HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in Spanish) on anachronistic and dyschronic motives in disciplinary history, focused on José Imbelloni—a controversial representative of 20th-century Argentinian anthropology. The English version is forthcoming.
Lazzari, Axel, 2024. “En torno al argumento del anacronismo y la Escuela Histórico‑Cultural en la Argentina: hacia un abordaje discrónico,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Born in Italy, José Imbelloni (1885–1967) emigrated to Argentina in 1908, where he began his career as an anthropologist in 1921, with previous training in the natural sciences. His anthropological work of a craniological and historical-philological nature contributed to the debates on the settlement of the American continent and the diffusion of cultural cycles. During the 1930s, as head of the Physical Anthropology Section of the Museo de Ciencias Naturales, Imbelloni gained greater visibility with the publication of Epítome de Culturología (1936), where he summarized the doctrine and method of the cultural-historical school and contributed his own empirical studies. In 1948 he took over the direction of the Museo Etnográfico, created the Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas at the University of Buenos Aires, and the journal Runa. During these years he established strong ties with academic sectors of Peron’s regime and became one of the world’s leading figures in Americanist anthropology. Imbelloni developed a culturalist-racialist approach that was not free of polemic tones, but his career is fundamental for understanding the development of Argentine anthropology.
Between the early 1980s and the beginning of the 21st century, the historiographical consensus on Argentine anthropology identified the long persistence of the cultural-historical school within it as “anachronistic.” According to this interpretation, the postulates, methods and subjects of interest of this current of Germanic origin, paradigmatically represented in Argentina by the figure and work of Imbelloni, would have lasted well beyond “its time” and were a factor in the delay in the modernization of the discipline that began after the Second World War. In recent decades, a new historiography that is less presentist and more attentive to context has repositioned and reinterpreted the doctrinal aspects, substantive results and trajectories of the actors and institutions associated with this school, contributing to a historicist densification of the phenomenon. In this way, the supposed “anachronism” has been historicized. Axel Lazzari (CONICET; and CESIA/IDAES, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina) argues that the denunciation or historicization of anachronisms are complementary symptoms of the same conception of time and the same historical regime, which tend to impede the appreciation of the singularity of the event. Having posed the problem, in this article Lazzari argues for a “dyschronic” approach and opens a “to-do list” to unravel the developments around the problem of the cultural-historical school.
The present article is part of a series of six papers originally delivered in the panel “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives”held during the First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures” (4–7 December 2023, online). The conference was co-organized by the EASA’s History of Anthropology Network and the Università di Pisa with the support of Bérose and ten other history of anthropology stakeholders. The panel was convened by David Shankland (Royal Anthropological Institute; University College London, UK), Christine Laurière (CNRS/UMR9022 Héritages, France) and Frederico Delgado Rosa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, CRIA Centre for Research in Anthropology, Portugal).
The other articles within the “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives” series are:
“Anthropology, Photography, and Painting: Jean Gabus and Hans Erni in Mauritania 1951‑1952,” by Serge Reubi
“Frobenius’ Culture History in Australia: Dead Ends and New Insights,” by Richard Kuba
“Fieldwork on the Banks of the Pilcomayo River: The Place of Erland Nordenskiöld in Pre-Malinowskian Traditions of Ethnography,” by Anne Gustavsson
“How Moscow Did Not Become a World Centre of Marxist Anthropology: Liudmila V. Danilova and the Fate of Soviet ‘Revisionism’ in the 1960s‑1970s,” by Sergei Alymov
“Through the Speculum of the Psyche: Paul Radin at the Eranos ‘Tagungen’,” by Zsofia Johanna Szoke
Leave a Comment