Field Notes (page 4 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.

Can Humanity be Mapped? Adolf Bastian, Friedrich Ratzel and the Cartography of Culture

December 6, 2018 / Carlotta Santini / 2 Comments

Introduction: Image and Science in Early Ethnology

During the second half of the nineteenth century, in German circles linked to anthropology, a movement of scientific systematization arose from the need to cope, scientifically and institutionally, with the great masses of data that had been collected over nearly a century of colonial enterprises and geographical discoveries. The most important German cities—Berlin, Bonn and Leipzig—laid a foundation of museums, learned societies, academies and scientific journals to set the agenda and limits for a new discipline: ethnology. Ethnology was supposed to develop a new knowledge of man as a being capable of culture. Mediating between ethnographic practices and anthropological science, ethnology at this time was difficult to distinguish from physiology and the study of man as a physical being , which were part of the natural sciences. In the struggle to attain the status of “science,” anthropology had credentials as good as any nineteenth century discipline, because of its early commitment to physiology and adoption of statistical tools. But it was also the first human science to question substantially the adequateness of the scientific method and the pretension of objectivity as it involved very unstable research materials focused on human culture and behavior.^[1]

This essay will analyze the case of two founders of German anthropology, Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) and Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), and examine the challenges they faced in creating images to use as scientific tools in their ethnological approaches. The absence of descriptive, paradigmatic and documentary image tools in the major ethnology handbooks of the time stands in contrast to the clear awareness of anthropologists of the urgent need to codify a coherent and comprehensive system of representations, and to give a symbolic account of the complex results of their discipline.

“Laying the Cards on the Table”

July 10, 2018 / Luis Felipe Sobral

Michel Leiris. Phantom Africa. Translated by Brent Hayes Edwards. Africa List Series. 720 pp., 37 halftones, 3 fascimiles, 1 map. Calcutta, London, and New York: Seagull Books, 2017. $60 (cloth)

Editor’s Note: This essay—an extended commentary on the recently published translation of Phantom Africa—is HAN’s first joint production of Field Notes and Reviews. The Editors welcome and encourage future submissions that combine reviews of recently published works with reflections on the history of anthropology.

Cover of the first edition of L’Afrique Fantôme, published by Gallimard in its series ‘Les Documents Bleus’ in 1934.

Phantom Africa is the diary that French writer and ethnologist, Michel Leiris, kept for almost two years, from May 1931 to February 1933. During this period, he was the secretary-archivist of the Dakar-Djibouti mission, an important ethnographic expedition financed by the French government, supported by several private donors, and organized by the University of Paris and the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. The main goal of the mission was to collect a large number of ethnographic objects in order to renew the collection of the museum. The years between the world wars were a critical period for French anthropology because it was the moment of its emergence as an independent discipline. As a highly publicized event attached to the Trocadéro, the Dakar-Djibouti mission in particular played an important role in this process, paving the way for other ethnographic expeditions throughout the 1930s.^[1] The original French edition of the diary was published by Gallimard soon after the mission, in 1934, and now it has been published in English, translated by Brent Hayes Edwards. Continue reading

Living Monuments: Imagining Ancient Gene Pools in the Middle East

May 29, 2018 / Elise K. Burton

In 1927, the Polish-Jewish physical anthropologist Henryk Szpidbaum published an account of his recent expedition to Mandate Palestine on behalf of the Polish Society for the Exploration of the Mental and Physical Condition of the Jews. He had traveled to Palestine not to investigate the Zionist settlers, but rather the Samaritans, an obscure religious group of no more than 150 members living in the town of Nablus. In the introduction to his study, Szpidbaum described the Samaritans as “a living monument [Denkmal] of the biblical period. This tribe can be traced back 2800 years, during which it should be noted that the Samaritans have never left their country of Palestine. Detailed knowledge of this tribe will hopefully help to solve many difficult problems concerning the anthropology of the former inhabitants of Canaan and partially [also of] today’s Jews ” (Szpidbaum 1927). Unfortunately, he warned, the community might soon disappear forever: “The Samaritans believe themselves to be a vanishing tribe [due to] the insufficient number of women. [Footnote:] In order to counter the extinction, the Samaritans try to enter into mixed marriages with Jews. For the time being there is only one such a marriage.”

“The Samaritans of Nablus,” early 1900s (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Arsenic and Old Pelts: Deadly Pesticides in Museum Collections

December 29, 2017 / Alice B. Kehoe and Marshall J. Becker / 2 Comments

All museums use pesticides and preservatives, though their health impacts are not always known; ethnographic collections can thus pose a health risk. Here we open one cold case file, in which we believe a prominent American anthropologist may have directly suffered from such effects. Our own experience and inquiries confirm this hunch.

Clark Wissler fell ill in 1905, soon after he began working in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. At some point during the period of Wissler’s illness, Museum Director Henry Fairfield Osborn recommended that his own physician examine Wissler. But despite this additional medical consultation, the illness persisted and was never successfully diagnosed—making him appear frail until 1928 when it mysteriously cleared up. The symptoms were severe enough to cause Wissler to give up his fieldwork on the Blackfeet Reservation. Continue reading

‘Cultures in the Body’: Dance and Anthropology in Revolutionary Cuba

December 14, 2017 / Elizabeth Schwall

The short documentary Historia de un ballet (History of a Ballet, 1962) dramatizes an ethnographic encounter central to a creative process. Director José Massip followed Cuban choreographer Ramiro Guerra and his company of modern dancers as they researched, created, and premiered a new work, Suite Yoruba (1960), about Afro-Cuban ritual music and dance. The film depicts dancers actively engaging with anthropological methods as they conduct fieldwork and share their findings with a wider public through performance. Though not formally trained as anthropologists, dancers traversed disciplinary and social boundaries to create work that animated political visions of revolutionary collectivity. Continue reading

Editors’ Introduction: Fields, Furrows, and Landmarks in the History of Anthropology

October 21, 2017 / Warwick Anderson, Lee D. Baker, Margaret M. Bruchac, William Carruthers, James Clifford, Rosanna Dent, Nélia Dias, Elizabeth Edwards, Ugo F. Edu, Matthew Engelke, Benoît de L'Estoile, James D. Faubion, Margaret Flood, Ruth Goldstein, Robert L. A. Hancock (Metis), Ageliki Lefkaditou, Adrianna Link, Jonathan Marks, H. Glenn Penny, Nathan Schlanger, Marilyn Strathern, Edna Suárez-Díaz, Helen Tilley, John Tresch and Han F. Vermeulen

In 1973, the first issue of the History of Anthropology Newsletter opened with a statement of purpose from the editorial committee, called “Prospects and Problems,” by George Stocking. The editors were self-consciously defining and claiming a field. They let loose with territorial metaphors: occupation, soil, furrows, forays. Now, as we continue our relaunch of HAN, we return to this 40-year-old manifesto as a starting point for thinking about the past, present, and future of the field.

The 1973 essay noted a sense of disciplinary crisis as a spur to growth; it asked whether this history should be done by anthropologists, intellectual historians on “one-book forays,” by “anthropologists manqué,” or by a new generation of interdisciplinarians; it announced the need for “landmarks” including lists of archival holdings, bibliographic aids, research in progress, recent publications—which HAN would provide. It ended with a call for participation from readers.

Seeking to continue HAN’s role as a site for debating the field’s present state and shaping its future, in late 2016 we invited a series of scholars from various fields to respond to this manifesto. In February 2017, eight distinguished authors responded with generosity, insight, experience, good humor—and impressive speed. Continuing our reappraisal of Stocking’s inaugural editorial statement, in August 2017 we added nine additional surveys of the field’s potential terrain. These contributions covered new ground, unearthed skepticisms, and sowed a set of new questions. Now, in October 2017, we close the series with a third set of reflections from an impressive group of early career scholars. They imply a rich future for the study of anthropology’s past.

We encourage HAN readers and subscribers to make use of the comments section to respond to individual pieces, or to the section as a whole. Dig in and leave a mark.

This editorial was originally published on February 1, 2017. It was updated on August 15, 2017 and on October 21, 2017.

Collaborations: Envisioning an Engaged Multimodal Future for Anthropology

October 21, 2017 / Ruth Goldstein, Ugo F. Edu and Patricia Alvarez Astacio

“The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.”
Zora Neale Hurston

I asked two colleague-friends to collaborate in this exercise of envisioning the future of the field: visual anthropologist and filmmaker Patricia Alvarez and medical anthropologist and playwright Ugo Edu. We first circulated written ideas and then Edu suggested a conversational format à la Hartman and Wilderson (2003). With the limits of time and space, we reproduce only parts of that conversation here. To render this collaborative work visible, see our transcript. Continue reading

Transcript: Collaborations: Envisioning an Engaged Multimodal Future for Anthropology

October 21, 2017 / Ruth Goldstein, Ugo F. Edu and Patricia Alvarez Astacio

This is the transcript from the conversation on August 18th, 2017, between Ruth Goldstein, Ugo F. Edu, and Patricia Alvarez Astacio that led to the piece “Collaborations: Envisioning an Engaged Multimodal Future for Anthropology.”

Ruth: Now we are officially starting [with the recording]. So I will officially say thank you both for collaborating with me on this. It is definitely an experiment. My thought was that we would talk through questions that we want to tackle and then, maybe, that fits really well with thinking about doing research in different modalities. So that we have a spoken component that is part of the written text too? How does that sound? Continue reading

Disentangling Ojibwe Botanical Medicine

October 21, 2017 / Margaret Flood

As a new graduate student in the history of science, technology, and medicine, I was interested in circulations of medical practices and medicinal plants between Ojibwe communities in northern Minnesota and non-native, non-professional medical practitioners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.^[1]

Casting about for archival materials, I found many historical documents that directly discuss medicinal plants had been produced by anthropologists, ethnologists, and their forbears. Medicine writ large—medicinal plants, songs, and recipes, ideas and stories about medical practice, and general concerns about sickness and health—figured frequently in the field notes, professional correspondence, and publications of such varied figures as Aleš Hrdlička (1869-1943), Frances Densmore (1867-1957), and Sister Mary Inez Hilger (1891-1977). In these documents, medicine and anthropology were deeply enmeshed. Continue reading

Entangled Tensions

October 21, 2017 / William Carruthers

The history of archaeology, as a field, has always seemed (to me) to be playing catch up with work in the history of anthropology.^[1] Yet, reading the contributions to HAN’s “Fields, Furrows, and Landmarks” Special Focus Section suggests to me that the histories of archaeology and anthropology now operate on the same plane in terms of the tensions that drive their production. Anyone working on archaeology’s history should be willing to grapple with the many tensions inherent in acknowledging the field’s geopolitical entanglements in the same way as historians of anthropology. Indeed, these shared but distinct histories of knowledge production can be put to good analytical use. As their investigations are driven by similar—and often entangled—tensions, are bounded categories like ‘the history of archaeology’ or ‘the history of anthropology’ still useful?

Anthropological Genealogies, Anthropological Kinship

October 21, 2017 / Robert L. A. Hancock (Metis)

For me, the most affecting part of the prospectus for HAN was not George Stocking’s use of settler colonialist metaphors, but finding Regna Darnell’s name among those on the original editorial board. Continue reading

Putting History on Display

October 21, 2017 / Ageliki Lefkaditou

Confronted with all the limitations of my stiff training as a historian of science, I have become enchanted by the narratives taking shape at the intersection of academic research and museum work with texts, things, space, and people. In March 2018, we are opening the exhibition FOLK: From Racial Types to DNA Sequences at The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo. Every time I utter these words, my heart starts beating faster. For me, this is where the history of anthropology comes alive, where we can test its contemporary relevance, and where all could go wrong. Continue reading

The Witches’ Stock

October 21, 2017 / Matt Watson

George Stocking was the anthropologist’s historian of anthropology: a “professional stranger” who plowed furrows in department halls arm-in-arm with anthros tending fields and chickens.^[1] The horticultural trope–his for us–strikes me as more taboo than totemic today, but I’ll take it anyway.^[2] I suspect he would’ve liked the image of toil in common.^[3]

*** Continue reading

Special Focus: Fields, Furrows, and Landmarks in the History of Anthropology

October 20, 2017 / Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Warwick Anderson, Lee D. Baker, Margaret M. Bruchac, William Carruthers, James Clifford, Nélia Dias, Rosanna Dent, Ugo F. Edu, Elizabeth Edwards, Matthew Engelke, James D. Faubion, Margaret Flood, Ruth Goldstein, Robert L. A. Hancock (Metis), Ageliki Lefkaditou, Benoît de L'Estoile, Adrianna Link, Jonathan Marks, H. Glenn Penny, Nathan Schlanger, Edna Suárez-Díaz, Marilyn Strathern, Helen Tilley, John Tresch, Han F. Vermeulen and Matt Watson

Read the full Focus Section here.

Ethnographic Presents

August 15, 2017 / Marilyn Strathern

Ethnographic presents are of course as much in history as any other phenomena, although anthropologists sometimes writing in the ethnographic present may be deliberately avoiding a historian’s trajectory. It has of course long ceased to be necessary to point to what once led anthropologists to be explicit on this point: they wanted to get away from the kinds of ‘conjectural histories’ that were then dominating explanations about human institutions. It is precisely because issues cease to be necessary that we need a history of anthropology.

George and Me

August 15, 2017 / James Clifford

I hope you’ll indulge a personal reminiscence.

When HAN was founded in 1973 I was a graduate student in History at Harvard, just focusing on my dissertation. George Stocking visited Harvard sometime before that and offered a seminar in the Anthropology Department. I sat in on the course—our first encounter.

Anthropology Has a History

August 15, 2017 / James D. Faubion

Why is the history of anthropology necessary and vital now? Why the history of anthropology (instead of other approaches to its content and questions)? Why the history of anthropology (instead of other human sciences or political/intellectual/material intersections)? At the risk of seeming to be a curmudgeon, I have to register my doubts that these questions merit the affirmative elaborations that they seem to presuppose. Any historical phenomenon merits its history being recorded and engaged. Anthropology has a history and so is a worthy subject of historiographical inquiry, and as Stocking amply demonstrated, a historiography that cannot legitimately be confined merely to its intellectually internal twists and turns.

The Charge of the Untimely

August 15, 2017 / Matthew Engelke

I came to HAN relatively late, 20 years after it got going. But there’s a sense in which the history of anthropology is always a belated field. I caught the bug as an undergraduate in two seminars with Stocking at Chicago— he was an inspiring, exacting teacher—and I pored over HAN, even subscribed to it, in the years to come. It had an obscure, retro charm, even then: the cover, which must have been mimeographed a hundred times; the stapled pages of typed-up and dot-matrix text. It was like a church circular from 1965, a decommissioned card-catalog entry, a zine, or an indie-label 45 to which only a few were privy.

Porous Borders

August 15, 2017 / Edna Suárez-Díaz

Now that borders and walls are so commonplace in our daily political discourse, a reflection on our (admittedly more benign) disciplinary boundaries seems timely. I came to the history of anthropology from an early focus on post-WWII evolutionary biology; encountering the particular mix of physical and cultural anthropology that underpinned post-revolutionary indigenista politics in Mexico necessarily led me to a disciplinary identity crisis. Continue reading

It’s Only the Science of Who We Are and Where We Came From

August 15, 2017 / Jonathan Marks

My training was in laboratory-based biological anthropology, but I was always interested in the (checkered) history of the field. So back in 1986, when I was a genetics post-doc at the University of California, Davis (during the first generation of DNA sequencing), I also co-taught a graduate anthropology seminar in the history of bio-anthropology.

Antiquarian Responsibilities

August 15, 2017 / Nathan Schlanger

If the truth be told, the exponential growth undergone by the history of archaeology over the past thirty years can only in part be attributed to the influence of G. W. Stocking and the History of Anthropology Newsletter—the revival of which is of course both timely and full of promise. The erstwhile debate as to whether the history of a given field (in the social sciences and humanities, at least) is best undertaken by its practitioners or by professional historians—besides raising questions as to what this “best” might possibly imply—proves rather less pertinent for a discipline such as archaeology that is, after all, an intrinsically historical one.

On Disciplines and Their Crises–Or, the Rise and Fall of Empires

August 15, 2017 / Helen Tilley

No less than epidemics or scientific facts, disciplinary crises are constructed. And just as a disease or a truth claim can also be real, so can a crisis. In all three cases, much depends on perspective and who is doing the defining. Few scholars today would contest, for instance, that anthropologists in the nineteen-sixties and seventies debated their profession’s politics and their discipline’s objects of study, or that these debates called into question tenets considered fundamental to the field (Kuklick 2008; Clifford 2005). As George Stocking put it in his original call to arms for the History of Anthropology Newsletter, anthropologists turned to historical analysis in part because of their shared “sense of disciplinary crisis.” From HAN’s brief “statement of purpose,” it was this casual yet confident emphasis on crisis that jumped out at me. Surely, this assertion needs some probing.

Rites of Passage

August 15, 2017 / John Tresch

When we editors of the History of Anthropology Newsletter refer to ourselves as “the HAN Dynasty,” we’re making a (bad) joke. But we have all felt the weighty presence of the ancestors. It was a strange and awful coincidence that HAN’s first two editors died in the first half of 2013: George Stocking after long preparation, Riki Kuklick with terrible suddenness.

Alexander Reshetov and the History of Russian Ethnography

July 22, 2017 / Elena V. Revunenkova / 1 Comment

Alexander Mikhailovich Reshetov (1932–2009) was a prominent Russian anthropologist and historian of anthropology. He authored more than 500 scientific publications dedicated to the culture of East and Southeast Asia, theoretical problems of ethnology, and the history of Russian ethnographic studies. He was a board member of the Association of Russian Ethnographers and Anthropologists for several years until 2007. Between 1994 and 2005 he organized panels on the history of Russian ethnography and anthropology during the Association’s biannual conferences, which drew hundreds of scholars. Reshetov filled many gaps in the history of Russian anthropology, saving many prominent ethnographers from oblivion and ensuring continuity of the Russian scholarly tradition. Continue reading

The Extended Archive, Vindicated

February 1, 2017 / Elizabeth Edwards

I remember the early days of HAN and the appearance of George Stocking’s foundational work—I still have my much-scribbled-on copies. It has been enormously gratifying to see the history of anthropology mature over the last few decades. For me, the way in which the visual and material have moved to the center of the analytical field is especially significant, because there appears to be an especially productive entanglement of visual, material, and historical studies within anthropology. Continue reading