher at the KWI-A who contradicted a racist theory that prevailed at that time and place. I examined how she strove to apply and adapt the racial theories and methods she learned in Berlin to her research practices in India and I showed how the legacies of racial knowledge remain present in spaces of anthropology training in India today. While I have extensively dealt with Karve’s history and current legacy elsewhere (Barbosa 2025; 2022a; 2022b), in the following I make some remarks about two approaches that informed my work on this anthropologist’s history: “critical presentism” and “topology.” Both are insightful ways to grasp the persistent legacies of scientific racism, also in less expected places beyond Europe and North America, and contribute to a critical and forward-looking assessment of anthropology.

Critical presentism

While Stocking’s 1965 critique of presentism is still invoked in order to criticize assessments of anthropology’s past wrongdoings for being anachronist, one needs to keep in mind the historical context of Stocking’s formulation. As Ira Bashkow (2019) pointedly shows, Stocking’s widely-cited critique was a response to a specific editorial discussion and political context in the late 1960s; in fact, Stocking later distanced himself from that position and emphasized instead that any historical inquiry lives in an intrinsic tension between a presentist orientation in its object selections and a commitment to historicism. To navigate this inevitable tension, I turn to “critical presentism”, an approach to history of science that was sharply formulated by Laurent Loison (2016) in his programmatic discussion of historical epistemology. A critical presentist approach entails being careful with excessive presentisms:in my project this meant that besides avoiding “inevitabilism” (the most excessive use of causal-narrative presentism), I avoided “descriptive presentism” by paying attention to how the meaning of concepts—including race—shifts situationally, historically, and locally (Loison 2016, 33–36). In sum, writing history with a critical presentist orientation also meant for me that, when I selected aspects of history to focus on, I was oriented by the understanding that history is ultimately looked at from present-day interrogations, to point “the ways into the future,” as Tim Ingold puts it (quoted in Vokes 2014, 124).

I understand this to mean that a critical assessment of the history of anthropology should strive to “reactivate the complexity” of scientific practices (Loison 2016, 36), while also taking account of elements of contingency in the making of scientific knowledge, as we learned from Foucault (1977). By so doing, a history of anthropology can create “awareness of the fleetingness of the present” and “develop tools to criticize present science” (Loison 2016, 36), oriented by historiography’s “double-gesture” of recovering and critiquing (Prasad 2019; Mukharji 2023).

A critical presentist approach also requires an awareness of the risks of moralizing assessments of historical actors based on present-day knowledge and related moral standards. To be sure, while I take for granted that the racial anthropology of Karve and her German colleagues does not hold scientific validity today, I refrain from labelling that racial anthropology “pseudo-science,” for the research done by KWI-A scientists was considered science by the established standards in that historical context (see Mukharij 2023:2-6; Rupnow et al. 2008). Coming to terms with this fact pushes us to reflect more seriously about current scientific standards and our own historical transience as scientists (Loison 2016). At the same time, I avoid judging Karve and her colleagues in moralizing terms as this would not be productive if we want to reflect about our own implications in the legacies of racial knowledge today. As much as we can distance ourselves historically from an anthropologist of the past, devaluing their work on moral grounds would be lazy and self-deceptive way out of the trouble of the heritage of scientific racism, as if current moral standards alone can disentangle science from its past. Also, ethically and morally, different facets of Karve’s oeuvre—although not those tainted by her racial anthropological accents—can be regarded as progressive even today. It is the nuances, changes, and contradictions in a past anthropologist’s work and persona that make them an insightful case to think with when we want to engage with the question of how our science could be better attuned to present-day concerns.

Topology

Grasping the spatial and historical circulation of racial knowledge is tricky. The apparent disappearance and discrediting of “racial science” does not mean that the influence of racial thinking, methods, and theories has ceased (Goldberg 2015). To tackle the legacy of racial knowledge in current science, I built upon different conceptual discussions of temporality and historicity which have pushed against an understanding of history as chronology. For example, Ann Laura Stoler’s (1997) Foucauldian theorization of the “polyvalent mobility” of race called attention to race’s adaptability to different historical contexts. In a similar line, Amade M’charek (2013; 2023) as well as Katharina Schramm and Markus Balkenhol (2019) talk of race as a “slippery object” to describe its situational elasticity and adaptability, while Anne Pollock (2012) writes that race has the ability to jump platforms and take on different shapes rather than disappearing. Both M’charek (2014) and Lundy Braun (2014) have also called attention to how racial knowledge might be inscribed in technologies and material objects which, as they circulate and are put into action, again produce racializing outcomes and thus contribute to the persistence of racialization, despite discursive changes post-race. Thus, as these and other scholars have shown, racial knowledge circulates through time and space in contingent and non-linear as well as material ways.

Therefore, my approach to the legacies of race-ism in their non-linear historicity and through their material incarnations is oriented by what M’charek, Schramm, and David Skinner (2014) termed the topology of race. Drawing from philosophical discussions on temporality, spatiality, and the foldability of time and space (Serres and Latour 1995 cited in M’charek 2014), the topological approach “is based on the presupposition that elements that are distant in time and space can become proximate and relevant in the here and now” (M’charek, Schramm, and Skinner 2014, 472). I followed a topological approach by attending to how objects embody histories and how, as they circulate through space and time, the histories implied in them might be drawn together and relationally affect the outcomes of knowledge production. In other words, topological lenses make visible how historicity in a scene of knowledge production is differently entailed in the human and nonhuman actors at play and how different histories embodied in them come to matter. Seeing through topological lenses implies an understanding of history as multidirectional. It also helps us to delineate how entanglements take shape both in spatial and historical ways.

Topological lenses are especially useful in grasping the circulations of race through less expected routes, also beyond Europe and North America, including in places where race does not directly inform social categorizations, like India. In my research on Karve’s physical anthropology and its legacies, working with topological lenses made visible how race persists despite discursive efforts to erase it and despite the repurposing of objects and methods once created to study race (see Barbosa 2025). Race reappears and circulates also through the methods and technologies Karve and other scientists worked (and still work) with. For instance, many of the anthropometric methods and instruments that were designed in the late nineteenth century to enact racial differences are still being used for purposes other than what the original design foresaw, for instance to study caste or human growth and nutrition. Although the purpose of the research with these anthropometric methods and instruments is not the same as it was a century ago, their use today still produces racializing and biologically-essentializing effects, despite scientists’ intentions. In sum, racializing knowledge persists through the durability of objects like anthropometric instruments and books as well as methods; once put into knowledge-making motion, these elements summon racial knowledge from the past scientific context in which they were designed. Understanding these topological effects is crucial for the continuing efforts in shaping an anti-racist, anti-essentializing, and decolonial anthropology, in India as elsewhere (Barbosa 2025).

Conclusion

There can be different ways to critique the history of anthropology as well as the history of scientific racism, while keeping an eye on the future we want for our sciences. Discussions of historicity and temporality in the study of scientific knowledge have developed since Stocking’s (later self-criticized) postulate against presentism from the 1960s. Both critical presentism and topology present us anthropologists important tools to identify the global histories and lingering legacies of scientific racism in our discipline. If virtually all anthropologists can agree in our concern about the future of anthropology in today’s precarious times, I am convinced that disregarding the calls to deal with anthropology’s entanglement with colonialism and racism just won’t do. Reactionary defensiveness will not just be insufficient to safeguard the discipline’s scientific authority but will also contribute to undermining it. Such willful avoidance of anthropology’s dark pasts can also be hazardous—socially and politically—as it would render us unable to spot the repetition of harmful effects like those in which imperial projects and anthropological knowledge have worked in tight collaboration, intentionally or not. In this sense, the understanding of history that I present here starkly opposes those positions within anthropology that insist on writing hagiographic history or mobilizing counterexamples and anti-racist figures in the history of anthropology, like Franz Boas, as a way to brush aside decolonial critique.[3] This sort of defensive disciplinary historiography will not save anthropology from its loss of political relevance; on the contrary, this anti-postcolonial defensiveness implies missing the chance to update the discipline’s responsiveness not only vis-à-vis the renewed global political urgency in discussing racism and (neo)colonialism but also vis-à-vis the concerns and moral impetus of younger and ever more diverse generations of anthropology students. Thinking of historical critique as a way to multiply possibilities and visualize how things could be otherwise will allow us to calibrate our (self-)criticism of our discipline’s past to the concerns of the present. By so doing, we can continue to hope for, and actively build, different and better ways of doing anthropology.

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Vokes, Richard. “The Many Histories of Anthropology.” History and Anthropology 25, no. 1: 123–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2013.816848. 2014.


[1] By writing this, I also have in mind the discussions in reaction to Akhil Gupta’s Decolonizing U.S. Anthropology (2021) as well as many positions seen in anthropology departments and conferences in Northern Europe.

[2] Commenting on the Californian wildfires that happened simultaneously with the 2018 meeting of the (US-) American Anthropological Association in an air-conditioned venue in San Diego, Ryan Cecil Jobson (2020) articulated different critiques in and to (US-based) anthropology in that year in his “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn.” My reservations to his review go in the same direction as those written by Luísa Reis-Castro (2021) and Samar Al-Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, and Madiha Tahir (2020), who call for a consideration of the geopolitics of location in the critique enunciated by Jobson—a tenured professor in one of the most renowned anthropology departments in the US. Jobson’s critique also does not mention anthropological spaces that have also literally burnt in the past years due to lack of funding—the reduction of Brazil’s National Museum to ashes being one example (see Reis-Castro 2021, 147-149). As Al-Bulushi, Ghosh, and Tahir (2020) put it, in conversation with Faye Harrison, “[i]f the appeal to ‘let anthropology burn’ aims to strike at the heart of the highly stratified system of knowledge production in the discipline, then the ‘epistemological imperialism’ [Harrison] of the US academy would be a good place to start the fire.”

[3] On the limitations of “the Boasian fix”, see Jobson (2020). See also Mark Anderson (2019) for a nuanced account on the liberal anti-racism that was typical of the Boasian anthropological tradition.

Communication without Control: Anthropology and Alternative Models of Information at the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences in Cybernetics

The Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953) originated at a moment of limitless optimism for a “new lingua franca” where a “universal language of information, feedback, and homeostasis” would lead to a capacity to “model all organisms from the level of the cell to that of society” (Kline, 2020: 13). It would be difficult to find another meeting with quite the same scope and soaring ambitions. Including the physical sciences, biology, neuroscience, linguistics, psychology alongside anthropology, the Macy conferences seemed to herald a new era where experts could speak to each other with a common language that would underwrite post-war technocratic dreams. And, as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson hoped, anthropology would prove key to the development of that language.

In this, the Macy conferences could be seen as an obdurate failure. In anthropology, at least, cybernetics fizzled out by the 1970s. Not even the post-human turn that began in the 1980s seems to have revived the project that Mead and Bateson began in these conferences. Not just “cybernetics” as a term, but the dreams of anthropological cybernetics seemed to have disappeared. And since the conferences ended, the sciences and (other) social sciences have continued apace without much need for our anthropological contributions.

On the other hand, there’s ample evidence that the Macy Conferences succeeded all too well. The technologies that currently dominate our world—the algorithms, the AI models, the networks—all have at least some of their origins with Macy conferences participants: game theory (John von Neumann), neural nets and circular causality (Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenbluth and Julian Bigelow) and information as the ratio of signal-to-noise (Claude Shannon). As Hayles laments in “How We Became Posthuman,” the Macy conferences helped usher in a world where everything—including our subjectivity—could be reduced to flows of fungible information, information that can be commodified and manipulated. From this perspective, the Macy conferences were a first salvo in what Haraway would call the “Informatics of Domination,” (Haraway, 1991), in which, as Bateson later suggested, “control” was elevated over “communication” (Bateson, 1991).

Of course, it would a mistake to view this hegemony as inevitable, and many scholars in recent decades have elaborated on alternatives. Second-order cybernetics, for example, (re)introduced subjectivity into the information equation in the question of the observer (Maturana and Varela 1980), while others (like N. Katharine Hayles and Andrew Pickering) have looked to models of embodiment, practice and performance that were also implicit in the physicality of interaction and apparatus (Hayles, 1999; Pickering, 2010).

But what has been the anthropological contribution to all of this debate? Has there been a similarly recuperative moment in the field? This is, I think a fair question: Mead and Bateson were present at every conference. Reading through the (admittedly incomplete) transcripts, it is hard not to notice that the anthropologists were especially loquacious. They brought with them many insights, perhaps none so frequent as what we might call the “anthropological exception”: counterexamples from the anthropological record puncturing the universalist pretensions of the Macy conferees. As Mead sagely notes to Lawrence Kubie’s sweeping generalities: “If you look at some other cultures, you don’t necessarily find that same contrast” (Pias, 2016: 426).

The anthropological exception is the twentieth century inversion of the anthropological universal—that nineteenth century rhetorical tool that allowed Edward Burnett Tylor, James George Frazer and others to build gigantic abstractions like “animism” or “barbarism” out of decontextualized and more-than-occasionally inaccurate “facts” collected by legions of travelers, missionaries and colonial officials. There are many examples of the anthropology of exception – the critique implicit in the culture and personality school of the early twentieth century depends upon it, although the genre arguably crystallized with Bronislaw Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society, where he argues that the Oedipus complex is not universal (Malinowski, 1927). This would not exorcise universalism from anthropology, but it would, at least, help to undermine the hierarchies underwriting anthropology as a colonial machine.

The Macy transcripts are filled with examples drawn from Mead’s and Bateson’s fieldwork—exceptions to the “rules” adduced by Macy conferees. But do they make any difference? In the example above, Kubie is hardly disarmed by Mead, and soldiers on in his inexplicitly Freudian way. And looking back, it is hard to see the anthropological dimensions of our world of networked communication and machine learning that are the two of the legacies of the conferences. So what was the anthropological contribution?

We could call the anthropological contribution “misunderstanding”—hardly a term with positive connotations, and one seemingly at odds with the point of an academic conference. The Macy conferences were intended to erect the scaffolding of a universalist science of cybernetics, one that would cut across disciplinary silos. And, yet, Macy conferees reported many misunderstandings. For example, Mead and Bateson critiqued their colleague in a 1976 interview with Stewart Brand: “So we used the model, ‘feedback,’ and Kurt Lewin—who didn’t understand any known human language, but always had to reduce them to concepts—he went away with the idea of feedback as something that when you did anything with a group you went back and told them later what had happened [  . . . ] So the word ‘feedback’ got introduced incorrectly into the international UNESCO type conferences where it’s been ever since” (Brand, 1976: 3).

This is something other than a garden variety misunderstanding. We might instead say that the anthropological contribution had to do with the idea of difference, as in the following example: in the 1950 meeting, J.C.R. Licklider (who would later be one of the architects of ARPANET) delivered a paper entitled “The Manner in Which and the Extent to Which Speech Can Be Distorted and Remain Intelligible.” It is really a paper on sound engineering, full of graphs showing frequency and clipping. It is just the sort of materialism that Shannon engages in his work—albeit in an even drier tone. Mead, however, re-frames Licklider’s presentation in terms of human communication across different languages, and the other conferees enthusiastically add their own anecdotes amidst Mead’s topical hijacking. Mead interjects: “I should like to get back to the question: Is this a translation or isn’t it? What is translation?” (237). While this wasn’t really Licklider’s question at all, Mead plunges ahead. It is, she concludes, “a question of framing. Some people frame all European languages together, so that the idea of learning any Indo-European language is regarded as just another language to be learned; the idea of learning Hawaiian or Japanese, however, would be regarded as something quite different. What is translation for one person is not translation for another” (237). Mead has, in the end, taken things rather far from Licklider’s materialist and quantitative starting point into an interesting meditation on the cultural politics of translation.

The pragmatic effect of Mead’s comments will be familiar to people who have attended academic conferences: the questions that are really comments, the endless self-aggrandizement and digression. Even if we are generous, it would be difficult to see Mead’s comments as helping to elaborate on Licklider’s work; in fact, they seem to accomplish exactly the opposite, jumping the rails entirely to something else, and leading conferees into anecdotes about their own foreign travel that hardly do much to cement the science of cybernetics. But what if the point of the exercise (at least as Mead and Bateson saw it) wasn’t to arrive at a consensus?

The second-generation cyberneticist Gordon Pask built an installation he called “The Colloquy of Mobiles,” consisting of hanging, robotic machines that would rotate towards each other in response to sequences of lights and sounds.

Figure 1: The Colloquy of Mobiles. Gordon Pask Archive at the Dept of Contemporary History, University of Vienna, Austria. 

Together, these cybernetic agents produced complex behavior, but what made the installation even more complex was the human component. Pask intended for people to interact with the robots and participants and generate their own patterns using small mirrors to interact with the Mobile. The question here: Is the “communication” between the machines the same as the communication between people? The mobiles, Pask concede, “cannot, of course, interpret these sound and light patterns. But human beings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they will also aim to achieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with the system at a higher level of discourse” (Pask, 1971, quoted in Pickering, 2010: 359-360). Humans and machines are interacting, but not “sharing” a communicative system from machine to human. Here, Pask encourages human participants to productively “misunderstand” or inject their own meaning into what his Mobiles are up to and strive to build patterns “pleasing” to them. The mobile is not “communicating”; lights would be discharged when capacitors reached a certain level, mobiles would discharge a light, which would be “answered” by a sound. As a cybernetic apparatus, Pask’s Colloquy was interesting, but as a piece of art it invited multiple levels of anthropomorphic interaction, including eliciting affective response in human participants. The point, here, was not to understand the servo-mechanisms, but to interact with the device.

Was the purpose of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics to reduce everything to information and feedback? Or was it to create a forum for people and ideas to interact without reduction to a single set of terms? For Mead, Licklider’s paper is an opportunity to interject notes on language and translation; it starts her down a chain of anthropological examples, rather than, say, reducing anthropological linguistics to acoustics.

Gregory Bateson’s 1970 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture elaborates on his celebrated definition of information:

In fact, what we mean by information–the elementary unit of information–is a difference which makes a difference, and is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continuously transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We might even say that the question is already implicit in them (Bateson, 1972: 459).

The sense here (which, perhaps, takes some inspiration from the work of Humberto Maturana, in his co-authored paper, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” (Lettvin et al, 1959)), is that the “differences” in the pathway are already there—internally produced even though the stimuli might be initially external. Applied to cybernetics itself, it means interacting across different disciplines, not to unite, but to stimulate differences that, perhaps were already there. Differences without generating differences within. As Pickering writes, “the cybernetic sense of control was rather one of getting along with, coping with, even taking advantage and enjoying, a world one cannot push around in that way” (Pickering, 2010: 383).

Here, the anthropological contribution is difference itself, anthropological examples that lead conferees outside the closed loop of cybernetic interpretation into other frames: the generation of more difference. If we return to Wiener’s definition of cybernetics as “control and communication in the animal and the machine,” then anthropology’s contribution lay almost entirely on the “communication” side (Wiener, 1948). More than that, it’s a refractory communication that escapes the boundaries of the topic and extends—through difference—into something else entirely. To be fair, that seems to be the most successful part of the conference: it continued over almost a decade without, perhaps, ever building consensus on anything.

Yes, one legacy of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics has been the domination of life by “code,” and the reduction of action, cognition and life itself to flows of information (Geoghegan, 2023). But it is not the only legacy. Another is the capacity to interact across differences in a way that is generative of more difference. It is, I am suggesting, the anthropological imperative—one that remains an unacknowledged contribution of anthropology, and one that presents an increasingly necessary alternative to the constantly expanding empire of the informatics of domination.

At present, we are again assailed by a nightmarish, cybernetic future where tasks that we have classified as definitively human—art, poetry, literature, music—are produced by generative AI models. We are encouraged to understand these outputs as the same as our human work, and that we are little better, in other words, than the stochastic machines that threaten jobs and educational assessment. In this, generative AI is heir to the insights of the Macy conferences, and, like them, leads to a series of invidious comparisons between the human and the machine. But perhaps an anthropology might shift the discourse into something else entirely—to refuse to see AI as a human simulacrum. Can we change the subject? Hijack this deterministic discourse onto another register altogether?

References

Bateson, Gregory. A Sacred Unity. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Brand, Stewart. “For God’s Sake, Margaret.” Co-Evolution Quarterly (Summer 1976): 32-44.

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. Code. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katharine. How We Became Post-Human. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Kilne, Ronald. “How disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human sciences in the United States, 1940-80.” History of the Human Sciences 33, no. 1 (2020): 12-35. 

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927.

Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela. Autopoesis and Cognition. Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980.

Pias, Claus, ed. Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences, 1946-1953. New York: diaphanes, 2016.

Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1948.

Otherness and Sameness in Hungarian Ethnology and beyond

Anthropology is often identified as an academic discipline that explores human diversity and the concept of Otherness (see Leistle 2017), offering an opportunity for the anti-hegemonic presentation of plural lifeworlds (Bertelsen and Bendixen 2016: 8). The focus on Otherness has therefore been considered a prominent paradigm, an epistemological basis for anthropological scholarship (Leistle 2015). The earliest instruction for collecting ethnological data compiled by Gerhard Friedrich Müller in 1740, for his follower Johann Eberhard Fischer, accordingly emphasizes the need for collecting “curiosities” that can be contrasted with European experiences (Bucher 2002; Gisi 2007). However, not all (proto-) anthropologies focused on presenting alterity and contrasting non-European peoples with their European counterparts. In Hungary and a few other (semi-) peripheral academic circles in Europe, the concept of Sameness and similarity occupied a significant role in the development of non-European studies.

This two hundred year-old anthropological research legacy is not just a methodological curiosity; it has significantly impacted the field and the research environment for Hungarian anthropologists in Siberia and Inner Asia. The widespread assumption of a common origin based on a shared nomadic heritage, and hence an indelible bond between Hungarian anthropologists and local Turco-Mongolic peoples in Asia, remains a prevalent condition of fieldwork in this area.

In the nineteenth century, Hungarian nation-building and identity construction were heavily influenced by the idea that Hungarians originated from Asia, unlike any other European nation (Klaniczay 2020). The Finnish national awakening had a similar focus on the Finns’ Siberian kinsfolk (Antonen 2012: 343), whereas Estonian nation-building intensely concentrated on Finno-Ugric linguistic relatedness (Raun 2003; Petersoo 2007).

As a result, rather than pursuing colonial agendas, Hungarian travelers in Asia were interested in finding distant relatives or fellow Hungarians (Mészáros et al. 2017). From the mid-nineteenth century, this focus on finding similarities and connections rather than emphasizing differences and exoticizing alterity inspired generations of Hungarian linguists, ethnographers, and anthropologists to conduct field studies in Siberia and Inner Asia. Consequently, Hungarian anthropological scholarship in Asia primarily catered to domestic interests, and was strongly related to the study of Hungarian prehistory; aligning with the major scholarly paradigms of the Anglo-Saxon world was only a secondary goal (Sárkány 2016).

The Self as Other

Several anthropologists have drawn attention to French Enlightenment debates on liberty, equality, and human dignity (Harvey 2012; Graeber and Wengrow 2021). These debates often invoked real and imagined outsiders to critique contemporary European social realities. This well-known hybrid discourse (academic and literary) had an immense impact on the development of anthropology in Europe. 

This was not, however, the only discourse critiquing eighteenth-century European social formations. As a counter-discourse to Western-European experiences of colonial encounters, a robust corpus of texts emerged in German-speaking regions in which fictional ancient German protagonists, rather than contemporary non-Europeans (“savages” or “Oriental others”), articulated their dissatisfaction with the social conditions of the period (Reusch 2008). Alongside the contrastive power of the classical, the primitive, and the Oriental other, a new construction emerged, that of the uncorrupted “same”: the ancestor who lives in original, virtuous social conditions. The ancient German tribespeople appeared as a version of, or rather, a better alternative to, the savage. An essential difference between the two schemes is that the image of the Germanic tribespeople was impregnated with the idea of the “Heimat,” the homeland (Kuehnemund 1953; Skarsten 2012). 

The outsider’s view, provided by the nationally and linguistically identical, but spatially and/or temporarily remote, played an intrinsic role in nation-building processes in Hungarian and to some extent in other (Finnish, Estonian) academic discourses (Merivirta et al. 2021; Annist – Kaaristo 2013). For these academic circles, Siberian and Oriental Sameness represented a point of alignment rather than a contrast. The powerful image of Germanic tribesmen living in an arboreal homeland provides a critical parallel, if not a direct preview, of similar discourses that developed in Hungary in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the case of Hungary, however, the uncorrupted tribesmen and lost homeland are found not in the distant past, but in Siberia or the Orient. 

The representational scheme of Sameness was particularly successful in Hungary. It influenced national discourse and the development of Oriental studies, literary oeuvres, and anthropological interest. It first appeared in the early 1800s as identicality (Békés 1997): the image of the linguistically-nationally identical but uncorrupted Hungarians residing in Asia. Several authors did their best to recognize Hungarian linguistic and cultural traits in Asia, and to create reports about contemporary Hungarians residing in the Orient. This endeavor resulted in a highly varied discourse of different generic and epistemological statuses, such as scholarly articles, reports, pseudo-ethnographies, and literary works (Mészáros 2023). What are the common features of this representational scheme?

First, a fairly uniform portrayal of Hungarians living in Asia came out of this discourse. Their language was reportedly not only similar to Hungarian, but completely identical to it. Therefore, Hungarians from the Carpathian Basin meeting Asian Hungarians could allegedly carry out a conversation easily, and linguists did not need a refined methodology to show that all spoke the same language. Furthermore, the indigenous Hungarian protagonists of these literary works residing between Greenland and China mutually recognized one another as Hungarians (Szeverényi 2002). 

This representational scheme suggested that Hungarians living in Europe and Asia shared a profound sympathy; they were happy to find one another. Furthermore, Hungarians in Asia were portrayed living virtuous lives in abundance and liberty. Compared to Hungarians in Europe, they usually occupied a higher position in the hierarchy of nations. Their language was richer and more authentic, their customs more original, and their religious life more devout. Asian Hungarians encountered outside of Asia in these reports usually expressed dissatisfaction with the degenerate social realities of nineteenth-century Hungary, and were in a hurry to return to their people and homeland (Mészáros 2023). This supposed homeland was said to be located in the Northern Caucasus, Mongolia, Siberia and even in Kandia (Crete).

According to these works, Hungarians living in Asia preserved what Hungarians in Europe had already forgotten: the original meaning of Hungarian words, customs, and personal virtues. At the same time, they maintained economic and cultural traits that were slowly disappearing in Hungary. This element of cultural conservation was one of the main motives for further research and subsequent expeditions to Asia.

Inspired by the discourse on Hungarians living in Asia, and by the European academic currents pointing to the Oriental origin of the Hungarians (Vermeulen 2015; Carhart 2019), more than a dozen research expeditions were organized by Hungarian noblemen and institutions to find Hungarian kinsfolk in Russia and the Orient up to the outbreak of World War I (Mészáros et al. 2017). By cherry-picking those elements from the local lifeworlds that researchers regarded as ancient traits of Hungarian culture, this variety of anthropology created its own frozen, timeless object in Asia: a people who maintained the uncorrupted Asian traits of Hungarian living in Europe.

This object was, therefore, not the Other, but the Self. As a result, popular research topics in Hungary diverged from contemporary mainstream European or American anthropology well into the twentieth century. Instead of focusing on kinship systems or the development of forms of religion, Hungarian (and to some extent Finnish and Estonian) researchers in the late nineteenth century usually focused on fishing and hunting methods, traps (Urbeschäftigungen), and the collection of epic songs in the Urals and Asia (Munkácsi 1893; Jankó 1900; Sirelius 1906). Inspired by earlier studies, in the early-twentieth century Géza Róheim made efforts to reconstruct an ancient Hungarian belief system as a version of Siberian shamanism (Róheim 1954). Based on these ideas, Vilmos Diószegi conducted several field studies in the Soviet Union and Mongolia in the 1960s and 70s, exploring parallel features in local shamanic practices. As a result, he hypothesized an ancient Hungarian pagan belief system (Diószegi 1958, 1968). After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, indigenous researchers in Siberia and Central Asia celebrated his work as a resource for national spiritual revival (Quijada et al. 2015).

The Return of the Idea of Sameness to the Field

Besides developing a set of analytical tools based on the concept of Sameness, Hungarian travelers and anthropologists also established a unique fieldwork methodology based on approaching local peoples in Asia as relatives, rather than exotic others (Klima 2019). Hungarian travelers distinguished themselves from other European travelers and researchers in the region, asserting their desire to reconnect with their kinfolk and visit their homeland (Herman 1898; Szádeczky Kardoss 1895). Notably, Zichy Jenő and Béla Széchenyi, two Hungarian noblemen who organized and financed research expeditions in Asia, sought research permits from the Chinese authorities to conduct research in their ancient homeland (Fajcsák 2023), and in the case of Széchenyi, to visit the graves of Hungarian ancestors, offering prayers for the Hungarian nation (Széchenyi 1890: xix–xxi).

Hungarian researchers highlighted their distinctive position in Asia during their research trips in Siberia among the Obugric peoples. Bernát Munkácsi and Károly Pápai often mentioned their aim to seek out the relatives of the Hungarian nation in Siberia in their fieldwork (Munkácsi 2008:73–74, 93; Pápai 1888: 623–624). A few years later, János Jankó, although heavily reliant on support from the Russian state, assured the indigenous peoples that his intentions differed from those of the Russians (Jankó 2000). When Vilmos Diószegi conducted fieldwork in the Soviet Union and Mongolia after World War II, he also often stressed to the local academic circles and beyond that his main interest was to find parallels between Siberian shamanism and ancient Hungarian religious beliefs (Sántha 2002). Even recent ethnomusicological research trips carried out by János Sipos, Gergely Agócs, and Dávid Somfai Kara reinforce the idea among academic communities and in field studies that Hungarian folk music is part of a great Turkic musical ecumene (Agócs 2020; Sipos 2020).

Sameness and the Diverse Landscape of Anthropology

Hungarian anthropology, focusing on the idea of Sameness, has led to a wealth of research in Asia and has given Hungarian researchers a special position there. This approach has also fostered enduring partnerships with local researchers and communities (Sipos 2003), and facilitated the exchange of information between academic circles and local people (Somfai 2023).

The diversity of the global academic landscape of anthropology is increasingly apparent as research methods and paradigms crisscross between schools and regional varieties. Recently, there has been a growing emphasis on portraying the development of anthropology not only through the major paradigm shifts in metropolitan centers (Kuklick 1991; Candea 2018), but also by giving a detailed picture of the diverse co-development of different anthropologies (Boškovic 2008; Barrera-Gonzalez et al. 2017). The emergence of local (in some cases parallel) disciplines in Europe (Hofer 2018) demonstrates that there is room for diverse and possibly incongruent methodologies and terminologies under the umbrella of anthropology (Sárkány 2013; Mészáros 2022).

The Hungarian example points out that regional academic communities demarcate with a certain degree of independence which activities can be regarded as full-blown academic research, and which do not fulfill the conditions of scientific inquiry. Therefore, not only do the different linguistic, methodological, and sociocultural backgrounds define the national boundaries of anthropological discourse, but also the dissimilar epistemic status of scholarly activities. Texts that may be an organic part of academic discourse in one tradition may be discredited in another.

In Central-Eastern Europe, in what Michal Buchowski has called the “twilight zone of anthropology” (Buchowski 2014), the epistemological status of texts and scholarly contributions is particularly diverse. In the Hungarian ethnological tradition, the epistemological status of texts that focus on Hungarians living in Asia has been the subject of a long debate, preventing their inclusion in retrospective historical studies. This exclusion has led to other contentious debates about Oriental versus primitive Otherness, and the identification of other peoples as kinsfolk in Hungarian ethnology. The irreconcilable difference between the scholarly discourse on Sameness and ideas of Oriental Otherness resulted in incommensurate research epistemologies in Hungary. The extent to which a shared discourse space can be created within anthropology is determined by methodological and epistemological differences and academic networks. Furthermore, many regional varieties of anthropology directly challenge mainstream anthropological or scientific methods, which makes it challenging to find a common ground among anthropological schools.

In anthropologies focusing on Otherness and human diversity, the idea of Sameness is an underlying condition of anthropological work, postulating that “despite, or perhaps because of their differences, all societies embody the same cultural value and worth” (Argyrou 2002:1). That is, “Sameness understood as human unity has always been the ethnological a priori. It has been the axiomatic proposition that demarcated the epistemological space within which it became possible to study Others” (Argyrou 2002:23).

In Hungarian Oriental studies, however, the idea of Sameness had a different epistemological status. Here, Sameness was not an underlying research condition; it had to be unfolded, explored, and demonstrated by subsequent field studies. Not all Asian peoples were identical (or kinfolk) to Hungarians (or ancient Hungarians): only those who conformed to the representational scheme of Sameness established in Hungarian discourse on national origins and prehistory.

Although Sameness is a representational scheme rather than an a priori in Hungarian anthropology, it has been immune to anthropological reflection. The political motivations behind the portrayal of “the Other” as “the Self,” and the perception of Asian cultures as maintaining identical cultural elements from Hungarian prehistory have not been thoroughly explained, and Hungarian anthropological scholarship provides little in the way of a critique of this perspective. Studies on the development of anthropology have pointed out that colonial encounters and dominant European representational schemes of Otherness heavily influenced ethnographic records, but little is known about how the representational scheme of Sameness in Hungary created its own unique Other: the Self. 

References:

Agócs, Gergely. “A Kaukázus szérűjében: Az észak-kaukázusi türk népek zenefolklórjának magyar őstörténeti vonatkozásairól” [In the Realm of the Caucasus: On the Hungarian Prehistoric Aspects of the Music Folklore of the North Caucasian Turkic Peoples]. In Magyar őstörténeti műhelybeszélgetés, edited by Neparáczki Endre, 81–105. Budapest: Magyarságkutató Intézet, 2020.

Annist, Aet, and Maarja Kaaristo. “Studying Home Fields: Encounters of Ethnology and Anthropology in Estonia.Journal of Baltic Studies 44 (2013): 121–51. .

Anttonen, Pertti Juhani. “Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation.” In Folklore and Nationalism in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin, 325–50. Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2012.

Argyrou, Vassos. Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: A Postcolonial Critique. London and Sterling: Pluto Press, 2002.

Barrera-González, Andrés, Monica Heintz, and Anna Horolets, eds. European Anthropologies. New York: Berghahn, 2017.

Békés, Vera. A hiányzó paradigma [The Missing Paradigm]. Debrecen: Latin Betűk, 1997.

Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge, and Synnøve Bendixsen. “Recalibrating Alterity, Difference, Ontology: Anthropological Engagements with Human and Non-Human Worlds.” In Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference: Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference, edited by Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Synnøve Bendixsen, 1–40. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Bucher, Gudrun. Von Beschreibung der Sitten und Gebräuche der Völcker: Die Instruktionen Gerhard Friedrich Müllers und ihre Bedeutung für die Geschichte der Ethnologie und der Geschichtswissenschaft. Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des östlichen Europa 63. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2002.

Buchowski, Michal. “Twilight Zone Anthropologies: The Case of Central Europe.” Cargo 12, no. 1–2 (2014): 7–18.

Carhart, Michael C. Leibniz Discovers Asia: Social Networking in the Republic of Letters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

Candea, Matei, ed. Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory. London: Routledge, 2018.

Diószegi, Vilmos. “Die Überreste des Schamanismus in der ungarischen Volkskultur.” Acta Ethnographica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 7 (1958): 97–135.

———. Tracing Shamans in Siberia: The Story of an Ethnographical Research Expedition. New York: Humanities Press, 1968.

Fajcsák, Györgyi. “Exhibiting East Asia in Hungary: Collecting Strategies and the Formation of East Asian Museum Collections.” In Centring the Periphery: New Perspectives on Collecting East Asian Objects, edited by Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik, 325–52. London: Brill, 2023.

Gisi, Lucas Marco. Einbildungskraft und Mythologie: Die Verschränkung von Anthropologie und Geschichte im 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Harvey, David Allen. The French Enlightenment and Its Others: The Mandarin, the Savage, and the Invention of the Human Sciences. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Herman, Ottó. “Gróf Zichy Jenő utazása a Kaukazusban” [Count Jenő Zichy’s Travel in the Caucasus]. Budapesti Szemle 93 (1898): 123–39.

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Special Focus: Approaching the Present through Anthropology’s Past

John Tresch and Richard Handler, guest editors

Anthropology’s intense concern with its own past stands out among the social sciences. After a quick review of current literature, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and even historians can jump right into their presentation of new findings. But few anthropologists writing about the contemporary world do so without at least an acknowledgement, and often a careful reckoning, of how anthropology’s previous theoretical frames and (geo-) political position continue to shape current anthropological work on the issues at hand.

In-depth study of the histories of anthropology adds detail and complexity to these briefer acknowledgements. Careful, contextual, polyphonic history reveals hidden contradictions and ambiguities; it can highlight the complicities of canonized figures and movements; it might produce an unwanted empathy for actors and developments we were inclined to condemn. Moreover, historical researchers focused on anthropology—or anthropologists focused on history—can often be deliberate and explicit about the ways in which their archival research, oral history, and hermeneutic reconstruction addresses and engages with current concerns.

This Special Focus Section is the result of a series of panels held in the First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies, “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures,” hosted online between 4 and 7 December, 2023. This conference—a landmark for history of anthropology, with nearly 100 presentations from scholars around the world—was organized by the history of anthropology network [HOAN].

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“México es un país megadiverso”: Biocultural Heritage and Exceptionality in Mexican Ethnobiology

During my years as an ethnobiology student, I repeatedly heard the claim “México es un país megadiverso” (Mexico is a megadiverse country). This claim was usually followed by lists of relevant facts: Mexico is second worldwide in reptile species diversity and fifth in vascular plants (Llorente-Bousquets and Ocegueda 2008). It hosts 10% of the total global biota in the world without being close to having 10% of the total territory on Earth (Ávila Blomberg 2020; Boege 2021, 5). Mexico’s diversity is the result of its geographical location and geological history. The country has a varied collection of climates unique to its location.

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Françoise Héritier as Fieldworker and Theorist: Women’s Status and the Transformation of Ethnology in Midcentury France

In the first part of the twentieth century in France, ethnology was a science in the making. Due to its low level of institutionalization relative to other social sciences, French ethnology had a large number of women in its ranks. This was in part due to the supposed existence of feminine qualities—such as sensitivity—which would enable women to obtain information on subjects considered more difficult for men to access during fieldwork (Laurière 2017, 427). As a result, the promoters of ethnology relegated women ethnologists to the collection of data, excluding them from the allegedly male domain of theory. With the increasing institutionalization of ethnology in the 1950s and 1960s, many women who had entered the discipline before the war gained institutional positions and intellectual recognition (much as Denise Paulme or Germaine Tillion, directrices d’étude at the 6th section of the École pratique des Hautes Études). 

Read more: Françoise Héritier as Fieldworker and Theorist: Women’s Status and the Transformation of Ethnology in Midcentury France

This was a time when, while women already made up more than a third of the students in France (Marry 1995, 591), “at a professorial level they were just becoming visible” (Waquet 2008, 300). However, despite the positive reception given to women by French anthropology in the 1950s-1960s, they remained subject to various kinds of constraints. In her work on women ethnologists in France during the inter-war period, Marianne Lemaire shows that these constraints affected the choices made by women anthropologists in regard to their objects of study. Moreover they strove, in their writing, to distance themselves from the suspicions of subjectivism that weighed on their work to be recognized as genuine ethnologists (Lemaire 2011, 83). The aim of this paper is to shed light on the role of gender norms in French anthropology beyond the inter-war period by analyzing Françoise Héritier’s career, from her first fieldwork in the Upper Volta in West Africa, present day Burkina Faso, to her election to the Collège de France

Héritier’s research on kinship systems (Héritier 2019[1981]), the prohibition of incest (Héritier 1979, 1994) and the differential valence of the sexes (Héritier 1996, 2002) make her one of the most theoretically ambitious anthropologists of the late twentieth century. Moreover, in succeeding Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France and as director of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, she climbed, at the age of 49, to the top of the French university cursus honorum, an institutional position which had hitherto been almost exclusively reserved to men.

While this double specificity makes Françoise Héritier’s career an example of the subversion of gender norms, she remained subjected to them in various ways.

Françoise Héritier and Michel Izard in Upper Volta: A Collaboration on an Equal Footing?

Françoise Héritier discovered anthropology in 1955. At the time, she was preparing for the agrégation in history at the Sorbonne, where she met Michel Izard, a young philosophy student. They quickly fell in love and he took her to Lévi-Strauss’s classes at the Vth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Héritier 2009, 36). The following year, Lévi-Strauss offered them a mission for the General Government of French West Africa, which was looking for a geographer and an ethnologist for a study in the territory of Upper Volta (Héritier 2009, 39). The couple left for their first field trip at the beginning of July 1957 and got married on the spot in February 1958. Françoise Héritier carried out her first fieldwork as part of a team, as women ethnologists of the inter-war period did. All of the women were accompanied by their partners, male colleagues or a colleague of the same sex (Lemaire 2011, 85; Laurière 2017, 427).

While traveling as a couple may have made it easier for women anthropologists to gain access to the field, it also carried the risk that they remained in the shadow of their husbands, seen more as companions than as researchers in their own right. In an interview published in February 1935, French American ethnologist and specialist of Mexico Georgette Soustelle had to disabuse the journalist Claude Janel of the idea that her mission with her husband was a “honeymoon” (Lemaire 2011, 85). More egregiously, the results of their investigation were published exclusively under the name of her husband Jacques Soustelle. However, working against this tendency, Françoise and Michel subverted gender norms, even as they reproduced them in various ways.

The Izard Héritier Team: A Collaboration and a Mutual Admiration That Did Not Erase the Gendered Division of Domestic and Scientific Tasks

Although Françoise Héritier was recruited as a geographer for her first mission in Upper Volta, she and her husband conducted their research jointly. They were both named as authors of the publications based on fieldwork data (Héritier-Izard & Izard 1958a, 1958b, 1959). Michel seemed anxious to establish a kind of equal treatment between them. In a letter to his friend Olivier Herrenschmidt dated August 1959, he asks him “to write to Françoise because it will please her and also because your choice (write to me) is too clearly anti-feminist, like other things.”

His correspondence also demonstrates his admiration for his wife’s proficiency in the study of kinship. On 1 September 1960, while completing military service, he wrote to Herrenschmidt that he follows “Françoise’s work, particularly what she is doing […] on kinship, through highly technical letters, which sometimes give me the impression (and I mean this sincerely), being so comatose, that I am definitely outside the range of action of glutamic acid.” In doing so, he confessed that Françoise’s skills in this area were superior to his own. In another letter, he expressed delight at forming “a perfect team” with his wife. Françoise Héritier and Michel Izard’s work as a couple thus appeared, in the latter’s view, to be a collaboration between equals. The egalitarian nature of the couple’s relationship was also illustrated in the way they combined parenthood and fieldwork research.

Michel and Françoise’s daughter Catherine was born on 5 February 1960. Françoise had only accomplished one period of fieldwork between 1957 and 1958, and her pregnancy might have been an obstacle to her continuing her work in Upper Volta. For example, Rose-Marie Lagrave, a sociologist specializing in gender studies, wrote in her memoirs that when Germaine Tillion, who could have supervised her thesis, found out she had two children, she wouldn’t let her go to Algiers. As a result, Rose-Marie Lagrave ended up completing a thesis on village life in contemporary novels, which enabled her, in her own words, “to become a bookworm and reconcile my job as a mother with my doctoral training” (Lagrave 2021, 225-227).

Against academic norms that made maternity an obstacle to doing fieldwork in far away lands, Françoise Héritier continued her research in the Upper Volta, a part of Africa which until 1960 had been colonized by France. Her first fieldwork diary, written between November 1963 and March 1964, reveals that they brought Catherine along when she was only three and a half years old. For the next fieldwork, which began in autumn 1964, Michel and Françoise decided to leave without their daughter, who spent the year with Michel’s parents. After six months away from her, the couple started taking turns (one going away on fieldwork while the other looked after Catherine), and sometimes left the child in the care of her grandparents or friends (Héritier 2009, 41).

Although Michel Izard tended to present his relationship with Françoise Héritier from the angle of a collaboration on an equal footing, Françoise’s first fieldwork diary reveals that, as mother and wife, she combined research work with domestic chores. During the six months of fieldwork, she was always the one who “washes Catherine” and “feeds her.” This imbalance regarding the practicalities of child-rearing was also present in how they shared their scientific work. If Françoise and Michel co-authored research based on their first year of fieldwork, she was provided menial secretarial tasks, like typing and formatting their work. In a letter dated December 1957, Michel wrote to Herrenschmidt that while he has free time, Françoise “has less […] because of typing.”

In addition, Michel Izard undertook projects in which he planned to benefit from Françoise’s work without her being credited. In a letter to Herrenschmidt dated August 1959, the ethnologist mentions a book project on French ethnology. Although presented as a six-handed work, Izard specified that only the two of them would be named authors: “Authors: You and me (…) Françoise would help us, but firstly, 3 authors is a bit stupid (especially for 128 pages); secondly, it was originally a two-person project.”

In the end, the couple’s division of responsibility for household chores, the division of scientific work, and unpaid and unrecognized work carried out by Françoise for her husband, ultimately reflected and reproduced gender norms in place in the French social world of the 1960s.

After an initial period of collaboration as husband and wife, Françoise and Michel’s work soon became distinct, with each of them working on his or her own particular subject in a specific field. Françoise Héritier then found herself leaving home alone on fieldwork, sometimes for several months in a row. Nonetheless, research institutions still considered her as the wife of a researcher rather than as an ethnologist in her own right.

Institutional Constraints: Françoise Héritier as Her Husband’s Wife

In 1963, Françoise Héritier began a thesis under the supervision of Denise Paulme on kinship and marriage among the Samo, while Michel Izard started his own on “The ancient political organisation of the Yatenga.” As a result, the couple spent more and more time apart, each working on his or her own fieldwork, producing writings in his or her own name. Despite this autonomy, in the eyes of the research institutions, Françoise remained first and foremost her husband’s wife.

The explicit discrimination suffered by Françoise Héritier because she was a woman came into focus when, in July 1966, Pierre Aigrain, directeur des enseignements supérieurs at the French Ministry of Education, refused to grant her funds to go on fieldwork on the pretext that “the mission funds requested for Mr. Izard have been refused by the competent Commission.” Thus, Héritier was refused funding on the grounds that her husband did not obtain funding. In this manner, she was relegated to the status of wife, which clearly prevailed, in the eyes of the institution, over her status as a researcher. She replied in September 1966, writing that she “protests against the procedure which consists of associating my fate with that of my husband,” recalling that they carry “different research, in different fields, with the help of fundings which are not granted to the couple, but to each of us in particular.” This protest was not taken into account, and it was only after joining CNRS as attachée de recherche that she was able to return to fieldwork in September 1967.

A Woman Theorist: Françoise Héritier Essentialized Despite Herself

In her work on women’s writing in the inter-war period, Marianne Lemaire formulates the hypothesis that women ethnologists, in order to establish their scientific authority, strove to choose subjects of study that presented important formal constraints and let as little room as possible for their authorial figure in order to dissimulate their position as a woman under the figure of the scientist and thus “avoid the accusation of amateurism with which women were very likely to be threatened” (Lemaire 2011, 89). In this respect, Françoise Héritier’s subjects of study and writing choices have much in common with those of the women who preceded her in the discipline. To participate in the discipline of ethnology, Héritier made the strategic choice to align with what was considered a serious topic of study, which required her to address subjects and write in a style so as not to be reduced to her position as a woman.

The Choice of Demography and Kinship Studies: A Bulwark Against the Accusation of Subjectivism That Weighs on Women Anthropologists

As soon as she began to study ethnology, Françoise Héritier took a keen interest in demography. It was Héritier who wrote the demographic section of the works published with Izard. In 1959, she signed the review of a handbook on demographic research in developing countries for L’Année Sociologique, and the same year the couple was asked to write a chapter on demographic surveys in fieldwork for a collective volume edited by Jean Poirier.

It is significant that the researcher’s interest in demography developed in a context where Lévi-Strauss, who established himself as a dominant figure in French anthropology, designated demography as a means for ethnologists to lend scientific legitimacy to their work. Indeed, in Anthropologie structurale, Lévi-Strauss wrote that anthropology “approaches mathematical expression by tackling the numerical properties of groups, which are the traditional domain of demography,” and he also welcomed a new alliance between ethnologists and demographers, defining the resulting “socio-demography” as “already on a par with social anthropology,” and suggesting that it could one day become “the compulsory starting point for all our research” (Lévi-Strauss 2003[1958], 348-349).

Françoise Héritier therefore decided, from the very beginning of her career, to enter a field considered by her mentor as pertaining to the most scientifically advanced one in social anthropology. For that matter, it was through computer processing of statistical materials collected in a Samo matrimonial isolate that she formulated her first solution to the enigma of semi-complex systems of alliance (Héritier 1976). It appears, then, that Françoise Héritier’s choice of subject constituted an assertion of scientificity, an essential condition for female anthropologists to gain symbolic and institutional recognition.

It is striking to note that Françoise Héritier effaced reference to herself in her various works on Samo kinship, from her first article on the subject (Héritier 1968) to the publication of L’exercice de la parenté (Héritier 2019[1981]). Her writings do not take the form of narratives, but rather objective, formal analyses of how kinship systems function via a mathematical model.

The researcher’s concern to distance herself from any hint of her own subjectivity is particularly striking in the introduction of L’exercice de la parenté. She defends, in a few pages, the scientific nature of her approach, writing that it is based “not on purely mental views, but on detailed accounts of specific ethnographic studies that constitute, in a way, experimental data for anthropologists,” experimental data that enable her to uncover “statistical laws” (Héritier 2019[1981], 12). By laying claim to the experimental method and defining her results as “laws,” Françoise Héritier explicitly defined her approach as a scientific one in the strongest sense of the term, comparable to the natural sciences.

But despite these precautions, Françoise Héritier, like her predecessors, regularly found herself referred back to her status as a woman, and the stereotypes attached to it.

An Essentialized Reception

In her archives, the researcher kept a text written at the end of the 1970s by the Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch, which she annotated at his request. In it, he set out the conditions for ensuring that the Samo kinship system uncovered by the researcher was operative for Omaha kinship systems in general, writing: “We will only be able to answer this question when other analyses, of the same scope and led with the same meticulousness, have been undertaken.” This phrase attracts attention, in that it was annotated by Françoise Héritier who barred the word “meticulousness” and replaced it with “quality.” It is significant that Luc de Heusch used this adjective, associated—as sociologists of work have shown (Guilbert 1966)—almost exclusively with the feminine gender, to qualify a work which strives to dissimulate as far as possible its author’s gender identity.

The essentializing gestures of Françoise Héritier’s work were not always so subtle. For example, when the family historian André Burguière reviewed Françoise Héritier’s first book in the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in March 1982, he wrote that: “In this 40-year-old anthropologist with a sparkling smile and a slightly country style gentleness, the intimidating abstraction of structuralism takes on the air of intimidated competence. You think she’s going to tell you a recipe for jam—which she also does very well—and in the same good-natured tone she explains the skewing rule in the Crow and Omaha terminology systems.” André Burguière referred to Françoise Héritier in terms of her gender, halfway between the figure of the grandmother—through the mention of the jam recipe—and that of the sweet little girl. In this respect, the author presents as a curiosity the gap between the social being he describes and the theoretical complexity of her object of study.

Despite the essentialization that prevailed in the reception of her work, Françoise Héritier’s choice of her object of study paid off on the institutional level. The results of her research on the Samo, which led to a general theory of how semi-complex alliance systems work, opened the doors to the French institutional cursus honorum and brought her significant symbolic benefits, including the authority bestowed upon someone working within this avowedly scientific paradigm of mid-century French structuralism.

In 1976, drawing on the results of computer processing of data collected among the Samo, the researcher presented a general model for understanding Crow-Omaha systems. In her article, she intended to demonstrate that semi-complex alliance systems are structured, like elementary systems, by positive rules that direct the choice of spouse towards a certain category of individuals or groups (Héritier 1976).

In doing so, she offered a solution to the problem identified by Lévi-Strauss, in his preface to the second edition of Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, as the greatest future challenge in the anthropology of kinship (Lévi-Strauss 1967, 27-30), and confirmed his hypothesis, which earned her a dramatic acceleration in her career.

In 1977, she was successively elected maître de recherche at the CNRS and directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales at her first attempt in December. Françoise Héritier was therefore able to get promotions which, for the majority of women researchers in France at the time, still represented an often insurmountable “glass ceiling.” 

Her work on semi-complex alliance systems found a definitive expression in L’exercice de la parenté, published in 1981. More than a simple presentation of her results, this book marked the transition of the researcher’s thought to an anthropological theory with universal scope: in it, she added to the prohibition of incest “a second fundamental law of kinship, the very condition of the existence of the first […] the differential valence of the sexes, or if one prefers, the different position of the two sexes on a table of values, more generally the dominance of the masculine principle over the feminine principle” (Héritier 2019[1981], 69), a dominance that symbolically makes possible the exchange of women by men and the rule of exogamy which both are at the origin of the prohibition of incest. By positing this second fundamental law as a condition for the existence of the first, designated by Lévi-Strauss as “the fundamental process by which […] the passage from the biological to the social, from the state of Nature to that of Culture, takes place” (Lévi-Strauss 1949, 35), the researcher placed her anthropological reflection on the scale of the human species and claimed the status of theorist.

On 27 June 1982, Françoise Héritier, presented by Claude Lévi-Strauss, was elected at the professor’s assembly of the Collège de France. After Jacqueline de Romilly, she was the second woman to sit on the board since the institution was founded. This election was all the more prestigious in that it took the form of a succession. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss presented her candidacy to succeed him not only at the Collège de France, but also at the head of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, which he had founded in 1960. Françoise Héritier thus appeared as the designated successor to the most famous French anthropologist of the time, a rare occurrence in an academic world where, as Françoise Waquet notes, “knowledge and therefore the transmission of knowledge are gendered” insofar as “retiring professors look for their clone” and thus identify “more easily with a male teacher than with a female teacher” (Waquet 2008, 302).

The fact remains that Lévi-Strauss’s presentation of Françoise Héritier to the Assembly of Professors of the Collège de France also betrayed the weight of gender norms in the way research work carried out by women was considered. Although the professor described the candidate as a “great theoretician,” he presented her above all as a great technician, emphasizing her computer skills, before praising her as the candidate who was “the first Africanist, and even the first ethnologist, to have had the idea of learning the humble techniques used by land surveyors to draw up natives’ land registers.” By glossing over Françoise Héritier’s theoretical dimension and stressing her technical skills, Lévi-Strauss reproduced the gender norms prevailing in the academic field. Indeed, he chose to set aside the theoretical scope of Françoise Héritier’s work, the figure of the theorist and its corollary capacity for abstraction related to masculine gender, in order to highlight her meticulousness and dexterity, skills associated with femininity.

Françoise Héritier’s ascension to the top of the French university cursus honorum, an institutional position traditionally reserved for men, did not abolish the weight of gender norms, and this is even more striking in the light of the media coverage of this election.

A Woman at the Collège de France: Françoise Héritier as a Curiosity

The press coverage of Françoise Héritier’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France left no room for equivocation: more than a scientist, it was a woman who had been elected. Indeed, most articles focused less on the content of the anthropologist’s inaugural lecture than on her dress, physical appearance and intimidated attitude, all of which gives rise to an infantilization of the female researcher who appeared to be something of a curiosity.

In the magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, Mona Ozouf emphasised the “exotic sparkle” of her “cherry dress,” her “wisely parted black hair,” and the “charming features” of a researcher with “the knotted throat of a beginner.” In the Swiss daily 24 heures, Jacqueline Baron portrays her as a “good pupil of Claude Lévi-Strauss” who “worries about her dress.” The infantilization of the researcher reaches its climax in a short article in the newspaper Le Point: “A pupil of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Françoise Héritier-Augé, 49 years old, a girl, holds the chair of comparative studies of African societies at the Collège de France since January.”

The election to the Collège de France is unique in that it confers considerable symbolic power and often elevates the elected researcher to the status of master of his discipline. In this respect, the way in which Françoise Héritier is portrayed is all the more striking: the figures of beginner, model student and young girl that emerge from the above-mentioned press articles appeared to be the antithesis of the master status generally associated with such a position, and thus revealed the impossibility for women researchers to acquire such a title in their own right.

It also appears that the anthropologist suffered from being in the shadow of her mentor. Indeed, the various articles reporting on her election never failed to mention that she was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s pupil, a way of implicitly pointing out that she owed her institutional position to the prestige of her master and, as a result, denying her the rank of master.

Françoise Héritier, in a note left on a loose leaf written in the last years of her life, expressed her frustration that despite her exceptional career, she had never really been acknowledged as a master in her own right because of her gender:

“People use my ideas, eventually my words and the concepts that I have introduced as if they were there from all eternity, without an author. This is regularly the case for the incest of the second type and the differential valence of the sexes. They are used or alluded to, sometimes with a footnote: ‘as Françoise Héritier might have written’. Well, no. It’s not that she might have written it, she invented it. […] It’s not uncommon for people close to me, for whom it’s impossible to have a female ‘guardianship’ or ‘ancestry’ or to ‘recognize’ what they owe to a woman, to forget what came to them from me, their apprenticeship, training and, more often than not, their career and promotion, in order to approach, as if by direct descent, to the august memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss.”

Editor’s note: This post was updated for accuracy on 17 February 2025.

Works Cited

Guilbert, Madeleine. 1966. Les fonctions des femmes dans l’industrie. Paris: Mouton.

Héritier, Françoise. 1968. “À propos de l’énoncé des interdits matrimoniaux.” L’Homme 8, no. 3: 5-21. .

Héritier, Françoise. 1976. “Contribution à la théorie de l’alliance. Comment fonctionnent les systèmes d’alliance omaha?” Informatique et Sciences Humaines, no. 29 (juin): 10-46. ‘Contribution à la théorie de l’alliance. Comment fonctionnent les systèmes d’alliance omaha?” Informatique et Sciences Humaines, no. 29 (juin): 10-46. 

Héritier, Françoise. 1979. “Symbolique de l’inceste et de sa prohibition.” In La fonction symbolique. Essais d’anthropologie, edited by Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, 209-243. Paris: Gallimard.

Héritier, Françoise. 2019 [1981]. L’exercice de la parenté. Paris: Points.

Héritier, Françoise. 1994. Les Deux Sœurs et leur mère. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Héritier, Françoise. 1996. Masculin/Féminin. La pensée de la différence. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Héritier, Françoise. 2002. Masculin Féminin II. Dissoudre la hiérarchie. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Héritier, Françoise. 2009. Une pensée en mouvement. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Izard-Héritier, Françoise and Michel Izard. 1958a. Aspects humains de l’aménagement hydro-agricole de la vallée du Sourou. Bordeaux: I.S.H.A.

Izard-Héritier, Françoise and Michel Izard. 1958b. Bouna. Monographie d’un village pana dans la vallée du Sourou (Haute-Volta). Bordeaux: I.S.H.A.

Izard-Héritier, Françoise and Michel Izard. 1959. Les Mossi du Yatenga. Étude de la vie économique et sociale. Bordeaux: I.S.H.A.

Lagrave, Rose-Marie. 2001. Se ressaisir. Enquête autobiographique d’une transfuge de classe féministe. Paris: La Découverte.

Laurière, Christine. 2017. “L’épreuve du feu des futurs maîtres de l’ethnologie.” In Les années folles de l’ethnographie : Trocadéro 28-37, edited by André Delpuech, Christine Laurière and Carine Peltier-Caroff, 405-447. Paris: Publications scientifiques du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.

Lemaire, Marianne. 2011. “La chambre à soi de l’ethnologue. Une écriture féminine en anthropologie dans l’Entre-deux-guerres.” L’Homme 200, no. 4: 83-112.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1967 [1949]. Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris: La Haye, Mouton et Maison des sciences de l’Homme.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2003 [1958]. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Pocket.

Marry, Catherine. 1995. “Les scolarités supérieures féminines en France dans les années 80: un bilan contrasté.” In La Places des femmes. Les enjeux de l’identité et de l’égalité au regard des sciences sociales, edited by EPHESIA, 591-597. Paris : La Découverte.

Waquet, Françoise. 2008. Les enfants de Socrate: filiation intellectuelle et transmission du savoir – XVIIe – XXIe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel.

Globalizing plant knowledge beyond bioprospecting?

Cassava plant, Ghana. Photo by Sabina Leonelli.

At 8 am on the first of September 2023, I find myself in Fumesua, a small town close to Kumasi, the second largest Ghanian city and the historical seat of the Ashanti kingdom. I am visiting the Crop Research Institute (CRI), the national center for plant and agricultural science since 1964, and I am taking a walk through their cassava field trials together with the agronomist and technicians in charge. The cassava root (Manihot esculenta, also known as manioc or yuca) is a key staple crop for Western Africa as well as Brazil and Indonesia. Cassava plants therefore take pride of place among the crops studied at CRI, with several fields hosting experiments that range from identifying sturdy, drought-resistant varieties to testing propagation and storage methods, verifying characteristics of varieties in demand for local markets, and finding ways to facilitate farmers’ everyday work.

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The Beyond-Intellectual-Property Moment in Context

In 1996, Darrell Posey and I published Beyond Intellectual Property: Towards Traditional Resource Rights for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. We must have given the impression from the title that the book was about patents, copyright, trademarks, and other legal rights in creative productions as they affected Indigenous peoples. It was about these things. But there was much more to the book. It offered a broad “bundles of rights” framework to comprehend and advance Indigenous peoples’ rights in knowledge, resources and territory. In addition to our lack of schooling in the discipline of law, the book had another unique feature diverging from mainstream legal publications: rather than legal scholars or practising lawyers, its primary target readership was Indigenous peoples. We intended it as explicatory and practical, and we conspicuously avoided paternalism.

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The Absence of Brazilian Medicinal Plants in Portuguese Writings

“Upon sowing, everything grows!”—wrote a Navy registrar, expressing amazement with Brazil’s luxuriant nature in a 1500 report to the Portuguese king (Caminha 1981).[1] Pero Vaz de Caminha, a registrar with Pedro Alvares de Cabral’s pioneering expedition to Brazil signed this letter to the Portuguese king on May 1st, 1500. It was first published in 1817; see C. Prado Junior, “Introdução”, in Casal, Corografia Brasilica, xxix. This statement was an early manifestation of European excitement with the exuberance and uniqueness of the flora in Terra Brasilis. From that time onward, European travelers, missionaries, and physicians, never stopped reporting on previously unknown plants and animals, as well as on Amerindian civilizations. While many of those visitors spent some time among Indigenous populations, to make their presence in the “New” World permanent, Europeans required alternative food sources. Shipments from Europe were both expensive and sporadic, and more often than not also arrived in a damaged condition. In addition, they had to learn how to identify unknown diseases and their respective treatments. Therefore, surveying their immediate surroundings proved essential for survival. For this reason, it comes as no surprise that the earliest settlers, including Jesuit missionaries, immediately explored the wealth of the three kingdoms of nature. Despite this, the fact that this knowledge was omitted from any publications written in Portuguese for many centuries still puzzles scholars to this day.

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Notes

Notes
1 Pero Vaz de Caminha, a registrar with Pedro Alvares de Cabral’s pioneering expedition to Brazil signed this letter to the Portuguese king on May 1st, 1500. It was first published in 1817; see C. Prado Junior, “Introdução”, in Casal, Corografia Brasilica, xxix.

“Women in Traditional Agricultural Knowledge”: Mexican Ethnobotany in the 1970s

Today, “traditional knowledge” is a widely used term in many fields and social movements. It is and has been linked to alternative ways of living beyond capitalist and imperialist impositions in many parts of the world. Often, traditional knowledge has been associated with food production systems and ways of creating more local, culturally appropriate, accessible, and sustainable agriculture. In the face of environmental and social hazards resulting from the so-called Green Revolution, traditional knowledge rose as a banner of change and justice in the 1970s.

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Plant Identification and Ethnoscience in the Work of Rumphius

How we define ethnoscience in relation to “science” and the “history of science,” the extent to which it is a conceptual “other,” and the way knowledge moves between them, depends on our starting point. Ethnoscience is configured differently depending on context: sometimes a linguistically-rooted methodology (usually in anthropology), sometimes referencing any traditional or Indigenous knowledge that approximately matches the conventional branches of science. Here I examine plant identification in the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist Rumphius living in Ambon, comparing it to the practices of Indigenous Nuaulu people in modern Indonesia. When seeking to identify plants in our ordinary lives or as professionals, what we mean by “identification” is not the same. Differences between people in the production of identifications arise from the way material presents itself in varying socio-cultural situations, and the reasons why identifications are sought. But to begin with I shall illustrate the interplay between seventeenth-century European beliefs, emerging scientific method, and Rumphius’s appraisal of Ambonese natural history knowledge.

Plant Worlds in Seventeenth-Century Europe and Ambon

Georgius Rumphius (1627–1702) joined the Dutch East India Company in 1651, along the way acquiring some familiarity with Dutch “Protestant science.” He arrived in Ambon, the center of the spice trade, in 1654, where he remained for the rest of his life. As a merchant he took an interest in local flora. He also found a partner in Susanna, probably a mixed-race Ambonese woman who bore him three children. This fact is significant not only because it tells us much about racialized gender relations in the Indies, than because it indicates an unusual cross-cultural intimacy in the production of new plant knowledge. After a series of personal disasters, including blindness, he completed his Herbarium Amboinense. His posthumous publications came to the attention of Linnaeus in Leiden, who adopted many of his plant descriptions (see Rumphius 1741–1750 (2011); Beekman 2011; Baas and Veldkamp 2013; Yoo 2018; Snelders 1995). The titles of each “book” in Rumphius’s Herbal are a mixture of utilitarian categories, groupings referencing morphology, and ad hoc residues. The order makes sense when seen as a journey from the south shore of Ambon through forests and mountains to the north shore. There is no standard order within each book, but groups of chapters begin by describing a representative type, followed by chapters devoted to individual Rumphian taxa. Rumphius described each plant in relation to that proceeding it, using the same template: a preamble (including characteristics), followed by names, places found, and uses.

We can compare Rumphius’s scheme with the hierarchical model of folk classification introduced by Brent Berlin (Berlin, Breedlove and Raven 1974), using concepts of over- and under-differentiation to measure correspondence with scientific taxa. Rumphius had a notion of “species” or “basic category” but understood the biological relationship between taxa differently. Berlin’s approach is partly post-Darwinian hindsight: we are drawn to a semblance of phylogenesis in a folk classification being accustomed to the idea of descent with modification. For Rumphius this cannot be assumed. Rather, the logical “kind-of” relation was often the same as “similar-to.” There is evidence of taxonomic hierarchy, but he does not necessarily invoke inclusion of lesser categories into larger. He is more “agglomerative,” emphasizing greater or lesser proximity. We might envisage cross-cutting schemes along two axes: one approximating what we today think of as phylogeny, and one stressing other major morphological features. For example, he does not treat Ficus (the fig genus) as a single unit, though he sees some resemblance in the grouping of species. Instead, he appropriates Ambonese categories to model the groups of species at the lower level, while a division between trees, shrubs, and vines prevails at the highest levels, overriding genetic similarity (Peeters 1979).

Rumphius’s botanical ontology must be judged by the diverse influences upon it. He was a scholar, and in organizing his Herbal was influenced by Pliny the Elder, seventeenth-century ideas about “natural history,” and the notion that nature is planned to benefit humanity. But he was not only a post-Reformation thinker. His early life was steeped in European beliefs that we would nowadays regard as unscientific. These are reflected in his later writings. For example, he incorporated a homunculus in the nymphs of the crustacean Irona renardi (Ellen 2004), observed that overhanging mangrove leaves of Sonneratia caseolaris became fish on touching water (Rumphius 1741–1750 (2011)), and accepted the spontaneous generation of life.

Rumphius’s botany has been hitherto assessed using the framework of globalized post-Linnaean taxonomy. Indeed, Rumphius and Linnaeus make an interesting comparison, their lives and work falling around the transition between what Foucault called the natural history and biology epistemes, where traditional or scholastic knowledge became recognizably science. Both sought to confer legitimacy to their writing by deferring to Indigenousness and by appealing to the wisdom of local peoples (Foucault 1970; on the authority of Indigenous peoples see Cooper 2007). Linnaeus self-consciously revered Saami traditions, while a feature of Rumphius’s work is his trust in local knowledge authenticated through an intimate familiarity with both language and ethnography. At a time when Moluccan spice gardens were being extirpated and violence perpetrated against their owners, Rumphius frequently claimed that Ambonese know more of nature than his detractors in the East India Company. Much of his data were collected first-hand, while his descriptions systematically interweave Indigenous knowledge with his own European interpretations and experience.

Rumphian ideas among the Nuaulu

Rumphius was therefore a precursor of Linneaus, sheds light on the ethnobotany of seventeenth-century Ambon, and is also an illuminating subject for the study of European natural history at a crucial moment in its transition. His observations have impacted my own work as an anthropologist and ethnobiologist studying the classifying behavior of Nuaulu, a people of central Seram (Ellen 2020). Rumphius knew of Nuaulu, mentioning them in his history of Ambon. He traveled to West Seram, but probably not into the hills where Nuaulu were living at that time. To illustrate how Rumphius’s observations have helped me disentangle some ethnobotanical puzzles, I take the example of gender in plant nomenclature.

The terms hanaie (male) and pina (female) appear in about 40 of 597 Nuaulu plant binomials (7 percent). One might think these refer to male and female plants of dioecious species, but this is unclear. Dioecious species are infrequent in the coastal tropics, perhaps constituting 14 percent. Of the more obvious dioecious species, none reported for Nuaulu display names suggesting this. One genus divided using gender terms is Clerodendrum. Unuhutu hanaie is Clerodendrum rumphianum (with a spike-like inflorescence), while unuhutu pina is usually Clerodendrum speciosissi-mum (similar leaves to rumphianum but a shorter more open inflorescence). Neither is technically bisexual but avoids self-pollination by staggering the maturation of male and female reproductive parts. 

Things become complicated where species are optionally dioecious (male and female flowers on different plants) and monoecious (all plants bisexual), where several types of female plant are distinguished as separate kinds. This is so with the kenari nut iane (Canarium indicum), where iane hanaie is distinguished from iane hanate (larger fruit) and iane mkauke (smaller fruit). Other Canarium are either monoecious or carry both male and female flowers (Ellen 2019). Terms are rarely used by Nuaulu to specifically indicate sex types, but serve to differentiate paired species, varieties of the same species, species of the same genus, or even genera in different families. This mirrors a wider occurrence of male-female opposition in Austronesian languages, found also in Rumphius’s Herbal. He sometimes used terms to reference same species sex morphotypes, but did not recognise the male as having a role in fertilizing female flowers. The sexuality of plants was a matter for speculation in Europe while Rumphius was writing, but the issue was quite unsettled (Taiz 2017).

Communities of Practice Across Time

The term “community of practice” derives from the situated learning theory of Lave and Wenger, emphasizing identification as a socially-shared, processual, and practical task, contextually embedded and embodied (Lave 1991). It marks doing rather than thinking, outcomes achieved through everyday activity rather than abstract theorizing, where “everyday” ranges between the practices of formally-trained professionals and of Indigenous people with skills undivided by occupation. But how do Rumphius’s working practices compare to modern taxonomy or Nuaulu ethnobotany? In what community of practice was he a member or participant? He was connected with the world of Western scholarship, but interacted everyday with Ambonese and had a different vision of plant relatedness. This necessitated intra-cultural and cross-cultural translation in hybrid spaces, where different assumptions and practices met and overlapped, evoking “partial overlaps” (see Ludwig and El-Hani 2020).

Taxonomists theoretically start with a post-Linnaean model, procedurally working down a hierarchy from family to sub-species. They employ tested lexical distinctions to ensure plants are described in the same way, have articulated concepts of level, and have words defining these. Botanists share a domain of knowledge excluding many uncertainties and variables important to others identifying plants—such as use—only employing non-taxonomic distinctions at the initial stages of a decision tree to achieve effective “keying-out” (Dupré 1993). Naturalists have sought to deliberately discard “artificial” and “practical” classifications and replace them with forms dependent on logic internal to the theory of science, whether Linnaean primacy of sexual organs or Darwinian models of common ancestry. Classification as against identification is more distinct in scientific taxonomy, making identification more efficient by grouping associated characters and reducing the steps in a sequence. 

Nuaulu identification of plants is multi-sensorial, in that touch, smell, and taste are as important as visual clues (Ellen 2020). Among professional botanists, the sense that underpins taxonomic practice is primarily visual. An obvious difference between Nuaulu identifiers of plants and contemporary taxonomists is that the former do not write  descriptions to which they can refer, or create images of diagnostic characteristics. Writing, text, and the physical medium on which text is inscribed had massive impacts on conceptualizing and executing acts of identification. Something as definite as “a classification” could hardly exist before it was written down. For Jack Goody, the impulses to classify that accompany literacy encourage “over-systematisation,” overwhelming “reasonable human purposes” (Goody 1982). Science has extracted individual plants from their contexts and re-thought them through abstract features, aided by the globalization of knowledge, and the facility to store specimens and descriptions. Once inscribed, plant names become discrete “things,” and where improvised, likely to become accepted once archived, even when not shared widely (Goody 1977; Ellen 1979). In Rumphius’s Herbal, because each plant is described through a template in relation to that proceeding it, an “order” is possible but rarely achievable where knowledge is orally transmitted. Nuaulu operate as if names were stable, but in effect, the relationship between name and plant is only as good as the last identification, and its frequency of application.

Though writing simplifies sensory reality and perpetuates mistakes, by permitting an “archival” tradition it allows systematic comparison through lists, tables, and lexically-annotated diagrams (Olson 1994). Rumphius drew pictures or had pictures drawn, and by the time of Linnaeus, it was accepted that natural history demanded “arrangement and designation” (Olson 1994, 226). Even modern ethnobiological accounts retrofit the operations of folk classification within the conventions of the written mode, often distorting the significance of notions of hierarchy and level, diminishing category overlap, suppressing dimensionality, and generally constraining the fluidity otherwise enjoyed by orality. 

In Nuaulu plant identification there is built-in flexibility enabled by the absence of one ultimate physical reference specimen or tight permanent descriptions that must be matched to achieve accuracy. For both Nuaulu and professional taxonomists, plant identification involves constant revision, partly because the boundaries of taxa change depending on the criteria selected. The scientific taxonomist faces the same practical and cognitive problems as the Indigenous expert, but whereas modern taxonomists are generally specialists, Nuaulu and Rumphius are generalists. Whereas professional taxonomists always refer to earlier physical specimens and descriptions, Nuaulu identification is fluid, informed by memories established from experience, confirmed or revised with the benefit of other people’s shared experiences. Rumphius too identified plants with reference to general abstractions incorporated into his written descriptions and likely in illustrated notes never preserved (Ellen 2020, 155-59).

Rumphius provides a bridge between several worlds. His work illuminates how the history of biological theory between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries intertwined with ethnobiology as we construe it today. Existing local knowledge systems made the conditions for science possible. In moving from Rumphius to late Linnaeus (and after), European botany rode “a wave of objectification” by which specimens were wiped clean of cultural complexities in order to be “pasted neatly into folios of European herbaria…and classificatory systems” (in Schiebinger and Swan 2005, 7). A focus on the practice of identification sheds light on issues surrounding the integration of heterogeneous knowledge systems. What early ethnoscience ignored with its strict focus on linguistics was the way bodily practice and skill influence how we secure something as mundane as identification (Conklin 1962; see also Ellen 2018). Identification and classification operate in all empirical knowledge systems as distinct processes. Yet in the case of scientific literacy, the two conflate, classification effectively overwhelming identification.

Read another piece in this series.

Works Cited

Baas, P. and J.F. Veldkamp. 2013. “Dutch pre-colonial botany and Rumphius’s Ambonese Herbal.” Allertonia, 13: 9–19.

Beekman, E.M. 2011. “Introduction.” G.E. Rumphius. (1741–1750) 2011. The Ambonese Herbal, Volume 1 (translated by E. M. Beekman_. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, vol. 1, 1–169.

Berlin, B., D.E. Breedlove and P.H. Raven (1974). Principles of Tzeltal plant classification: an introduction to the botanical ethnography of a Mayan-speaking people of highland Chiapas. New York: Academic Press.

Conklin, H.C. 1962. “Lexicographical treatment of folk taxonomies.” International Journal of American Linguistics 28: 119–41.

Cooper, A. 2007. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dupré, J. 1993. The Disorder of Things. Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press.

Ellen, R. 1979. Introductory essay. In Classifications in Their Social Context, edited by R. F. Ellen and D. Reason. London: Academic Press, 1–32.

———. 2004. “From ethno-science to science, or ‘What the indigenous knowledge debate tells us about how scientists define their project.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 4(3–4): 409–50.

———. 2018. “Ethnoscience.” In The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by H. Callan, v4: 2086–87. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

———. 2019. “Ritual, landscapes of exchange, and the domestication of Canarium: a Seram case study.” Asian Perspectives 58 (4): 261–86.

———. 2020. The Nuaulu World of Plants: Ethnobotanical Cognition, Knowledge and Practice Among a People of Seram, Eastern Indonesia. London: Sean Kingston for the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock.

Goody, J. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1982. Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lave, J. 1991. “Situating learning in communities of practice.” Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, ed. L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine and S. D. Teasley. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Ludwig, D. and C. N. El-Hani 2020. “Philosophy of ethnobiology: understanding knowledge integration and its limitations.” Journal of Ethnobiology 40: 3–20.

Olson, D.R. 1994. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Peeters, A. 1979. “Nomenclature and classification in Rumphius’s ‘Herbarium Amboinense’.” Classifications in Their Social Context, ed. R. F. Ellen and D. Reason. London: Academic Press, 145–166.

Rumphius, G.E. (1741–1750) 2011. The Ambonese Herbal, Volumes 1-6 (translated by E. M. Beekman). New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Schiebinger, L. and C. Swan. 2005. “Introduction.” Colonial Botany; Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. L. Schiebinger and C. Swan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1–18.

Snelders H. A. 1995. “Naturwissenschaft und Religion in den Niederlanden um 1600.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte. 18 (2): 67–78.

Taiz, L. and Taiz, L. 2017. Flora Unveiled: The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yoo, G. 2018. “Wars and wonders: the inter-island information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius.” The British Journal for the History of Science 51 (4): 559–84.

Sources for the History of Ethnosciences: James Mooney and the Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees

Formularies, or books of prescriptions, have been in circulation since the very onset of recorded history. A large part of Egyptian papyri and Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform tablets, for example, consist of collections of medical prescriptions. This genre of literature awakened the attention of European scholars, together with the rise of philology in the nineteenth century, to gain momentum starting in the early decades of the following century. To our surprise, during research for another project, we fell upon a study of a formulary that antedates by several decades the earliest known ones. This is noteworthy not only for its temporal precedence but also because this study was carried out in the “New,” rather than in the “Old,” World and within a context entirely foreign to both philology and historical studies. Here, we are referring to James Mooney’s The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891).

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