The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association will be held in-person in New Orleans, LA from November 19-23, 2025.
The HAR News editors are pleased to share a selection of panels that may be of interest to our readers. Other panels and additional details can be found in the preliminary program.
NOTE: We have done our best to identify all relevant panels listed in the program, but if we have accidentally overlooked your session, please email news@histanthro.org and we will add it to this round-up as soon as possible!
Thursday, November 20
3521 “Beyond the Published Record: Collective Assemblages in the Afterlife of Fieldnotes”
8:30-10:00 AM
Organizer: Amina Tawasil, Teachers College, Columbia University, Department of International and Transcultural Studies; Aïsha Philippe, Teachers College, Columbia University, Department of International and Transcultural Studies
Presenter(s):
Rose Wellman, University of Michigan, Dearborn, Department of Behavioral Sciences, Cassie Smith, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology, Skylar Kaat , Amina Tawasil, Teachers College, Columbia University, Department of International and Transcultural Studies,
Esther Tinhoy Fan , Maria Pia Rios Macedo Opperman, Jennifer Van Tiem, University of Iowa
Discussant: Amina Tawasil, Teachers College, Columbia University, Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Aïsha Philippe, Teachers College, Columbia University, Department of International and Transcultural Studies
This roundtable discussion explores the significant but often invisible components of anthropological knowledge production: the fieldnotes, observations, and experiences that never make it into published academic work. These are experiences that are tactile, olfactory, visual, auditory and rhythmic in nature, and that we, along with our interlocutors, experience together and/or separately. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of collective assemblage, we propose to examine these “excess” materials not as discarded singular observations but as critical expressions of collective ethnographic engagement that continue to shape anthropological thought in unacknowledged ways. Participants in this roundtable will provide specific examples of how they have considered these unpublished materials-partial observations, affective responses, ethical challenges, methodological failures, and relational encounters-as existing within larger networks of anthropological knowledge production. Rather than treating these as discard or merely supplementary to “real” published work, we suggest they form essential components of the collective assemblage from which anthropological insights emerge. The roundtable will address several key questions: How do unpublished fieldnotes continue to inform our thinking and writing even when not explicitly cited? What epistemological and ethical implications arise from recognizing fieldnotes as expressions of collective forces rather than individual observations? How might digital archiving, collaborative fieldnote practices, or alternative publication venues create new possibilities for these materials? What methodological innovations might emerge from centering rather than marginalizing these “excess” components of fieldwork? How do these unpublished materials carry affective and relational dimensions of fieldwork that published work often cannot accommodate? What connections, if any, exist between these considerations and the work of decolonizing ethnographic practices? We then consider the dissemination of these in multimodal forms such as zines, graphic novels, collages, sketches, paintings, podcasts, soundbytes, exhibits, and short films. By reconceptualizing fieldnotes as part of a collective assemblage rather than as individual intellectual property, we hope to generate new conversations about anthropological knowledge production, research ethics, and the politics of academic publishing.
2752 Desiring Ghosts
08:30-10:00 AM
Organizer: Joshua Babcock, Brown University, Department of Anthropology
Presenter(s):
Amanda Brock Morales, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, Department of Anthropology, Annalisa Heppner, Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University
Anthropology is haunted. Our disciplinary ghosts continue to linger despite decades of ritual exorcisms aimed at decolonization, recapturing, reinvention, or renewed responsibility. But what if the ghosts don’t linger because we haven’t found the right formulae to release them from this plane of reality? What if they remain because we desire our ghosts-and they desire us back?
This roundtable explores what is at stake in our individual and collective desires for the very ghosts we desperately wish (or claim to wish) to no longer stalk our halls. We do not seek to enact yet another ritual exorcism; neither is it a retelling of the importance of anthropological hauntology-the anthropological study of ghosts and experiences of being haunted-though this work is important here, too (Good, Chiovenda, and Rahimi 2022; see also Fischer 2014; Strong 2021). Instead, we will explore how the incomplete project of a decolonizing anthropology (Harrison 1995; Jobson 2016; Bolles 2023) across subfields is repeatedly stymied by the hauntings we collectively fear, resent, and loathe, but cannot bear to see leave, from the persistence of the discipline’s raciolinguistic uncanny (Rosa and Flores 2020) to colonial and imperial inheritances in archaeology and biological anthropology. We end not with a hauntological roll-call or litany of the ghostly presences from which to rid ourselves, but by reflecting together on the question: how does anthropology move beyond naming disciplinary ghosts and shift to helping them cross over as an act of resistance and collective liberation?
4313 Ghosts in Our Classrooms: A Roundtable on Teaching Anthropology
8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Organizer: Christopher Lowman, University of California, Irvine, Department of Anthropology; Katherine Kinkopf, Cal Poly Pomona, Department of Geography and Anthropology
Presenter(s):
Angela Jenks, John Millhauser, North Carolina State University, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Trent Trombley, Augustana University, Christian Doll, North Carolina State University, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Alisha Winn, Prerna Srigyan, Margaret Tebbe, University of California, Irvine
Discussant: Christopher Lowman, University of California, Irvine, Department of Anthropology; Katherine Kinkopf, Cal Poly Pomona, Department of Geography and Anthropology
What are the “ghosts” in the classrooms where we teach anthropology? This roundtable discussion will focus on what haunts our teaching from both the past and present. We will examine our experiences dealing with disciplinary traditions, institutional memories, and the chains of intellectual citation that entangle our teaching with theories, words, and anthropologists from centuries past. We will also discuss the previous experiences of instructors and students and the myths and misconceptions about our subjects. Through this, we will consider how the opportunities and uncertainties of the world outside the university impact our approach to course design and encourage creativity in our classrooms and the other sometimes ephemeral places where we find ourselves teaching. Together, we will share how these ghosts inform our pedagogy and how we continue to embrace or challenge them in our teaching.
2828 Moving Beyond Ghosting and Gaslighting: Anthropological Histories That Matter
8:30-10:00 AM
Organizer: Rick Feinberg, Kent State University
Chair: Rick Feinberg, Kent State University
Presenter(s):
Robert Ulin, Rochester Institute of Technology, Fadwa El Guindi, University of California, Los Angeles, Margaret LeCompte, University of Colorado, Boulder, Herbert Lewis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Jim Weil, Science Museum of Minnesota
Boas and his followers envisioned anthropology as a holistic discipline, drawing from the natural and social sciences as well as from the humanities. Their objective was to forge a comprehensive understanding of humanity in the hope that such an understanding would help solve a host of social problems that had grown out of racism, colonialism, exploitation, xenophobia, and warfare. Since then, anthropology has faced enormous challenges, both from within and outside of the discipline. Many 20th century anthropologists perceived themselves as leaders in the battle against racism and imperialism. By the end of the century, however, “post-modernist” critics often dismissed “science” as an ethnocentric construct, while “scientific anthropologists” condemned their humanistically-inclined colleagues as subjective and devoid of methodological rigor. In the 21st century, these divides have widened, sometimes mapping across generational and cultural lines. One critique, coming from oppressed and disenfranchised groups as well as their activist-inspired allies, accuses our intellectual ancestors of complicity with the very evils against which they believed themselves to have been fighting. Colleagues responding to these critiques often express alarm at what they view as radical presentism. The critics, they contend, are blind to the historical trajectory of a field that centered upon social justice but whose objective was differently realized in different global and temporal contexts. External challenges are still more extreme, as politicians accuse social scientists of being “radical” or “woke” for their commitment to diversity and equity. Several US states have outlawed “DEI,” and President Trump has ordered the dismantling of all such federal initiatives. In addition, social sciences face opposition owing to their purported irrelevance in preparing students for employment opportunities. One consequence of these attacks has been to scale back–and sometimes eliminate–anthropology programs throughout the US. This raises the question of what our discipline will look like, or if it will exist at all, in coming decades. Our session will present a critical examination of anthropology’s history, both long-term and recent, as well as the discipline’s future contours. The papers in this session will not create ghosts of intellectual and activist ancestors, whose work was situated in very different times, nor will they gaslight current anthropologists who–despite the valuable work of generations past–argue for a present rethinking as we strive to open future doors.
4378 Community-Based Research: Grappling with Ghosts of Research Past, Present, and Future
10:15 AM-11:45 AM
Organizer: Alysa Handelsman, Wofford College, Sociology and Anthropology Department
Presenter(s): Rachael Goodman, Mercer University, Department of International and Global Studies, Claire Menck , Ankita Chandranath , Malvya Chintakindi , Justin Helepololei, Colgate University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Sofya Shahab , Hema Ganapathy Coleman, University of Toronto
Discussant: Alysa Handelsman, Wofford College, Sociology and Anthropology Department
How have ghostly legacies of research past influenced the ways we currently practice and envision collaborative and participatory ethnographic research? As ethnographers deeply engaged in community-based participatory research in the U.S., Canada, India, Iraq, and Ecuador, we will discuss the development or our methods and methodologies across distinct cultural contexts — often in response to research’s haunted past. Methods like photovoice, participatory mapping, and community walks demonstrate our efforts to resist spectral legacies of research and forge a collaborative ethnographic practice that promotes diverse ways of building rapport, sharing stories, and making research matter. From designing mutually beneficial service-learning trips to connect college students with an Indian NGO, to long-term studies of community food systems, affordable housing, and jails in U.S. cities, to accompanying Yezidi women in publishing auto-ethnographic research, our roundtable participants will share strategies to confront disciplinary specters along with our challenges and missteps along the way. Trust is difficult to build and easy to lose, and this roundtable creates space for candid discussion about the significance of community-based research and the ongoing, unfinished nature inherent in collaborative research within a haunted discipline. How, for example, do you build collaborative research relationships with communities who have been historically treated as test subjects by researchers? How can you work collaboratively with a community whose neighborhoods were demolished for the expansion of the very university you represent? How do you navigate a shift in your role from a UNHCR employee determining refugee status to a researcher focused on statelessness and institutional humanitarian work? Not only are we ethnographers, but we are also professors, (former) NGO employees, and members of local committees and initiatives. We will discuss how our positioning within the university system and within the communities where we work influences how we learn and how we collaborate. What is our role as engaged anthropologists? What do people expect of us, and what do we expect of ourselves? How are we co-constructing research agendas, and how do we ensure our work leads to impacts defined by our community partners? Finally, how do we navigate current political and institutional challenges with our partners while reflecting together on the future of community-centered research?
8008 Disturbing the Ghosts: Un(der) questioned assumptions, ideas, and practice in human evolutionary studies
10:15-11:45 AM
Section Organizer: Adam Van Arsdale, Wellesley College, Department of Anthropology
Chair: Adam Van Arsdale, Wellesley College, Department of Anthropology
Presenter(s): Adam Van Arsdale, Wellesley College, Department of Anthropology, John Hawks, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Department of Anthropology, Sheela Athreya, Texas A&M University, College Station, Department of Anthropology, Marc Kissel, Appalachian State University, Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Discussant: Adam Van Arsdale, Wellesley College, Department of Anthropology
Paleoanthropologists, geneticists, and archaeologists are often primarily focused on the study and understanding of empirical data to better understand the human past. In studies of our evolutionary past, the legacies of both historical practice and theory often lie unacknowledged and unexamined beneath many contemporary debates within the field. This session will dig up some of these ideas and explore the potential consequences for how we study and understand our evolutionary past today. For example, how have colonial practices of paleoanthropology shaped the trajectory of the composition of the fossil record and its understanding? How have prominent ideas become ingrained as baseline starting points of analysis, rather than as hypotheses subject to continual scrutiny? How have institutions themselves served as legacy bodies that shape careers, research agendas, and practice? This session is intended to open the floor for questions that are, at least today, seldom questioned within the field. The aim is not to provide clear or concise answers to these questions, but rather to explore the potential consequence of our reluctance to pay attention to these implicit biases, practices, and ideas.
2657 Excavating museum pasts, trekking pathways forward: ghosts in the proverbial museum closet
10:15-11:45 AM
Organizer: Amanda Sorensen, University of Maryland, College Park
Chair: Amanda Sorensen, University of Maryland, College Park
Presenter(s): Christina Hodge, Brown University, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, JayneLeigh Thomas, Indiana University, Bloomington, Amanda Sorensen, University of Maryland, College Park, Sara Ann Knutson, University of British Columbia, Christopher Smith, University of British Columbia, Department of Anthropology
Museums and archives have checkered pasts that we have long endeavored to thwart and redirect in our practice and scholarship. This session explores contemporary approaches to working with historical collections, colonial legacies, and a variety of challenging museum histories, attending to the accompanying ideologies, power dynamics, and absences that have shaped museum pasts and also shaped how we react to them moving forward. Session presentations will examine repatriation, community-based research, museum and archival information practices, and collecting histories. Broadly, this panel will engage a few key questions: how do museum pasts continue to haunt contemporary museum and archival practices? And how do we respond?
1946 Possessed by the Past: Institutional Perspectives on the Contemporary Relevance of the History of Anthropology (Part I)
12:45-2:15 PM
Organizer: Nicholas Barron, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Department of Anthropology, Grant Arndt, Iowa State University, Department of Anthropology
Presenter(s): Cameron Brinitzer, Harvard University, Adrianna Link , Ira Bashkow, University of Virginia, Department of Anthropology, Rosanna Dent , Christine Laurière, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Fabiana Dimpflmeier
Discussant: Nicholas Barron, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Department of Anthropology, Grant Arndt, Iowa State University, Department of Anthropology
The history of anthropology as a field of scholarly inquiry gained formal recognition with the 1962 Social Science Research Council’s Conference on the History of Anthropology-a watershed moment that linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes described as a “definite shift [affecting] the interests and fortunes of all anthropologists” (Hymes 1962, 25). Six decades later, the History of Anthropology Network (HOAN) organized the First International Conference on the Histories of Anthropologies (2023), focusing on “the methodological and theoretical, pedagogical, and ethical aspects of the histories of anthropologies” with an eye toward building a “sustainable global community of historians of anthropologies.” This expanding global interest in anthropology’s histories has emerged alongside renewed calls for disciplinary reinvention in the United States, exemplified by Akhil Gupta and Jesse Stoolman’s much discussed “Decolonizing US Anthropology” (2022). Such calls depict anthropology’s past as haunting the present in consequential ways-a haunting so profound that some argue for radical solutions, as in Ryan Cecil Jobson’s call to “let anthropology burn.” This stance has sparked debate about the utility of disciplinary history and how to reckon with its ghosts. While many argue that the discipline remains possessed by its past, requiring exorcism as a necessary step to realize a more just and liberatory anthropology, Herbert Lewis offers a prominent counterpoint, arguing that while “the moral center and the concerns of the discipline have changed… It does not follow…that the anthropology of half a century ago and more impedes the work of current anthropology” (2023, 182), and that other uses of the history of anthropology are possible.
This roundtable brings together representatives from key institutions shaping the history of anthropology including HOAN; the History of Anthropology Working Group of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; BEROSE: International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology; the History of Anthropology Review; the Histories of Anthropology Annual; the American Philosophical Society; and the AAA’s History of Anthropology Interest Group. Through their institutional perspectives, we examine a central question that persists in both anthropology and the history of anthropology: what is the relevance of anthropological history for contemporary practice? While not a new question, examining it through the lens of these contemporary institutions offers fresh insight into the field’s past trajectories, current state, and future directions.
3857 Anthropology’s Ghosts: Ethics, Power, and Pedagogy in Departments of Anthropology
12:45-2:15 PM
Organizer: Karen-Sue Taussig, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Department of Anthropology, Anand Pandian, Johns Hopkins University, Department of Anthropology
Presenter(s): John Hawks, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Department of Anthropology, Stacie King, Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Anthropology, Rebecca Lester, Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Anthropology, Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania, Roberto Gonzalez, San Jose State University, Department of Anthropology, Juliet McMullin
Discussant: Karen-Sue Taussig, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Department of Anthropology, Anand Pandian, Johns Hopkins University, Department of Anthropology
This Town Hall explores how anthropology is haunted by the past–the legacies of our field’s institutions, the ghosts of anthropology–and how we grapple with such a haunting as we work to shape the future of the discipline. Events of the past several years and months have upended settled practices in anthropology, disorienting understandings of education and intellectual pursuits across academia. As we try to regain our bearings after witnessing the spectacle of an attempted coup; the urgency of Black Lives Matter activism in the context of global pandemic shut down; the rise of right wing nationalism; and authoritarian modes of governance with deep consequence for higher education, scientific research, and civil rights, we are called to reimagine a more engaged, humane, and liberatory vision of anthropology both as a scholarly discipline and as a professional institution. The proposed Town Hall will be the culmination of a year of conversations in which 39 current and former anthropology department chairs, from public and private institutions across the U.S. and from Brazil and South Africa, share experiences of leadership and think collectively about the role, responsibility, and future of anthropology departments at this historical moment. Funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, this initiative has been structured to strategize about the specific responsibilities department chairs may bear in reconceptualizing pedagogy, power, and ethics in this arena. This work aims to think comparatively and holistically to address the positions and experiences (e.g. minoritized, raced, gendered, regional, transnational, historical) of all members of our academic and larger communities, including the geographic spaces where our institutions are located and those in which we conduct research but especially adjuncts, pre-tenure faculty, students, and students and scholars from the global south. Many ghosts require continued confrontation: the specter of biological racism and eugenics; collections that deserve repatriation; gendered and racialized opportunities; the lure of corporate research funding despite likely strings attached. This Town Hall brings our conversation to the wider membership of the AAA to consider: what are the various responsibilities and opportunities for each of us, as anthropologists and as academics, as we confront the challenges of this moment from our varied vantages and positions of power, with uneven access to resources? What may be learned–about this cultural moment, and about anthropology–by viewing the contemporary academy, and the state of anthropology within and beyond the academy, through the lens of anthropological critique?
4960 Friendships that Haunt: On the Relationships that Hide Within Ethnographic Texts 12:45-2:15 PM
Organizer: Katharine Lindquist , Sana Malik, Emory University
Presenter(s): Nadine Fernandez, SUNY – State University of New York System, Angela Storey, University of Louisville, Department of Anthropology, Sophia Balakian, George Mason University, Adeem Suhail, Franklin & Marshall College, Department of Anthropology, Hazal Hurman, Princeton University
Discussant: Katharine Lindquist , Sana Malik, Emory University
The figure of the “key informant” has been a long used trope in literature on ethnography as a method. From the controversies over Margaret Mead’s potential over-reliance on a certain interlocutor to the new momentum around the practice of “co-theorizing,” the presence of specific interlocutors in ethnographic texts is a topic of perennial debate in anthropology. This roundtable discusses the role of friendships made in the process of ethnographic research and where they surface (and don’t) in the practice of ethnographic representation. How do certain relationships that both center around and exceed the bounds of “interlocutor” show up in the process of analysis and what are the ways in which we can and should represent these relationships in text? What are the consequences of concealing the nature of friendship in the ethnographic process and what are the potentials of revealing it? How do recent approaches to “co-theorizing” and “collaboration” account for, use, or side step friendship as a mode of relatedness? This roundtable seeks to continue ongoing conversations about the messiness of the relationships made in the process of ethnographic inquiry, while also acknowledging the unique potential this messiness offers to ethnography as a method and form. This panel will be run as a roundtable, attempting to model an ethic of friendship. Presenters will be asked to share their own reflections on the roundtable prompt, followed by a facilitated and dynamic discussion with other panelists and audience members.
7829 What ideas do: Celebrating James Ferguson
12:45-2:15 PM
Organizer: Esteban Salmon Perrilliat, Stanford University, Department of Anthropology
Presenter(s): Austin Zeiderman, London School of Economics, Dean Chahim, New York University, Kevin O’Neill , Robert Samet, Union College, Department of Anthropology, Vivian Chenxue Lu, Rice University, Department of Anthropology
Discussant: Esteban Salmon Perrilliat, Stanford University, Department of Anthropology
This roundtable brings together anthropologists influenced by Jim Ferguson to reflect on how his distinctive approach to social theory, history, and ethnography continues to shape us. Much of Jim’s teaching and scholarship asks, “What do ideas do? What real social effects do they have?” (1995, xv). By examining the underlying concepts that permeate the foundations of social science and the potential interventions stemming from them, Jim was a model for generations of anthropologists. We invite everyone who has been shaped by Jim’s work to come together and commemorate his vibrant influence.
1969 Curiosity: Anthropology and/after Ian Hacking
2:30-4:00 PM
Organizer: David Henig
Presenter(s): Michael Lambek, University of Toronto, Department of Anthropology, Talia DanCohen, Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Anthropology, Tanya Luhrmann, Stanford University, Department of Anthropology, Stephan Palmié, University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology, Roy Grinker, George Washington University, Department of Anthropology
Discussant: David Henig
It has become a commonplace for anthropologists to draw inspiration from philosophy. This traffic of ideas have only rarely worked the other way round. There are some exceptions, most notably Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. And then, there is Ian Hacking. Hacking was a versatile thinker and a prolific writer covering a wide range of topics. As he explained in several interviews, what tied together these diverse topics was his curiosity. “Curiosities for the Ingenious” is also the motto of one of his books. In his oeuvre, Hacking was inexhaustibly curious about anthropology. Throughout his life, he was in an extended conversation and collaboration with numerous anthropologists, while drawing on their work, ranging from Mary Douglas, Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, Paul Rabinow, Michael Lambek and Scott Atran to name a few. This roundtable is the first systematic attempt to interrogate Ian Hacking’s lasting and ingenious curiosity about anthropology. In turn, drawing on this curiosity and the themes Hacking explored (including biosociality, classifications, language and incommensurability, laboratory science, making up people, memory, probability, styles of reasoning), it asks: What might an Ian Hacking inspired curious anthropology look like?
3787 From Bodies to Objects with/out Value
2:30-4:00 PM
Organizer: Lai Wo, Elif Irem Az, Harvard University
Chair: Lai Wo, Elif Irem Az, Harvard University
Presenter(s): Elif Irem Az, Harvard University, Lai Wo, Anamaria Berbec-Chiritoiu, Uppsala University, Devika Singh Shekhawat, Cornell University, Ping-hsiu Lin
Discussant: Lai Wo, Elif Irem Az, Harvard University
In early anthropological collections, categories such as “tool,” “ritual,” and “weapon” came to define the relationships between humans, matter, and technology. However, the presumed boundaries between the social and technical dissipate as we delve further ethnographically and historically into the histories of bodies and earthly matter. Drawing inspiration from, while also challenging, Mauss’s proposition that “the body is man’s first and most natural instrument” (1937:75), this panel examines the body not just in terms of aptitude, technique, and habituation, but also through its materiality, valuation, and objectification. In an era of automated technology replacing manufacturing, service, and clerical labor, bodies themselves become doubly eclipsed as they are technologized and reduced to the capacity of their labor, particularly within informal, agrarian, and extractive economies. How do bodies and earthly matter traverse the boundary between subject and technical object, acquiring or losing value through processes of commodification and labor extraction? Under what conditions might the materiality of labor come to coalesce with the materiality of bodies? These questions become increasingly urgent as we witness the abstraction of human capacities into technical functions, mirroring the historical processes of the commodification of enslaved persons into fungible objects. Our papers examine the transformative processes of the devaluation of bodies and (dis)abilities to the construction of value in matter and objects. We aim to spark a conversation about how different types of matter are involved in value systems that blur the traditional divide between human subjects and objects.
1880 Possessed by the Past: Histories of Anthropology and Contemporary Practice (Part 2)
2:30-4:00 PM
Organizer: Grant Arndt, Iowa State University, Department of Anthropology, Nicholas Barron, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Department of Anthropology
Chair: Grant Arndt, Iowa State University, Department of Anthropology, Nicholas Barron, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Department of Anthropology
Presenter(s): Robert Hancock, University of Victoria, Department of Anthropology, Matthew Watson, Mount Holyoke College, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, John Tresch, University of London, Hande Birkalan-Gedik, Frederico Rosa
At the 1962 Social Science Research Council’s Conference on the History of Anthropology, Dell Hymes observed that anthropologists felt discomfort when they encountered historians’ perspectives on their discipline. This unease, he noted, stemmed from anthropologists’ attachment to their own narratives of “origin, nature, and destiny”-narratives that would come to haunt the discipline in unexpected ways. When historians of anthropology presented their findings as “historical topics,” anthropologists tend to translate them into “substantive contemporary issues.” This tension between historical research and disciplinary self-understanding, which Hymes hoped could be resolved through “objective control over our use of our history,” has only intensified in recent decades. Hymes suggested that historians’ perspectives on anthropology were particularly jarring to anthropologists because their own historical narratives were largely self-affirming. The tensions that resulted spurred George Stocking toward his influential insistence on rigorous historicism in the history of anthropology. Yet Stocking came to recognize, partly through Hymes’ influence, that while anthropologists inevitably approach their past through present concerns, an “enlightened presentism” was possible-one that could both critique the past and recover its unrealized possibilities. This dual approach to disciplinary history-as both critique and resource-remains vital as anthropology grapples with its ghosts. Similar methodological tensions have emerged across various national traditions, as seen in European ethnology’s struggle to establish a new identity distinct from Nazi science, or in the complex negotiations between colonial-era anthropological knowledge and postcolonial reckonings in many regions. The 1962 conference emerged when, as Hymes noted, American anthropology was “flushed with success”-expanding enrollments, multiplying jobs, and increasing funding marked an era of disciplinary confidence in the United States. Today’s landscape, as Ira Bashkow observes, is radically different: “we no longer live in a world where the value and institutional viability of anthropology itself can be taken for granted.” The discipline finds itself possessed by both doubt and possibility-some call for radical breaks with the past, while others seek to reassess it whether by reading the classics with new lenses or by recovering alternative traditions and forgotten insights from the archives. By taking the Hymes-Stocking controversy as a starting point for exploring analogous or contrasting debates in multiple settings, this panel invites papers that explore how historical research can productively engage anthropology’s diverse past in ways that inform its present and future.
6308 Spirit Matters: Ghosts and Hauntings in the Museum
2:30-4:00 PM
Organizer: Pascale Boucicaut, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Anthropology, Joshua Bell, Smithsonian Institution (NMNH)
Presenter(s): Charlotte Williams , Dorothy Lippert, Smithsonian Institution (Repatriation Office), Rosemary Joyce, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Anthropology
Discussant: Pascale Boucicaut, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Anthropology, Joshua Bell, Smithsonian Institution (NMNH)
Scholarly work on ghosts and hauntings has tended to overemphasize analyses of belief. Far less scholarship has engaged with ghostly phenomena directly. Are ghosts and hauntings necessarily immaterial? In this roundtable, researchers and museum practitioners at diverse career stages consider spectral matter, which we encounter in the form of cultural materials, faunal and botanical remains, and human ancestors resting in museum collections. We invite each presenter to contribute a spectral encounter, be it with a known entity or cultural presence from the past that reveals itself in the present. In a time when the politics of recognition of ghosts and haunting has become increasingly contested in the US, this round table contributes to the wider re-envisioning of museums as spaces of plurality, transformation and healing. How do these presences impact the ways we learn and the knowledge we produce about objects, belongings, communities, and heritage? What are our stewardship responsibilities to them and to their living associates? What happens in museums when we begin to open up our practices of stewardship to these different understandings and presences?
6860 UnCanon: Unsettling Anthropological Theory
2:30-4:00 PM
Organizer: Amy Moran-Thomas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Anthropology, Adia Benton, Northwestern University, Department of Anthropology
Presenter(s): Adia Benton, Northwestern University, Department of Anthropology, Amy MoranThomas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Anthropology, Jocelyn Chua, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Department of Anthropology, Thurka Sangaramoorthy, American University, Department of Anthropology, Andrew McDowell, Tulane University, Department of Anthropology
Discussant: Amy Moran-Thomas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Anthropology, Adia Benton, Northwestern University, Department of Anthropology
The past is alive in the present, and anthropology’s disciplinary ancestors are no exception. This panel selectively revisits an assembly of relatively useful excerpts from anthropology’s inherited canons, while also punching holes in their parameters and wrestling with their colonial contexts and other ghosts. Contributors were invited to think in relation to, and beyond, a specific text of their choosing from the history of anthropology (however they define it). In some cases, the historical essays that panelists selected may have been relatively overlooked in their time, often for familiar reasons that merit ongoing attention. In other cases, authors might choose to return to a particular text from inherited canons with fresh questions in mind, interrogating what they still find useful for contemporary social theory and living struggles today. Each panelist will reflect on related questions: what do they find useful in whatever text they chose for fresh thinking ahead? What compromised contexts and uneasy aspects need to be kept in mind? What recent writing or ongoing conceptual dilemmas in anthropology would they place the text in dialogue with? Reflections include revisiting E. E. Evans-Pritchard to grapple with the first outbreak of Ebola in Azandeland, paired with Eslanda Robeson’s travels in South Sudan (Benton); rereading early literary ethnography alongside Rachel Carson’s largely forgotten interactions with her contemporaries in anthropology, and the questions raised by these exchanges for putting anthropological writing and structuralism in conversation with structural violence frameworks (Moran-Thomas); revisiting Sidney Mintz’s work on sugar (and the rejoinders of his critics) to trace the kinds of politics that emerge along one chemical’s commodity chain in the Caribbean across time (Agard-Jones); rethinking with Émile Durkheim’s “On Suicide” to grapple with confinement and constraint against suicide in war among enlisted soldiers in the US military today (Chua); returning to “How Institutions Think” and foundational anthropological theories about institutions, in a moment marked by institutional erosion in US science and medicine on the global stage (Sangaramoorthy); and revisiting questions of class with entanglement theory and James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” at the mouth of the Mississippi River (McDowell). Each contributor will highlight suggested pages and historical excerpts they are thinking through/with/against in attempts to wrestle with contemporary dilemmas–offering fresh reworkings and adding to collective resources for teaching, relearning, and rethinking histories of anthropological theory and writing and their many possible uncanons
5394 Epidemic Endings and Afterlives
4:15-5:45 PM
Organizer: K. Eliza Williamson, Duke University, Vinicius Cardoso Reis
Chair: K. Eliza Williamson, Duke University, Vinicius Cardoso Reis
Presenter(s): Vinicius Cardoso Reis, K. Eliza Williamson, Duke University, Jean Segata, Daniel Krugman, Brown University, Department of Anthropology, Mary Knipper, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Department of Anthropology
Discussant: K. Eliza Williamson, Duke University, Vinicius Cardoso Reis
Epidemics and pandemics are dynamic social, political, and biological processes with layered temporalities and unequal impacts. Viewed as emergencies requiring urgent responses from individuals, scientists, governments, and global health agencies, epidemics are often narrativized as exceptional moments that demand resolution for normalcy to return. From this viewpoint, life is divided between crisis and aftermath. But the boundaries between the two are often blurry in practice. Medical anthropologists have tracked the extended implications of epidemics, offering a holistic perspective on how they arise and endure in social, political, legal, and medical worlds (Fassin 2007; Lynteris 2014). We know that epidemics are produced and shaped by social, political, economic, technological, and environmental factors operating in conjunction and over the long term (Kelly, Keck & Lynteris 2019). While anthropologists have attended to epidemic risk and preparedness (Lakoff 2017), and while the Covid-19 pandemic has inspired much scholarship on life during the pandemic, much less anthropological attention has been paid to epidemic endings and aftermaths. This session asks: How do past epidemics haunt the present? How “past” are they, and for whom? This session builds on important work in anthropology, history, and disability studies to examine how epidemics endure beyond the confines of their officially declared beginnings and endings. We turn an ethnographic lens to what, and who, endures after others have moved on. How do patients, families, caregivers, practitioners, scientists, bureaucrats, and others navigate life in the aftermath of epidemics? How and why do people contest the endings of epidemics, and what kinds of biological communities does such contestation produce? What socialities and temporalities dissipate, emerge, or intensify in the wake of officially declared epidemic endings? Each of the papers addresses these questions through ethnographic attention to various epidemics, places, and temporal frames. By situating epidemic endings and aftermaths in particular historical and ethnographic context, this session advances conversations about what it means to live on in the wake of epidemics.
Friday, November 21
2683 What Remains? Legacies of the Anthropological Skeleton
08:30-10:00 AM
Chair: Matthew Rossi, University of Chicago
Presenter(s): Isis Dwyer, University of Florida, Han Jiang, Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Anthropology, Matthew Rossi, University of Chicago, Iris Clever, Lisette Jong, University of Amsterdam
Discussant: Matthew Rossi, University of Chicago
Bones are one of the most salient images popularly associated with anthropology – this despite contested histories of skeletal collecting, typological racialization, and the siloing of osteological subfields within the discipline. At the same time, anthropological practitioners and ideas continue to shape understandings of the human skeleton across a vast breadth of locations, from archaeological excavations to disaster sites to investigations of mass atrocity, homicide, and suspicious death, not to mention fictional representations based on them. The histories and practices around the anthropology of the skeleton thus circulate and manifest in unexpected ways and places. Based on the principle that cross-field collaboration, rather than increasing isolation, is necessary to address this array of legacies and institutions, this panel brings together scholars from bioarchaeology, sociocultural anthropology, forensic anthropology, the history of science, and science and technology studies. Across a variety of contexts, we ask: how do the afterlives of twentieth-century anthropology mold the way in which bones are talked about, physically treated, and enrolled in intellectual and political projects? This set of concerns responds to critiques that the dividing line between anthropology and biology has never been clean or complete (Viswewaran 1998). They are especially crucial following new changes to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act last year, showing that what it means to ethically engage with, and work toward repair for, practices of dispossession remains fraught with problems of implementation and political will. And because anthropological orientations to the human skeleton and its evolution have been key to pedagogical approaches in the discipline, bones have been employed in (re)producing anthropological knowledge inside the classroom as well as outside of it (Colwell and Rutherford 2025). In thinking across historical, theoretical, and practical approaches to the anthropology of the human skeleton and its uptake, this panel opens space for new perspectives on a topic with a long (and ever-present) past.
5649 Diagrams in anthropology: haunting the canon? Exploring critiques and possibilities of diagrammatic work
10:15-11:45 AM
Organizer: Tristan Partridge, University of California, Santa Barbara, Nick Seaver, Tufts University Presenter(s): Allison Holt , Natan Diacon-Furtado , Nick Seaver, Tufts University, Tristan Partridge, University of California, Santa Barbara Discussant: Tristan Partridge, University of California, Santa Barbara, Nick Seaver, Tufts University
Diagrams appeared in some of the earliest works of anthropology and are still frequently used across the discipline today. This persistence alone warrants attention, especially since certain diagrammatic forms have remained largely unchanged over many decades. Given this longevity, studying diagrams is a way to engage with the disciplinary history of anthropology itself, as in the recent book “Burning Diagrams in Anthropology” (punctum 2024). While other visual components of anthropological work – especially photography, cartography, and film – have been subject to significant critical scrutiny, diagrams have received far less reflexive attention. What are the ethical, political, or epistemological implications of these gaps? What have been – and what might be – the roles that diagrams perform in anthropological work, e.g. the diagram as method, as representational technique, as conceptual tool? This Roundtable conversation will explore how practitioners across diverse fields enliven, enact, extend, and inhabit diagrammatic work – pointing towards potential futures for (re)visualizing relational, conceptual, and social worlds.
3002 (The George Stocking Jr. Symposium) The New Negro @ 100: Anthropology and The Anthology that Catapulted a Movement
Start Date: 11/21/2025 10:15 AM through 11/21/2025 11:45 AM
Venue: Sheraton Room: Napoleon BR B1 (3rd fl)
Type: Oral Presentation Session
In 1925 Alain Locke published the “The New Negro,” which brought together artists and social scientists of the emerging Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro movement. Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Fauset, and Melville Herskovits all made contributions. Elsie Clews Parsons, The Hampton Folklore Society, and the “Journal of American Folk-Lore” were routinely cited, and Franz Boas and American Anthropology heavily influenced each. For the first time, anthropology was used to celebrate, explore, and describe African American culture as distinctive, specific, beautiful, and rooted to an African past. These papers directly or indirectly interrogate how anthropology was positioned as an academic discipline in the 1920s as a liberating discipline that showcased, celebrated, and interrogated Black culture and folklore — pioneering the anthropology of diasporic cultures and performances today.
Section: Association of Black Anthropologists
Organizer: Lee D Baker, Duke University, Department of Cultural Anthropology
Chair: Lee D Baker, Duke University, Department of Cultural Anthropology
Presenter(s): Lee D Baker, Duke University, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Riché Barnes, University of Florida, Department of Anthropology, Kimberly Simmons, University of South Carolina, Kamela Heyward-Rotimi, Knowledge Exchange Research Group (K.E.R.G.), Jason Vasser- Elong, Alexis Holloway, Duke University, Department of Cultural Anthropology
Discussant: Lee D Baker, Duke University, Department of Cultural Anthropology
Presentation(s): Beyond B’rer Rabit: Arthur Fauset and Scientific Folklore
Arthur Huff Fauset wrote “American Negro Fok Literature” as his chapter in Alain Locke’s anthology. He argued that Folklore must be collected and analyzed systematically and scientifically, not left to the literary amateur. Beyond critiquing amateurs, he specifically challenges Joel Chandler Harris who “assumes to interpret Negro character instead of simply telling his stories. The result is a composite picture of the ante-bellum Negro that fits exactly into the conception of the type of Negro which so many white people would like to think once existed.” This paper will explore Fauset’s contribution to the volume as well as his critique of “entertaining” interpretations of Negro Folklore, and his collection of stories from “Cugo” [sic.] Lewis,” who becomes Zora Neale Hurston’s informant in “Baracoon.”
Presenter(s): Lee D Baker
Zora Neale Hurston’s Interpretation of New Negro Womanhood
As the editor of The New Negro: An Interpretation, Alain Locke shaped the themes that would undergird Black cosmopolitanism and Black modernism, and he wrote the script for what became known as the Harlem Renaissance. Locke’s vision for the emergence of the New Negro meant the birth of a new set of ideas. One of those was that African American life had moved away from aggressive emulation of White American values toward the search for an alternative, healthy, more self-accepting value system.
Only six out of thirty-five authors in Alain Locke’s The New Negro were women. While only seventeen percent of the content, the inclusion of Black women in this volume was an important testament to Locke’s commitment to Black women’s position within new imaginings of the race. One, Zora Neale Hurston, is probably the most well-known of those women and one of two anthropologists.
I argue that while we hear a great deal about Hurston’s work with Boas as important to her development as a folklorist, ethnographer, and author, being published in The New Negro, and mentored by Alain Locke who also had a patron relationship with Charlotte Osgood Mason and introduced Hurston and Hughes to “the Godmother” also plays an important role that has not been fully explored. Centering Zora Neale Hurston’s biography and her reoccurring themes on Black love, male-female relationships, and gender norms across class, this paper interrogates Hurston’s “New Black womanhood.”
Presenter(s): Riché Barnes
Anthropology and the Harlem Renaissance: The New Negro and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk”
Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Spunk” represents a significant contribution to Alain Locke’s landmark anthology, The New Negro (1925), which helped define the Harlem Renaissance. What makes Hurston’s work particularly distinctive is how she infused her literary output with her anthropological training and field research.
Through a close reading of “Spunk,” with African American culture in mind, this paper highlights specific ethnographic approaches – linguistic preservation, participant-observer perspective, and documentation of folk epistemologies – that transformed rural Black cultural expression from object of study to subject of artistic and cultural legitimacy. It can be argued that Hurston’s fiction established an early model of merging insider cultural knowledge with rigorous anthropological approaches. A complete understanding of The New Negro’s century-long impact compels us to acknowledge Hurston’s groundbreaking methodological contributions demonstrating how her fiction, enhanced by anthropological approaches, helped create the intellectual framework that supported the cultural, political, and artistic ambitions of the Harlem Renaissance.
Presenter(s): Kimberly Simmons
Records of Existence: Arturo Schomburg Documenting Black Diasporic Cultures
Alain Locke presented the historic critical record of diasporic cultures, “The New Negro,” as a corrective to early 20th century narratives of Black lives—in so doing, shifted the discourse on Black cultures. The New Negro also marks larger discussions around Black representation in the historical record and scholarship of the twentieth century. Archivist, curator, writer, and historian Arturo Schomburg contributed a chapter addressing his dedication to collecting and curating artifacts and studies from anthropology and other disciplines to document a historically accurate record of Black people. Schomburg’s work signals the significant movement of, but not limited to, Black scholars, activists, archivists, writers, and poets of that period who challenged exclusionary knowledge production practices by preserving documentation/evidence of the diaspora to prevent the erasure of representative Black and Latinx experiences in the historical record and archives. In this paper, I explore Schomburg’s foundational role in developing diasporic archival practice and Black knowledge production. Also considered are critical understandings of Black knowledge production represented in fields of study such as mid-20th-century Black Liberation Anthropology, and how questions about knowledge construction are being brought forward today in ethnographic and living archives of Black communities. His archives became the basis for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Presenter(s): Kamela Heyward-Rotimi
Identity at the Intersection: New Pathways Through Poetry
Identity at the Intersection: New Pathways Through Poetry is an essay that examines a new interpretation of The New Negro Movement. Coined by philosopher Alain Locke in the early 20th century to characterize African American Life and Culture, I argue that the poetry of contemporary African American poets is a continuum of this cultural phenomena. In this essay, I will illustrate how the New Negro Movement has survived through cotemporary poetry, evidenced in the poetry of several writers.
In his day, Locke was most interested in how African American writers addressed issues of race consciousness, activism, and leadership and I will examine these same themes. From a contemporary, socio-cultural lens, my essay will illustrate how African American poets use their voices in a political climate not dissimilar from the writers of the New Negro Movement, beginning in 1925. I created a course, Rhyme & Reason: African American Poets in Dialogue with Notions of Slavery, Identity and Existence, and in it, I teach about the significance of the New Negro Movement and its relevance in our current social – political landscape.
Identity at the Intersection: New Pathways Through Poetry will not only provide readers with how contemporary poetry mirrors similar issues of the New Negro Movement, but will also provide classroom activities and tools to be used while having difficult conversations. In effect, meeting people where there are, at the intersection of difference.
Presenter(s): Jason Vasser-Elong
Sounding the New Negro: Music, Respectability, and Black Intellectual Praxis
Creative expression and innovation were central to Alain Locke’s paradigm of the “New Negro.” He recognized the political potential of music-making practices, framing this new mode of intellectual contribution as a pathway to African Americans’ “spiritual emancipation.” Yet Locke’s analysis reproduced sonic hierarchies, ambivalently demoting Black artistic forms like jazz and blues in favor of the concertized Negro spiritual. Through this performance of sonic respectability politics, he overlooked the ways that vernacular Black music functioned both as cultural memory and as rich ethnographic material. This paper traces the productive tensions between Harlem Renaissance figures—Locke, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Zora Neale Hurston—whose writings and performances variously theorized Black musical forms as sites of knowledge production. I analyze how these intellectuals navigated issues of legibility, class, and cultural authenticity, and how their engagements with music prefigure Black anthropological thought. In doing so, I argue that Black musical praxis served not only as creative expression, but as an intellectual method for theorizing race, community, and the politics of representation.
Presenter(s): Alexis Holloway
Saturday, November 22
8684 History of Anthropology Interest Group Luncheon– offsite
11:45-12:45 PM
This History of Anthropology Interest Group (HOAIG) will once again host its luncheon during the annual AAA meeting. Operating under the banner of the General Anthropology Division, the HOAIG provides a gathering place within the AAA for all those interested in the history of anthropology and the human sciences. If you are interested in attending, please contact the group Convener, Nicholas Barron (nicholas.barron@unlv.edu). As we get closer to the date and we have a better sense of the number of attendees, we will provide more details including location and directions.
1089 Part I: Specters in the Sepulcher 12:45-02:15 PM
Organizer: Alanna Warner-Smith, American University, Meredith Ellis, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Anthropology
Chair: Alanna Warner-Smith, American University, Meredith Ellis, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Anthropology Presenter(s): Alanna Warner-Smith, American University, Celia Emmelhainz, Smithsonian Institution (NMNH), Lucy Mulroney, Yale University, Paul White, University of Nevada, Reno, Meredith Ellis, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Anthropology, Tony Chamoun, North Carolina State University, Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Historian Arlette Farge (2013, 46) has argued that the archive is a “sepulcher,” where one encounters “silhouettes of the past, be they faltering or sublime.” Here, we take a broad definition of “archive” to include traditional archival documents, collections, archaeological record, ethnographic fieldnotes, and even the body itself. Following the “archive as sepulcher,” we ask: what are the implications for our studies and our results when we encounter ghostly absences buried in these spaces? Ghosts in anthropology have taken many forms, with “haunting” often metaphorically gesturing toward absence, longing, and troubled, violent, or unsettled pasts. They can also take the form of our recognition of what is missing, the loss of materials and knowledge unwittingly perpetuated by praxis, time, and historical forces. In our work, we encounter absences and the ghostly impressions they suggest in many ways. In collections and archives, we often open an empty box, note a missing document, see a space left blank on a form, or encounter a missing page from field notes or diaries. There is also the pause, the self-censoring involved, when asking ourselves, “should I write that experience down?” Whether such absences become a dead end, a frustration, or an obsession, they are often left out of our studies, never mentioned in the “materials and methods.” Writing on agnotology, Proctor (2008, 3) tells us, “Ignorance can be made and unmade, and science can be complicit in either process.” In this session, we invite contributors to re-presence these absences and impressions. Welcoming scholars from across the subdisciplines, we ask that they interrogate the ways that the absences we encounter in the archive–that sepulcher where “silhouettes of the past” live–shape anthropological knowledge, or the lack thereof, even as they are rarely discussed in official publications or presentations. In other words, we will consider the double haunting of archival ghosts: first encountered as absence in our fieldwork, and second as present absences that continue to haunt anthropological knowledge even as we participate in removal of their work.
3570 Ghosts of Empire
12:45-2:15 PM
Organizer: Roger Lancaster , Andrew Bickford, Georgetown University, Department of Anthropology
Presenter(s): Jeff Maskovsky, CUNY, Graduate Center, Department of Anthropology, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, University of San Francisco, Rhoda Kanaaneh , Andrew Bickford, Georgetown University, Department of Anthropology, Roger Lancaster , David Price, Saint Martin’s University, Department of Sociology and Cultural Anthropology
Discussant: Roger Lancaster , Andrew Bickford, Georgetown University, Department of Anthropology
The empire has seen better times. Or so it would seem.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the US had been a continent-wide empire guided by an expressly white ethno-nationalist vision of Manifest Destiny. It was expansionist, protectionist, and mercantilist; isolationist with regard to European disputes but interventionist in its own hemisphere. A different sort of empire took shape at the end of World War II, when the US emerged from the war with global military dominance and its economy accounted for half the world industrial output. Under Pax Americana, the bipartisan consensus was liberal, internationalist, and constitutionalist. In the arsenal of imperial persuasion were not only forms of brute coercion but also various forms of soft power, the ideal of rule of law, and an outsized cultural influence. Anchored in a modern administrative state, the global policeman’s internal policies were mildly redistributive — organized labor was on a strong footing from the late 1930s until the early 1980s — and increasingly guided by one variant or another of race-ethnic liberalism. Both parties tamped down social movements and political currents on the far right (such as Lindbergh’s “America First” conservatism) and the socialist left (especially but not only the Communist Party during the McCarthy era). These arrangements are presently being dismantled. What comes next? A diverse panel of discussants working in different venues at different stages in their careers, we will discuss aspects of a present haunted by the past, surveying military techniques, satellite states, soft power, raceethnic imaginaries, labor organization, migration, and the role of law. Among the questions we consider: What conceptual models might be up to the challenge of the moment? How do earlier, pre-World War versions of empire inform the thinking of the contemporary right, and does the left remain trapped in later versions of Pax Americana? Do Cold War and post-Cold War frames continue to offer explanatory power under current conditions? Should we criticize today’s right, which openly declares its dictatorial ambitions, with institutional logics that the left once called elitest or imperialist? Will present-day rearrangements and the evisceration of the administrative state reverse the empire’s decline — or hasten its demise? Bertolt Brecht once said, “Build not on the good old days but on the bad new ones.” Is the left trying to bust the ghosts of the past when we should be confronting the monsters of the present?
4297 “The Making of History in a Time of World Order Instability”
2:30-4:00 PM
Organizer: David Dinwoodie, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology, Muhammad Abro, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology
Chair: David Dinwoodie, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology, Muhammad Abro, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology
Presenter(s): David Dinwoodie, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology, Kaitlin Lewis, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology, Sarah Leiter, University of Pennsylvania, Muhammad Abro, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology
Discussant: David Dinwoodie, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology, Muhammad Abro, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology
This is a session devoted to the ethnographic documentation of the making of history with a focus, in the words of Stephane Palmié and Charles Stewart, on “the principles, whether ideological, cosmological, or scientific – call them broadly cultural – that underpin practices of inquiry into the past, as well as the forms and modes in which the past is represented to others” in the specific context of world order instability, varying among economic liberalism, decolonial nation-building, and neo-imperialism. In this context, anthropologists cannot assume that the making of history represents grass-roots folk nationalism. History making practices can in some cases mobilize the official nationalist sentiments of new states; in other cases history making practices mobilize alternative perspectives — even if not necessary anti-state perspectives. As more and more literature highlights variations in colonial practice and in decolonial ideologies, we see that the valences of history making practices call for careful inquiry into world order matrices.
Sunday, November 23
8252 Anthropology and the Specters of Science 1
Start Date: 11/23/2025 08:30 AM through 11/23/2025 10:00 AM
4494 The Enduring Lives of Museum Collections: Approaches to Care at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
8:30-10:00 AM
Organizer: Krystiana Krupa, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Presenter(s): Jenny Davis, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Department of Anthropology, Bethany Anderson, Aimee Carbaugh, Elizabeth Sutton, Katelyn Bishop, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Discussant: Krystiana Krupa, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has a long history of collecting people, objects, art, animals, plants, organisms, earth, and documents, and capturing people, places, and events through images, sound recordings, and written descriptions. These collections are housed in units across campus and during their tenure at the university have been used, modified, dispersed, moved, neglected, misplaced, forgotten, found again, rehoused, and displayed. Such collections have historically been treated as though dead or extinct, or otherwise deprived of their agency. More recent frameworks for collections emphasize practices of care, highlighting the continued relationships and interactions between the people, beings, and objects in collections and those professionals who care for them. Collections professionals at the University of Illinois prioritize such care-based approaches to the people, beings, objects, and archives with which we work. Today, there are multiple units on campus working to address these harmful histories and to reimage the lives of the people, beings, objects, and records that make up the collections that are in the university’s care. In this roundtable, faculty and staff in the University of Illinois Archives, Department of Anthropology, NAGPRA Office, and Spurlock Museum of World Cultures discuss approaches to responsible stewardship and the future we are working towards for the collections within our units.
Historically, museums are places where objects and art go to die. They are locked up away from communities for the sake of preservation, to save them for future generations. When they are always kept for “the future” no one in the present can connect to them, learn from them, or be inspired by them. They have no power, no life. Access is limited to scholars, museum professionals, and only those deemed worthy and appropriate by museum staff. The works are thought of only in the past tense, as artifacts of their past lives, with little relevance in the present, only kept to remind us of how people lived, thought, loved, and died in the past. Alternative approaches are applied by University of Illinois professionals and campus units in order to identify and enact respectful, collaborative, and ethical collections care in the form of community consultation, co-curation, repatriation, and other avenues. Ideally, museums and collections spaces should function much like community archives, to serve the descendants and communities tied to the people, collections, and works housed within them. These frameworks emphasize campus partnerships with internal and external parties in order to determine appropriate standards of care for the wide variety of collections types housed at the University. We provide examples for other practitioners of how these partnerships can help us move toward our shared goal of consultation, collaboration, and care for museum collections in their post-acquisition lives.
3289 The Real Crisis of Anthropology: A reflection on the limits of various disciplinary exorcisms to date, and the problem with anthropology on the moon
08:30-10:00 AM
Organizer: Daniel Souleles, Copenhagen Business School, Michael Scroggins, University of California, Los Angeles
Presenter(s): Nicola Sharratt, Georgia State University, Elizabeth Falconi, University of West Georgia, Department of Anthropology, Steven Black, Georgia State University, Department of Anthropology, Aja Lans, Johns Hopkins University, Department of Anthropology, Jess Beck, University of Cambridge, Jennifer Van Tiem , Bernard Perley, University of British Columbia
Discussant: Daniel Souleles, Copenhagen Business School, Michael Scroggins, University of California, Los Angeles
It’s no secret that anthropology fancies itself in constant crisis. More to the point, these crises are serial, parallel across the various subfields, and often involve some manner of exorcism. After all, at root, most of these crises involve a sober reckoning with what disfavoured disciplinary ancestors did, and a struggle to free ourselves from their demonic legacies. We, as a discipline, are in a state of perpetual and vexatious haunting that we don’t quite know what to do with. This panel convenes the contributors from a forthcoming edited volume from the School for Advanced Research Press called, The Real Crisis of Anthropology. The contributors come from all subfields of anthropology and will briefly explain the crisis in their subfield, offer notes on how and why these crises are often parallel, and then offer a vision of an unpossessed discipline, one that has finally shaken its crisis doom loop. This vision offers a roadmap for cross-field collaboration, and a vision of a professional association with a clearer and more active mandate to advocate for the professional wellbeing of anthropologists.
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